All he would be was an observer. He waited with serenity. Life had never been good enough to him for him to wince at its destruction. He told himself that he was indifferent even to his own dissolution. It seemed to him that this indifference was the most that human dignity could achieve, and for the moment forgetting his lapses, forgetting even his narrow escape of the afternoon, he felt he had achieved it. To feel nothing was peace.
He watched idly as a round red moon rose into the lower corner of his window. It might have been the sun rising on the upsidedown half of the world. He came to a decision. When the boy came back he would say: Bishop and I are returning to town tonight. You may go with us under these conditions: not that you begin to cooperate, but that you cooperate, fully and completely, that you change your attitude, that you allow yourself to be tested, that you prepare yourself to enter school in the fall, and that you take that hat off your head right now and throw it out the window into the lake. If you can’t meet these requirements, then Bishop and I are leaving by ourselves.
It had taken him five days to reach this state of clarity. He thought of his foolish emotions the night the boy had come, thought of himself sitting by the side of the bed, thinking that at last he had a son with a future. He saw himself again following the boy down back alleys to end finally at a detestable temple, saw the idiot figure of himself standing with his head in the window, listening to the mad child preach. It was unbelievable. Even the plan to take the boy back to Powderhead seemed ridiculous to him now and going to Powderhead this afternoon was the act of an insane person. His indecision, his uncertainty, his eagerness up to now appeared shameful and absurd to him. He felt that he had regained his senses after five days of madness. He could not wait for them to return so that he could deliver his ultimatum.
He closed his eyes and went over the scene in detail, seeing the sullen face at bay, the haughty eyes forced to look down. His power would lie in the fact that he was indifferent now whether the boy stayed or went, or not indifferent for he positively wanted him to leave. He smiled at the thought that his indifference lacked that one perfection. Presently he dozed again, and again he and Bishop were fleeing in the car, the tornado just behind them.
When he awoke again, the moon travelling toward the middle of the window had lost its color. He sat up startled as if it were a face looking in on him, a pale messenger breathlessly arrived.
He got up and went to the window and leaned out. The sky was a hollow black and an empty road of moonlight crossed the lake. He leaned far out, his eyes narrowed, but he could see nothing. The stillness disturbed him. He turned the hearing aid on and at once his head buzzed with the steady drone of crickets and treefrogs. He searched for the boat in the darkness and could see nothing. He waited expectantly. Then an instant before the cataclysm, he grabbed the metal box of the hearing aid as if he were clawing his heart. The quiet was broken by an unmistakable bellow.
He did not move. He remained absolutely still, wooden, expressionless, as the machine picked up the sounds of some fierce sustained struggle in the distance. The bellow stopped and came again, then it began steadily, swelling. The machine made the sounds seem to come from inside him as if something in him were tearing itself free. He clenched his teeth. The muscles in his face contracted and revealed lines of pain beneath harder than bone. He set his jaw. No cry must escape him. The one thing he knew, the one thing he was certain of was that no cry must escape him.
The bellow rose and fell, then it blared out one last time, rising out of its own momentum as if it were escaping finally, after centuries of waiting, into silence. The beady night noises closed in again.
He remained standing woodenly at the window. He knew what had happened. What had happened was as plain to him as if he had been in the water with the boy and the two of them together had taken the child and held him under until he ceased to struggle.
He stared out over the empty still pond to the dark wood that surrounded it. The boy would be moving off through it to meet his appalling destiny. He knew with an instinct as sure as the dull mechanical beat of his heart that he had baptized the child even as he drowned him, that he was headed for everything the old man had prepared him for, that he moved off now through the black forest toward a violent encounter with his fate.
He stood there trying to remember something else before he moved away. It came to him finally as something so distant and vague in his mind that it might already have happened, a long time ago. It was that tomorrow they would drag the pond for Bishop.
He stood waiting for the raging pain, the intolerable hurt that was his due, to begin, so that he could ignore it, but he continued to feel nothing. He stood light-headed at the window and it was not until he realized there would be no pain that he collapsed.
THREE
X
THE headlights revealed the boy at the side of the road, slightly crouched, his head turned expectantly, his eyes for an instant lit red like the eyes of rabbits and deer that streak across the highway at night in the path of speeding cars. His pantslegs were wet up to the knees as if he had been through a swamp. The driver, minute in the glassed cab, brought the looming truck to a halt and left the motor idling while he leaned across the empty seat and opened the door. The boy climbed in.
It was an auto-transit truck, huge and skeletal, carrying four automobiles packed in it like bullets. The driver, a wiry man with a nose sharply twisted down and heavy-lidded eyes, gave the rider a suspicious look and then shifted gears and the truck began to move again, rumbling fiercely. “You got to keep me awake or you don’t ride, buddy,” he said. “I ain’t picking you up to do you a favor.” His voice, from some other part of the country, curled at the end of each sentence.
Tarwater opened his mouth as if he expected words to come out of it but none came. He remained, staring at the man, his mouth half-open, his face white.
