He was a bull-like old man with a short head set directly into his shoulders and silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining to get out of a net of red threads. He had on a putty-colored hat with the brim turned up all around and over his undershirt a gray coat that had once been black. Tarwater, sitting across the table from him, saw red ropes appear in his face and a tremor pa.s.s over him. It was like the tremor of a quake that had begun at his heart and run outward and was just reaching the surface. His mouth twisted down sharply on one side and he remained exactly as he was, perfectly balanced, his back a good six inches from the chair back and his stomach caught just under the edge of the table. His eyes, dead silver, were focused on the boy across from him.
Tarwater felt the tremor transfer itself and run lightly over him.He knew the old man was dead without touching him and he continued to sit across the table from the corpse, finishing his breakfast in a kind of sullen embarra.s.sment, as if he were in the presence of a new personality and couldn"t think of anything to say. Finally he said in a querulous tone, "Just hold your horses. I already told you I would do it right." The voice sounded like a stranger"s voice, as if the death had changed him instead of the old man.
He got up and took his plate out the back door and set it down on the bottom step, and two long-legged black game roosters tore across the yard and finished what was on it. He sat down on a long pine box on the back porch, and his hands began absently to unravel a length of rope, while his long cross-shaped face stared ahead beyond the clearing over woods that ran in gray and purple folds until they touched the light-blue fortress line of trees set against the empty morning sky.
The clearing was not simply off the dirt road but off the wagon track and footpath, and the nearest neighbors, colored not white, still had to walk through the woods, pushing plum branches out of their way to get to it. The old man had started an acre of cotton to the left and had run it beyond the fence line almost up to the house on one side. The two strands of barbed wire ran through the middle of the patch. A line of fog, hump-shaped, was creeping toward it, ready like a white hound dog to crouch under and crawl across the yard.
"I"m going to move that fence," Tarwater said. "I ain"t going to have my fence in the middle of a field." The voice was loud and still strange and disagreeable and he finished the rest of his thought in his head: because this place is mine now whether I own it or not because I"m here and n.o.body can"t get me off. If any school teacher comes here to claim the property, I"ll kill him.
He had on a faded pair of overalls and a gray hat pulled down over his ears like a cap. He followed his uncle"s custom of never taking off his hat except in bed. He had always followed his uncle"s customs up to this date but: if I want to move that fence before I bury him, there wouldn"t be a soul to hinder me, he thought; no voice will be lifted.
"Bury him first and get it over with," the loud stranger"s disagreeable voice said, and he got up and went to look for the shovel.
The pine box he had been sitting on was his uncle"s coffin but he didn"t intend to use it. The old man was too heavy for a thin boy to hoist over the side of a box, and though old Tarwater had built it himself a few years before, he had said that if it wasn"t feasible to get him into it when the time came, then just to put him in the hole as he was, only to be sure the hole was deep. He wanted it ten foot, he said, not just eight. He had worked on the box a long time, and when he finished it he had scratched on the top MASON TARWATER, WITH G.o.d, and had climbed into it where it stood on the back porch and had lain there for some time, nothing showing but his stomach which rose over the top like overleavened bread.The boy had stood at the side of the box, studying him. "This is the end of us all," the old man said with satisfaction, his gravel voice hearty in the coffin.
"It"s too much of you for the box, " Tarwater, aid. "I"ll have to sit on the lid or wait until you rot a little."
"Don"t wait," old Tarwater had said. "Listen. If it ain"t feasible to use the box when the time comes, if you can"t lift it or whatever, just get me in the hole, but I want it deep. I want it ten foot, not just eight-ten. You can roll me to it if nothing else. I"ll roll. Get two boards and set them down the steps and start me rolling and dig where I stop and don"t let me roll over into it until it"s deep enough.Prop me with some bricks so I won"t roll into it and don"t let the dogs nudge me over the edge before it"s finished. You better pen up the dogs," he said.
