The Violent Bear It Away (8 page)

“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.

“It don’t speak,” he murmured.

“Give him time,” Meeks said, “maybe he don’t like to get up in the middle of the night.”

The buzzing continued for a minute and then stopped abruptly. Tarwater stood speechless, holding the earpiece tight against his head, his face rigid as if he were afraid that the Lord might be about to speak to him over the machine. All at once he heard what sounded like heavy breathing in his ear.

“Ask for your party,” Meeks prompted. “How do you expect to get your party if you don’t ask for him?”

The boy remained exactly as he was, saying nothing.

“I told you to ask for your party,” Meeks said irritably. “Ain’t you got good sense?”

“I want to speak with my uncle,” Tarwater whispered.

There was a silence over the telephone but it was not a silence that seemed to be empty. It was the kind where the breath is drawn in and held. Suddenly the boy realized that it was the schoolteacher’s child on the other side of the machine. The white-haired, blunted face rose before him. He said in a furious shaking voice, “I want to speak with my uncle. Not you!”

The heavy breathing began again as if in answer. It was a kind of bubbling noise, the kind of noise someone would make who was struggling to breathe in water. In a second it faded away. The horn of the machine dropped out of Tarwater’s hand. He stood there blankly as if he had received a revelation he could not yet decipher. He seemed to have been stunned by some deep internal blow that had not yet made its way to the surface of his mind.

Meeks picked up the earpiece and listened but there was no sound. He put it back on the hook and said, “Come on. I ain’t got this kind of time.” He gave the stupefied boy a shove and they left, driving off into the city again. Meeks told him to learn to work every machine he saw. The greatest invention of man, he said, was the wheel and he asked Tarwater if he had ever thought how things were before it was a wheel, but the boy didn’t answer him. He didn’t even appear to be listening. He sat slightly forward and from time to time his lips moved as if he were speaking silently with himself.

“Well, it was terrible,” Meeks said sourly. He knew the boy didn’t have any uncle at any such respectable address and to prove it, he turned down the street the uncle was supposed to live on and drove slowly past the small shapes of squat houses until he found the number, visible in phosphorescent letters on a small stick set on the edge of the grass plot. He stopped the car and said, “Okay, kiddo, that’s it.”

“That’s what?” Tarwater mumbled.

“That’s your uncle’s house,” Meeks said.

The boy grabbed the edge of the window with both hands and stared out at what appeared to be only a black shape crouched in a greater darkness a little distance away. “I told you I wasn’t going there until daylight,” he said angrily, “go on.”

“You’re going there right now,” Meeks said. “Because I ain’t getting stuck with you. You can’t go with me where I’m going.”

“I ain’t getting out here,” the boy said.

Meeks reached across him and opened the car door. “So long, son,” he said, “if you get real hungry by next week, you can contack me from that card and we might make a deal.”

The boy gave him one white-faced outraged look and flung himself from the car. He moved up the short concrete walk to the doorstep and sat down abruptly, absorbed into the darkness. Meeks pulled the car door shut. His face hung for a moment watching the barely visible outline of the boy’s shape on the step. Then he drew back and drove on. He won’t come to no good end, he said to himself.

III

TARWATER sat in the corner of the doorstep, scowling in the dark as the car disappeared down the block. He did not look up at the sky but he was unpleasantly aware of the stars. They seemed to be holes in his skull through which some distant unmoving light was watching him. It was as if he were alone in the presence of an immense silent eye. He had an intense desire to make himself known to the schoolteacher at once, to tell him what he had done and why and to be congratulated by him. At the same time, his deep suspicion of the man continued to work in him. He tried to bring the schoolteacher’s face again to mind, but all he could manage was the face of the seven-year-old boy the old man had kidnapped. He stared at it boldly, hardening himself for the encounter.