“I’m not kiddin’, kid,” the driver said.
The boy kept his elbows gripped into his sides to prevent his frame from shaking. “I only want to go as far as where this road joins 56,” he said finally. There were queer ups and downs in his voice as if he were using it for the first time after some momentous failure. He appeared to listen to it himself, to be trying to hear beyond the quaver in it to some solid basis of sound.
“Start talking,” the driver said.
The boy wet his lips. After a moment he said in a high voice, entirely out of control, “I never wasted my life talking. I always done something.”
“What you done lately?” the man asked. “How come your pantslegs are wet?”
He looked down at his wet pantslegs and kept looking. They seemed to turn his mind entirely from what he had been going to say, to absorb his attention completely.
“Wake up, buddy,” the driver said. “I say how come are your pantslegs wet?”
“Because I never took them off when I done it,” he said. “I took off my shoes but I never taken off my pants.”
“When you done what?”
“I’m going home,” he said. “It’s a place I get off at on 56 and then down that road a piece I take a dirt road. It’s liable to be morning before I get there.”
“How come your pantslegs are wet?” the driver persisted.
“I drowned a boy,” Tarwater said.
“Just one?” the driver asked.
“Yes.” He reached over and caught hold of the sleeve of the man’s shirt. His lips worked a few seconds. They stopped and then started again as if the force of a thought were behind them but no words. He shut his mouth, then tried again but no sound came. Then all at once the sentence rushed out and was gone. “I baptized him.”
“Huh?” the man said.
“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to,” he said breathlessly. Then in a calmer voice he said, “The words just come out of themselves but it don’t mean nothing. You can’t be born again.”
“Make sense,” the man said.
“I only meant to drown him,” the boy said
. “You’re only born once. They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water.” He shook his head violently as if to scatter his thoughts. “There’s nothing where I’m going but the stall,” he began again, “because the house is burnt up but that’s the way I want it. I don’t want nothing of his. Now it’s all mine.”
“Of his whose?” the man muttered.
“Of my great-uncle’s,” the boy said. “I’m going back there. I ain’t going to leave it again. I’m in full charge there. No voice will be uplifted. I shouldn’t never have left it except I had to prove I wasn’t no prophet and I’ve proved it.” He paused and jerked the man’s sleeve. “I proved it by drowning him. Even if I did baptize him that was only an accident. Now all I have to do is mind my own bidnis until I die. I don’t have to baptize or prophesy.”
The man only looked at him, shortly, and then back at the road.
“It’s not going to be any destruction or any fire,” the boy said. “There are them that can act and them that can’t, and them that are hungry and them that ain’t. That’s all. I can act. And I ain’t hungry.” The words crowded out as if they were pushing each other forward. Then he was suddenly silent. He seemed to watch the darkness that the headlights pushed in front of them, always at the same distance. Sudden signs would spring up and vanish at the side of the road.
“That don’t make sense but make up some more of it,” the driver said. “I gotta stay awake. I ain’t riding you just for a good time.”
“I don’t have no more to say,” Tarwater said. His voice was thin, as if many more words would destroy it permanently. It seemed to break off after each sound had found its way out. “I’m hungry,” he said.
“You just said you weren’t hungry,” the driver said.
“I ain’t hungry for the bread of life,” the boy said. “I’m hungry for something to eat here and now. I threw up my dinner and I didn’t eat no supper.”
The driver began to feel in his pocket. He pulled out half a bent sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. “You can have this,” he said. “It don’t have but one bite out of it. I didn’t like it.”
Tarwater took it and held it wrapped in his hand. He didn’t open it.
“Okay, eat it!” the driver said in an exasperated voice. “What’s the matter with you?”
“When I come to eat, I ain’t hungry,” Tarwater said. “It’s like being empty is a thing in my stomach and it don’t allow nothing else to come down in there. If I ate it, I would throw it up.”
“Listen,” the driver said, “I don’t want you puking in here and if you got something catching, you get out right now.”
“I’m not sick,” the boy said. “I never been sick in my life except sometimes when I over ate myself. When I baptized him it wasn’t nothing but words. Back home,” he said, “I’ll be in charge. I’ll have to sleep in the stall until I get to where I can build me back a house. If I hadn’t been a big fool I’d have taken him out and burned him up outside. I wouldn’t have burned up the house along with him.”
“Live and learn,” the driver said.
“My other uncle knows everything,” the boy said, “but that don’t keep him from being a fool. He can’t do nothing. All he can do is figure it out. He’s got this wired head. There’s an electric cord runs into his ear. He can read your mind. He knows you can’t be born again. I know everything he knows, only I can do something about it. I did,” he added.
“Can’t you talk about something else?” the driver asked. “How many sisters you got at home?”
“I was born in a wreck,” the boy said.
