The old man grabbed the front of his overalls and pulled him up against the side of the box so that their faces were not two inches apart. “The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are,” he said and then, as if he had conceived the answer for all insolence, he said, “There’s a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive!” and he released him with a laugh.
The boy had shown only by a slight quiver in the eyes that he was shaken by this, and after a minute he had said, “The schoolteacher is my uncle. The only blood connection I’ll have and a living man and if I wanted to go to him, I’d go, now.”
The old man looked at him silently for what seemed a full minute. Then he slammed his hands on the sides of the box and roared, “Whom the plague beckons, to the plague! Whom the sword, to the sword! Whom fire, to fire!” and the child trembled visibly.
A living man, he thought as he went to get the shovel, but he better not come out here and try to get me off this property because I’ll kill him. Go to him and be dammed, his uncle had said. I’ve saved you from him this far and if you go to him the minute I’m in the ground, there’s nothing I can do about it.
The shovel lay against the side of the henhouse. “I’ll never set my foot in the city again,” Tarwater said. “I’ll never go to him. Him nor nobody else will ever get me off this place.” He decided to dig the grave under the fig tree because the old man would be good for the figs. The ground was sandy on top and solid brick underneath and the shovel made a clanging sound when he struck it in the sand. Two hundred pounds of dead mountain to bury, he thought, and stood with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, studying the white sky through the leaves of the tree. It would take all day to get a hole big enough out of this rock and the schoolteacher would burn him in a minute.
Tarwater had never seen the schoolteacher but he had seen his child, a boy who resembled old Tarwater himself. The old man had been so shocked by the likeness that the time he and Tarwater had gone there, he had only stood in the door, staring at the little boy and rolling his tongue around outside his mouth like an old idiot. That had been the first and only time the old man had seen the boy. “Three months there,” he would say. “It shames me. Betrayed for three months in the house of my own kin, and if when I’m dead you want to turn me over to my betrayer and see my body burned, go ahead. Go ahead, boy!” he had shouted, sitting up splotch-faced in his box. “Go ahead and let him burn me but watch out for the crab that begins to grip your neck after that!” and he had clawed his hand in the air to show Tarwater his grip. “I been leavened by the yeast he don’t believe in,” he said, “and I won’t be burned. And when I’m gone you’ll be better off in these woods by yourself with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in than you would be in the city with him!”
The white fog had eased through the yard and disappeared into the next bottom and now the air was clear and blank. “The dead are poor,” Tarwater said in the voice of the stranger. “You can’t be any poorer than dead. He’ll have to take what he gets.” Nobody to bother me, he thought. Ever. No hand uplifted to hinder me from anything. A sand-colored hound beat its tail on the ground nearby and a few black chickens scratched in the raw clay he was turning up. The sun had slipped over the blue line of trees and, circled by a haze of yellow, was moving slowly across the sky. “Now I can do anything I want to,” he said, softening the stranger’s voice so that he could stand it. Could kill off all those chickens if I had a mind to, he thought, watching the worthless black game bantams that his uncle had been fond of keeping.
“He favored a lot of foolishness,” the stranger said. “The truth is he was childish. Why, that schoolteacher never did him any harm. You take, all he did was to watch him and write down what he seen and heard and put it in a paper for schoolteachers to read. Now what was wrong in that? Why nothing. Who cares what a schoolteacher reads? And the old fool acted like he had been killed in his very soul. Well, he wasn’t so near dead then as he thought he was. Lived on fifteen years and raised up a boy to bury him, suitable to his own taste.”
As Tarwater slashed at the ground with the shovel, the stranger’s voice took on a kind of restrained fury and he kept repeating, “You got to bury him whole and completely by hand and that schoolteacher would burn him in a minute.” After he had dug for an hour or more, the grave was only a foot deep, not as deep yet as the corpse. He sat down on the edge of it for a while. The sun was like a furious white blister in the sky. “The dead are a heap more trouble than the living,” the stranger said. “That schoolteacher wouldn’t consider for a minute that on the last day all the bodies marked by crosses will be gathered. In the rest of the world they do things different than what you been taught.”
