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 here 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
