Haze didn’t seem to hear the question.
“Well, it won’t no relief,” Enoch said. “Good Jesus, it won’t no relief. I run away from there after four weeks and durn if she didn’t get me back and brought me to that house of hers again. I got out though.” He waited a minute. “You want to know how?”
After a second he said, “I scared hell out of that woman, that’s how. I studied on it and studied on it. I even prayed. I said, ‘Jesus, show me the way to get out of here without killing thisyer woman and getting sent to the penitentiary,* and durn if He didn’t. I got up one morning at just daylight and I went in her room without my pants on and pulled the sheet off her and giver a heart attact. Then I went back to my daddy and we ain’t seen hide of her since.
“Your jaw just crawls,” he observed, watching the side of Haze’s face. “You don’t never laugh. I wouldn’t be surprised if you wasn’t a real wealthy man.”
Haze turned down a side street. The blind man and the girl were on the corner a block ahead. “Well, I reckon we going to ketch up with them after all,” Enoch said. “You know many people here?”
“No,” Haze said.
“You ain’t gonna know none neither. This is one more hard place to make friends in. I been here two months and I don’t know nobody. Look like all they want to do is knock you down. I reckon you got a right heap of money,” he said. “I ain’t got none. Had, I’d sho know what to do with it.” The blind man and his child stopped on the corner and turned up the left side of the street. “We ketchin* up,” he said. “I bet we’ll be at some meeting singing hymns with her and her daddy if we don’t watch out.”
Up in the next block there was a large building with columns and a dome. The blind man and the girl were going toward it. There was a car parked in every space around the building and on the other side of the street and up and down the streets near it. “That ain’t no picture show,” Enoch said. The blind man and the girl turned up the steps to the building. The steps went all the way across the front, and on either side there were stone lions sitting on pedestals. “Ain’t no church,” Enoch said. Haze stopped at the steps. He looked as if he were trying to settle his face into an expression. He pulled the black hat forward at a sharp angle and started toward the two, who had sat down in the corner by one of the lions. He came up to where the blind man was without saying anything and stood leaning forward in front of him as if he were trying to see through the black glasses. The child stared at him.
The blind man’s mouth thinned slightly. “I can smell the sin on your breath,” he said.
Haze drew back.
“What’d you follow me for?”
“I never followed you,” Haze said.
“She said you were following,” the blind man said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the child.
“I ain’t followed you,” Haze said. He felt the peeler box in his hand and looked at the girl. Her black knitted cap made a straight line across her forehead. She grinned suddenly and then quickly drew her expression back together as if she smelled something bad. “I ain’t followed you nowhere/’ Haze said. “I followed her.” He stuck the peeler out at her.
At first she looked as if she were going to grab it, but she didn’t. “I don’t want that thing,” she said. “What you think I want with that thing? Take it. It ain’t mine. I don’t want it!”
“You take it,” the blind man said. “You put it in your sack and shut up before I hit you.”
Haze thrust the peeler at her again.
“I won’t have it,” she muttered.
“You take it like I told you,” the blind man said. “He never followed you.”
She took it and shoved it in the sack where the tracts were. “It ain’t mine,” she said. “I got it but it ain’t mine.”
“I followed her to say I ain’t beholden for none of her fast eye like she gave me back there,” Haze said, looking at the blind man.
“What you mean?” she shouted. “I never looked at you with no fast eye. I only watched you tearing up that tract. He tore it up in little pieces,” she said, pushing the blind man’s shoulder. “He tore it up and sprinkled it all over the ground like salt and wiped his hands on his pants.”
“He followed me,” the blind man said. “Nobody would follow you. I can hear the urge for Jesus in his voice.”
“Jesus,” Haze muttered. “My Jesus.” He sat down by the girl’s leg and set his hand on the step next to her foot. She had on sneakers and black cotton stockings.
“Listen at him cursing,” she said in a low tone. “He never followed you, Papa.”
The blind man gave his edgy laugh, “Listen boy,” he said, “you can’t run away from Jesus. Jesus is a fact.”
“I know a whole heap about Jesus,” Enoch said. “I attended thisyer Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy that a woman sent me to. If it’s anything you want to know about Jesus, just ast me.” He had got up on the lion’s back and he was sitting there sideways, cross-legged.
“I come a long way,” Haze said, “since I would believe anything. I come halfway around the world.”
“Me too,” Enoch Emery said.
“You ain’t come so far that you could keep from following me,” the blind man said. He reached out suddenly and his hands covered Haze’s face. For a second Haze didn’t move or make any sound. Then he knocked the hands off.
“Quit it,” he said in a faint voice. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“My daddy looks just like Jesus,” Enoch remarked from the lion’s back. “His hair hangs to his shoulders. Only difference is he’s got a scar acrost his chin. I ain’t never seen who my mother is.”
“Some preacher has left his mark on you,” the blind man said with a kind of snicker. “Did you follow for me to
