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
