“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.