was a lean and surprisingly handsome man in his late fifties, directed a delighted smile up at the green, insect-buzzing heights that surrounded them. One of his dogs, a whiskery mutt with a demented physiognomy, began to growl. “Stupid!” Mathis said. “That’s a funny word to be using, mister. You almost done made my day there. Not every day I get called stupid. You might say people around here know better’n that.”
“Look, I’m sure you’re a very smart man,” Walter said. “I was referring to—”
“I reckon I’m smart enough to count to ten,” Mathis said. “How about you, sir? You look like you got some education. You know how to count to ten?”
“I, in fact, know how to count to twelve hundred,” Walter said, “and I know how to multiply that by four hundred and eighty, and how to add two hundred thousand to the product. And if you would just take one minute to listen—”
“My question,” Mathis said, “is can you do it backwards? Here, I’ll get you started. Ten, nine . . .”
“Look, I’m very sorry I used the word stupid. The sun’s a little bright out here. I didn’t mean—”
“Eight, seven . . .”
“Maybe we’ll come back another time,” Lalitha said. “We can leave you some materials that you can read at your leisure.”
“Oh, y’all reckon I can read, do you?” Mathis was beaming at them. All three of his dogs were growling now. “I believe I’m at six. Or was it five? Stupid old me, I done forgot already.”
“Look,” Walter said, “I sincerely apologize if I—”
“Four three two!”
The dogs, themselves apparently rather intelligent, advanced with flattened ears.
“We’ll come back,” Walter said, hastily retreating with Lalitha.
“I’ll shoot your car if you do!” Mathis called after them merrily.
All the way back down the terrible road to the state highway, Walter loudly cursed his own stupidity and his inability to control his anger, while Lalitha, ordinarily a font of praise and reassurance, sat pensively in the passenger seat, brooding about what to do next. It was not an over-statement to say that, without Mathis’s cooperation, all the other work they’d done to secure Haven’s Hundred would be for naught. At the bottom of the dusty valley, Lalitha delivered her assessment: “He needs to be treated like an important man.”
“He’s a two-bit sociopath,” Walter said.
“Be that as it may,” she said—and she had a particularly charming Indian way of pronouncing this favorite phrase of hers, a clipped lilt of practicality that Walter never tired of hearing—“we’re going to need to flatter his sense of importance. He needs to be the savior, not the sellout.”
“Yeah, unfortunately, a sellout is the only thing we’re asking him to be.”
“Maybe if I went back up and talked to some of the women.”
“It’s a fucking patriarchy up here,” Walter said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“No, Walter, the women are very strong. Why don’t you let me talk to some of them?”
“This is a nightmare. A nightmare.”
“Be that as it may,” Lalitha said again, “I wonder if I should stay behind and try to talk to people.”
“He’s already said no to the offer. Categorically.”
“We’ll need a better offer, then. You’ll have to talk to Mr. Haven about a better offer. Go back to Washington and talk to him. It’s probably just as well if you don’t go back up the hollow. But maybe I won’t seem so threatening by myself.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“I’m not afraid of dogs. He’d set the dogs on you, but not on me, I don’t think.”
“This is just hopeless.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Lalitha said.
Leaving aside her sheer bravery, as an unaccompanied dark-skinned woman, slight of build and alluring of feature, in returning to a poor-white place where she’d already been threatened with physical harm, Walter was struck, in the months that followed, by the fact that it was she, the suburban daughter of an electrical engineer, and not he, the small-town son of an angry drunk, who’d effected the miracle in Forster Hollow. Not only did Walter lack the common touch; his entire personality had been formed in opposition to the backcountry he’d come from. Mathis, with his poor-white unreason and resentments, had offended Walter’s very being: had blinded him with rage. Whereas Lalitha, having no experience with the likes of Mathis, had been able to go back with an open mind and a sympathetic heart. She’d approached the proud country poor the way she drove a car, as if no harm could possibly come to a person of such cheer and goodwill;