“Well get on with it,” he would say. “If you don’t make haste, you’ll never get to where he blasphemed at.”
“He was glad to see me,” his uncle said. “He opened the door with all that house full of paper-trash behind him and there I stood and he was glad to see me. It was all underneath his face.”
“What did he say?” Tarwater asked.
“He looked at my satchel,” the old man said, “and he said, ‘Uncle, you can’t live with me. I know exactly what you want but I’m going to raise this child my way.’”
These words of the schoolteacher’s had always caused a quick charge of excitement to race through Tarwater, an almost sensuous satisfaction. “It might have sounded to you like he was glad to see you,” he said. “It don’t sound that way to me.”
“He wasn’t but twenty-four years old,” the old man said. “His expression hadn’t even set on his face yet. I could still see the seven-year-old boy that had gone off with me, except that now he had a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a nose big enough to hold them up. The size of his eyes had shrunk because his face had grown but it was the same face all right. You could see behind it to what he really wanted to say. When he came out here later to get you back after I had stolen you, it was already set. It was as set then as the outside of a penitentiary but not now when I’m telling you about. Then it wasn’t set and I could see he wanted me. Else why had he come out to Powderhead to tell me they were all dead? I ask you that? He could have let me alone.”
The boy couldn’t answer.
“Anyway,” the old man said, “what all he gone on and done proved he wanted me right then because he took me in. He looked at my satchel and I said, ‘I’m on your charity,’ and he said, ‘I’m sorry, Uncle. You can’t live with me and ruin another child’s life. This one is going to be brought up to live in the real world. He’s going to be brought up to expect exactly what he can do for himself. He’s going to be his own saviour. He’s going to be free!’” The old man turned his head to the side and spit. “Free,” he said. “He was full of such-like phrases. But then I said it. I said what changed his mind.”
The boy sighed at this. The old man considered it his master stroke. He had said, “I never come to live with you. I come to die!”
“And you should have seen his face,” he said. “He looked like he’d been pushed all of a sudden from behind. He hadn’t cared if the other three were wiped out but when he thought of me going, it was like he was losing somebody for the first time. He stood there staring at me.” And once, only once, the old man had leaned forward and said to Tarwater, in a voice that could no longer contain the pleasure of its secret, “He loved me like a daddy and he was ashamed of it!”
The boy’s face had remained unmoved. “Yes,” he said, “and you had told him a bare-face lie. You never had no intention of dying.”
“I was sixty-nine years of age,” his uncle said. “I could have died the next day as well as not. No man knows the hour of his death. I didn’t have my life in front of me. It was not a lie, it was only a speculation. I told him, I said, ‘I may live two months or two days.’ And I had on my clothes that I bought to be buried in—all new.”
“Ain’t it that same suit you got on now?” the boy asked indignantly, pointing to the threadbare knee. “Ain’t it that one you got on yourself right now?”
“I may live two months or two days, I said to him,” his uncle said.
Or ten years or twenty, Tarwater thought.
“Oh it was a shock to him,” the old man said.
It might have been a shock, the boy thought, but he wasn’t all that sorry about it. The schoolteacher had merely said, “So I’m to put you away, Uncle? All right, I’ll put you away. I’ll do it with pleasure. I’ll put you away for good and all,” but the old man insisted that his words were one thing and his actions and the look on his face another.
His great-uncle had not been in the nephew’s house ten minutes before he had baptized Tarwater. They had gone into the room where the crib was with Tarwater in it and as the old man looked at him for the first time—a wizened grey-faced scrawny sleeping baby—the voice of the Lord had come to him and said: HERE IS THE PROPHET TO TAKE YOUR PLACE. BAPTIZE HIM.
That? the old man had asked, that wizened grey-faced … and then as he wondered how he could baptize him with the nephew standing there, the Lord had sent the paper boy to knock on the door and the schoolteacher had gone to answer it.
