A fierce surging pressure had begun upward beneath his hands and grimly he had exerted more and more force downward. In a second, he felt he was trying to hold a giant under. Astonished, he let himself look. The face under the water was wrathfully contorted, twisted by some primeval rage to save itself. Automatically he released his pressure. Then when he realized what he had done, he pushed down again angrily with all his force until the struggle ceased under his hands. He stood sweating in the water, his own mouth as slack as the child’s had been. The body, caught by an undertow, almost got away from him but he managed to come to himself and snatch it. Then as he looked at it, he had a moment of complete terror in which he envisioned his life without the child. He began to shout frantically. He plowed his way out of the water with the limp body. The beach which he had thought empty before had become peopled with strangers converging on him from all directions. A bald-headed man in red and blue Roman striped shorts began at once to administer artificial respiration. Three wailing women and a photographer appeared. The next day there had been a picture in the paper, showing the rescuer, striped bottom forward, working over the child. Rayber was beside him on his knees, watching with an agonized expression. The caption said, OVERJOYED FATHER SEES SON REVIVED.
The boy’s voice broke in on him harshly. “All you got to do is nurse an idiot!”
The schoolteacher opened his eyes. They were bloodshot and vague. He might have been returning to consciousness after a blow on the head.
Tarwater was glaring to the side of him. “Come on if you’re coming,” he said, “and if you ain’t, I’m going on about my bidnis.”
Rayber didn’t answer.
“So long,” Tarwater said.
“And where would your business be?” Rayber asked sourly. “At another tabernacle?”
The boy reddened. He opened his mouth and said nothing.
“I nurse an idiot that you’re afraid to look at,” Rayber said. “Look him in the eye.”
Tarwater shot a glance at the top of Bishop’s head and left it there an instant like a finger on a candle flame. “I’d as soon be afraid to look at a dog,” he said and turned his back. After a moment, as if he were continuing the same conversation, he muttered, “I’d as soon baptize a dog as him. It would be as much use.”
“Who said anything about baptizing anybody?” Rayber said. “Is that one of your fixations? Have you taken that bug up from the old man?”
The boy whirled around and faced him. “I told you I only gone there to spit on it,” he said tensely. “I ain’t going to tell you again.”
Rayber watched him without saying anything. He felt that his own sour words had helped him recover himself. He pushed Bishop off and stood up. “Let’s get going,” he said. He had no intention of discussing it further, but as they moved on silently, he thought better of it.
“Listen Frank,” he said, “I’ll grant that you went to spit on it. I’ve never for a second doubted your intelligence. Everything you’ve done, your very presence here proves that you’re above your background, that you’ve broken through the ceiling the old man set for you. After all, you escaped from Powderhead. You had the courage to attend to him the quickest way and then get out of there. And once out, you came directly to the right place.”
The boy reached up and picked a leaf from a tree branch and bit it. A wry expression spread over his face. He rolled the leaf into a ball and threw it away. Rayber continued to speak, his voice detached, as if he had no particular interest in the matter, and his were merely the voice of truth, as impersonal as air.
“Say that you went to spit on it,” he said, “the point is this: there’s no need to spit on it. It’s not worth spitting on. It’s not that important. You’ve somehow enlarged the significance of it in your mind. The old man used to enrage me until I learned better. He wasn’t worth my hate and he’s not worth yours. He’s only worth our pity.” He wondered if the boy were capable of the steadiness of pity. “You want to avoid extremes. They are for violent people and you don’t want…”—he broke off abruptly as Bishop let loose his hand and galloped away.
They had come out into the center of the park, a concrete circle with a fountain in the middle of it. Water rushed from the mouth of a stone lion’s head into a shallow pool and the little boy was flying toward it, his arms flailing like a windmill. In a second he was over the side and in. “Too late, goddammit,” Rayber muttered, “he’s in.” He glanced at Tarwater.
The boy stood arrested in the middle of a step. His eyes were on the child in the pool but they burned as if he beheld some terrible compelling vision. The sun shone brightly on Bishop’s white head and the little boy stood there with a look of attention. Tarwater began to move toward him.
He seemed to be drawn toward the child in the water but to be pulling back, exerting an almost equal pressure away from what attracted him. Rayber watched, puzzled and suspicious, moving along with him but somewhat to the side. As he drew closer to the pool, the skin on the boy’s face appeared to stretch tighter and tighter. Rayber had the sense that he was moving blindly, that where Bishop was he saw only a spot of light. He felt that something was being enacted before him and that if he could understand it, he would have the key to the boy’s future. His muscles were tensed and he was prepared somehow to act. Suddenly his sense of danger was so great that he cried out. In an instant of illumination he understood. Tarwater was moving toward Bishop to baptize him. Already he had reached the edge of the pool. Rayber sprang and snatched the child out of the water and set him down, howling, on the concrete.
