“And where would your business be?” Rayber asked sourly. “At another tabernacle?”
The boy reddened. He opened his mouth and said nothing.
“l nurse an idiot that you’re afraid to look at,” Rayber said. “Look him in the eye.”
Tarwater shot a glance at the top of Bishop’s head and left it there an instant like a finger on a candle flame. “I’d as soon be afraid to look at a dog,” he said and turned his back. After a moment, as if he were continuing the same conversation, he muttered, “I’d as soon baptize a dog as him. It would be as much use”
“Who said anything about baptizing anybody?” Rayber said. “Is that one of your fixations? Have you taken that bug up from the old man?”
The boy whirled around and faced him. “I told you I only gone there to spit on it,” he said tensely. “I ain’t going to tell you again.”
Rayber watched him without saying anything. He felt that his own sour words had helped him recover himself. He pushed Bishop off and stood up. “Let’s get going,” he said. He had no intention of discussing it further, but as they moved on silently, he thought better of it.
“Listen Frank,” he said, “I’ll grant that you went to spit on it. I’ve never for a second doubted your intelligence. Everything you’ve done, your very presence here proves that you’re above your background, that you’ve broken through the ceiling the old man set for you. After all, you escaped from Powderhead. You had the courage to attend to him the quickest way and then get out of there. And once out, you came directly to the right place.”
The boy reached up and picked a leaf from a tree branch and bit it. A wry expression spread over his face. He rolled the leaf into a ball and threw it away. Rayber continued to speak, his voice detached, as if he had no particular interest in the matter, and his were merely the voice of truth, as impersonal as air.
“Say that you went to spit on it,” he said, “the point is this: there’s no need to spit on it. It’s not worth spitting on. It’s not that important. You’ve somehow enlarged the significance of it in your mind. The old man used to enrage me until I learned better. He wasn’t worth my hate and he’s not worth yours. He’s only worth our pity.” He wondered if the boy were capable of the steadiness of pity. “You want to avoid extremes. They are for violent people and you don’t want… “—he broke off abruptly as Bishop let loose his hand and galloped away.
They had come out into the center of the park, a concrete circle with a fountain in the middle of it. Water rushed from the mouth of a stone lion’s head into a shallow pool and the little boy was flying toward it, his arms flailing like a windmill. In a second he was over the side and in. “Too late, goddammit,” Rayber muttered, “he’s in.” He glanced at Tarwater.
The boy stood arrested in the middle of a step. His eyes were on the child in the pool but they burned as if he beheld some terrible compelling vision. The sun shone brightly on Bishop’s white head and the little boy stood there with a look of attention. Tarwater began to move toward him.
He seemed to be drawn toward the child in the water but to be pulling back, exerting an almost equal pressure away from what attracted him. Rayber watched, puzzled and suspicious, moving along with him but somewhat to the side. As he drew closer to the pool, the skin on the boy’s face appeared to stretch tighter and tighter. Rayber had the sense that he was moving blindly, that where Bishop was he saw only a spot of light. He felt that something was being enacted before him and that if he could understand it, he would have the key to the boy’s future. His muscles were tensed and he was prepared somehow to act. Suddenly his sense of danger was so great that he cried out. In an instant of illumination he understood. Tarwater was moving toward Bishop to baptize him. Already he had reached the edge of the pool. Rayber sprang and snatched the child out of the water and set him down, howling, on the concrete.
His heart was beating furiously. He felt that he had just saved the boy from committing some enormous indignity. He saw it all now. The old man had transferred his fixation to the boy, had left him with the notion that he must baptize Bishop or suffer some terrible consequence. Tarwater put his foot down on the marble edge of the pool. He leaned forward, his elbow on his knee, looking over the side at his broken reflection in the water. His lips moved as if he were speaking silently to the face forming in the pool. Rayber said nothing. He realized now the magnitude of the boy’s affliction. He knew that there was no way to appeal to him with reason. There was no hope of discussing it sanely with him, for it was a compulsion. He saw no way of curing him except perhaps through some shock, some sudden concrete confrontation with the futility, the ridiculous absurdity of performing the empty rite.
He squatted down and began to take off Bishop’s wet shoes. The child had stopped howling and was crying quietly, his face red and hideously distorted. Rayber turned his eyes away.
Tarwater was walking off. He was past the pool, his back strangely bent as if he were being driven away with a whip. He was moving off onto one of the narrow tree-shaded paths.
“Wait!” Rayber shouted. “We can’t go to the museum now. We’ll have to go home and change Bishop’s shoes.”
Tarwater could not have failed to hear but he kept on walking and in a second was lost to view.
Goddam backwoods imbecile, Rayber said under his breath. He stood looking at the path where the boy had disappeared. He felt no urge to go after him for he knew that he would be back, that he was held by Bishop. His feeling of oppression was caused now by the certain knowledge that there was no way to get rid of him. He would be with them until he had either accomplished what he came for, or until he was cured. The words the old man had scrawled on the back of the journal rose before him: THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN. The sentence was like a challenge renewed. I will cure him, he said grimly. I will cure him or know the reason why.
VII
THE Cherokee Lodge was a two-story converted warehouse, the lower part painted white and the upper green. One end sat on land and the other was set on stilts in a glassy little lake across which were dense woods, green and black farther toward the skyline, grey-blue. The long front side of the building, plastered with beer and cigaret signs, faced the highway, which ran about thirty feet away across a dirt road and beyond a narrow stretch of iron weed. Rayber had passed the place before but had never been tempted to stop.
He had selected it because it was only thirty miles from Powderhead and because it was cheap and he arrived there the next day with the two boys in time for them to take a walk and look around before they ate. The ride up had been oppressively silent, the boy sitting as usual on his side of the car like some foreign dignitary who would not admit speaking the language—the filthy hat, the stinking overalls, worn defiantly like a national costume.
Rayber had hit upon his plan in the night. It was to take him back to Powderhead and make him face what he had done. What he hoped was that if seeing and feeling the place again were a real shock, the boy’s trauma might suddenly be revealed. His irrational fears and impulses would burst out and his uncle—sympathetic, knowing,