When he came back in a few minutes, his uncle was holding Tarwater in one hand and with the other he was pouring water over his head out of the bottle that had been on the table by the crib. He had pulled off the nipple and stuck it in his pocket. He was just finishing the words of baptism as the schoolteacher came back in the door and he had had to laugh when he looked up and saw his nephew’s face. It looked hacked, the old man said. Not even angry at first, just hacked.
Old Tarwater had said, “He’s been born again and there ain’t a thing you can do about it,” and then he had seen the rage rise in the nephew’s face and had seen him try to conceal it.
“Time has passed you by, Uncle,” the nephew said. “That can’t even irritate me. That only makes me laugh,” and he laughed, a short forced bark, but the old man said his face was mottled. “Just as well you did it now,” he said. “If you had got me when I was seven days instead of seven years, you might not have ruined my life.”
“If it’s ruined,” the old man said, “it wasn’t me that ruined it.”
“Oh yes it was,” the nephew said, advancing across the room, his face very red. “You’re too blind to see what you did to me. A child can’t defend himself. Children are cursed with believing. You pushed me out of the real world and I stayed out of it until I didn’t know which was which. You infected me with your idiot hopes, your foolish violence. I’m not always myself, I’m not al…” but he stopped. He wouldn’t admit what the old man knew. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said. “I’ve straightened the tangle you made. Straightened it by pure will power. I’ve made myself straight.”
“You see,” the old man said, “he admitted himself the seed was still in him.”
Old Tarwater had laid the baby back in the crib but the nephew took him out again, a peculiar smile, the old man said, stiffening on his face. “If one baptism is good, two will be better,” he said and he had turned Tarwater over and poured what was left in the bottle over his bottom and said the words of baptism again. Old Tarwater had stood there, aghast at this blasphemy. “Now Jesus has a claim on both ends,” the nephew said.
The old man had roared, “Blasphemy never changed a plan of the Lord’s!”
“And the Lord hasn’t changed any of mine either,” said the nephew coolly and put the baby back.
“And what did I do?” Tarwater asked.
“You didn’t do nothing,” the old man said as if what he did or didn’t do was of no consequence whatsoever.
“It was me that was the prophet,” the boy said sullenly.
“You didn’t even know what was going on,” his uncle said.
“Oh yes I did,” the child said. “I was laying there thinking.”
His uncle would ignore this and go on. He had thought for a while that by living with the schoolteacher, he might convince him again of all that he had convinced him of when he had kidnapped him as a child and he had had hope of it up until the time when the schoolteacher showed him the study he had written of him for the magazine. Then the old man had realized at last that there was no hope of his doing anything for the schoolteacher. He had failed the schoolteacher’s mother and he had failed the schoolteacher, and now there was nothing to do but try to save Tarwater from being brought up by a fool. In this he had not failed.
The boy felt that the schoolteacher could have made more of an effort to get him back. He had come out and got shot in the leg and the ear but if he had used his head, he might have avoided that and got him back at the same time. “Why didn’t he bring the law out he
re and get me back?” he had asked.
“You want to know why?” his uncle said. “Well I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you exactly why. It was because he found you a heap of trouble. He wanted it all in his head. You can’t change a child’s pants in your head.”
The boy would think: but if the schoolteacher hadn’t written that piece on him, we might all three be living in town right now.
When the old man had read the piece in the schoolteacher magazine, he had at first not recognized who it was the schoolteacher was writing about, who the type was that was almost extinct. He had sat down to read the piece, full of pride that his nephew had succeeded in having a composition printed in a magazine. He had handed it carelessly to his uncle and said he might want to glance over it and the old man had sat down at once at the kitchen table and commenced to read it. He recalled that the schoolteacher had kept passing by the kitchen door to witness how he was taking the piece.
