saving you from those advantages.”
The boy looked off into the distance as though he were staring blankly at his invisible advantages.
“When he got shut of the three of them in that crash, this was the first place he came. On the very day they were killed he came out here to tell me. Straight out here. Yes sir,” the old man said with the greatest satisfaction, “straight out here. He hadn’t seen me in years but this is where he came. I was the one he came to. I was the one he wanted to see. Me. I had never left his mind. I had taken my seat in it,”
“You skipped all that part about how he came when he was fourteen and give you all that sass,” Tarwater said.
“It was sass he had got from them,” the old man said. “Just parrot-mouthing all they had ever said about how I was a crazy man. The truth was even if they told him not to believe what I had taught him, he couldn’t forget it. He never could forget that there was a chance that that simpleton was not his only father. I planted the seed in him and it was there for good. Whether anybody liked it or not.”
“It fell amongst cockles,” Tarwater said. “Say the sass.”
“It fell in deep,” the old man said, “or else after that crash he wouldn’t have come out here hunting me.”
“He only wanted to see if you were still crazy,” the boy offered.
“The day may come,” his great-uncle said slowly, “when a pit opens up inside you and you know some things you never known before,” and he would give him such a prescient piercing look that the child would turn his face away, scowling fiercely.
His great-uncle had gone to live with the schoolteacher and as soon as he had got there, he had baptized Tarwater, practically under the schoolteacher’s nose and the schoolteacher had made a blasphemous joke of it. But the old man could never tell this straight through. He always had to back up and tell why he had gone to live with the schoolteacher in the first place. He had gone for three reasons. One, he said, because he knew the schoolteacher wanted him. He was the only person in the schoolteacher’s life who had ever taken two steps out of his way in his behalf.
And two, because his nephew was the proper person to bury him and he wanted to have it understood with him how he wanted it done. And three, because the old man meant to see that Tarwater was baptized.
“I know all that,” the boy would say, “get on with the rest of it.”
“After the three of them perished and the house was his, he cleared it out,” old Tarwater said. “He moved every stick of furniture out of it except a table and a chair or two and a bed or two and the crib he bought for you. Taken down all the pictures and all the curtains and taken up all the rugs. Even burned up all his mother’s and sister’s and the simpleton’s clothes, didn’t want a thing of theirs around. It wasn’t anything left but books and papers that he had collected. Papers everywhere,” the old man said. “Every room looked like the inside of a bird’s nest. I came a few days after the crash and when he saw me standing there, he was glad to see me. His eyes lit up. He was glad to see me. ‘Ha,’ he said, ‘my house is swept and garnished and here are the seven other devils, all rolled into one!’” The old man slapped his knee with pleasure.
“It don’t sound to me like.. “
“No, he didn’t say so,” his uncle said, “but I ain’t an idiot.”
“If he didn’t say so you can’t be sure.”
“I’m as sure,” his uncle said, “as I am that this here,” and he held up his hand, every short thick finger stretched rigid in front of Tarwater’s face, “is my hand and not yours.” There was something final in this that always made the boy’s impudence subside.
“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
