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.
Then he rose and faced the heavy brass knocker on the door. He touched it and jerked his hand away, burnt by a metallic coldness. He looked quickly over his shoulder. The houses across the street formed a dark jagged wall. The quiet seemed palpable, waiting. It seemed almost to be waiting patiently, biding its time until it should reveal itself and demand to be named. He turned back to the cold knocker and grabbed it and shattered the silence as if it were a personal enemy. The noise filled his head. He was aware of nothing but the racket he was making.
He beat louder and louder, bamming at the same time with his free fist until he felt he was shaking the house. The empty street echoed with his blows. He stopped once to get his breath and then began again, kicking the door frenziedly with the blunt toe of his heavy work shoe. Nothing happened. Finally he stopped and the implacable silence descended around him, immune to his fury. A mysterious dread filled him. His whole body felt hollow as if he had been lifted like Habakkuk by the hair of his head, borne swiftly through the night and set down in the place of his mission. He had a sudden foreboding that he was about to step into a trap laid for him by the old man. He half- turned to run.
At once the glass panels on either side of the door filled with light. There was a click and the knob turned. Tarwater jerked his hands up automatically as if he were pointing an invisible gun and his uncle, who had opened the door, jumped back at the sight of him.
The image of the seven-year-old boy disappeared forever from Tarwater’s mind. His uncle’s face was so familiar to him that he might have seen it every day of his life. He steadied himself and shouted, “My great-uncle is dead and burnt, just like you would have burnt him yourself!”
The schoolteacher remained absolutely still as if he thought that by looking long enough his hallucination would disappear. He had been roused by the vibration in the house and had run, half-asleep, to the door. His face was like the face of a sleep-walker who wakes and sees some horror of his dreams take shape before him. After a moment he muttered, “Wait here, deaf,” and turned and went quickly out of the hall. He was barefooted and in his pajamas. He came back almost at once, plugging something into his ear. He had thrust on the black-rimmed glasses and he was sticking a metal box into the waist-band of his pajamas. This was joined by a cord to the plug in his ear. For an instant the boy had the thought that his head ran by electricity. He caught Tarwater by the arm and pulled him into the hall under a lantern-shaped light that hung from the ceiling. The boy found himself scrutinized by two small drill-like eyes set in the depths of twin glass caverns. He drew away. Already he felt his privacy imperilled.
“My great-uncle is dead and burnt,” he said again.
“I was the only one there to do it and I done it. I done your work for you,” and as he said the last, a perceptible trace of scorn crossed his face.
“Dead?” the schoolteacher said. “My uncle? The old man’s dead?” he asked in a blank unbelieving tone. He caught Tarwater abruptly by the arms and stared into his face. In the depths of his eyes, the boy, shocked, saw an instant’s stricken look, plain and awful. It vanished at once. The straight line of the schoolteacher’s mouth began turning into a smile. “And how did he go—with his fist in the air?” he asked. “Did the Lord arrive for him in a chariot of fire?”
“He didn’t have no warning,” Tarwater said, suddenly breathless. “He was eating his breakfast and I never moved him from the table. I set him on fire where he was and the house with him.”
The schoolteacher said nothing but the boy read in his look a doubt that this had happened, a suspicion that he dealt with an interesting liar.
“You can go there and see for yourself,” Tarwater said. “He was too big to bury. I done it the quickest way.”
His uncle’s eyes had the look now of being trained on a fascinating problem. “How did you get here? How did you know this was where you belonged?” he asked.
The boy had expended all his energy announcing himself. He was suddenly blank and stunned and he remained stupidly silent. He had never been this tired before. He felt he was about to fall.
The schoolteacher waited, searching his face impatiently. Then his expression changed again. He tightened his grip on Tarwater’s arm and his eyes turned, glowering, toward the front door, which was still open. “Is he out there?” he asked in a low enraged voice. “Is this one of his tricks? Is he out there waiting to sneak in a window and baptize Bishop while you’re here baiting me? Is that his senile game this time?”
The boy blanched. In his mind’s eye he saw the old man, a dark shape standing behind the corner of the house, restraining his wheezing breath while he waited impatiently for him to baptize the dimwitted child. He stared shocked at the schoolteacher’s face. There was a wedge-shaped gash in his new uncle’s ear. The sight of it brought old Tarwater so close that the boy thought he could hear him laugh. With a terrible clarity he saw that the schoolteacher was no more than a decoy the old man had set up to lure him to the city to do his unfinished business.
His eyes began to burn in his fierce fragile face. A new energy seized him. “He’s dead,” he said. “You can’t be any deader than he is. He’s reduced to ashes. He don’t even have a cross set up over him. If it’s anything left of him, the buzzards wouldn’t have it and the bones the dogs’ll carry off. That’s how dead he is.”