His heart was beating furiously. He felt that he had just saved the boy from committing some enormous indignity. He saw it all now. The old man had transferred his fixation to the boy, had left him with the notion that he must baptize Bishop or suffer some terrible consequence. Tarwater put his foot down on the marble edge of the pool. He leaned forward, his elbow on his knee, looking over the side at his broken reflection in the water. His lips moved as if he were speaking silently to the face forming in the pool. Rayber said nothing. He realized now the magnitude of the boy’s affliction. He knew that there was no way to appeal to him with reason. There was no hope of discussing it sanely with him, for it was a compulsion. He saw no way of curing him except perhaps through some shock, some sudden concrete confrontation with the futility, the ridiculous absurdity of performing the empty rite.
He squatted down and began to take off Bishop’s wet shoes. The child had stopped howling and was crying quietly, his face red and hideously distorted. Rayber turned his eyes away.
Tarwater was walking off. He was past the pool, his back strangely bent as if he were being driven away with a whip. He was moving off onto one of the narrow tree-shaded paths.
“Wait!” Rayber shouted. “We can’t go to the museum now. We’ll have to go home and change Bishop’s shoes.”
Tarwater could not have failed to hear but he kept on walking and in a second was lost to view.
Goddam backwoods imbecile, Rayber said under his breath. He stood looking at the path where the boy had disappeared. He felt no urge to go after him for he knew that he would be back, that he was held by Bishop. His feeling of oppression was caused now by the certain knowledge that there was no way to get rid of him. He would be with them until he had either accomplished what he came for, or until he was cured. The words the old man had scrawled on the back of the journal rose before him: THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN. The sentence was like a challenge renewed. I will cure him, he said grimly. I will cure him or know the reason why.
VII
THE Cherokee Lodge was a two-story converted warehouse, the lower part painted white and the upper green. One end sat on land and the other was set on stilts in a glassy little lake across which were dense woods, green and black farther toward the skyline, grey-blue. The long front side of the building, plastered with beer and cigaret signs, faced the highway, which ran about thirty feet away across a dirt road and b
eyond a narrow stretch of iron weed. Rayber had passed the place before but had never been tempted to stop.
He had selected it because it was only thirty miles from Powderhead and because it was cheap and he arrived there the next day with the two boys in time for them to take a walk and look around before they ate. The ride up had been oppressively silent, the boy sitting as usual on his side of the car like some foreign dignitary who would not admit speaking the language—the filthy hat, the stinking overalls, worn defiantly like a national costume.
Rayber had hit upon his plan in the night. It was to take him back to Powderhead and make him face what he had done. What he hoped was that if seeing and feeling the place again were a real shock, the boy’s trauma might suddenly be revealed. His irrational fears and impulses would burst out and his uncle—sympathetic, knowing, uniquely able to understand—would be there to explain them to him. He had not said they were going to Powderhead. So far as the boy knew, this was to be a fishing trip. He thought that an afternoon of relaxation in a boat before the experiment would help ease the tension, his own as well as Tarwater’s.
On the drive up, his thoughts had been interrupted once when he saw Bishop’s face rise unorganized into the rearview mirror and then disappear as he attempted to crawl over the top of the front seat and climb into Tarwater’s lap. The boy had turned and without looking at him had given the panting child a firm push onto the back seat again. One of Rayber’s immediate goals was to make him understand that his urge to baptize the child was a kind of sickness and that a sign of returning health would be his ability to begin looking Bishop in the eye. Rayber felt that once he could look the child in the eye, he would have confidence in his ability to resist the morbid impulse to baptize him.
When they got out of the car, he watched the boy closely, trying to discover his first reaction to being in the country again. Tarwater stood for a moment, his head lifted sharply as if he detected some familiar odor moving from the pine forest across the lake. His long face, depending from the bulb-shaped hat, made Rayber think of a root jerked suddenly out of the ground and exposed to the light. The boy’s eyes narrowed so that the lake must have been reduced to the width of a knife-blade in his sight. He looked at the water with a peculiar undisguised hostility. Rayber even thought that as his eye fell on it, he began to tremble. At least he was certain that his hands clenched. His glare steadied, then with his usual precipitous gait, he set off around the building without looking back.
Bishop climbed out of the car and thrust his face against his father’s side. Absently Rayber put his hand on the little boy’s ear and rubbed it gingerly, his fingers tingling as if they touched the sensitive scar of some old wound. Then he pushed the child aside, picked up the bag and started toward the screen door of the lodge. As he reached it, Tarwater came quickly around the side of the building with the distinct look to Rayber of being pursued. His feeling for the boy alternated drastically between compassion for his haunted look and fury at the way he was treated by him. Tarwater acted as if to see him at all required a special effort. Rayber opened the screen door and stepped inside, leaving the two boys to come in or not as they pleased.
The interior was dark. To the left he made out a reception desk with a heavy plain-looking woman behind it, leaning on her elbows. He set the bags down and gave her his name. He had the feeling that though her eyes were on him, they were looking behind him. He glanced around. Bishop was a few feet away, gaping at her.
“What’s your name, Sugarpie?” she asked.
“His name is Bishop,” Rayber said shortly. He was always irked when the child was stared at.
The woman tilted her head sympathetically. “I reckon you’re taking him off to give his mother a little rest,” she said, her eyes full of curiosity and compassion.