"What if you die in bed?" the boy asked. "How"m I going to get you down the stairs?"
"I ain"t going to die in bed," the old man said. "As soon as I hear the summons, I"m going to run downstairs. I"ll get as close to the door as I can. If I should get stuck up there, you"ll have to roll me down the stairs, that"s all."
"My Lord," the child said.
The old man sat up in the box and brought his fist down on the edge of it. "Listen," he said. "I never asked much of you. I taken you and raised you and saved you from that a.s.s in town and now all I"m asking in return is when I die to get me in the ground where the dead belong and set up a cross over me to show I"m there. That"s all in the world I"m asking you to do."
"I"ll be doing good if I get you in the ground," Tarwater said."I"ll be too wore out set up any cross. I ain"t bothering with trifles."
"Trifles!" his uncle hissed. "You"ll learn what a trifle is on the day those crosses are gathered! Burying the dead right may be the only honor you ever do yourself. I brought you out here to raise you a Christian," he hollered, "and I"m d.a.m.ned if you won"t be one!"
"If I don"t have the strength to do it," the child said, watching him with a careful detachment, "I"ll notify my uncle in town and he can come out and take care of you. The school teacher," he drawled, observing that the pockmarks in his uncle"s face had already turned pale against the purple, "he"ll "tend to you."
The threads that restrained the old man"s eyes thickened. He gripped both sides of the coffin and pushed forward as if he were going to drive it off the porch. "He"d burn me," he said hoa.r.s.ely."He"d have me cremated in an oven and scatter my ashes. "Uncle," he said to me, "you"re a type that"s almost extinct!" He"d be willing to pay the undertaker to burn me to be able to scatter my ashes," he said. "He don"t believe in the Resurrection. He don"t believe in the Last Day. He don"t believe in..."
"The dead don"t bother with particulars," the boy interrupted.
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 school teacher 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 hen house. "I"ll never set my foot in the city again," Tarwater said. "I"ll never go to him. Him nor n.o.body 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 school teacher would burn him in a minute.
Tarwater had never seen the school teacher 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." n.o.body 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 school teacher 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 school teachers to read. Now what was wrong in that? Why nothing. Who cares what a school teacher 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 school teacher 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 school teacher 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. "n.o.body 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 school teacher 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 ma.s.s of moving metal and concrete speckled with the very small eyes of people. The glitter of his own eyes was shaded under the stiff rootlike brim of a new gray hat balanced perfectly straight on his b.u.t.tressing ears. Before coming he had read facts in the almanac and he knew that there were 60,000 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 pa.s.sing figure until they began to pa.s.s too thickly and he observed that their eyes didn"t grab at you like the eyes of country people. Several of them b.u.mped 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 upsidedown 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 G.o.d 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 clone; 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, hath 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 pa.s.sing people who observed him now. "Thank G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sing 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 halfopen doors that let a little dried light fall on the stained pa.s.sageways inside. Finally they came out into another section where the houses were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of gra.s.s 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 bra.s.s 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 school teacher at all, and he hoped to G.o.d, 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 an y 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 G.o.d 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 Judgement for you."
"That"s my bidnis," Tarwater said.
"I ain"t b.u.t.tin 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 looked 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 pa.s.sed," 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 n.i.g.g.e.r-mourning."
"I seen his spirit for two nights," she said, "Seen him two nights and he was unrested."
"He ain"t been dead hut 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 pa.s.sing 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 quick lv that he almost fell. He stalked across the back field toward the rim of trees that surrounded the clearmg.
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 waslk 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 balk, 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.
"A man, seventy years of age, to bring a baby out into the backwoods to raise him right! Suppose he had died when you were four years old? Could you have toted mash to the still then and supported yourself? I never heard of no four-year-old running a still.
