Light in August by William Faulkner

heavy shoes upon her feet. “Are you Miz Burch?”
    She does not answer at once. She stands there just insidethe door, watching him intently but without alarm, with that untroubled, faintly baffled, faintly suspicious gaze. Her eyes are quite blue. But in them is that shadow of the belief that he is trying to deceive her. “They told me away back on the road that Lucas is working at the planing mill in Jefferson. Lots of them told me. And I got to Jefferson and they told me where the planing mill was, and I asked in town about Lucas Burch and they said ‘Maybe you mean Bunch’ and so I thought they had just got the name wrong and so it wouldn’t make any difference. Even when they told me the man they meant wasn’t dark complected. You aint telling me you dont know Lucas Burch out here.”
    Byron puts down the load of staves, in a neat stack, ready to be taken up again. “No, ma’am. Not out here. Not no Lucas Burch out here. And I know all the folks that work here. He may work somewhere in town. Or at another mill.”
    “Is there another planing mill?”
    “No, ma’am. There’s some saw mills, a right smart of them, though.”
    She watches him. “They told me back down the road that he worked for the planing mill.”
    “I dont know of any here by that name,” Byron says. “I dont recall none named Burch except me, and my name is Bunch.”
    She continues to watch him with that expression not so much concerned for the future as suspicious of the now. Then she breathes. It is not a sigh: she just breathes deeply and quietly once. “Well,” she says. She half turns and glances about, at the sawn boards, the stacked staves. “I reckon I’ll set down a while. It’s right tiring, walking over them hardstreets from town. It seems like walking out here from town tired me more than all that way from Alabama did.” She is moving toward a low stack of planks.
    “Wait,” Byron says. He almost springs forward, slipping the sack pad from his shoulder. The woman arrests herself in the act of sitting and Byron spreads the sack on the planks. “You’ll set easier.”
    “Why, you’re right kind.” She sits down.
    “I reckon it’ll set a little easier,” Byron says. He takes from his pocket the silver watch and looks at it; then he too sits, at the other end of the stack of lumber. “I reckon five minutes will be about right.”
    “Five minutes to rest?” she says.
    “Five minutes from when you come in. It looks like I done already started resting. I keep my own time on Saturday evenings,” he says.
    “And every time you stop for a minute, you keep a count of it? How will they know you stopped? A few minutes wouldn’t make no difference, would it?”
    “I reckon I aint paid for setting down,” he says. “So you come from Alabama.”
    She tells him, in his turn, sitting on the towsack pad, heavybodied, her face quiet and tranquil, and he watching her as quietly; telling him more than she knows that she is telling, as she has been doing now to the strange faces among whom she has travelled for four weeks with the untroubled unhaste of a change of season. And Byron in his turn gets the picture of a young woman betrayed and deserted and not even aware that she has been deserted, and whose name is not yet Burch.
    “No, I dont reckon I know him,” he says at last. “Thereaint anybody but me out here this evening, anyway. The rest of them are all out yonder at that fire, more than like.” He shows her the yellow pillar of smoke standing tall and windless above the trees.
    “We could see it from the wagon before we got to town,” she says. “It’s a right big fire.”
    “It’s a right big old house. It’s been there a long time. Dont nobody live in it but one lady, by herself. I reckon there are folks in this town will call it a judgment on her, even now. She is a Yankee. Her folks come down here in the Reconstruction, to stir up the niggers. Two of them got killed doing it. They say she is still