Tarwater turned an expressionless face toward the rim of trees that made a paling around the lake. He appeared to stare into emptiness.
Rayber subsided again but he could stand it only a few minutes. He finished the cigaret and lit another. Then he decided to start off on a new tack and leave the morbid alone for a while. “I’ll tell you what I’ve planned for us to do in a couple of weeks,” he said in an almost affable tone. “We’re going up for a plane ride. How about that?” He had been considering this, holding it in reserve, thinking it would be the greatest marvel he could produce, something that would surely stir the glum child out of himself.
There was no response. The boy’s eyes looked glazed.
“Flying is the greatest engineering achievement of man,” Rayber said in an irked voice. “Doesn’t it stir your imagination even slightly? If it doesn’t I’m afraid there’s something wrong with you.”
“I done flew,” Tarwater said and suppressed a belch. He was entirely occupied with his nausea which he could feel minutely rising.
“How could you have flown?” his uncle asked angrily.
“Him and me give a dollar to go up in one at a fair once,” he said. “The houses weren’t nothing but matchboxes and the people were invisible—like germs. I wouldn’t give you nothing for no airplane. A buzzard can Fly.”
The schoolteacher gripped both sides of the boat and pushed forward. “He’s warped your whole life,” he said hoarsely. “You’re going to grow up to be a freak if you don’t let yourself be helped. You still believe all that crap he taught you. You’re eaten up with false guilt. I can read you like a book!” The words were out before he could stop them.
The boy did not even look at him. He leaned over the side of the boat and shuddered. The column, released, formed a sweetly sour circle on the water. A wave of dizziness came over him and then his head cleared. A ravenous emptiness raged in his stomach as if it had reestablished its rightful tenure. He washed his mouth out with a handful of the lake and then wiped his face on his sleeve.
Rayber trembled at his recklessness. He felt certain he had produced this by the word guilt. He put his hand on the boy’s knee and said, “You’ll feel better now.”
Tarwater said nothing, glaring with his red-lidded wet eyes at the water as if he were glad he had polluted it.
“It’s just as much relief,” his uncle said, pressing his advantage, “to get something off your mind as off your stomach. When you tell somebody else your troubles, then they don’t bother you so much, they don’t get in your blood and make you sick. Somebody else shares the weight. God boy,” he said, “you need help. You need to be saved right here now from the old man and everything he stands for. And I’m the one who can save you.” With his hat turned down all around he looked like a fanatical country preacher. His eyes glistened. “I know what your problem is,” he said. “I know and I can help you. Something’s eating you on the inside and I can tell you what it is.”
The boy looked at him fiercely. “Why don’t you shut your big mouth?” he said. “Why don’t you pull that plug out of your ear and turn yourself off? I come to fish. I never came to have no traffic with you.”
His uncle snapped the cigaret out of his fingers and it hit the water with a hiss. “Every day,” he said coldly, “you remind me more of the old man. You’re just like him. You have his future before you.”
The boy put down his line. With rigid deliberate movements he lifted his right foot and pulled off his shoe, then his left foot and pulled off that shoe. Then he jerked the straps of his overalls off his shoulders and pulled them down, over his bottom and off. He had on a pair of long thin old man’s drawers. He pulled his hat tight down on his head so that it would not possibly come off, then he threw himself out of the boat and swam away, smashing the glassy lake with his cupped fists as if he would like to make it sting and bleed.
My God! Rayber thought, I touched a nerve that time! He kept his eye on the hat in the receding spasm of water. The empty overalls lay at his feet. He grabbed them and felt in the pockets. He took out two stones, a nickel, a box of wooden matches and three nails. He had brought along the new suit and shirt and laid them out on a chair.
Tarwater reached the dock and climbed onto it, the drawers clinging to him, the hat still ground down on his forehead. He turned just in time to see his uncle thrust the bundled overalls below the surface of the water.
Rayber felt as if he had just run across a mined field. At once he was afraid he had made a mistake. The thin rigid figure on the dock did not move. It seemed no more than a wraith-like column of fragile white-hot rage, materialized for an instant, the makings of some pure unfathomable passion. The boy turned and started rapidly toward the lodge and Rayber decided it would be best to linger on the lake awhile.
When he came in, he was startled to see Tarwater lying on the far cot in his new clothes and to see Bishop sitting on the other end of it, watching him as if he were mesmerized by the steel-like glint that came from the boy’s eyes and was directed into his own. In the plaid shirt and new blue trousers, he looked like a changeling, half his old self and half his new, already half the boy he would be when he was rehabilitated.
Rayber’s spirits rose cautiously. He was holding the shoes with the contents of the overall pockets in them. He set them down on the bed and said, “No hard feelings about the clothes, old man. That was just my round.”
There was a strange suppressed excitement about the boy’s whole figure, as if he had settled on an inevitable course of action. He did not get up, did not acknowledge the shoes, but he acknowledged his uncle’s presence by shifting the glint in his eyes slightly, on him and then away. The schoolteacher might have been just enough present to be ignored. Then he looked back at Bishop, triumphantly, boldly, into the very center of his eyes.
Rayber stood puzzled in the doorway. “Who wants to go for a ride?” he asked.
Bishop jumped off the bed and was at his side in an instant. Tarwater started at the little boy’s abrupt disappearance from his field of vision, but he did not get up or turn his face toward the schoolteacher in the door.
“Well, we’ll leave Frank to his meditations,” Rayber said and swung the child around by the shoulder and left with him, hastily. He wanted to escape before the boy changed his mind.
IX
THE heat was not as intense on the road as it had been on the lake and he drove with a sense of refreshment he had not felt in the five days Tarwater had been with him. Once out of sight of the boy, he felt a pressure had been lifted from the atmosphere. He eliminated the oppressive presence from his thoughts and retained only those
