and now that he was not looking at her

“She can’t talk, can she?” Jay said, and now that he was not looking at her, it was as if they were talking over a stump. “Times she can,” Sadie said. “Times she can’t. Ain’t only so seldom call for talk, reckon she loses the hang of it. But I figger she knows ye and I am tickled she does.” His father looked all around him in the shade and he looked sad, and unsure, and then he looked at him. “Come here, Rufus,” he said. “Go to him,” his mother whispered for some reason, and she pushed his hand gently as she let it go. “Just call her Granmaw,” his father said quietly. “Get right up by her ear like you do to Granmaw Lynch and say, ‘Granmaw, I’m Rufus.’ ” He walked over to her as quietly as if she were asleep, feeling strange to be by himself, and stood on tiptoe beside her and looked down into her sunbonnet towards her ear. Her temple was deeply sunken as if a hammer had struck it and frail as a fledgling’s belly. Her skin was crosshatched with the razor-fine slashes of innumerable square wrinkles and yet every slash was like smooth stone; her ear was just a fallen intricate flap with a small gold ring in it, her smell was faint yet very powerful, and she smelled like new mushrooms and old spices and sweat, like his fingernail when it was coming off. “Granmaw, I’m Rufus,” he said carefully, and yellow-white hair stirred beside her ear. He could feel coldness breathing from her cheek. “Come out where she can see you,” his father said, and he drew back and stood still further on tiptoe and leaned across her, where she could see. “I’m Rufus,” he said, smiling, and suddenly her eyes darted a little and looked straight into his, but they did not in any way change their expression. They were just color: seen close as this, there was color through a dot at the middle, dim as blue-black oil, and then a circle of blue so pale it was almost white, that looked like glass, smashed into a thousand dimly sparkling pieces, smashed and infinitely old and patient, and then a ring of dark blue, so fine and sharp no needle could have drawn it, and then a clotted yellow full of tiny squiggles of blood, and then a wrong-side furl of red-bronze, and little black lashes. Vague light sparkled in the crackled blue of the eye like some kind of remote ancestor’s anger, and the sadness of time dwelt in the blue-breathing, oily center, lost and alone and far away, deeper than the deepest well. His father was saying something, but he did not hear and now he spoke again, careful to be patient, and Rufus heard, “Tell her ‘I’m Jay’s boy.’ Say, ‘I’m Jay’s boy Rufus.’ ”