“I lost my hat there,” he muttered.
“Your hat is on your head,” Rayber said. He could not look at the object without irritation. He wished to God there were some way to get it off him.
“My first hat,” the boy said. “It fell,” and he had rushed on, away from the place as if he could not stand to be near it.
Only one other time had he shown a particular interest. He had stopped with a kind of lurch backwards in front of a large grimey garage-like structure with two yellow and blue painted windows in the front of it, and had stood there, precariously balanced as if he were arresting himself in the middle of a fall. Rayber recognized the place for some kind of pentecostal tabernacle. Over the door was a paper banner bearing the words, UNLESS YE BE BORN AGAIN YE SHALL NOT HAVE EVERLASTING LIFE. Beneath it a poster showed a man and woman and child holding hands. “Hear the Carmodys for Christ!” it said. “Thrill to the Music, Message, and Magic of this team!”
Rayber was well enough aware of the boy’s trouble to understand the sinister pull such a place would have on his mind. “Does this interest you?” he asked drily. “Does it remind you of something in particular?”
Tarwater was very pale. “Horse manure,” he whispered.
Rayber smiled. Then he laughed. “All such people have in life,” he said, “is the conviction they’ll rise again.”
The boy steadied himself, his eyes still on the banner but as if he had reduced it to a small spot a great distance away.
“They won’t rise again?” he said. The statement had the lilt of a question and Rayber realized with an intense thrill of pleasure that his opinion, for the first time, was being called for.
“No,” he said simply, “they won’t rise again.” There was a profound finality in his tone. The grimey structure might have been the carcass of a beast he had just brought down. He put his hand experimentally on the boy’s shoulder. It was suffered to remain there.
In a voice unsteady with the sudden return of enthusiasm he said, “That’s why I want you to learn all you can. I want you to be educated so that you can take your place as an intelligent man in the world. This fall when you start school… “
The shoulder was roughly withdrawn and the boy, throwing him one dark look, removed himself to the farthest edge of the sidewalk.
He wore his isolation like a mantle, wrapped it around himself as if it were a garment signifying the elect. Rayber had intended to keep notes on him and write up his most important observations but each night his energy had been too depleted to permit him to do any work. He had dropped off every night into a restless sleep, afraid that he would wake up and find the boy gone. He felt he had hastened his urge to leave by confronting him with the test. He had intended giving him the standard ones, intelligence and aptitude, and then going on to some he had perfected himself dealing with emotional factors. He had thought that in this way he could ferret to the center of the emotional infection. He had laid a simple aptitude test out on the kitchen table—the printed book and a few newly sharpened pencils. “This is a kind of game,” he said. “Sit down and see what you can make of it. I’ll help you begin.”
The expression that came over the boy’s face was very peculiar. His eyelids lowered just slightly; his mouth failed a smile by only a fraction; his look was compounded of fury and superiority. “Play with it yourself,” he said. “I ain’t taking no test,” and he spit the word out as if it were not fit to pass between his lips.
Rayber sized up the situation. Then he said, “Maybe you don’t really know how to read and write. Is that the trouble?”
The boy thrust his head forward. “I’m free,” he hissed. “I’m outside your head. I ain’t in it. I ain’t in it and I ain’t about to be.”
His uncle laughed. “You don’t know what freedom is,” he said, “you don’t… ” but the boy turned and strode off.
It was no use. He could no more be reasoned with than a jackal. Nothing gave him pause—except Bishop, and Rayber knew that the reason Bishop gave him pause was because the child reminded him of the old man. Bishop looked like the old man grown backwards to the lowest form of innocence, and Rayber observed that the boy strictly avoided looking him in the eye. Wherever the child happened to be standing or sitting or walking seemed to be for Tarwater a dangerous hole in space that he must keep away from at all costs. Rayber was afraid that Bishop would drive him away with his friendliness. He was always creeping up to touch him and when the boy was aware of his being near, he would draw himself up like a snake ready to strike and hiss, “Git!” and Bishop would scurry off to watch him again from behind the nearest piece of furniture.
The schoolteacher understood this too. Every problem the boy had he had had himself and had conquered, or had for the most part conquered, for he had not conquered the problem of Bishop. He had only learned to live with it and had learned too that he could not live without it.
When he had got rid of his wife, he and the child had begun living together in a quiet automatic fashion like two bachelors whose habits were so smoothly connected that they no longer needed to take notice of each other. In the winter he sent him to a school for exceptional children and he had made great strides. He could wash himself, dress himself, feed himself, go to the toilet by himself and make peanut butter sandwiches though sometimes he put the bread inside. For the most part Rayber lived with him without being painfully aware of his presence but the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity. It was only a touch of the curse that lay in his blood.
His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate. He did not believe that he himself was formed in the image and likeness of God but that Bishop was he had no doubt. The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him—powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.
He was not afraid of love in general. He knew the value of it and how it could be used. He had seen it transform in cases where nothing else had worked, such as with his poor sister. None of this had the least bearing on his situation. The love that would overcome him was of a different order entirely. It was not the kind that could be used for the child’s improvement or his own. It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of