“I been there oncet,” Tarwater muttered. “Nobody has to tell me.”
His uncle two or three years before had gone there to call on the lawyers to try and get the property unentailed so that it would skip the schoolteacher and go to Tarwater. Tarwater had sat at the lawyer’s twelfth-story window and looked down into the pit of the city street while his uncle transacted the business. On the way from the railroad station he had walked tall in the mass of moving metal and concrete speckled with the very small eyes of people. The glitter of his own eyes was shaded under the stiff roof-like brim of a new gray hat balanced perfectly straight on his buttressing ears. Before coming he had read facts in the almanac and he knew that there were sixty thousand people here who were seeing him for the first time. He wanted to stop and shake hands with each of them and say his name was Francis M. Tarwater and that he was here only for the day to accompany his uncle on business at a lawyer’s. His head jerked backwards after each passing figure until they began to pass too thickly and he observed that their eyes didn’t grab at you like the eyes of country people. Several of them bumped into him and this contact that should have made an acquaintance for life made nothing because the hulks shoved on with ducked heads and muttered apologies that he would have accepted if they had waited. At the lawyer’s window, he had knelt down and let his face hang out upside-down over the floating speckled street moving like a river of tin below and had watched the glints on it from the sun which drifted pale in a pale sky. You have to do something particular here to make them look at you, he thought. They ain’t going to look at you just because God made you. When I come for good, he said to himself, I’ll do something to make every eye stick on me for what I done; and leaning forward, he saw his hat drop down gently, lost and casual, dallied slightly by the breeze on its way to be smashed in the traffic below. He clutched at his bare head and fell back inside the room.
His uncle was in argument with the lawyer, both hitting the desk that separated them, bending their knees and hitting their fists at the same time. The lawyer, a tall dome-headed man with an eagle’s nose, kept repeating in a restrained shriek, “But I didn’t make the will. I didn’t make the law,” and his uncle’s voice grated, “I can’t help it. My daddy wouldn’t have wanted it this way. It has to skip him. My daddy wouldn’t have seen a fool inherit his property. That’s not how he intended it.”
“My hat is gone,” Tarwater said.
The lawyer threw himself backwards into his chair and screaked it toward Tarwater and saw him without interest from pale-blue eyes and screaked it forward again and said to his uncle, “There’s nothing I can do. You’re wasting your time and mine. You might as well resign yourself to this will.”
“Listen,” old Tarwater said, “at one time I thought I was finished, old and sick and about to die and no money, nothing, and I accepted his hospitality because he was my closest blood connection and you could have called it his duty to take me, only I thought it was charity, I thought . . .”
“I can’t help what you thought or did or what your connection thought or did,” the lawyer said and closed his eyes.
“My hat fell,” Tarwater said.
“I’m only a lawyer,” the lawyer said, letting his glance rove over the lines of clay-colored books of law that fortressed his office.
“A car is liable to have run over it by now.”
“Listen,” his uncle said, “all the time he was studying me for a paper he was writing. Only had me there to study me for this paper. Taking secret tests on me, his own kin, looking into my soul like a Peeping Tom, and then says to me, ‘Uncle, you’re a type that’s almost extinct!’ Almost extinct!” the old man piped, barely able to force a thread of sound from his throat. “You see how extinct I am!”
The lawyer shut his eyes and smiled into one cheek.
“Other lawyers,” the old man growled, and they had left and visited three more without stopping, and Tarwater had counted eleven men who might have had on his hat or might not. Finally when they came out of the fourth lawyer’s office, they sat down on the window ledge of a bank building and his uncle felt in his pocket for some biscuits he had brought and handed one to Tarwater. The old man unbuttoned his coat and allowed his stomach to ease forward and rest on his lap while he ate. His face worked wrathfully; the skin between the pockmarks grew pink and then purple and then white and the pockmarks appeared to jump from one spot to another. Tarwater was very pale and his eyes glittered with a peculiar hollow depth. He had an old work handkerchief tied around his head, knotted at the four corners. He didn’t observe the passing people who observed him now. “Thank God, we’re finished here and can go home,” he muttered.