About the middle of it, old Tarwater had begun to think that he was reading about someone he had once known or at least someone he had dreamed about, for the figure was strangely familiar. “This fixation of being called by the Lord had its origin in insecurity. He needed the assurance of a call and so he called himself,” he read. The schoolteacher kept passing by the door, passing and repassing, and finally he came in and sat down quietly on the other side of the small white metal table. When the old man looked up, the schoolteacher smiled. It was a very slight smile, the slightest that would do for any occasion. The old man knew from the smile who it was he had been reading about.
For the length of a minute, he could not move. He felt he was tied hand and foot inside the schoolteacher’s head, a space as bare and neat as the cell in the asylum, and was shrinking, drying up to fit it. His eyeballs swerved from side to side as if he were pinned in a strait jacket again. Jonah, Ezekiel, Daniel, he was at that moment all of them—the swallowed, the lowered, the enclosed.
The nephew, his smile still fixed, reached across the table and put his hand on the old man’s wrist in a gesture of pity. “You’ve got to be born again, Uncle,” he said, “by your own efforts, back to the real world where there’s no saviour but yourself.”
The old man’s tongue lay in his mouth like a stone but his heart began to swell. His prophet’s blood surged in him, surged to floodtide for a miraculous release, though his face remained shocked, expressionless. The nephew patted his huge clenched fist and got up and left the kitchen, bearing away his smile of triumph.
The next morning when he went to the crib to give the baby his bottle, he found nothing in it but the blue magazine with the old man’s message scrawled on the back of it: THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN.
“It was me could act,” the old man said, “not him. He could never take action. He could only get everything inside his head and grind it to nothing. But I acted. And because I acted, you sit here in freedom, you sit here a rich man, knowing the Truth, in the freedom of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
The boy would move his thin shoulder blades irritably as if he were shifting the burden of Truth like a cross on his back. “He came out here and got shot to get me back,” he said obstinately.
“If he had really wanted you back, he could have got you,” the old man said. “He could have had the law out here after me or got me put back in the asylum. There was plenty he could have done, but what happened to him was that welfare-woman. She persuaded him to have one of his own and let you go, and he was easy persuaded. And that one,” the old man would say, beginning to brood on the schoolteacher’s child again, “that one—the Lord gave him one he couldn’t corrupt.” And then he would grip the boy’s shoulder and put a fierce pressure on it. “And if I don’t get him baptized, it’ll be for you to do,” he said. “I enjoin you to do it, boy.”
Nothing irritated the boy so much as this. “I take my orders from the Lord,” he would say in an ugly voice, trying to pry the fingers out of his shoulder. “Not from you.”
“The Lord will give them to you,” the old man said, gripping his shoulder tighter.
“He had to change that one’s pants and he done it,” Tarwater muttered.
“He had the welfare-woman to do it for him,” his uncle said. “She had to be good for something, but you can bet she ain’t still around there. Bernice Bishop!” he said as if he found this the most idiotic name in the language. “Bernice Bishop!”
The boy had sense enough to know that he had been betrayed by the schoolteacher and he did not mean to go to his house until daylight, when he could see behind and before him. “I ain’t going there until daylight,” he said suddenly to Meeks. “You needn’t to stop there because I ain’t getting out there.”
Meeks leaned casually against the door of the car, driving with half his attention and giving the other half to Tarwater. “Son,” he said, “I’m not going to be a preacher to you. I’m not going to tell you not to lie. I ain’t going to tell you nothing impossible. All I’m going to tell you is this: don’t lie when you don’t have to. Else when you do have to, nobody’ll believe you. You don’t have to lie to me. I know exactly what you done.” A shaft of light plunged through the car window and he looked to the side and saw the white face beside him, staring up with soot-colored eyes.
“How do you know?” the boy asked.
Meeks smiled with pleasure. “Because I done the same thing myself once,” he said.
Tarwater caught hold of the sleeve of the salesman’s coat and gave it a quick pull. “On the Day of Judgment,” he said, “me and you will rise and say we done it!”
