"Talk English," I snapped. "This chitterlin's and corn pone are just more window dressing, right?"
Her face was solemn behind the glasses. "When you are a smart girl, and you know the future, too, they hate you and try to hurt you," she said. "They don't seem to mind it so much if it comes from a piece of white trash that never could be 'no account.' By the time I was twelve or so I had learned to act just a little stupid and corn-fed."
This, her longest speech, she delivered in quiet, Neutral American, the speech that covers the great prairie states and is as near accentless and pure as American English ever is. It branded her Ozark twang as a lie, and a great many other things about her. But it added something very solid to her claims of prophecy.
"All this," I said. "Because you see the future?"
"Yes, Billy Joe."
"And this talk about losing your prophecy because of divorce was just that, talk?" I insisted.
Her mouth worked silently. "I talk like trash, and sometimes I start to think like it," she confessed. "I even act like it. I've tried not to see things acomin'. But," she added, drifting back into her Ozark lingo. "Always I knowed I was to find you. I knowed I was to go and search in spots of sin, for there you would be. And it kept getting stronger on me where to seek. This night I knew it was the time. I never got a dress and all before."
The chilly fingers touched me again. Still, what she was saying made some weird kind of sense. "What about the healing?" I tried, feeling a trap slowly descending over me.
She smiled at that. "I guess I put that punishment on myself for what I done," she said.