"Never did I hear of that," he continued. "You weren"t anything to him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when the time came, and now that he"s dead, he"s shut of you but you got two hundred pounds of him to carry below the face of the earth.And don"t think he wouldn"t heat up like a coal stove to see you take a drop of liquor," he added. "He might say it would hurt you but what he would mean was you might get so much you wouldn"t be in no fit condition to bury him. He said he brought you out here to raise you according to principle and that was the principle: that you should be fit when the time came to bury him so he would have a cross to mark where he was at.
"Well," he said in a softer tone, when the boy had taken a long swallow from the black jug, "a little won"t interfere. Moderation never hurt no one."
A burning arm slid down Tarwater"s throat as if the devil were already reaching inside him to finger his soul. He squinted at the angry sun creeping behind the topmost fringe of the trees.
"Take it easy," his friend said. "Do you remember them n.i.g.g.e.r gospel singers you saw one time, all drunk, all singing, all dancing around that black Ford automobile? Jesus, they wouldn"t have been near so glad they were redeemed if they hadn"t had that liquor in them. I wouldn"t pay too much attention to my Redemption if I was you," he said. "Some people take everything too hard."
Tarwater drank more slowly. He had been drunk only one time before and that time his uncle had beat him with a board for it, saying liquor would dissolve a child"s gut; another of his lies because his gut had not dissolved.
"It should be clear to you," his kind friend said, "how all your life you been tricked by that old man. You could have been a city slicker for the last ten years. Instead, you been deprived of any company but his, you been living in a two-story barn in the middle of this earth"s bald patch, following behind a mule and plow since you were seven. And how do you know the education he give you is true to the fact? Maybe he taught you a system of figures n.o.body else uses? How do you know that two added to two makes four?Four added to four makes eight? Maybe other people don"t use that system. How do you know if there was an Adam or if Jesus eased your situation any when He redeemed you? Or how you know if He actually done it? Nothing but that old man"s word and it ought to be obvious to you by now that he was crazy. And as for Judgment Day," the stranger said, "every day is Judgment Day.
"Ain"t you old enough to have learnt that yet for yourself? Don"t everything you do, everything you have ever done, work itself out right or wrong before your eye and usually before the sun has set?Have you ever got by with anything) No you ain"t nor ever thought you would," he said. "You might as well drink all that liquor since you"ve already drunk so much. Once you pa.s.s the moderation mark you"ve pa.s.sed it, and that gyration you feel working down from the top of your brain," he said, "that"s the Hand of G.o.d laying a blessing on you. He has given you your release. That old man was the stone before your door and the Lord has rolled it away. He ain"t rolled it quite far enough yet, of course. You got to finish up yourself but He"s done the main part. Praise Him."
Tarwater had ceased to have any feeling in his legs. He dozed for a while, his head hanging to the side and his mouth open and the liquor trickling slowly down the side of his overalls where the jug had overturned in his lap. Eventually there was just a drip at the neck of the bottle, forming and filling and dropping, silent and measured and sun-colored. The bright, even sky began to fade, coa.r.s.ening with clouds until every shadow had gone in. He woke with a wrench forward, his eyes focusing and unfocusing on something that looked like burnt rag hanging close to his face.
Buford said, "This ain"t no way for you to act. Old man don"t deserve this. There"s no rest until the dead is buried." He was squatting on his heels, one hand gripped around Tarwater"s arm. "I gone yonder to the door and seen him sitting there at the table, not even laid out on a cooling board. He ought to be laid out and have some salt on his bosom if you mean to keep him overnight."
The boy"s lids pinched together to hold the image steady and in a second he made out the two small red blistered eyes. "He deserves to lie in a grave that fits him," Buford said. "He was deep in this life, he was deep in Jesus" misery."
"n.i.g.g.e.r," the child said, working his strange swollen tongue, "take your hand off me."
Buford lifted his hand. "He needs to be rested," he said.
"He"ll be rested all right when I get through with him," Tarwater said vaguely. "Go on and lea" me to my bidnis."
