to Jefferson for.”
“It was because—” she says. Her voice is sudden and deep, almost harsh, though not loud. It is as though she had not expected to make so much noise when she spoke; she ceases in a sort of astonishment as though at the sound of her own voice, looking from one to the other of the two faces.
“Tell me,” Hightower says. “Try to tell me.”
“It’s because I …” Again the voice ceases, dies harshly though still not raised, as though of its own astonishment. It is as if the three words were some automatic impediment which her voice cannot pass; they can almost watch her marshalling herself to go around them. “I ain’t never seen him when he could walk,” she says. “Not for thirty years I never saw him. Never once walking on his own feet and calling his own name—”
“Bitchery and abomination!” the man says suddenly. His voice is high, shrill, strong. “Bitchery and abomination!” Then he ceases. Out of his immediate and dreamlike state he shouts the three words with outrageous and prophetlike suddenness, and that is all. Hightower looks at him, and then at Byron. Byron says quietly:
“He is their daughter’s child. He—” with a slight movement of the head he indicates the old man, who is now watching Hightower with his bright, mad glare—“he took it right after it was born and carried it away. She didn’t know what he did with it. She never even knew if it was still alive or not until—”
The old man interrupts again, with that startling suddenness. But he does not shout this time: his voice now is as calm and logical as Byron’s own. He talks clearly, just a little jerkily: “Yes. Old Doc Hines took him. God give Old Doc Hines his chance and so Old Doc Hines give God His chance too. So out of the mouths of little children God used His will. The little children hollering Nigger! Nigger! at him in the hearing of God and man both, showing God’s will. And Old Doc Hines said to God, ‘But that ain’t enough. Them children call one another worse than nigger,’ and God said, ‘You wait and you watch, because I ain’t got the time to waste neither with this world’s sluttishness and bitchery. I have put the mark on him and now I am going to put the knowledge. And I have set you there to watch and guard My will. It will be yours to tend to it and oversee.’ ” His voice ceases; his tone does not drop at all. His voice just stops, exactly like when the needle is lifted from a phonograph record by the hand of someone who is not listening to the record. Hightower looks from him to Byron, also almost glaring.
“What’s this? What’s this?” he says.
“I wanted to fix it so she could come and talk to you without him being along,” Byron says. “But there wasn’t anywhere to leave him. She says she has to watch him. He was trying down in Mottstown yesterday to get the folks worked up to lynch him, before he even knew what he had done.”
“Lynch him?” Hightower says. “Lynch his own grandson?”
“That’s what she says,” Byron says levelly. “She says that’s what he come up here for. And she had to come, with him to keep him from doing it.”
The woman speaks again. Perhaps she has been listening. But there is no more expression on her face now than when she entered; woodenfaced, she speaks again in her dead voice, with almost the suddenness of the man. “For fifty years he has been like that. For more than fifty years, but for fifty years I have suffered it. Even before we were married, he was always fighting. On the very night that Milly was born, he was locked up in jail for fighting. That’s what I have bore and suffered. He said he had to fight because he is littler than most men and so folks would try to put on him. That was his vanity and his pride. But I told him it was because the devil was in him. And that some day the devil was going to come on him and him not know it until too late, and the devil was going to say, ‘Eupheus Hines, I have come to collect my toll.’ That’s what I told him, the next day after Milly was born and me still too weak to raise my head, and him just out of jail again. I told him so: how right then God had given him a sign and a warning: that him being locked up in a jail on the very hour and minute of his daughter’s birth was the Lord’s own token that heaven never thought him fitten to raise a daughter. A sign from God above that town (he was a brakeman then, on the railroad) was not doing him anything but harm. And he took it so himself then, because it was a sign, and we moved away from the towns then and after a while he got to be foreman at the sawmill, doing well because he hadn’t begun then to take God’s name in vain and in pride to justify and excuse the devil that was in him. So when Lem Bush’s wagon passed that night coming home from the circus and never stopped to let Milly out and Eupheus come back into the house and flung the things out of the drawer until he come to the pistol, I said, ‘Eupheus, it’s the devil. It’s not Milly’s safety that’s quicking you now,’ and he said, ‘Devil or no devil. Devil or no devil,’ and he hit me with his hand and I laid across the bed and watched him—” She ceases. But hers is on a falling inflection, as if the machine had run down in midrecord. Again Hightower looks from her to Byron with that expression of glaring amazement.
“That’s how I heard it too,” Byron says. “It was hard for me to get it straight too, at first. They were living at a sawmill that he was foreman of, over in Arkansas. The gal was about eighteen then. One night a circus passed the mill, on the way to town. It was December and there had been a lot of rain, and one of the wagons broke through a bridge close to the mill and the men come to their house to wake him up and borrow some log tackle to get the wagon out—”
“It’s God’s abomination of womanflesh!” the old man cries suddenly. Then his voice drops, lowers; it is as though he were merely gaining attention. He talks again rapidly, his tone plausible, vague, fanatic, speaking of himself again in the third person. “He knowed. Old Doc Hines knowed. He had seen the womansign of God’s abomination already on her, under her clothes. So when he went and put on his raincoat and lit the lantern and come back, she was already at the door, with a raincoat on too and he said, ‘You get on back to bed,’ and she said, ‘I want to go too,’ and he said, ‘You get on back inside that room,’ and she went back and he went down and got the big tackle from the mill and got the wagon out. Till nigh daybreak he worked, believing she had obeyed the command of the father the Lord had given her. But he ought to knowed. He ought to knowed God’s abomination of womanflesh; he should have knowed the walking shape of bitchery and abomination already stinking in God’s sight. Telling Old Doc Hines, that knowed better, that he was a Mexican. When Old Doc Hines could see in his face the black curse of God Almighty. Telling him—”
“What?” Hightower says. He speaks loudly, as if he had anticipated having to drown the other’s voice by sheer volume. “What is this?”
“It was a fellow with the circus,” Byron says. “She told him that the man was a Mexican, the daughter told him when he caught her. Maybe that’s what the fellow told the gal. But he”—again he indicates the old man—“knew somehow that the fellow had nigger blood. Maybe the circus folks told him. I don’t know. He ain’t never said how he found out, like that never made any difference. And I reckon it didn’t, after the next night.”
“The next night?”
“I reckon she slipped out that night when the circus was stuck. He says she did. Anyway, he acted like it, and what he did could not have happened if he hadn’t known and she hadn’t slipped out. Because the next day she went in to the circus with some neighbors. He let her go, because he didn’t know then that she had slipped out the night before. He didn’t suspect anything even when she came out to get into the neighbor’s wagon with her Sunday dress on. But he was waiting for the wagon when it came back that night, listening for it, when it came up the road and passed the house. like it was not. going to stop to let her out. And he ran out and called, and the neighbor stopped
