doubtful it would ever move again. As he followed the outline of the face, he had realized with an intense stab of joy that his nephew looked enough like him to be his son. The heavy work shoes, the worn overalls, the atrocious stained hat filled him with pain and pity. He thought of his poor sister. The only real pleasure she had had in her life was the time she had had the lover who had given her this child, the hollow-cheeked boy who had come from the country to study divinity but whose mind Rayber (a graduate student at the time) had seen at once was too good for that. He had befriended him, had helped him to discover himself and then to discover her. He had engineered their meeting purposely and then had observed to his delight how it prospered and how the relationship developed them both. If there had been no accident, he felt sure the boy would have become completely stable. As it was, after the calamity he had killed himself, a prey to morbid guilt. He had come to Rayber’s apartment and had stood confronting him with the gun. He saw again the long brittle face as raw red as if a blast of fire had singed the skin off it and the eyes that had seemed burnt too. He had not felt they were entirely human eyes. They were the eyes of repentence and lacked all dignity. The boy had looked at him for what seemed an age but was perhaps only a second, then he had turned without a word and left and killed himself as soon as he reached his own room.
When Rayber had first opened the door in the middle of the night and had seen Tarwater’s face white, drawn by some unfathomable hunger and pride—he had remained for an instant frozen before what might have been a mirror thrust toward him in a nightmare. The face before him was his own, but the eyes were not his own. They were the student’s eyes, singed with guilt. He had left the door hurriedly to get his glasses and his hearing aid.
As he sat that first night by the bed, he had recognized something rigid and recalcitrant about the boy even in repose. He lay with his teeth bared and the hat clenched in his fist like a weapon. Rayber’s conscience smote him that all these years he had left him to his fate, that he had not gone back and saved him. His throat had tightened, his eyes had begun to ache. He had vowed to make it up to him now, to lavish on him everything he would have lavished on his own child if he had had one who would have known the difference.
The next morning while Tarwater was still asleep, he had rushed out and bought him a decent suit, a plaid shirt, socks, and a red leather cap. He wanted him to have new clothes to wake up to, new clothes to indicate a new life.
After four days they were still untouched in the box on a chair in the room. The boy had looked at them as if the suggestion he put them on were equal to asking that he appear naked.
It was apparent from everything he did and said exactly who had brought him up. At every turn an almost uncontrollable fury would rise in Rayber at the brand of independence the old man had wrought—not a constructive independence but one that was irrational, backwoods, and ignorant. After Rayber had rushed back with the clothes, he had gone to the bed and put his hand on the still sleeping boy’s forehead and decided that he had a fever and should not get up. He had prepared a breakfast on a tray and brought it to the room. When he appeared in the door with it, Bishop at his side, Tarwater was sitting up in the bed, in the act of shaking out his hat and putting it on. Rayber had said, “Don’t you want to hang up your hat and stay a while?” and had given him such a smile of welcome and good will as he thought had possibly never been turned on him before.
The boy, with no look of appreciation or even interest, had pulled the hat down farther on his head. His gaze had turned with a peculiar glare of recognition to Bishop. The child had on a black cowboy hat and he was gaping over the top of a trash basket that he clasped to his stomach. He kept a rock in it. Rayber remembered that Bishop had caused the boy some disturbance the night before and he pushed him back with his free hand so that he could not get in. Then stepping into the room, he closed the door and locked it. Tarwater looked at the closed door darkly as if he continued to see the child through it, still clasping his trashbasket.
Rayber set the tray down across his knees and stood back scrutinizing him. The boy seemed barely aware that he was in the room. “That’s your breakfast,” his uncle said as if he might not be able to identify it. It was a bowl of dry cereal and a glass of milk. “I thought you’d better stay in bed today,” he said. “You don’t look too chipper.” He pulled up a straight chair and sat down. “Now we can have a real talk,” he said, his smile spreading. “It’s high time we got to know each other.”
No expression of approval or pleasure lightened the boy’s face. He glanced at the breakfast but did not pick up the spoon. He began to look around the room. The walls were an insistent pink, the color chosen by Rayber’s wife. He used it now for a store room. There were trunks in the corners with crates piled on top of them. On the mantel, besides medicine bottles and dead electric lightbulbs and some old match boxes, was a picture of her. The boy’s attention paused there and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly as if in some kind of comic recognition. “The welfare woman,” he said.
His uncle reddened. The tone he detected under this was old Tarwater’s exactly. Without warning, irritation mounted in him. The old man might suddenly have obtruded his presence between them. He felt the same familiar fantastic anger, out of all proportion to its cause, that his uncle had always been able to stir in him. With an effort, he forced it out of his way. “That’s my wife,” he said, “but she doesn’t live with us anymore. This is her old room you’re in.”
The boy picked up the spoon. “My great-uncle said she wouldn’t hang around long,” he said and began to eat rapidly as if he had established enough independence by this remark to eat somebody else’s food. It was apparent from his expression that he found the quality of it poor.
Rayber sat and watched him, saying to himself in an effort to calm his irritation: this child hasn’t had a chance, remember he hasn’t had a chance. “God only knows what the old fool has told you and taught you!” he said with a sudden explosive force. “God only knows!”
The boy stopped eating and looked at him sharply.
Then after a second he said, “He ain’t had no effect on me,” and returned to his eating.
“He did you a terrible injustice,” Rayber said, wishing to impress this on him as often as he could. “He kept you from having a normal life, from getting a decent education. He filled your head with God knows what rot!”
Tarwater continued to eat. Then with a stoney deliberateness, he looked up and his gaze fastened on the gash in his uncle’s ear. Somewhere in the depths of his eyes a glint appeared. “Shot yer, didn’t he?” he said.
Rayber took a package of cigarets from his shirt pocket and lit one, his motions inordinately slow from the effort he was making to calm himself. He blew the smoke straight into the boy’s face. Then he tilted back in the chair and gave him a long hard look. The cigaret hanging from the corner of his mouth trembled. “Yes, he shot me,” he said.
The glint in the boy’s eyes followed the wires of the hearing aid down to the metal box stuck in his belt. “What you wired for?” he drawled. “Does your head light up?”
Rayber’s jaw snapped and then relaxed. After a moment, after extending his arm stiffly and knocking the ash off his cigaret onto the floor, he replied that his head did not light up. “This is a hearing aid,” he said patiently. “After the old man shot me I began to lose my hearing. I didn’t have a gun when I went to get you back. If I’d stayed he would have killed me and I wouldn’t have done you any good dead.”
The boy continued to study the machine. His uncle’s face might have been only an appendage to it. “You ain’t
