dead words. What it bore was a dry and seedless fruit, incapable even of rotting, dead from the beginning. From time to time, the old man would spit out of his mouth, like gobbets of poison, some of the idiotic sentences from the schoolteacher’s piece. Wrath had burned them on his memory, word for word. “His fixation of being called by the Lord had its origin in insecurity. He needed the assurance of a call, and so he called himself.”
“Called myself!” the old man would hiss, “called myself!” This so enraged him that half the time he could do nothing but repeat it. “Called myself. I called myself. I, Mason Tarwater, called myself! Called myself to be beaten and tied up. Called myself to be spit on and snickered at. Called myself to be struck down in my pride. Called myself to be torn by the Lord’s eye. Listen boy,” he would say and grab the child by the straps of his overalls and shake him slowly, “even the mercy of the Lord burns,” He would let go the straps and allow the boy to fall back into the thorn bed of that thought, while he continued to hiss and groan.
“Where he wanted me was inside that schoolteacher magazine. He thought once he got me in there, I’d be as good as inside his head and done for and that would be that, that would be the end of it. Well, that wasn’t the end of it! Here I sit. And there you sit. In freedom. Not inside anybody’s head!” and his voice would run away from him as if it were the freest part of his free self and were straining ahead of his heavy body to be off. Something of his great-uncle’s glee would take hold of Tarwater at that point and he would feel that he had escaped some mysterious prison. He even felt he could smell his freedom, pine-scented, coming out of the woods, until the old man would continue, “You were born into bondage and baptized into freedom, into the death of the Lord, into the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Then the child would feel a sullenness creeping over him, a slow warm rising resentment that this freedom had to be connected with Jesus and that Jesus had to be the Lord.
“Jesus is the bread of life,” the old man said.
The boy, disconcerted, would look off into the distance over the dark blue treeline where the world stretched out, hidden and at its ease. In the darkest, most private part of his soul, hanging upsidedown like a sleeping bat, was the certain, undeniable knowledge that he was not hungry for the bread of life. Had the bush flamed for Moses, the sun stood still for Joshua, the lions turned aside before Daniel only to prophesy the bread of life? Jesus? He felt a terrible disappointment in that conclusion, a dread that it was true. The old man said that as soon as he died, he would hasten to the banks of the Lake of Galilee to eat the loaves and fishes that the Lord had multiplied.
“Forever?” the horrified boy asked.
“Forever,” the old man said.
The boy sensed that this was the heart of his great-uncle’s madness, this hunger, and what he was secretly afraid of was that it might be passed down, might be hidden in the blood and might strike some day in him and then he would be tornby hunger like the old man, the bottom split out of his stomach so that nothing would heal or fill it but the bread of life.
He tried when possible to pass over these thoughts, to keep his vision located on an even level, to see no more than what was in front of his face and to let his eyes stop at the surface of that. It was as if he were afraid that if he let his eye rest for an instant longer than was needed to place something—a spade, a hoe, the mule’s hind quarters before his plow, the red furrow under him—that the thing would suddenly stand before him, strange and terrifying, demanding that he name it and name it justly and be judged for the name he gave it. He did all he could to avoid this threatened intimacy of creation. When the Lord’s call came, he wished it to be a voice from out of a clear and empty sky, the trumpet of the Lord God Almighty, untouched by any fleshly hand or breath. He expected to see wheels of fire in the eyes of unearthly beasts. He had expected this to happen as soon as his great-uncle died. He turned his mind off this quickly and went to get the shovel. The schoolteacher is a living man, he thought as he went, but he’d better not come out here and try to get me off this property because I’ll kill him. Go to him and be damned, his uncle had said. I’ve saved you from him this far and if you go to him the minute I’m in the ground there’s nothing I can do about it.
The shovel lay against the side of the hen house. “I’ll never set my foot in the city again,” the boy said to himself aloud. I’ll never go to him. Him nor nobody else will ever get me off this place.
He decided to dig the grave under the fig tree because the old man would be good for the figs. The ground was sandy on top and solid brick underneath and the shovel made a clanging sound when he struck it in the sand. Two hundred pounds of dead mountain to bury, he thought, and stood with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, studying the white sky through the leaves of the tree. It would take all day to get a hole big enough out of this rock and the schoolteacher would burn him in a minute.
Tarwater had seen the schoolteacher once from a distance of about twenty feet and he had seen the dimwitted child closer up. The little boy somewhat resembled old Tarwater except for his eyes which were grey like the old man’s but clear, as if the other side of them went down and down into two pools of light. It was plain to look at him that he did not have any sense. The old man had been so shocked by the likeness and the unlikeness that the time he and Tarwater had gone there, he had only stood in the door, staring at the little boy and rolling his tongue around outside his mouth as if he had no sense himself. That had been the first time he had seen the child and he could not forget him. “Married her and got one child out of her and that without sense,” he would murmur. “The Lord preserved him and now He means to see he’s baptized.”
“Well whyn’t you get on with it then?” the boy asked, for he wanted something to happen, wanted to see the old man in action, wanted him to kidnap the child and have the schoolteacher have to come after him so that he could get a closer look at his other uncle. “What ails you?’ he asked. “What makes you tarry so long? Why don’t you make haste and steal him?”
“I take my directions from the Lord God,” the old man said, “Who moves in His own time. I don’t take them from you.”
The white fog had eased through the yard and disappeared into the next bottom and the air was clear and blank. His mind continued to dwell on the schoolteacher’s house. “Three months there,” his great-uncle had said. “It shames me. Betrayed for three months in the house of my own kin and if when I’m dead you want to turn me over to my betrayer and see my body burned, go ahead! Go ahead, boy,” he had shouted, sitting up splotch-faced in his box. “Go ahead and let him burn me but watch out for the Lord’s lion after that. Remember the Lord’s lion set in the path of the false prophet! I been leavened by the yeast he don’t believe in,” he had said, “and I won’t be burned! And when I’m gone, you’ll be better off in these woods by yourself with just as much light as the sun wants to let in than you’ll be in the city with him.”
He kept on digging but the grave did not get any deeper. “The dead are poor,” he said in the voice of the stranger. You can’t be any poorer than dead. He’ll have to take what he gets. Nobody to bother me, he thought. Ever. No hand uplifted to hinder me from anything; except the Lord’s and He ain’t said anything. He ain’t even noticed me yet.
A sand-colored hound beat its tail on the ground nearby and a few black chickens scratched in the raw clay he was turning up. The sun had slipped over the blue line of trees and circled by a haze of yellow was moving slowly across the sky. “Now I can do anything I want to,” he said, softening the stranger’s voice so that he could stand it. Could kill off all those chickens if I had a mind to, he thought, watching the worthless black game bantams that his
