The schoolteacher continued to glare at him. “I’m not so sure of that.”
The boy said nothing. He seemed to have suffered some shock inside the building that had permanently slowed his tongue.
Rayber turned and they walked away in silence.
At any point along the way, he could have put his hand on the shoulder next to his and it would not have been withdrawn, but he made no gesture. His head was churning with old rages. The afternoon he had learned the full extent of Bishop’s future had sprung to his mind. He saw himself rigidly facing the doctor, a man who had made him think of a bull, impassive, insensitive, his brain already on the next case. He had said, “You should be grateful his health is good. In addition to this, I’ve seen them born blind as well, some without arms and legs, and one with a heart outside.”
He had lurched up, almost ready to strike the man.
“How can I be grateful,” he had hissed, “when one—just one—is born with a heart outside?”
“You’d better try,” the doctor had said.
Tarwater walked slightly behind him and Rayber did not cast a glance back at him. His fury seemed to be stirring from buried depths that had lain quiet for years and to be working upward, closer and closer, toward the slender roots of his peace. When they reached the house he went in and straight to his bed without turning to look at the boy’s white face which, drained but expectant, lingered a moment at the threshold of his door as if waiting for an invitation to enter.
VI
THE next day, too late, he had the sense of opportunity missed. Tarwater’s face had hardened again and the steely gleam in his eye was like the glint of a metal door sealed against an intruder. Rayber felt afflicted with a peculiar chilling clarity of mind in which he saw himself divided in two—a violent and a rational self. The violent self inclined him to see the boy as an enemy and he knew that nothing would hinder his progress with the case so much as giving in to such an inclination. He had waked up after a wild dream in which he chased Tarwater through an interminable alley that twisted suddenly back on itself and reversed the roles of pursuer and pursued. The boy had overtaken him, given him a thunderous blow on the head, and then disappeared. And with his disappearance there had come such an overwhelming feeling of release that Rayber had waked up with a pleasant anticipation that his guest would be gone. He was at once ashamed of the feeling. He settled on a rational tiring plan for the day and by ten o’ clock the three of them were on their way to the natural history museum. He intended to stretch the boy’s mind by introducing him to his ancestor, the fish, and to all the great wastes of unexplored time.
They passed part of the territory they had walked over the night before but nothing was said about that trip. Except for the circles under Rayber’s eyes, there was nothing about either of them to indicate it had been made. Bishop stumped along, squatting every now and then to pick up something off the sidewalk, while Tarwater, to avoid contamination with them, walked a good four feet to the other side and slightly in advance. I must have infinite patience. I must have infinite patience, Rayber kept repeating to himself.
The museum lay on the other side of the city park which they had not crossed before. As they approached it, the boy paled as if he were shocked to find a wood in the middle of the city. Once inside the park, he stopped and stood glaring about him at the huge trees whose ancient rustling branches intermingled overhead. Patches of light sifting through them spattered the concrete walks with sunshine. Rayber observed that something disturbed him. Then he realized that the place reminded him of Powderhead.
“Let’s sit down,” he said, wanting both to rest and to observe the boy’s agitation. He sat down on a bench and stretched his legs in front of him. He suffered Bishop to climb into his lap. The child’s shoelaces were untied and he tied them, for the moment ignoring the boy who was standing there, his face furiously impatient. When he finished tying the shoes, he continued to hold the child, sprawled and grinning, in his lap. The little boy’s white head fitted under his chin. Above it Rayber looked at nothing in particular. Then he closed his eyes and in the isolating darkness, he forgot Tarwater’s presence. Without warning his hated love gripped him and held him in a vise. He should have known better than to let the child onto his lap.
His forehead became beady with sweat; he looked as if he might have been nailed to the bench. He knew that if he could once conquer this pain, face it and with a supreme effort of his will refuse to feel it, he would be a free man. He held Bishop rigidly. Although the child started the pain, he also limited it, contained it. He had learned this one terrible afternoon when he had tried to drown him.
He had taken him to the beach, two hundred miles away, intending to effect the accident as quickly as possible and return bereaved. It had been a beautiful calm day in May. The beach, almost empty, had stretched down into the gradual swell of ocean. There was nothing to be seen but an expanse of sea and sky and sand and an occasional figure, stick-like, in the distance. He had taken him out on his shoulders and when he was chest deep in the water, had lifted him off, swung the delighted child high in the air and then plunged him swiftly below the surface on his back and held him there, not looking down at what he was doing but up, at an impeturbable witnessing sky, not quite blue, not quite white.
A fierce surging pressure had begun upward beneath his hands and grimly he had exerted more and more force downward. In a second, he felt he was trying to hold a giant under. Astonished, he let himself look. The face under the water was wrathfully contorted, twisted by some primeval rage to save itself. Automatically he released his pressure. Then when he realized what he had done, he pushed down again angrily with all his force until the struggle ceased under his hands. He stood sweating in the water, his own mouth as slack as the child’s had been. The body, caught by an undertow, almost got away from him but he managed to come to himself and snatch it. Then as he looked at it, he had a moment of complete terror in which he envisioned his life without the child. He began to shout frantically. He plowed his way out of the water with the limp body. The beach which he had thought empty before had become peopled with strangers converging on him from all directions. A bald-headed man in red and blue Roman striped shorts began at once to administer artificial respiration. Three wailing women and a photographer appeared. The next day there had been a picture in the paper, showing the rescuer, striped bottom forward, working over the child. Rayber was beside him on his knees, watching with an agonized expression. The caption said, OVERJOYED FATHER SEES SON REVIVED.
The boy’s voice broke in on him harshly. “All you got to do is nurse an idiot!”
The schoolteacher opened his eyes. They were bloodshot and vague. He might have been returning to consciousness after a blow on the head.
Tarwater was glaring to the side of him. “Come on if you’re coming” he said, “and if you ain’t, I’m going on about my bidnis.”
Rayber didn’t answer.
“So long,” Tarwater said.
