The rain had cooled the day’s heat and over the water of the lake, a fog-sheet suspended itself, giving the lake a ghostly look. From nearby, he heard an owl—a low, soft call. The same owl as he had seen before, he guessed, making known its ownership of the lake, saying to Noah that he was freeloading in a place where he had no right to be.

He pulled himself from the chair, stretched against the tender ache of his muscles, then walked to the screen door of the porch, letting his eyes search for the owl, and in the search, he thought of Howard Reynolds’s grandson, the boy called Matthew, and of the glasses Matthew wore, giving him the appearance of having large, owl-like eyes. Yet, the boy’s eyes were small behind the glasses—small eyes made large, like a telescope made far-off things seem close. The boy’s eyes had seemed to make words that his grandfather understood, for his grandfather had answered many questions about the fishing without Matthew’s making a sound.

To Noah, the words of eyes often made better sense than the words of the tongue.

In the war, he had relied on eye-talk, since he could not understand what was being said by people who lived in the countries he had passed through, going from fight to fight. It had all been a mystery to him, though sometimes he knew the gist of what was being said by the way the speaker said it, and by the tilt of the head, by gesture, by pointing, by nodding. Mostly, he had read their eyes. If their eyes showed up fearful, he knew to take guard. If he could see some laughter, some shine of gladness, he knew the danger was not so great.

He remembered unexpectedly the deaf-and-dumb Negro man he had met in north Alabama. A tall, thin man, showing four teeth when he smiled, a scar down his right cheek that had the look of a whelp, his right leg bowed at the knee, making his walk have a wobble to it. Noah had no name for him, since the man could not say it or write it in the dirt, but the name did not matter. They had met on a road going into Tennessee, not far from the Flint River, the man ambling along in is wobble walk, carrying a large cook pot that contained a small sack of cornmeal and another of sugar, and they had walked together for a day and a half before the man veered off, waving his goodbye. The man had made talk with his hands and with his face and, mostly, with his eyes, and Noah had made awkward attempts to speak the same language. It had been a cause for laughter, two men walking along a road, one white, one black, trying to make words out of air, like two old and addled women sitting in porch chairs, knitting imaginary garments from rolls of imaginary wool. Or like two children in chase of fireflies, their hands snatching at darting dots of yellow light. Or like Beatrice Cunningham’s hands moving over her lap. Not a word had been spoken between the man and Noah, yet at the break-off of their journey together, Noah knew much about him. Knew he was a farmer. Knew he had a wife and two children. Knew he had served some jail time in Alabama—Huntsville, Noah guessed—and had been set free and was heading back to his home, carrying the cook pot and cornmeal and sugar as prizes. All this he knew because the man could draw pictures of it with his fingertips and with his eyes. His fingertips were like fine paint brushes, his eyes like the screens of picture shows.