I said nothing to that. I despise that kind of language.
‘Two things you want from me. Neither makes no sense.’ He looked at me with the first real expression I have ever seen in his face: a profound wonderment.’ You want to know all about me, where I came from, how I got to be what I am.’
‘Yes, I do want that. What’s the other thing I want that you know and I don’t?’
‘I was born some place and growed like a weed somehow,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘Folks who didn’t give even enough of a damn to try the orphanage routine. So I just ran loose, sort of in training to be the village idiot. I’da made it, but I took to the woods instead.’
‘Why?’
He wondered why, and finally said, ‘I guess because the way people lived didn’t make no sense to me. Out here I can grow like I want.’
‘How is that?’ I asked over one of those vast distances that built and receded between him and me so constantly.
‘What I wanted to get from your books.’
‘You never told me.’
For the second time he said, ‘You learn, but you don’t think. There’s a kind of—well, person. It’s all made of separate parts, but it’s all one person. It has like hands, it has like legs, it has like a talking mouth, and it has like a brain. That’s me, a brain for that person. Damn feeble, too, but the best I know of.’