Without reading it, he said, “Three hamburger plates,” and thrust it aside.
When she was gone, he said in a dry voice, “I want to lay some cards on the table.” He sought the boy’s eyes and steadied himself by the hated glint in them.
Tarwater looked at the table as if waiting for the cards to be laid on it.
“That means I want to talk straight to you,” Rayber said, rigidly keeping the exasperation out of his voice. He strove to make his gaze, his tone, as indifferent as his listener’s “I have some things to say to you that you’ll have to listen to. What you do about what I have to say is your own business. I have no further interest in telling you what to do. I only intend to put the facts before you.” His voice was thin and brittle sounding. He might have been reading from a paper. “I notice that you’ve begun to be able to look Bishop in the eye. That’s good. It means you’re making progress but you needn’t think that because you can look him in the eye now, you’ve saved yourself from what’s preying on you. You haven’t. The old man still has you in his grip. Don’t think he hasn’t.”
The boy continued to give him the same omniscient look. “It’s you the seed fell in,” he said. “It ain’t a thing you can do about it. It fell on bad ground but it fell in deep. With me,” he said proudly, “it fell on rock and the wind carried it away.”
The schoolteacher grasped the table as if he were going to push it forward into the boy’s chest. “Goddam you!” he said in a breathless harsh voice. “It fell in us both alike. The difference is that I know it’s in me and I keep it under control. I weed it out but you’re too blind to know it’s in you. You don’t even know what makes you do the things you do.”
The boy looked at him angrily but he said nothing. At least, Rayber thought, I’ve shocked that look off his face. He did not say anything for a few moments while he thought how to continue.
The woman returned with the three plates. She set them down slowly, giving herself time for observation. The man’s face had a sweaty harassed look and so did the boy’s. He threw her an ugly glance. The man began to eat at once as if he wanted to get it over with. The little boy took his bun apart and began to lick the mustard off it. The other boy looked at his as if it were probably bad meat and did not touch it. She left and watched indignantly for a few seconds from the kitchen door. The boy finally picked his hamburger up. He raised it halfway to his mouth and then put it down again. He picked it up and put it down twice without biting into it. Then he pulled his hat down and sat there, his arms folded. She had had enough and closed the door.
The schoolteacher leaned forward across the table, his eyes pin-pointed and very bright. “You can’t eat,” he said, “because something is eating you. And I intend to tell you what it is.”
“Worms,” the boy hissed as if his disgust could not be contained an instant longer.
“It takes guts to listen,” Rayber said.
Tarwater leaned toward him with a kind of blaring attention. “You ain’t got nothing to say to me that I don’t have the guts to listen to,” he said.
The schoolteacher sat back. “All right,” he said, “then listen.” He folded his arms and looked at him for an instant before he began. Then he started coldly. “The old man told you to baptize Bishop. You have that order lodged in your head like a boulder blocking your path.”
The blood drained from the boy’s face but his eyes did not swerve. They looked at Rayber furiously, the glint in them gone.
The schoolteacher spoke slowly, picking his words as if he were looking for the steadiest stones to step on across a rushing stream. “Until you get rid of this compulsion to baptize Bishop, you’ll never make any progress toward being a normal person. I said in the boat you were going to be a freak. I shouldn’t have said that. I only meant you had the choice. I want you to see the choice. I want you to make the choice and not simply be driven by a compulsion you don’t understand. What we understand, we can control,” he said. “You have to understand what it is that blocks you. I wonder if you’re smart enough to take this in. It’s not simple.”
The boy’s face seemed dry and old as if he had taken it in long ago, and now it was part of him like the current of death in his blood. The schoolteacher was touched by this muteness before the facts. His anger left him. The room was silent. A pink cast had fallen from the windows over the table. Tarwater looked away from his uncle at Bishop. The little boy’s hair was pink and lighter than his face. He was sucking his spoon; his eyes were drowned in silence.
“I want to put two solutions before you,” Rayber said. “What you do is up to you.”
Tarwater looked at him again, with no mockery, no glint in his eye, but with no anticipation either, as if his course were irrevocably set.
“Baptism is only an empty act,” the schoolteacher said. “If there’s any way to be born again, it’s a way that you accomplish yourself, an understanding about yourself that you reach after a long time, perhaps a long effort. It’s nothing you get from above by spilling a little water and a few words. What you want to do is meaningless, so the easiest solution would be simply to do it. Right here now, with this glass of water. I would permit it in order to get it out of your mind. As far as I’m concerned, you may baptize him at once.” He pushed his own glass of water across the table. His look was patient and ironical.
The boy’s glance touched the top of the glass and then bounded off. His hand lying by the side of his plate twitched. He jammed it into his pocket and looked the other way, out the window. His whole aspect seemed shaken as if his integrity had been dangerously challenged.
The schoolteacher pulled back the glass of water.
“I knew that would be too cheap for you,” he said. “I knew you would refuse to do anything so unworthy of the courage you’ve already shown.” He raised the glass and drank the rest of the water. Then he set it down on the table. He looked tired enough to collapse; his aspect was so weary that he might just have attained the top of a mountain he had been climbing for days.
After an interval he said, “The other way is not so simple. It’s the way I’ve chosen for myself. It’s the way you take as a result of being born again the natural way—through your own efforts. Your intelligence.” His words had a disconnected sound. “The other way is simply to face it and fight it, to cut down the weed every time you see it appear. Do I have to tell you this? An intelligent boy like you?”
“You don’t have to tell me nothing,” Tarwater murmured.
“I don’t have a compulsion to baptize him,” Rayber said. “My own is more complicated, but the principle is the same. The way we have to fight it is the same.”
“It ain’t the same,” Tarwater said. He turned toward his uncle. The glint had reappeared. “I can pull it up by
