The Violent Bear It Away (18 page)

The woman had been standing for some time at his side, waiting to take their order but she could have been invisible for all the notice he paid her. She began tapping the menu on a glass, then she slid it in front of his face. Without reading it, he said, “Three hamburger plates,” and thrust it aside.

When she was gone, he said in a dry voice, “I want to lay some cards on the table.” He sought the boy’s eyes and steadied himself by the hated glint in them.

Tarwater looked at the table as if waiting for the cards to be laid on it.

“That means I want to talk straight to you,” Rayber said, rigidly keeping the exasperation out of his voice. He strove to make his gaze, his tone, as indifferent as his listener’s “I have some things to say to you that you’ll have to listen to. What you do about what I have to say is your own business. I have no further interest in telling you what to do. I only intend to put the facts before you.” His voice was thin and brittle-sounding. He might have been reading from a paper. “I notice that you’ve begun to be able to look Bishop in the eye. That’s good. It means you’re making progress but you needn’t think that because you can look him in the eye now, you’ve saved yourself from what’s preying on you. You haven’t. The old man still has you in his grip. Don’t think he hasn’t.”

The boy continued to give him the same omniscient look. “It’s you the seed fell in,” he said. “It ain’t a thing you can do about it. It fell on bad ground but it fell in deep. With me,” he said proudly, “it fell on rock and the wind carried it away.”

The schoolteacher grasped the table as if he were going to push it forward into the boy’s chest. “Goddam you!” he said in a breathless harsh voice. “It fell in us both alike. The difference is that I know it’s in me and I keep it under control. I weed it out but you’re too blind to know it’s in you. You don’t even know what makes you do the things you do.”

The boy looked at him angrily but he said nothing.

At least, Rayber thought, I’ve shocked that look off his face. He did not say anything for a few moments while he thought how to continue.

The woman returned with the three plates. She set them down slowly, giving herself time for observation. The man’s face had a sweaty harassed look and so did the boy’s. He threw her an ugly glance. The man began to eat at once as if he wanted to get it over with. The little boy took his bun apart and began to lick the mustard off it. The other boy looked at his as if it were probably bad meat and did not touch it. She left and watched indignantly for a few seconds from the kitchen door. The boy finally picked his hamburger up. He raised it half-way to his mouth and then put it down again. He picked it up and put it down twice without biting into it. Then he pulled his hat down and sat there, his arms folded. She had had enough and closed the door.

The schoolteacher leaned forward across the table, his eyes pin-pointed and very bright. “You can’t eat,” he said, “because something is eating you. And I intend to tell you what it is.”

“Worms,” the boy hissed as if his disgust could not be contained an instant longer.

“It takes guts to listen,” Rayber said.

Tarwater leaned toward him with a kind of blaring attention. “You ain’t got nothing to say to me that I don’t have the guts to listen to,” he said.

The schoolteacher sat back. “All right,” he said, “then listen.” He folded his arms and looked at him for an instant before he began. Then he started coldly. “The old man told you to baptize Bishop. You have that order lodged in your head like a boulder blocking your path.”

The blood drained from the boy’s face but his eyes did not swerve. They looked at Rayber furiously, the glint in them gone.

The schoolteacher spoke slowly, picking his words as if he were looking for the steadiest stones to step on across a rushing stream. “Until you get rid of this compulsion to baptize Bishop, you’ll never make any progress toward being a normal person. I said in the boat you were going to be a freak. I shouldn’t have said that. I only meant you had the choice. I want you to see the choice. I want you to make the choice and not simply be driven by a compulsion you don’t understand. What we understand, we can control,” he said. “You have to understand what it is that blocks you. I wonder if you’re smart enough to take this in. It’s not simple.”

The boy’s face seemed dry and old as if he had taken it in long ago, and now it was part of him like the current of death in his blood. The schoolteacher was touched by this muteness before the facts. His anger left him. The room was silent. A pink cast had fallen from the windows over the table. Tarwater looked away from his uncle at Bishop. The little boy’s hair was pink and lighter than his face. He was sucking his spoon; his eyes were drowned in silence.

“I want to put two solutions before you,” Rayber said. “What you do is up to you.”

Tarwater looked at him again, with no mockery, no glint in his eye, but with no anticipation either, as if his course were irrevocably set.

“Baptism is only an empty act,” the schoolteacher said. “If there’s any way to be born again, it’s a way that you accomplish yourself, an understanding about yourself that you reach after a long time, perhaps a long effort. It’s nothing you get from above by spilling a little water and a few words. What you want to do is meaningless, so the easiest solution would be simply to do it. Right here now, with this glass of water. I would permit it in order to get it out of your mind. As far as I’m concerned, you may baptize him at once.” He pushed his own glass of water across the table. His look was patient and ironical.

The boy’s glance touched the top of the glass and then bounded off. His hand lying by the side of his plate twitched. He jammed it into his pocket and looked the other way, out the window. His whole aspect seemed shaken as if his integrity had been dangerously challenged.

The schoolteacher pulled back the glass of water. “I knew that would be too cheap for you,” he said. “I knew you would refuse to do anything so unworthy of the courage you’ve already shown.” He raised the glass and drank the rest of the water. Then he set it down on the table. He looked tired enough to collapse; his aspect was so weary that he might just have attained the top of a mountain he had been climbing for days.