He took off his hat and rubbed his head. His hair was flat and thin, dark across his white forehead. He held the hat in his lap like a bowl and looked into it. He took out a box of wooden matches and a white card. “I put all this here in my hat when I drowned him,” he said. “I was afraid my pockets would get wet.” He held up the card close to his eyes and read it aloud. “T. Fawcett Meeks. Southern Copper Parts. Mobile, Birmingham, Atlanta.” He stuck the card in the inside band of his hat and put the hat back on his head. He put the box of matches in his pocket.
The driver’s head was beginning to roll. He shook it and said, “Talk, dammit.”
The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out the combination corkscrew-bottleopener the schoolteacher had given him. “My uncle give me this,” he said. “He ain’t so bad. He knows a heap. I speck I’ll be able to use this thing some time or other,” and he looked at it lying compact in the center of his hand. “I speck it’ll come in handy,” he said, “to open something.”
“Tell me a joke,” the driver said.
The boy didn’t look as if he knew any joke. He didn’t look as if he knew what a joke was. “Do you know what the greatest invention of man is?” he asked finally.
“Naw,” the driver said, “what?”
He didn’t answer. He was staring ahead again into the darkness and seemed to have forgotten the question.
“What’s the greatest invention of man?” the truck driver asked irritably.
The boy turned and looked at him without comprehension. There was a choking sound in his throat and then he said, “What?”
The driver glared a him. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” the boy said. “I feel hungry but I ain’t.”
“You belong in the booby hatch,” the driver muttered. “You ride through these states and you see they all belong in it. I won’t see nobody sane again until I get back to Detroit.”
For a few miles they rode in silence. The truck moved slower and slower. The driver’s lids would fall as if they were weighted with lead and he would shake his head to open them. Almost at once they would close again. The truck began to veer. He shook his head once violently and pulled off the road onto a wide shoulder and leaned back and began to snore without once looking at Tarwater.
The boy sat quietly on his side of the cab. His eyes were open wide without the least look of sleep in them. They seemed not to be able to close but to be open forever on some sight that would never leave them. Presently they closed but his body did not relax. He sat rigidly upright, a still alert expression on his face as if under the closed lids an inner eye were watching, piercing out the truth in the distortion of his dream.
They were sitting facing each other in a boat suspended on a soft bottomless darkness only a little heavier than the black air around them, but the darkness was no hindrance to his sight. He saw through it as if it were day. He looked through the blackness and saw perfectly the light silent eyes of the child across from him. They had lost their diffuseness and were trained on him, fish-colored and fixed. By his side, standing like a guide in the boat, was his faithful friend, lean, shadow-like, who had counseled him in both country and city.
Make haste, he said. Time is like money and money is like blood and time turns blood to dust.
The boy looked up into his friend’s eyes, bent upon him, and was startled to see that in the peculiar darkness, they were violet-colored, very close and intense, and fixed on him with a peculiar look of hunger and attraction. He turned his head away, unsettled by their attention.
No finaler act than this, his friend said. In dealing with the dead you have to act. There’s no mere word sufficient to say NO.
Bishop took off his hat and threw it over the side where it floated right-side-up, black on the black surface of the lake. The boy turned his head, following the hat with his eyes, and saw suddenly that the bank loomed behind him, not twenty yards away, silent, like the brow of some leviathan lifted just above the surface of the water. He felt bodiless as if he were nothing but a head full of air, about to tackle all the dead.
Be a man, his friend counseled, be a man. It’s only one dimwit you have to drown.
The boy edged the boat toward a dark clump of bushes and tied it. Then he removed his shoes, put the contents of his pockets into his hat and put the hat into one shoe, while all the time the grey eyes were fixed on hi
m as if they were waiting serenely for a struggle already determined. The violet eyes, fixed on him also, waited with a barely concealed impatience.
This is no time to dawdle, his mentor said. Once it’s done, it’s done forever.
The water slid out from the bank like a broad black tongue. He climbed out of the boat and stood still, feeling the mud between his toes and the wet clinging around his legs. The sky was dotted with fixed tranquil eyes like the spread tail of some celestial night bird. While he stood there gazing, for the moment lost, the child in the boat stood up, caught him around the neck and climbed onto his back. He clung there like a large crab to a twig and the startled boy felt himself sinking backwards into the water as if the whole bank were pulling him down.
Sitting upright and rigid in the cab of the truck, his muscles began to jerk, his arms flailed, his mouth opened to make way for cries that would not come. His pale face twitched and grimaced. He might have been Jonah clinging wildly to the whale’s tongue.
The silence in the truck was corrugated with the snores of the driver, whose head rolled from side to side. The boy’s jerking arms almost touched him once or twice as he struggled to extricate himself from a monstrous enclosing darkness. Occasionally a car would pass, illuminating for an instant his contorted face. He grappled with the air as if he had been flung like a fish on the shores of the dead without lungs to breathe there. The night finally began to fade. A plateau of red appeared in the eastern sky just above the treeline and a dun-colored light began to reveal the fields on either side. Suddenly in a high raw voice the defeated boy cried out the words of baptism, shuddered, and opened his eyes. He heard the sibilant oaths of his friend fading away on the darkness.