“I have him all the time,” he said and added before he could stop himself, “his mother abandoned him.”
“No!” she breathed. “Well,” she said, “it takes all kinds of women. I couldn’t leave a child like that.”
You can’t even take your eyes off him, he thought irritably and began to fill out the card. “Are the boats for rent?” he asked without looking up.
“Free for the guests,” she said, “but anybody gets drowned, that’s their lookout. How about him? Can he sit still in a boat?”
“Nothing ever happens to him,” he murmured, finishing the card and turning it around to her.
She read it, then she glanced up and stared at Tarwater. He was standing a few feet behind Bishop, looking around him suspiciously, his hands in his pockets and his hat pulled down. She began to scowl. “That boy there—is yours too?” she asked, pointing the pen at him as if this were inconceivable.
Rayber realized that she must think he was some one hired for a guide. “Certainly, he’s mine too,” he said quickly and in a voice the boy could not fail to hear. He made it a point to impress on him that he was wanted, whether he cared to be wanted or not.
Tarwater lifted his head and returned the woman’s stare. Then he took a stride forward and thrust his face at her. “What do you mean—is his?” he demanded.
“Is his,” she said, drawing back. “You don’t look it is all.” Then she frowned as if, continuing to study him, she began to see a likeness.
“And I ain’t it,” he said. He snatched the card from her and read it. Rayber had written, “George F. Rayber, Frank and Bishop Rayber,” and their address. The boy put the card down on the desk and picked up the pen, gripping it so hard that his fingers turned red at the tips. He crossed out the name Frank and underneath in an old man’s meticulous hand he began to write something else.
Rayber looked at the woman helplessly and lifted his shoulders as if to say, “I have more than one problem,” and shrug it off, but the gesture ended in a violent tremor. To his horror he felt the side of his mouth give a series of quick jerks. He had an instant’s premonition that if he wished to save himself, he should leave at once, that the trip was doomed.
The woman handed him the key and, looking at him suspiciously, said, “Up the steps yonder and four doors down to the right. We don’t have anybody to tote the bags.”
He took the key and started up a rickety flight of steps to the left. Halfway up, he paused and said in a voice in which there was a remnant of authority, “Bring up that bag when you come, Frank.”
The boy was finishing his essay on the card and gave no indication of hearing.
The woman’s curious gaze followed Rayber up the stairs until he disappeared. She observed as his feet passed the level of her head that he had on one brown sock and one grey. His shoes were not run-down but he might have slept in his seersucker suit every night. He was in bad need of a haircut and his eyes had a peculiar look—like something human trapped in a switch box. Has come here to have a nervous breakdown, she said to herself. Then she turned her head. Her eyes rested on the two boys, who had not moved. And who wouldn’t? she asked herself.
The afflicted child looked as if he must have dressed himself. He had on a black cowboy hat and a pair of short khaki pants that were too tight even for his narrow hips and a yellow t-shirt that had not been washed any time lately. Both his brown hightop shoes were untied. The upper part of him looked like an old man and the lower part like a child. The other, the mean-looking one, had picked up the desk card again and was reading over what he had written on it. He was so taken up with it that he did not see the little boy reaching out to touch him. The instant the child touched him, the country boy’s shoulders leapt. He snatched his touched hand up and jammed it in his pocket. “Leave off!” he said in a high voice. “Git away and quit bothering me!”
“Mind how you talk to one of them there, you boy!” the woman hissed.
He looked at her as if it were the first time she had spoken to him. “Them there what?” he murmured.
“That there kind,” she said, looking at him fiercely as if he had profaned the holy.
He looked back at the afflicted child and th
e woman was startled by the expression on his face. He seemed to see the little boy and nothing else, no air around him, no room, no nothing, as if his gaze had slipped and fallen into the center of the child’s eyes and was still falling down and down and down. The little boy turned after a second and skipped off toward the steps and the country boy followed, so directly that he might have been attached to him by a tow-line. The child began to scramble up the steps on his hands and knees, kicking his feet up on each one. Then suddenly he flipped himself around and sat down squarely in the country boy’s way and stuck his feet out in front of him, apparently wanting his shoes tied. The country boy stopped still. He hung over him like some one bewitched, his long arms bent uncertainly.
The woman watched fascinated. He ain’t going to tie them, she said, not him.
He leaned over and began to tie them. Frowning furiously, he tied one and then the other and the child watched, completely absorbed in the operation. When the boy finished tying them, he straightened himself and said in a querulous voice, “Now git on and quit bothering me with them laces,” and the child flipped over on his hands and feet and scrambled up the stairs, making a great din.
Confused by this kindness, the woman called, “Hey boy.”
She had intended to say, “Whose boy are you?” but she said nothing, her mouth opening on a vanished sentence. His eyes as they turned and looked down at her were the color of the lake just before dark when the last daylight has faded and the moon has not risen yet, and for an instant she thought she saw something fleeing across the surface of them, a lost light that came from nowhere and vanished into nothing. For some moments they stared at each other without issue. Finally, convinced she had not seen it, she muttered, “Whatever devil’s work you mean to do, don’t do it here.”