After an interval he said, “The other way is not so simple. It’s the way I’ve chosen for myself. It’s the way you take as a result of being born again the natural way—through your own efforts. Your intelligence.” His words had a disconnected sound. “The other way is simply to face it and fight it, to cut down the weed every time you see it appear. Do I have to tell you this? An intelligent boy like you?”

“You don’t have to tell me nothing,” Tarwater murmured.

“I don’t have a compulsion to baptize him,” Rayber said. “My own is more complicated, but the principle is the same. The way we have to fight it is the same.”

“It ain’t the same,” Tarwater said. He turned toward his uncle. The glint had reappeared. “I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all. I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.” He was looking at his uncle now with a completely fresh contempt. “It’s nothing about me like you,” he said.

“There are certain laws that determine every man’s conduct,” the schoolteacher said. “You are no exception.” He saw with perfect clarity that the only feeling he had for this boy was hate. He loathed the very sight of him.

“Wait and see,” Tarwater said as if it needed only a short time to be proved.

“Experience is a terrible teacher,” Rayber said.

The boy shrugged and got up. He walked off, across the room to the screen door where he stood looking out. At once Bishop climbed down off his chair and started after him, putting on his hat as he went. Tarwater stiffened when the child approached but he did not move and Rayber watched as the two of them stood there side by side, looking out the door—the two figures, hatted and somehow ancient, bound together by some necessity of nerve that excluded him. He was startled to see the boy put his hand on Bishop’s neck just under his hat, open the door and guide him out of it. It occurred to him that what he meant by “doing something” was to make a slave of the child. Bishop would be at his command like a faithful dog. Instead of avoiding him, he planned to control him, to show who was master.

And I will not permit that, he said. If anyone controlled Bishop, it would be himself. He put his money on the table under the salt-shaker and went out after them.

The sky was a bright pink, casting such a weird light that every color was intensified. Each weed that grew out of the gravel looked like a live green nerve. The world might have been shedding its skin. The two were in front of him half way down the dock, walking slowly, Tarwater’s hand still resting just under Bishop’s hat; but it seemed to Rayber that it was Bishop who was doing the leading, that the child had made the capture. He thought with a grim pleasure that sooner or later the boy’s confidence in his own judgment would be brought low.

When they arrived at the end of the dock, they stood looking down into the water. Then to Rayber’s chagrin, the boy lifted the child like a sack under the arms and lowered him over the edge of the dock into the boat that was tied there.

“I haven’t given you permission to take Bishop out in the boat,” Rayber said.

Tarwater may have heard or he may not; he did not answer. He sat down on the edge of the dock and for a few moments looked across the water at the opposite bank. Part of a red globe hung almost motionless in the far side of the lake as if it were the other end of the elongated sun cut through the middle by a swath of forest. Pink and salmon-colored clouds floated in the water at different depths. Suddenly Rayber wanted nothing so much as a half hour to himself, without sight of either of them. “But you may take him,” he said, “if you’ll be careful.”

The boy didn’t move. He was leaning forward, his thin shoulders hunched, his hands gripped on the edge of the dock. He seemed poised there waiting to make a momentous move.

He dropped down into the boat with Bishop.

“You’ll look after him?” Rayber asked.

Tarwater’s face was like a very old mask, colorless and dry. “I’ll tend to him,” he said.

“Thanks,” his uncle said. He experienced a short feeling of warmth for the boy. He strolled back down the dock to the lodge and when he reached the door, he turned and watched the boat move out into view on the lake. He raised his arm and waved but Tarwater showed no sign of seeing him and Bishop’s back was turned. The small black-hatted figure sat like a passenger being borne by the surly oarsman across the lake to some mysterious destination.

*   *   *

Back in his room, Rayber lay on the cot trying to feel the release he had felt when he started out in the car in the afternoon. More than anything else, what he experienced in the boy’s presence was the feeling of pressure and when it was taken off for a while, he realized how intolerable it was. He lay there thinking with distaste of the moment when the silent mutinous face would appear again in the door. He imagined the rest of the summer spent coping with the boy’s cold intractability. He began to consider the possibility of his leaving of his own accord and after a moment he knew that this was actually what he wanted him to do. He no longer felt any challenge to rehabilitate him. All he wanted now was to get rid of him. He thought with horror of being stuck with him for good and began to consider ways that he might hasten his departure. He knew he would never leave as long as Bishop was around. The thought flew through his mind that he might put Bishop in an institution for a few weeks. He was shaken and turned his mind to other things. For a while he dozed and dreamed that he and Bishop were speeding away in the car, escaping safely from a lowering tornado-like cloud. He awoke to find the room growing dim.

He got up and went to the window. The boat with the two of them in it was near the middle of the lake, almost still. They were sitting there facing each other in the isolation of the water, Bishop small and squat, and Tarwater gaunt, lean, bent slightly forward, his whole attention concentrated on the opposite figure. They seemed to be held still in some magnetic field of attraction. The sky was an intense purple as if it were about to explode into darkness.

Rayber left the window and threw himself on the cot again but he was no longer sleepy. He had a peculiar sense of waiting, of marking time. He lay with his eyes closed as if listening to something he could hear only when his hearing aid was off. He had had this sense of waiting, kin in degree but not in kind, when he was a child and expected any moment that the city would blossom into an eternal Powderhead. Now he sensed that he waited for a cataclysm. He waited for all the world to be turned into a burnt spot between two chimneys.

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.