Light in August by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online

a Saturday night.”
    “What’s the pass word?” another said. “Six bits?”
    Byron looked from face to face. “Is that a fact? Is that what they are doing?”
    “That’s what Brown is doing. I dont know about Christmas. I wouldn’t swear to it. But Brown aint going to be far away from where Christmas is at. Like to like, as the old folks say.”
    “That’s a fact,” another said. “Whether Christmas is in it or not, I reckon we aint going to know. He aint going to walk around in public with his pants down, like Brown does.”
    “He aint going to need to,” Mooney said, looking at Brown.
    And Mooney was right. They watched Brown until noon, down there at the sawdust pile by himself. Then the whistle blew and they got their lunch pails and squatted in the pump shed and began to eat. Brown came in, glum, his face at once sullen and injured looking, like a child’s, and squatted among them, his hands dangling between his knees. He had no lunch with him today.
    “Aint you going to eat any dinner?” one said.
    “Cold muck out of a dirty lard bucket?” Brown said. “Starting in at daylight and slaving all day like a durn nigger, with a hour off at noon to eat cold muck out of a tin bucket.”
    “Well, maybe some folks work like the niggers work where they come from,” Mooney said. “But a nigger wouldn’t last till the noon whistle, working on this job like some white folks work on it.”
    But Brown did not seem to hear, to be listening, squatting with his sullen face and his dangling hands. It was as though he were not listening to any save himself, listening to himself: “A fool. A man is a fool that will do it.”
    “You are not chained to that scoop,” Mooney said.
    “You durn right I aint,” Brown said.
    Then the whistle blew. They went back to work. They watched Brown down at the sawdust pile. He would dig for a while, then he would begin to slow, moving slower and slower until at last he would be clutching the shovel as though it were a riding whip, and they could see that he was talking to himself. “Because there aint nobody else down there for him to tell it to,” one said.
    “It’s not that,” Mooney said. “He hasn’t quite convinced himself yet. He aint quite sold yet.”
    “Sold on what?”
    “On the idea that he’s a bigger fool than even I think he is,” Mooney said.
    The next morning he did not appear. “His address from now on will be the barbershop,” one said.
    “Or that alley just behind it,” another said.
    “I reckon we’ll see him once more,” Mooney said. “He’ll be out here once more to draw his time for yesterday.”
    Which he did. About eleven oclock he came up. He wore now the new suit and the straw hat, and he stopped at the shed and stood there looking at the working men as Christmas had done on that day three years ago, as if somehow the very attitudes of the master’s dead life motivated, unawares to him, the willing muscles of the disciple who had learned too quick and too well. But Brown merely contrived to look scattered and emptily swaggering where the master had looked sullen and quiet and fatal as a snake. “Lay into it, you slaving bastards!” Brown said, in a merry, loud voice cropped with teeth.
    Mooney looked at Brown. Then Brown’s teeth didn’t show. “You aint calling me that,” Mooney said. “Are you?”
    Brown’s mobile face performed one of those instantaneous changes which they knew. Like it was so scattered and so lightly built that it wasn’t any trouble for even him to change it, Byron thought. “I wasn’t talking to you,” Brown said.
    “Oh, I see.” Mooney’s tone was quite pleasant, easy. “It was these other fellows you were calling a bastard.”
    Immediately a second one said: “Were you calling that at me?”
    “I was just talking to myself,” Brown said.
    “Well, you have told God’s truth for once in your life,” Mooney said. “The half of it, that is. Do you want me to come up there and whisper the