me where we were going to move to but it didn’t take long and I was worried nigh crazy how the baby would get along until we got there and he still wouldn’t tell me and it was like we wouldn’t ever get there. Then we got there and the baby wasn’t there and I said, ‘You tell me what you have done with Joey. You got to tell me,’ and he looked at me like he looked at Milly that night when she laid on the bed and died and he said, ‘It’s the Lord God’s abomination, and I am the instrument of His will.’ And he went away the next day. and I didn’t know where he had gone, and another moneypaper came, and the next month Eupheus come home and said he was working in Memphis. And I knew he had Joey hid somewhere in Memphis and I thought that that was something because he could be there to see to Joey even if I wasn’t. And I knew that I would have to wait on Eupheus’ will to know, and each time I would think that maybe next time he will take me with him to Memphis. And so I waited. I sewed and made clothes for Joey and I would have them all ready when Eupheus would come home and I would try to get him to tell me if the clothes fit Joey and if he was all right and Eupheus wouldn’t tell me He would sit and read out of the Bible, loud, without nobody there to hear it but me, reading and hollering loud out of the Bible like he believed I didn’t believe what it said. But he would not tell me for five years and I never knew whether he took Joey the clothes I made or not. And I was afraid to ask, to worry at him, because it was something that he was there where Joey was, even if I wasn’t. And then after five years he came home one day and he said, ‘We are going to move,’ and I thought that now it would be, I will see him again now; if it was a sin, I reckon we have all paid it out now, and I even forgave Eupheus. Because I thought that we were going to Memphis this time, at last. But it was not to Memphis. We come to Mottstown. We had to pass through Memphis, and I begged him. It was the first time I had ever begged him. But I did then, just for a minute, a second; not to touch him or talk to him or nothing. But Eupheus wouldn’t. We never even left the depot. We got off of one train and we waited seven hours without even leaving the depot, until the other train come, and we come to Mottstown. And Eupheus never went back to Memphis to work anymore, and after a while I said, ‘Eupheus,’ and he looked at me and I said, ‘I done waited five years and I ain’t never bothered you. Can’t you tell me just once if he is dead or not?’ and he said, ‘He is dead,’ and I said, ‘Dead to the living world, or just dead to me? If he is just dead to me, even. Tell me that much, because in five years I have not bothered you,’ and he said, ‘He is dead to you and to me and to God and to all God’s world forever and ever more.’ ”
She ceases again. Beyond the desk Hightower watches her with that quiet and desperate amazement. Byron too is motionless, his head bent a little. The three of them are like three rocks above a beach, above ebbtide, save the old man. He has been listening now, almost attentively, with that ability of his to flux instantaneously between complete attention that does not seem to hear, and that comalike bemusement in which the stare of his apparently inverted eye is as uncomfortable as though he held them with his hand. He cackles, suddenly, bright, loud, mad; he speaks, incredibly old, incredibly dirty. “It was the Lord. He was there. Old Doc Hines give God His chance too. The Lord told Old Doc Hines what to do and Old Doc Hines done it. Then the Lord said to Old Doc Hines, ‘You watch, now. Watch My will a-working.’ And Old Doc Hines watched and heard the mouths of little children, of God’s own fatherless and motherless, putting His words and knowledge into their mouths even when they couldn’t know it since they were without sin yet, even the girl ones without sin and bitchery yet: Nigger! Nigger! in the innocent mouths of little children. ‘What did I tell you?’ God said to Old Doc Hines. ‘And now I’ve set My will to working and now I’m gone. There