Lorenzo Niesen shook his head. A tiny core of awareness began to throb inside him: it was seldom that he summoned a thought or an emotion, his mind had fallen to rust, to decay over the long years, but now an awareness throbbed. Niggers were in town. Nigger children were on their way to the school. He was seeing it. And he wondered, how did it happen? Why didn’t some­body tell me?

“Looka there.”

Lorenzo Niesen shifted the wad of Beech Nut chewing tobacco in his mouth. He was a “jumpin’ preacher” and insisted on a Reverend before his name, and, as with so many of the poor whites, he had once traveled a circuit, trying to preach. But he lacked the gift of language. He’d never been able to stir people’s hearts, because he was never truly stirred himself; now, and for a decade, he existed on the meager handouts that came from an occasional Meeting—when hunger would throw his memory back to the nights he had spent aping the words of the Holy Bible. He lived alone, in a hillside shack that he’d constructed himself with the help of friends. He did have friends, all as poor as himself. And a few of them liked him. He needed little else. Only once in a while would come the urge for expression; but he did not recognize the urge. He called it “feelin’ the devil” and cured it with the whiskey he bought, or begged, from Len Backus’s still.

Life had cheated Lorenzo Niesen. He had a hot furnace somewhere inside him, a holy fire waiting to burn out sin—yet he lived in a placid, sinless town. He could rail against Sex, or thunder cautions on crimes uncommitted, but he did not have the ability to see sin where it was not. Long ago he had planned, vaguely, to go to the city, where godless practices flourished in every dark alley; but now he knew that he would remain forever in Caxton. He was sixty-two. He was an aging knight with a sword in his hand, and he would willingly do battle with any dragon that might wander into his country, but—there was no point in going out of one’s way to look for enemies.

He lacked only one thing, and this galled him.

He lacked respect.

“By God,” he said.

Phil Dongen nodded. He was a large man with round, rimless spectacles. He, too, had a weathered look; as if his skin were many layers thicker than ordinary skin, tougher and harder. He had straight dark hair that was gray about the temples. “It makes you sick to the stomach,” he said, “don’t it?”