into his mysterious face. They were in the middle of the lake before he came clattering down the dock, the woman running behind. She snatched him just in time to keep him from plunging over the edge.
Rayber made a frantic grabbing motion in the boat and cried out. Then he reddened and scowled. “Don’t look,” he said, “she’ll take care of him. We need a break.”
The boy gazed darkly where the accident had been prevented. The child was a black spot in the glare of his vision. The woman turned him around and started leading him back to the lodge. “It wouldn’t have been no great loss if he had drowned,” he observed.
Rayber had an instant’s picture of himself, standing in the ocean, holding the child’s limp body in his arms. With a kind of convulsive motion, he cleared his head of the image. Then he saw that Tarwater had observed his discomposure; he was looking at him with a distinct attention, a peculiar prescient look as if he were about to penetrate some secret.
“Nothing ever happens to that kind of child,” Rayber said. “In a hundred years people may have learned enough to put them to sleep when they’re born.”
Something appeared to be working on the boy’s face, struggling there, some war between agreement and outrage.
Rayber’s blood burned beneath his skin. He tried to restrain the urge to confess. He leaned forward; his mouth opened and closed and then in a dry voice he said, “Once I tried to drown him,” and grinned horribly at the boy.
Tarwater’s lips parted as if only they had heard, but he said nothing.
“It was a failure of nerve,” Rayber said. The glare on the water gave him the sensation of glancing at white fire each time he looked up or out where it was reflected on the water. He turned down the brim of his hat all the way around.
“You didn’t have the guts,” Tarwater said as if he would put it in a more accurate way. “He always told me you couldn’t do nothing, couldn’t act.”
The schoolteacher leaned forward and said between his teeth, “I’ve resisted him. I’ve done that. What have you done? Maybe you attended to him the quickest way but it takes more than that to go against his will for good. Are you quite sure,” he said, “are you quite sure you’ve overcome him? I doubt it. I think you’re chained to him right now. I think you’re not going to be free of him without my help. I think you’ve got problems that you’re not capable of solving yourself.”
The boy scowled and was silent.
The glare pierced Rayber’s eyeballs fiercely. He did not think he could stand an afternoon of this. He felt recklessly compelled to pursue the subject. “How do you like being in the country again?” he growled. “Remind you of Powderhead?”
“I come to fish,” the boy said disagreeably.
Goddam you, his uncle thought, all I’m trying to do is save you from being a freak. He was holding his line unbaited in the blinding water. He felt a madness on him to talk about the old man. “I remember the first time I ever saw him,” he said. “I was six or seven. I was out in the yard playing and all of a sudden I felt something between me and the sun. Him. I looked up and there he was, those mad fish-coloured eyes looking down at me. Do you know what he said to me-a seven year old child?” He tried to make his voice sound like the old man’s. “‘Listen boy,’ he said, ‘the Lord Jesus Christ sent me to find you. You have to be born again.’” He laughed, glaring at the boy with his furious blistered-looking eyes. “The Lord Jesus Christ had my welfare so at heart that he sent a personal representative. Where was the calamity? The calamity was I believed him. For five or six years. I had nothing else but that. I waited on the Lord Jesus. I thought I’d been born again and that everything was going to be different or was different already because the Lord Jesus had a great interest in me.”
Tarwater shifted on the seat. He seemed to listen as if behind a wall.
“It was the eyes that got me,” Rayber said. “Children may be attracted to mad eyes. A grown person could have resisted. A child couldn’t. Children are cursed with believing.”
The boy recognized the sentence. “Some ain’t,” he said.
The schoolteacher smiled thinly. “And some who think they aren’t are,” he said, feeling that he was back in control. “It’s not as easy as you think to throw it off. Do you know,” he said, “that there’s a part of your mind that works all the time, that you’re not aware of yourself. Things go on in it. All sorts of things you don’t know about.”
Tarwater looked around him as if he were vainly searching for a way to get out of the boat and walk off.
“I think you’re basically very bright,” his uncle said. “I think you can understand the things that are said to you.”
“I never came for no school lesson,” the boy said rudely. “I come to fish. I ain’t worried what my underhead is doing. I know what I think when I do it and when I get ready to do it, I don’t talk no words. I do it.” There was a dull anger in his voice. He was becoming aware of how much he had eaten. The food appeared to be sinking like a leaden column inside him and to be pushed back at the same time by the hunger it had intruded upon.
The schoolteacher watched him a moment and then said, “Well anyway, as far as the baptizing went, the old man could have spared himself. I was already baptized. My mother never overcame her upbringing and she had had it done. But the damage to me of having it done at the age of seven was tremendous. It made a lasting scar.”
The boy looked up suddenly as if there had been a tug at his line. “Him back there,” he said and jerked his head toward the lodge, “he ain’t been baptized?”
“No,” Rayber said. He looked at him narrowly. He thought that if he could get the right words in now, he might do some good, might give him a painless lesson. “I may not have the guts to drown him,” he said, “but I have the guts to maintain my self-respect and not to perform futile rites over him. I have the guts not to become the prey of superstitions. He is what he is and there’s nothing for him to be born into. My guts,” he finished, “are in my head.”
The boy only stared at him, his eyes filmed with a dull cast of nausea.
“The great dignity of man,” his uncle said, “is his ability to say: I am born once and no more. What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it. It’s enough to be a man.” There was a light ring in his voice. He watched the boy closely to see if he had struck a chord.