“We ain’t finished here,” the old man said and got up abruptly and started down the street.
“My Jesus,” the boy hissed, jumping to catch up with him. “Can’t we sit down for one minute? Ain’t you got any sense? They all tell you the same thing. It’s only one law and it’s nothing you can do about it. I got sense enough to get that; why ain’t you? What’s the matter with you?”
The old man strode on with his head thrust forward as if he were smelling out an enemy.
“Where we going?” Tarwater asked after they had walked out of the business streets and were passing between rows of gray bulbous houses with sooty porches that overhung the sidewalks. “Listen,” he said, hitting his uncle’s hip, “I never ast to come.”
“You would have asked to come soon enough,” the old man muttered. “Get your fill now.”
“I never ast for no fill. I never ast to come at all. I’m here before I knew this here was here.”
“Just remember,” the old man said, “just remember that I told you to remember when you ast to come that you never liked it when you were here,” and they kept on going, crossing one length of sidewalk after another, row after row of overhanging houses with half-open doors that let a little dried light fall on the stained passageways inside. Finally they came out into another section where the houses were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass in front of it like a dog gripping a stolen steak. After a few blocks, Tarwater dropped down on the sidewalk and said, “I ain’t going a step further.”
“I don’t even know where I’m going and I ain’t going no further!” he shouted at his uncle’s heavy figure which didn’t stop or look back. In a second he jumped up and followed him again, thinking: If anything happened to him, I would be lost here.
The old man kept straining forward as if his blood scent were leading him closer and closer to the place where his enemy was hiding. He suddenly turned up the short walk of a pale-yellow house and moved rigidly to the white door, his heavy shoulders hunched as if he were going to crash through like a bulldozer. He struck the wood with his fist, ignoring a polished brass knocker. By the time Tarwater came up behind him, the door had opened and a small pink-faced fat boy stood in it. He was a white-haired child and wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had pale-silver eyes like the old man’s. The two stood staring at each other, old Tarwater with his fist raised and his mouth open and his tongue lolling idiotically from side to side. For a second the little fat boy seemed shocked still with astonishment. Then he guffawed. He raised his fist and opened his mouth and let his tongue roll out as far as it would go. The old man’s eyes seemed about to strain out of their sockets.
“Tell your father,” he roared, “that I’m not extinct!”
The little boy shook as if a blast had hit him and pushed the door almost shut, hiding himself all but one spectacled eye. The old man grabbed Tarwater by the shoulder and swung him around and pushed him down the path away from the place.
He had never been back there again, never seen his cousin again, never seen the schoolteacher at all, and he hoped to God, he told the stranger digging the grave along with him now, that he would never see him, though he had nothing against him and he would dislike to kill him, but if he came out here, messing with what was none of his business except by law, then he would be obliged to.
“Listen,” the stranger said, “what would he want to come out here for—where there’s nothing?”
Tarwater began to dig again and didn’t answer. He didn’t search out the stranger’s face, but he knew by now it was sharp and friendly and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed hat. He had lost his dislike for the sound of the voice. Only, every now and then it sounded like a stranger’s voice to him. He began to feel that he was only just now meeting himself, as if, as long as his uncle had lived, he had been deprived of his own acquaintance.
“I ain’t denying the old man was a good one,” his new friend said, “but like you said: you can’t be any poorer than dead. They have to take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his body is not going to feel the pinch—of fire or anything else.”
“It was the last day he was thinking of,” Tarwater said.
