mouth twisted out of the smile. “This is how I got the scars,” he muttered. The child made a sign to him from the door to smile and not look sour. As he waited for Haze to finish reading, the smile slowly returned.
The headline on the clipping said, Evangelist promises to blind self. The rest of it said that Asa Hawks, an evangelist of the Free Church of Christ, had promised to blind himself to justify his belief that Christ Jesus had redeemed him. It said he would do it at a revival on Saturday night at eight o’clock, the fourth of October. The date on it was more than ten years before. Over the headline was a picture of Hawks, a scarless, straight-mouthed man of about thirty, with one eye a little smaller and rounder than the other. The mouth had a look that might have been either holy or calculating, but there was a wildness in the eyes that suggested terror.
Haze sat staring at the clipping after he had read it. He read it three times. He took his hat off and put it on again and got up and stood looking around the room as if he were trying to remember where the door was.
“He did it with lime/’ the child said, “and there was hundreds converted. Anybody that blinded himself for justification ought to be able to save you—or even somebody of his blood/’ she added, inspired.
“Nobody with a good car needs to be justified,” Haze murmured. He scowled at her and hurried out the door, but as soon as it was shut behind him, he remembered something. He turned around and opened it and handed her a piece of paper, folded up several times into a small pellet shape; then he hurried out to his car.
Hawks took the note away from her and opened it up. It said, Babe, I never saw anybody that looked as good as you before is why I came here. She read it over his arm, coloring pleasantly.
“Now you got the written proof for it, Papa,” she said.
“That bastard got away with my clipping,” Hawks muttered.
“Well you got another clipping, ain’t you?” she asked, with a little smirk.
“Shut your mouth,” he said and flung himself down on the cot. The other clipping was one that said, Evangelist’s nerve fails.
“I can get it for you,” she offered, standing close to the door so that she could run if she disturbed him too much, but he had turned toward the wall as if he were going to sleep.
Ten years ago at a revival he had intended to blind himself and two hundred people or more were there, waiting for him to do it. He had preached for an hour on the blindness of Paul, working himself up until he saw himself struck blind by a Divine flash of lightning and, with courage enough then, he had thrust his hands into the bucket of wet lime and streaked them down his face; but he hadn’t been able to let any of it get into his eyes. He had been possessed of as many devils as were necessary to do it, but at that instant, they disappeared, and he saw himself standing there as he was. He fancied Jesus, Who had expelled them, was standing there too, beckoning to him; and he had fled out of the tent into the alley and disappeared.
“Okay, Pa,” she said, “I’ll go out for a while and leave you in peace.”
Haze had driven his car immediately to the nearest garage where a man with black bangs and a short expressionless face had come out to wait on him. He told the man he wanted the horn made to blow and the leaks taken out of the gas tank, the starter made to work smoother and the windshield wipers tightened.
The man lifted the hood and glanced inside and then shut it again. Then he walked around the car, stopping to lean on it here and there, and thumping it in one place and another. Haze asked him how long it would take to put it in the best order.
“It can’t be done,” the man said.
“This is a good car,” Haze said. “I knew when I first saw it that it was the car for me, and since I’ve had it, I’ve had a place to be that I can always get away in.”
“Was you going some place in this?” the man asked.
“To another garage,” Haze said, and he got in the Essex and drove off. At the other garage he went to, there was a man who said he could put the car in the best shape overnight, because it was such a good car to begin with, so well put together and with such good materials in it, and because, he added, he was the best mechanic in town, working in the best-equipped shop. Haze left it with him, certain that it was in honest hands.
CHAPTER 7
The next afternoon when he got his car back, he drove it out into the country to see how well it worked on the open road. The sky was just a little lighter blue than his suit, clear and even, with only one cloud in it, a large blinding white one with curls and a beard. He had gone about a mile out of town when he heard a throat cleared behind him. He slowed down and turned his head and saw Hawks’s child getting up off the floor onto the two-by- four that stretched across the seat frame. “I been here all the time,” she said, “and you never known it/’ She had a bunch of dandelions in her hair and a wide red mouth on her pale face.
“What do you want to hide in my car for?” he said angrily. “I got business before me. I don’t have time for foolishness/* Then he checked his ugly tone and stretched his mouth a little, remembering that he was going to seduce her. “Yeah sure,” he said, “glad to see you.”
She swung one thin black-stockinged leg over the back of the front seat and then let the rest of herself over. “Did you mean ‘good to look at’ in that note, or only ‘good?” she asked.
“The both,” he said stiffly.
“My name is Sabbath,” she said. “Sabbath Lily Hawks. My mother named me that just after I was born because I was born on the Sabbath and then she turned over in her bed and died and I never seen her.”
“Unh,” Haze said. His jaw tightened and he entrenched himself behind it and drove on. He had not wanted any company. His sense of pleasure in the car and in the afternoon was gone.
“Him and her wasn’t married,” she continued, “and that makes me a bastard, but I can’t help it. It was what he done to me and not what I done to myself.”
“A bastard?” he murmured. He couldn’t see how a preacher who had blinded himself for Jesus could have a bastard. He turned his head and looked at her with interest for the first time.
She nodded and the corners of her mouth turned up. “A real bastard,” she said, catching his elbow, “and do you know what? A bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven 1” she said.
Haze was driving his car toward the ditch while he stared at her. “How could you be…,” he started and saw the
