Rasba asked her to read to them after they had 242 cleared up the dishes, and she took down the familiar volumes and read. Rasba sat with his eyes closed, listening. Terabon watched her face. She seemed to choose the pages at random, and read haphazardly, but it was all delight and all poetry.
She was reading, which was strange, the Humphrey-Abbott book about the Mississippi River levees, the classic report on river facts, all fascinating to the mind that grasps with pleasure any river fact. When Rasba looked up and smiled, the two were absorbed in their occupations, one reading, the other watching her read. She stopped in conscious confusion.
“Yas, suh!” he smiled aloud. “I ’low we uns can leave hit to Old Mississip’, these yeah things that trouble us: I, my triflin’ doubts, and you children yo’ own don’t-know-yets.”
What made him say that, if he wasn’t a River Prophet? Who told him, what voice informed him, at that moment? Who can say?
The following morning the big mission boat and Missy Nelia’s boat landed in at Memphis wharf, and the three went up town to buy groceries, newspapers and magazines to read, and to help Nelia choose another set of books from the shelves of local book stores. Old Rasba had never been in a book store before, and he stared at the hundreds of feet of shelves, with books of all sizes, kinds, and makes.
“Sho!” he cried aloud, and then, again, “Sho! Sho!”
It was fairyland for him, a land of enchantment, of impossible satisfaction and glory-be! Terabon and Nelia saw that they had given him another pleasure, and Rasba was happy to know that he would always be able to visit such places, and add to his own store of literature, when he had read the books which he had, 243 as he would do, page by page, and word by word, his dictionary at hand.
Magazines and newspapers had little interest for him. Nelia and Terabon could not help but wish to keep closer in touch with the world. They picked up a copy of the Trade-Appealer, and then a copy of the Evening Battle Ax, just out.
They read one headline:
UNKNOWN DROWNS IN CRUISER