“Well now,” the stranger said, “don’t you think any cross you set up in the year 1954 or 5 or 6 would be rotted out by the year the Day of Judgment comes in? Rotted to as much dust as his ashes if you reduced him to ashes? And lemme ast you this: what’s God going to do with sailors drowned at sea that the fish have et and the fish that et them et by other fish and they et by yet others? And what about people that get burned up naturally in house fires? Burnt up one way or another or lost in machines until they’re a pulp? And all these sojers blasted to nothing? What about all these naturally left without a piece to fit a piece?”
“If I burnt him,” Tarwater said, “it wouldn’t be natural, it would be deliberate.”
“Oh, I see,” the stranger said. “It ain’t the Day of Judgment for him you’re worried about, it’s the Day of Judgment for you.”
“That’s my bidnis,” Tarwater said.
“I ain’t buttin into your bidnis,” the stranger said. “It don’t mean a thing to me. You’re left by yourself in this empty place. Forever by yourself in the empty place with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in. You don’t mean a thing to a soul as far as I can see.”
“Redeemed,” Tarwater muttered.
“Do you smoke?” the stranger asked.
“Smoke if I want to and don’t if I don’t,” Tarwater said. “Bury if need be and don’t if don’t.”
“Go take a look at him and see if he’s fell off his chair,” his friend suggested.
Tarwater let the shovel drop in the grave and returned to the house. He opened the front door a crack and put his face to it. His uncle glared slightly to the side of him, like a judge intent upon some terrible evidence. The child shut the door quickly and went back to the grave. He was cold in spite of the sweat that stuck his shirt to his back.
The sun was directly overhead, apparently dead still, holding its breath waiting out the noontime. The grave was about two feet deep. “Ten foot now, remember,” the stranger said and laughed. “Old men are selfish. You got to expect the least from them. The least from everybody,” he added, and let out a flat sigh that was like a gust of sand raised and dropped suddenly by the wind.
Tarwater lo
oked up and saw two figures cutting across the field, a colored man and woman, each dangling an empty vinegar jug by a finger. The woman, tall and Indian-like, had on a green sunhat. She stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the yard toward the grave; the man held the wire down and swung his leg over and followed at her elbow. They kept their eyes on the hole and stopped at the edge of it, looking down into the raw ground with shocked satisfied expressions. The man, Buford, had a crinkled, burnt-rag face, darker than his hat. “Old man passed,” he said.
The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail, piercing and formal. She set her jug down on the ground and crossed her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again.
“Tell her to shut up that,” Tarwater said. “I’m in charge here now and I don’t want no nigger-mourning.”
“I seen his spirit for two nights,” she said. “Seen him two nights and he was unrested.”
“He ain’t been dead but since this morning,” Tarwater said. “If you all want your jugs filled, give them to me and dig while I’m gone.”
“He’d been perdicting his passing for many years,” Buford said. “She seen him in her dream several nights and he wasn’t rested. I known him well. I known him very well indeed.”
“Poor sweet sugar boy,” the woman said to Tarwater, “what you going to do here now by yourself in this lonesome place?”
“Mind by bidnis,” the boy growled, jerking the jug out of her hand, and started off so quickly that he almost fell. He stalked across the back field toward the rim of trees that surrounded the clearing.
The birds had gone into the deep woods to escape the noon sun and one thrush, hidden some distance ahead of him, called the same four notes again and again, stopping each time after them to make a silence. Tarwater began to walk faster, then he began to lope, and in a second he was running like something hunted, sliding down slopes waxed with pine needles and grasping the limbs of trees to pull himself, panting, up the slippery inclines. He crashed through a wall of honeysuckle and leapt across a sandy stream bed that was almost dry now and fell down against the high clay bank that formed the back wall of a cove where the old man had kept his extra liquor hidden. He hid it in a hollow of the bank, covered with a large stone. Tarwater began to fight at the stone to pull it away, while the stranger stood over his shoulder, panting, “He was crazy! He was crazy! That’s the long and short of it. He was crazy!” Tarwater got the stone away and pulled out a black jug and sat down against the bank with it. “Crazy!” the stranger hissed, collapsing by his side. The sun appeared, edging its way secretly behind the tops of the trees that rose over the hiding place.