“Damn the money,” I say. “Did you ever hear of me worrying a fellow before he was ready to pay?”
“Hit ain’t begrudgin’ the money,” he says. “I jest kept a-thinkin’. … She’s goin’, is she?” The durn little tyke is sitting on the top step, looking smaller than ever in the sulphur-coloured light. That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image. “I knowed hit,” Anse says. “All the while I made sho. Her mind is sot on hit.”
“And a damn good thing, too,” I say. “With a trifling—” He sits on the top step, small, motionless in faded overalls. When I came out he looked up at me, then at Anse. But now he has stopped looking at us. He just sits there.
“Have you told her yit?” Anse says.
“What for?” I say. “What the devil for?”
“She’ll know hit. I knowed that when she see you she would know hit, same as writing. You wouldn’t need to tell her. Her mind—”
Behind us the girl says, “Paw.” I look at her, at her face.
“You better go quick,” I say.
When we enter the room she is watching the door. She looks at me. Her eyes look like lamps blaring up just before the oil is gone. “She wants you to go out,” the girl says.
“Now, Addie,” Anse says, “when he come all the way from Jefferson to git you well?” She watches me: I can feel her eyes. It’s like she was shoving at me with them, I have seen it before in women. Seen them drive from the room them coming with sympathy and pity, with actual help, and