Still Byron does not look up, speaking in that still, stubborn voice:
“She needs a place where it will be kind of home to her.
She ain’t got a whole lot more time, and in a boarding house, where it’s mostly just men ...
A room where it will be quiet when her time comes, and not every durn horsetrader or courtjury that passes through the hallway ...”
“I see,” Hightower says.
He watches Byron’s face. “And you want me to take her in here.” Byron makes to speak, but the other goes on: his tone too is cold, level: “It won’t do, Byron.
If there were another woman here, living in the house.
It’s a shame too, with all the room here, the quiet.
I’m thinking of her, you see.
Not myself.
I would not care what was said, thought.”
“I am not asking that.” Byron does not look up.
He can feel the other watching him.
He thinks He knows that is not what I meant, too.
He knows.
He just said that.
I know what he is thinking.
I reckon I expected it.
I reckon it is not any reason for him to think different from otherfolks, even about me “I reckon you ought to know that.”
Perhaps he does know it.
But Byron does not look up to see.
He talks on, in that dull, flat voice, downlooking, while beyond the desk Hightower, sitting a little more than erect, looks at the thin, weatherhardened, laborpurged face of the man opposite him.
“I ain’t going to get you mixed up in it when it ain’t none of your trouble.
You haven’t even seen her, and I don’t reckon you ever will.
I reckon likely you have never seen him to know it either.
It’s just that I thought maybe ...”
His voice ceases.
Across the desk the unbending minister looks at him, waiting, not offering to help him.
“When it’s a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice.
But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.
But I ain’t going to mix you up in it.
I don’t want you to worry about that.”
“I think I know that,” Hightower says.
He watches the other’s downlooking face.
‘I am not in life anymore,’ he thinks. ‘That’s why there is no use in even trying to meddle, interfere.
He could hear me no more than that man and that woman (ay, and that child) would hear or heed me if I tried to come back into life.’ “But you told me she knows that he is here.”
“Yes,” Byron says, brooding. “Out there where I thought the chance to harm ere a man or woman or child could not have found me.
And she hadn’t hardly got there before I had to go and blab the whole thing.”
“I don’t mean that.
You didn’t know yourself, then.
I mean, the rest of it.
About him and the—that ...
It has been three days.
She must know, whether you told her or not.
She must have heard by now.”
“Christmas.” Byron does not look up. “I never said any more, after she asked about that little white scar by his mouth.
All the time we were coming to town that evening I was afraid she would ask.
I would try to think up things to talk to her about so she would not have a chance to ask me any more.
And all the time I thought I was keeping her from finding out that he had not only run off and left her in trouble, he had changed his name to keep her from finding him, and that now when she found him at last, what she had found was a bootlegger, she already knew it. Already knew that he was a nogood.” He says now, with a kind of musing astonishment: “I never even had any need to keep it from her, to lie it smooth.
It was like she knew beforehand what I would say, that I was going to lie to her.