Byron alone seems to possess life.
His face is lowered.
He seems to muse upon one hand which lies upon his lap, the thumb and forefinger of which rub slowly together with a kneading motion while he appears to watch with musing absorption.
When Hightower speaks, Byron knows that he is not addressing him, not addressing anyone in the room at all.
“What do they want me to do?” he says. “What do they think, hope, believe, that I can do?”
Then there is no sound; neither the man nor the woman have heard, apparently.
Byron does not expect the man to hear.
‘He don’t need any help,’ he thinks.
‘Not him.
It’s hindrance he needs’; thinking remembering the comastate of dreamy yet maniacal suspension in which the old man had moved from place to place a little behind the woman since he had met them twelve hours ago.
‘It’s hindrance he needs.
I reckon it’s a good thing for more folks than her that he is wellnigh helpless.’
He is watching the woman.
He says quietly, almost gently:
“Go on.
Tell him what you want.
He wants to know what you want him to do.
Tell him.”
“I thought maybe—” she says.
She speaks without stirring.
Her voice is not tentative so much as rusty, as if it were being forced to try to say something outside the province of being said aloud, of being anything save felt, known. “Mr. Bunch said that maybe—”
“What?” Hightower says.
He speaks sharply, impatiently, his voice a little high; he too has not moved, sitting back in the chair, his hands upon the armrests. “What?
That what?”
“I thought ...” The voice dies again.
Beyond the window the steady insects whirr.
Then the voice goes on, flat, toneless, she sitting also with her head bent a little, as if she too listened to the voice with the same quiet intentness: “He is my grandson, my girl’s little boy.
I just thought that if I ... if he ...” Byron listens quietly, thinking It’sright funny.
You’d think they had done got swapped somewhere.
Like it was him ‘that had a nigger grandson waiting to be hung The voice goes on. “I know it ain’t right to bother a stranger.
But you are lucky.
A bachelor, a single man that could grow old without the despair of love.
But I reckon you couldn’t never see it even if I could tell it right.
I just thought that maybe if it could be for one day like it hadn’t happened.
Like folks never knew him as a man that had killed ...” The voice ceases again.
She has not stirred.
It is as though she listened to it cease as she listened to it begin, with the same interest, the same quiet unastonishment.
“Go on,” Hightower says, in that high impatient voice; “go on.”
“I never saw him when he could walk and talk.
Not for thirty years I never saw him.
I am not saying he never did what they say he did.
Ought not to suffer for it like he made them that loved and lost suffer.
But if folks could maybe just let him for one day.
Like it hadn’t happened yet.
Like the world never had anything against him yet.
Then it could be like he had just went on a trip and grew man grown and come back.
If it could be like that for just one day.
After that I would not interfere.
If he done it, I would not be the one to come between him and what he must suffer.
Just for one day, you see.