“I already seen them,” he said.
“That’s fine,” the man said, “beat it.”
“I got fifteen cents,” he said. “Whyn’t you lemme in and I could see half of it?” It’s something about a privy, he was thinking. It’s some men in a privy. Then he thought, maybe it’s a man and a woman in a privy. She wouldn’t want me in there. “I got fifteen cents,” he said.
“It’s more than half over,” the man said, fanning with his straw hat. “You run along.”
“That’ll be fifteen cents worth then,” Haze said.
“Scram,” the man said.
“Is it a nigger?” Haze asked. “Are they doing something to a nigger?”
The man leaned off his platform and his dried-up face drew into a glare. “Where’d you get that idear?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Haze said.
“How old are you?” the man asked.
“Twelve,” Haze said. He was ten.
“Gimme that fifteen cents,” the man said, “and get in there.”
He slid the money on the platform and scrambled to get in before it was over. He went through the flap of the tent and inside there was another tent and he went through that. All he could see were the backs of the men. He climbed up*on a bench and looked over their heads. They were looking down into a lowered place where something white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman. She was fat and she had a face like an ordinary woman except there was a mole on the corner of her lip, that moved when she grinned, and one on her side.
“Had one of themther built into ever’ casket/’ his father, up toward the front, said, “be a heap ready to go sooner/*
Haze recognized the voice without looking. He slid down off the bench and scrambled out of the tent. He crawled out under the side of the outside one because he didn’t want to pass the barker. He got in the back of a truck and sat down in the far corner of it. The carnival was making a tin roar outside.
His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at him, when he got home. She wore black all the time and her dresses were longer than other women’s. She was standing there straight, looking at him. He moved behind a tree and got out of her view, but in a few minutes, he could feel her watching him through the tree. He saw the lowered place and the casket again and a thin woman in the casket who was too long for it. Her head stuck up at one end and her knees were raised to make her fit. She had a cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head. He stood flat against the tree, waiting. She left the washpot and came toward him with a stick. She said, “What you seen?
“What you seen?” she said.
“What you seen,” she said, using the same tone of voice all the time. She hit him across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the tree. “Jesus died to redeem you,” she said.
“I never ast him,” he muttered.
She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed, and he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him. In a minute she threw the stick away from her and went back to the washpot, still shut-mouthed.
The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods. He didn’t wear them except for revivals and in the winter. He took them out of the box and filled the bottoms of them with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight and walked in them through the woods for what he knew to be a mile, until he came to a creek, and then he sat down and took them off and eased his feet in the wet sand. He thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had fallen he would have taken it as a sign. After a while he drew his feet out of the sand and let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again with the rocks still in them and he walked a half-mile back before he took them off.
CHAPTER 4
He got out of Mrs. Watts’s bed early in the morning before any light came in the room. When he woke up, her arm was flung across him. He leaned up and lifted it off and eased it down by her side, but he didn’t look at her. There was only one thought in his mind: he was going to buy a car. The thought was full grown in his head when he woke up, and he didn’t think of anything else. He had never thought before of buying a car; he had never even wanted one before. He had driven one only a little in his life and he didn’t have any license. He had only fifty dollars but he thought he could buy a car for that. He got stealthily out the bed, without disturbing Mrs. Watts, and put his clothes on silently. By six-thirty, he was down town, looking for used-car lots.
Used-car lots were scattered among the blocks of old buildings that separated the business section from the railroad yards. He wandered around in a few of them before they were open. He could tell from the outside of the lot if it would have a fifty-dollar car in it. When they began to be open for business, he went through them quickly, paying no attention to anyone who tried to show him the stock. His black hat sat on his head with a carefult placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.
It was a wet glary day. The sky was like a piece of thin polished silver with a dark sour-looking sun in one corner of it. By ten o’clock he had canvassed all the better lots and was nearing the railroad yards. Even here, the lots were full of cars that cost more than fifty dollars. Finally he came to one between two deserted warehouses. A sign over the entrance said: Slade’s for the Latest.
There was a gravel road going down the middle of the lot and over to one side near the front, a tin shack with the word, Office, painted on the door. The rest of the lot was full of old cars and broken machinery. A white boy was sitting on a gasoline can in front of the office. He had the look of being there to keep people out. He wore a black raincoat and his face was partly hidden under a leather cap. There was a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth and the ash on it was about an inch long.
Haze started off toward the back of the lot where he saw a particular car. “Hey!” the boy yelled. ‘
‘You don’t just walk in here like that. Ill show you what I got to show,” but Haze didn’t pay any attention to