Meeks looked at him again with one eyebrow cocked at the same angle he wore his hat. “Will we?” he asked. Then he said, “What line you gonna get into, boy?”
“What line?”
“What you going to do? What kind of work?”
“I know everything but the machines,” Tarwater said, sitting back again. “My great-uncle learnt me everything but first I have to find out how much of it is true.” They were entering the dilapidated outskirts of the city where wooden buildings leaned together and an occasional dim light lit up a faded sign advertising some remedy or other.
“What line was your great-uncle in?” Meeks asked.
“He was a prophet,” the boy said.
“Is that right?” Meeks asked and his shoulders jumped several times as if they were going to leap over his head. “Who’d he prophesy to?”
“To me,” Tarwater said. “Nobody else would listen to him and there wasn’t anybody else for me to listen to. He grabbed me away from this other uncle, my only blood connection now, so as to save me from running to doom.”
“You were a captive audience,” Meeks said. “And now you’re coming to town to run to doom with the rest of us, huh?”
The boy didn’t answer at once. Then he said in a guarded tone, “I ain’t said what I’m going to do.”
“You ain’t sure about what all this great-uncle of yours told you, are you?” Meeks asked. “You figure he might have got aholt to some misinformation.”
Tarwater looked away, out the window, at the brittle forms of the houses. He was holding both arms close to his sides as if he were cold. “I’ll find out,” he said.
“Well how now?” Meeks asked.
The dark city was unfolding on either side of them and they were approaching a low circle of light in the distance. “I mean to wait and see what happens,” he said after a moment.
“And suppose nothing don’t happen?” Meeks asked.
The circle of light became huge and they swung into the center of it and stopped. It was a gaping concrete mouth with two red gas pumps set in front of it and a small glass office toward the back. “I say suppose nothing don’t happen?” Meeks repeated.
The boy looked at him darkly, remembering the silence after his great uncle’s death.
“Well?” Meeks said.
“Then I’ll make it happen,” he said. “I can act.”
“Attaboy,?
?? Meeks said. He opened the car door and put his leg out while he continued to observe his rider. Then he said, “Wait a minute. I got to call my girl.”
A man was asleep in a chair tilted against the outside wall of the glass office and Meeks went inside without waking him up. For a minute Tarwater only craned his neck out the window. Then he got out and went to the office door to watch Meeks use the machine. It sat, small and black, in the center of a cluttered desk which Meeks sat down on as if it had been his own. The room was lined with automobile tires and had a concrete and rubber smell. Meeks took the machine in two parts and held one part to his head while he circled with his finger on the other part. Then he sat waiting, swinging his foot, while the horn buzzed in his ear. After a minute an acid smile began to eat at the corners of his mouth and he said, drawing in his breath, “Heythere, Sugar, hyer you?” and Tarwater, from where he stood in the door, heard an actual woman’s voice, like one coming from beyond the grave, say, “Why Sugar, is that reely you?” and Meeks said it was him in the same old flesh and made an appointment with her in ten minutes.
Tarwater stood awestruck in the doorway. Meeks put the telephone together and then he said in a sly voice, “Now why don’t you call your uncle?” and watched the boy’s face change, the eyes swerve suspiciously to the side and the flesh drop around the boney mouth.
“I’ll speak with him soon enough,” he muttered, but he kept looking at the black coiled machine, fascinated. “How do you use it?” he asked.
“You dial it like I did. Call your uncle,” Meeks urged.
“No, that woman is waiting on you,” Tarwater said.
“Let ’er wait,” Meeks said. “That’s what she knows how to do best.”
The boy approached it, taking out the card he had written the number on. He put his finger on the dial and began gingerly to turn it.
“Great God,” Meeks said and took the receiver off the hook and put it in his hand and thrust his hand to his ear. He dialed the number for him and then pushed him down in the office chair to wait but Tarwater stood up again, slightly crouched, holding the buzzing horn to his head, while his heart began to kick viciously at his chest wall.