"n.o.body going to bother you," Buford said, standing up. He waited a minute, bent, looking down at the limp figure sprawled against the bank. The boy"s head was tilted backwards over a root that jutted out of the clay wall. His mouth hung open, and his hat, turned up in front, cut a straight line across his forehead, just over his halfopen eyes. His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them held an ancient look as if the child"s skeleton beneath were as old as the world. "n.o.body going to bother you," the Negro muttered, pushing through the wall of honeysuckle without looking back. "That going to be your trouble."
Tarwater closed his eyes again.
Some night bird complaining close by woke him up. It was not a screeching noise, only an intermittent hump-hump as if the bird had to recall his grievance each time before he repeated it. Clouds were moving convulsively across a black sky and there was a pink unsteady moon that appeared to be jerked up a foot or so and then dropped and jerked up again. This was because as he observed in an instant, the sky was lowering, coming down fast to smother him.The bird screeched and flew off in time and Tarwater lurched into the middle of the stream bed and crouched on his hands and knees.The moon was reflected like pale fire in the few spots of water in the sand. He sprang at the wall of honeysuckle and began to tear through it, confusing the sweet familiar odor with the weight coming down on him. When he stood up on the other side, the black ground swung slowly and threw him down again. A flare of pink lightning lit the woods and he saw the black shapes of trees pierce out of the ground all around him. The night bird began to hump again from a thicket where he had settled.
Tarwater got up and started moving in the direction of the clearing, feeling his way from tree to tree, the trunks very cold and dry to his touch. There was distant thunder and a continuous flicker of pale lightning firing one section of woods and then another.Finally he saw the shack, standing gaunt-black and tall in the middle of the clearing, with the pink moon trembling directly over it. His eyes glittered like open pits of light as he moved across the sand, dragging his crushed shadow behind him. He didn"t turn his head to that side of the yard where he had started the grave.
He stopped at the far back corner of the house and squatted down on the ground and looked underneath at the litter there, chicken crates and barrels and old rags and boxes. He had four matches in his pocket. He crawled under and began to set small fires, building one from another and working his way out at the front porch, leaving the fire behind him eating greedily at the dry tinder and the floor boards of the house. He crossed the front side of the clearing and went under the barbed-wire fence and through the rutted field without looking back until he reached the edge of the opposite woods. Then he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the pink moon had dropped through the roof of the shack and was bursting and he began to run, forced on through the woods by two bulging silver eyes that grew in immense astonishment in the center of the fire behind him.
Toward midnight he came out on the highway and caught a ride with a salesman who was a manufacturer"s representative selling copper flues throughout the Southeast and who gave the silent boy what he said was the best advice he could give any young fellow setting out to find himself a place in the world. While they sped forward on the black untwisting highway watched on either side by a dark wall of trees, the salesman said that it had been his personal experience that you couldn"t sell a copper flue to a man you didn"t love. He was a thin fellow with a narrow gorgelike face that appeared to have been worn down to the sharpest possible depressions.He wore a broad-brimmed stiff gray hat of the kind used by business men who would like to look like cowboys. He said love was the only policy that worked ninety-five per cent of the time. He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man"s wife"s health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customer"s families in and what was wrong with them. A man"s wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man"s hardware store until she died; then he scratched her name out and wrote dead there "And I say thank G.o.d when they"re dead," the salesman said, "that"s one less to remember."
"You don"t owe the dead anything," Tarwater said in a loud voice, speaking for almost the first time since he had got in the car.
"Nor they you," said the stranger. "And that"s the way it ought to be in this world-n.o.body owing n.o.body nothing."
"Look," Tarwater said suddenly, sitting forward, his face close to the windshield, "we"re headed in the wrong direction. We"re going back where we came from. There"s the fire again. There"s the fire we left." Ahead of them in the sky there was a faint glow, steady and not made by lightning. "That"s the same fire we come from!" the boy said in a high wild voice.