done me no good alive neither,” he remarked.
“Do you understand me?” Rayber persisted. “I didn’t have a gun. He would have killed me. He was a mad man. The time when I can do you good is beginning now, and I want to help you. I want to make up for all those years.”
For an instant the boy’s eyes left the hearing aid and rested on his uncle’s eyes. “Could have got you a gun and come back terreckly,” he said.
Stricken by the distinct sound of betrayal in his voice, Rayber could not say a word. He looked at him helplessly. The boy returned to his eating.
Finally Rayber said, “Listen.” He took hold of the fist with the spoon in it and held it. “I want you to understand. He was crazy and if he had killed me, you wouldn’t have this place to come to now. I’m no fool. I don’t believe in senseless sacrifice. A dead man is not going to do you any good, don’t you know that? Now I can do something for you. Now I can make up for all the time we’ve lost. I can help correct what he’s done to you, help you to correct it yourself.” He kept hold of the fist all the while it was being drawn insistently back. “This is our problem together,” he said, seeing himself so clearly in the face before him that he might have been beseeching his own image.
With a quick yank, Tarwater managed to free his hand. Then he gave the schoolteacher a long appraising look, tracing the line of his jaw, the two creases on either side of his mouth, the forehead extending into skull until it reached the pie-shaped hairline. He gazed briefly at the pained eyes behind his uncle’s glasses, appearing to abandon a search for something that could not possibly be there. The glint in his eye fell on the metal box half- sticking out of Rayber’s shirt. “Do you think in the box,” he asked, “or do you think in your head?”
His uncle had wanted to tear the machine out of his ear and fling it against the wall. “It’s because of you I can’t hear!” he said, glaring at the impassive face. “It’s because once I tried to help you!”
“You never helped me none.”
“I can help you now,” he said.
After a second he sank back in his chair. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said, letting his hands fall in a helpless gesture. “It was my mistake. I should have gone back and killed him or let him kill me. Instead I let something in you be killed.”
The boy put down his milk glass. “Nothing in me has been killed,” he said in a positive voice, and then he added, “And you needn’t to worry. I done your work for you. I tended to him. It was me put him away. I was drunk as a coot and I tended to him.” He said it as if he were recalling the most vivid point in his history.
Rayber heard his own heart, magnified by the hearing aid, suddenly begin to pound like the works of a gigantic machine in his chest. The boy’s delicate defiant face, his glowering eyes still shocked by some violent memory, brought back instantly to him the vision of himself when he was fourteen and had found his way to Powderhead to shout imprecations at the old man.
An insight came to him that he was not to question until the end. He understood that the boy was held in bondage by his great-uncle, that he suffered a terrible false guilt for burning and not burying him, and he saw that he was engaged in a desperate heroic struggle to free himself from the old man’s ghostly grasp. He leaned forward and said in a voice so full of feeling that it was barely balanced, “Listen, listen Frankie,” he said, “you’re not alone any more. You have a friend. You have more than a friend now.” He swallowed. “You have a father.”
The boy turned very white. His eyes were blackened by the shadow of some unspeakable outrage. “I ain’t ast for no father,” he said and the sentence struck like a whip across his uncle’s face. “I ain’t ast for no father,” he repeated. “I’m out of the womb of a whore. I was born in a wreck.” He flung this forth as if he were declaring a royal birth. “And my name ain’t Frankie. I go by Tarwater and… “
“Your mother was not a whore,” the schoolteacher said angrily. “That’s just some rot he’s taught you. She was a good healthy American girl, just beginning to find herself when she was struck down. She was …”
“I ain’t fixing to hang around here,” the boy said, looking about him as if he might throw over the breakfast tray and jump out the window. “I only come to find out a few things and when I find them out, then I’m going.”
“What did you come to find out?” the schoolteacher asked evenly. “I can help you. All I want to do is help you any way I can. “
“I don’t need noner yer help,” the boy said, looking away.
His uncle felt something tightening around him like an invisible strait jacket. “How do you mean to find out if you don’t have help?”
“I’ll wait,” he said, “and see what happens.”
“And suppose,” his uncle asked, “nothing happens?”
An odd smile, like some strange inverted sign of grief, came over the boy’s face. “Then I’ll make it happen,” he said, “like I done before,”
In four days nothing had happened and nothing had been made to happen. They had simply covered—the three of them—the entire city, walking and all night Rayber rewalked the same territory backwards in his sleep. It would not have been so tiring if he had not had Bishop. The child dragged backwards on his hand, always attracted by something they had already passed. Every block or so he would squat down to pick up a stick or a piece of trash and have to be pulled up and along. Whereas Tarwater was always slightly in advance of them, pushing forward on the scent of something. In four days they had been to the art gallery and the movies, they had toured department stores, ridden escalators, visited the supermarkets, inspected the water works, the post office, the railroad yards and the city hall. Rayber had explained how the city was run and detailed the duties of a good citizen. He had talked as much as he had walked, and the boy for all the interest he showed might have been the one who was deaf. Silent, he viewed everything with the same noncommittal eye as if he found nothing here worth holding his attention but must keep moving, must keep searching for whatever it was that appeared just beyond his vision.
Once he had paused at a window where a small red car turned slowly on a revolving platform. Seizing on the display of interest, Rayber had said that perhaps when he was sixteen, he could have a car of his own. It might have been the old man who had replied that he could walk on his two feet for nothing without being beholden. Rayber had never, even when Old Tarwater had lived under his roof, been so conscious of the old man’s presence.
Once the boy had stopped suddenly in front of a tall building and had stood glaring up at it with a peculiar ravaged look of recognition. Puzzled, Rayber said, “You look as if you’ve been here before.”
