“Jimmy Bobb, who’s he? What does he want with me?” queried Lee.
“Jimmy’s my older brother, only he ain’t near so big as me. He had infantile para—para something—”
“Paralysis, was it?” put in Lee.
“Yeah, that’s what a doctor what saw him one time said it was. But Johnny Poolak, him that preaches when the spell gets on him, said it warn’t nothing but tarnation sin what twisted Jimmy all up. I dunno. But Jimmy, he can’t move by himself, just got to sit one place all the time. He heard ’em talking 'bout you. He don’t never see nothing much and he wanted to see you. But promise you won’t conjure up no imps, no nothing and hurt him.”
Lee Renaud felt a wave of pity for the bleak existence of the crippled one, though caution stirred in him too. He didn’t exactly like to mix in with these Cove people. In every meeting with them, he had sensed their antagonism toward him. If he happened to tread on the toes of their ignorance and superstition, why, like as not they’d fill him full of buckshot! He turned back into the path that led toward home.
“Say, you, ain’t you coming?” The child clung to him with desperate, clutching hands. “Jimmy, he’s so powerful lonesome. He said to me, 'Mackey, you go git that there furriner and bring him down here. Folks tell how he’s got store-bought clothes and slicks his hair and looks different an’ all. And I ain’t never seen nothing different in all my life.’ And I promised Jimmy I’d get you. Please, mister, you—you—”
“I—yes.” The child was so insistent that Lee Renaud found himself following down the path. This by-trail twisted in and out through some thickets and suddenly came out before the clean-swept knoll whereon was perched Mackey Bobb’s home.
Lee Renaud may have thought he had seen poor folks before, but now he found himself face to face with real poverty. The dwelling was a square log cabin with a log lean-to on behind. Inside was bareness save for a homemade bedstead spread with a faded old quilt and one chair set by the window opening that had no glass but merely closed with a heavy shutter of wooden slabs. Although it was summer, a fire blazed up the mud-and-wattle chimney. Before it knelt a lanky woman in a faded wrapper and a sunbonnet, frying something in a skillet.
Lee had met these Cove women now and then out on the road, as they carried eggs or chickens to the store to barter for store-bought rations. Always they had on wide aprons and sunbonnets. He hadn’t known they wore these flapping bonnets in the house too.
The woman rose languidly from her supper cooking and came across the room. She looked worn out and old without being old. Her clothing was awkward and her hands were work-roughened, yet she held to a certain dignity.