red embankment in front of him and pulled the car back on the road.
“Do you read the papers?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Well, there’s this woman in it named Mary Brittle that tells you what to do when you don’t know. I wrote her a letter and ast her what I was to do.”
“How could you be a bastard when he blinded him…,” he started again.
“I says, ‘Dear Mary, I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as we all know, but I have this personality that makes boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not? I shall not enter the kingdom of heaven anyway so I don’t see what difference it makes/ “
“Listen here,” Haze said, “if he blinded himself how…”
“Then she answered my letter in the paper. She said, ‘Dear Sabbath, Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to re-examine your religious values to see if they meet your needs in Life. A religious experience can be a beautiful addition to living if you put it in the proper prespective and do not let it warf you. Read some books on Ethical Culture.’ “
“You couldn’t be a bastard,” Haze said, getting very pale. “You must be mixed up. Your daddy blinded himself.”
“Then I wrote her another letter,” she said, scratching his ankle with the toe of her sneaker, and smiling, “I says, ‘Dear Mary, What I really want to know is should I go the whole hog or not? That’s my real problem. I’m adjusted okay to the modern world.* “
“Your daddy blinded himself,” Haze repeated.
“He wasn’t always as good as he is now,” she said. “She never answered my second letter.”
“You mean in his youth he didn’t believe but he came to?” he asked. “Is that what you mean or ain’t it?” and he kicked her foot roughly away from his.
“That’s right,” she said. Then she drew herself up a little. “Quit that feeling my leg with yours,” she said.
The blinding white cloud was a little ahead of them, moving to the left. “Why don’t you turn down that dirt road?” she asked. The highway forked off onto a clay road and he turned onto it. It was hilly and shady and the country showed to advantage on either side. One side was dense honeysuckle and the other was open and slanted down to a telescoped view of the city. The white cloud was directly in front of them.
“How did he come to believe?” Haze asked. “What changed him into a preacher for Jesus?”
“I do like a dirt road,” she said, “particularly when it’s hilly like this one here. Why don’t we get out and sit under a tree where we could get better acquainted?”
After a few hundred feet Haze stopped the car and they got out. “Was he a very evil-seeming man before he came to believe,” he asked, “or just part way evil-seeming?”
“All the way evil,” she said, going under the barbed wire fence on the side of the road. Once under it she sat down and began to take off her shoes and stockings. “How I like to walk in a field is barefooted,” she said with gusto.
“Listenhere,” Haze muttered, “I got to be going back to town. I don’t have time to walk in any field,” but he went under the fence and on the other side he said, “I suppose before he came to believe he didn’t believe at all.”
“Let’s us go over that hill yonder and sit under the trees/’ she said.
They climbed the hill and went down the other side of it, she a little ahead of Haze. He saw that sitting under a tree with her might help him to seduce her, but he was in no hurry to get on with it, considering her innocence. He felt it was too hard a job to be done in an afternoon. She sat down under a large pine and patted the ground close beside her for him to sit on, but he sat about five feet away from her on a rock. He rested his chin on his knees and looked straight ahead.
“I can save you,” she said. “I got a church in my heart where Jesus is King.”
He leaned in her direction, glaring. “I believe in a new kind of jesus,” he said, “one that can’t waste his blood redeeming people with it, because he’s all man and ain’t got any God in him. My church is the Church Without Christ!”
She moved up closer to him. “Can a bastard be saved in it?” she asked.
“There’s no such thing as a bastard in the Church Without Christ/* he said. “Everything is all one. A bastard wouldn’t be any different from anybody else.”
“That’s good,” she said.
He looked at her irritably, for something in his mind was already contradicting him and saying that a bastard couldn’t, that there was only one truth—that Jesus was a liar—and that her case was hopeless. She pulled open her collar and lay down on the ground full length. “Ain’t my feet white, though?” she asked raising them slightly.
Haze didn’t look at her feet. The thing in his mind said that the truth didn’t contradict itself and that a bastard couldn’t be saved in the Church Without Christ. He decided he would forget it, that it was not important.
“There was this child once,” she said, turning over on her stomach, “that nobody cared if it lived or died. Its kin sent it around from one to another of them and finally to its grandmother who was a very evil woman and she couldn’t stand to have it around because the least good thing made her break out in these welps. She would get all itching and swoll. Even her eyes would itch her and swell up and there wasn’t nothing she could do but run up and down the road, shaking her hands and cursing and it was twicet as bad when this child was there so she kept the child locked up in a chicken crate. It seen its granny in hell-fire, swoll and burning, and it told her everything it seen and she got so swoll until finally she went to the well and wrapped the well rope around her neck and let down the bucket and broke her neck.
“Would you guess me to be fifteen years old?” she asked.
“There wouldn’t be any sense to the word, bastard, in the Church Without Christ,” Haze said.
