Wise Blood

by Flannery O'Connor

  “My Jesus,” Haze muttered.

  “She didn’t have nothing but good looks,” she said in the loud fast voice. “That ain’t enough. No sirree.”

  “I hear them scraping their feet inside there,” the blind man said. “Get out the tracts, they’re fixing to come out.”

  “It ain’t enough,” she repeated.

  “What we gonna do?” Enoch asked. “What’s inside theter building?”

  “A program letting out,” the blind man said. “My congregation.”

  The child took the tracts out of the gunny sack and gave him two bunches of them, tied with a string. “You and the other boy go over on that side and give out,” he said to her. “Me and the one that followed me’ll stay over here.”

  “He don’t have no business touching them,” she said. “He don’t want to do anything but shred them up.”

  “Go like I told you,” the blind man said.

  She stood there a second, scowling. Then she said, “You come on if you’re coming,” to Enoch Emery and Enoch jumped off the lion and followed her over to the other side.

  Haze ducked down a step but the blind man’s hand shot out and clamped him around the arm. He said in a fast whisper, “Repent! Go to the head of the stairs and renounce your sins and distribute these tracts to the people!” and he thrust a stack of pamphlets into Haze’s hand.

  Haze jerked his arm away but he only pulled the blind man nearer. “Listen,” he said, “I’m as clean as you are.”

  “Fornication and blasphemy and what else?” the blind man said.

  “They ain’t nothing but words,” Haze said. “If I was in sin I was in it before I ever committed any. There’s no change come in me.” He was trying to pry the fingers off from around his arm but the blind man kept wrapping them tighter. “I don’t believe in sin,” Haze said, “take your hand off me.”

  “Jesus loves you,” the blind man said in a flat mocking voice, “Jesus loves you, Jesus loves you…”

  “Nothing matters but that Jesus don’t exist,” Haze said, pulling his arm free.

  “Go to the head of the stairs and distribute these tracts and…”

  “I’ll take them up there and throw them over into the bushes!” Haze shouted. “You be watching and see can you see.”

  “I can see more than you!” the blind man yelled, laughing. “You got eyes and see not, ears and hear not, but you’ll have to see some time.”

  “You be watching if you can see!” Haze said, and started running up the steps. A crowd of people were already coming out the auditorium doors and some were halfway down the steps. He pushed through them with his elbows out like sharp wings and when he got to the top, a new surge of them pushed him back almost to where he had started up. He fought through them again until somebody shouted, “Make room for this idiot!” and people got out of his way. He rushed to the top and pushed his way over to the side and stood there, glaring and panting.

  “I never followed him,” he said aloud. “I wouldn’t follow a blind fool like that. My Jesus.” He stood against the building, holding the stack of leaflets by the string. A fat man stopped near him to light a cigar and Haze pushed his shoulder. “Look down yonder,” he said. “See that blind man down there? He’s giving out tracts and begging. Jesus. You ought to see him and he’s got this here ugly child dressed up in woman’s clothes, giving them out too. My Jesus.”

  “There’s always fanatics,” the fat man said, moving on.

  “My Jesus,” Haze said. He leaned forward near an old woman with blue hair and a collar of red wooden beads. “You better get on the other side, lady,” he said. “There’s a fool down there giving out tracts.” The crowd behind the old woman pushed her on, but she looked at him for an instant with two bright flea eyes. He started toward her through the people but she was already too far away and he pushed back to where he had been standing against the wall. “Sweet Jesus Christ Crucified,” he said, “I want to tell you people something. Maybe you think you’re not clean because you don’t believe. Well you are clean, let me tell you that. Every one of you people are clean and let me tell you why if you think it’s because of Jesus Christ Crucified you’re wrong. I don’t say he wasn’t crucified but I say it wasn’t for you. Listenhere, I’m a preacher myself and I preach the truth.” The crowd was moving fast. It was like a large spread raveling and the separate threads disappeared down the dark streets. “Don’t I know what exists and what don’t?” he cried. “Don’t I have eyes in my head? Am I a blind man? Listenhere,” he called, “I’m going to preach a new church—the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified. It won’t cost you nothing to join my church. It’s not started yet but it’s going to be.” The few people who were left glanced at him once or twice. There were tracts scattered below over the sidewalk and out on the street. The blind man was sitting on the bottom step. Enoch Emery was on the other side, standing on the lion’s head, trying to balance himself, and the child was standing near him, watching Haze. “I don’t need Jesus,” Haze said. “What do I need with Jesus? I got Leora Watts.”

  He went down the stairs quietly to where the blind man was and stopped. He stood there a second and the blind man laughed. Haze moved away, and started across the street. He was on the other side before the voice pierced after him. He turned and saw the blind man standing in the middle of the street, shouting, “Hawks, Hawks, my name is Asa Hawks when you try to follow me again!” A car had to swerve to the side to keep from hitting him. “Repent!” he shouted and laughed and ran forward a little way, pretending he was going to come after Haze and grab him.

  Haze drew his head down nearer his hunched shoulders and went on quickly. He didn’t look back until he heard other footsteps coming behind him.

  “Now that we got shut of them,” Enoch Emery panted, “whyn’t we go somewher and have us some fun?”

  “Listen,” Haze said roughly, “I got business of my own. I seen all of you I want.” He began walking very fast.

  Enoch kept skipping steps to keep up. “I been here two months,” he said, “and I don’t know nobody. People ain’t friendly here. I got me a room and there ain’t never no body in it but me. My daddy said I had to come. I wouldn’t never have come but he made me. I think I seen you sommers before. You ain’t from Stockwell, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Melsy?”

  “No.”

  “Sawmill set up there oncet,” Enoch said. “Look like you had a kind of familer face.”

  They walked on without saying anything until they got on the main street again. It was almost deserted. “Good-by,” Haze said.

  “I’m going thisaway too,” Enoch said in a sullen voice. On the left there was a movie house where the electric bill was being changed. “We hadn’t got tied up with them hicks we could have gone to a show,” he muttered: He strode along at Haze’s elbow, talking in a half mumble, half whine. Once he caught at his sleeve to slow him down and Haze jerked it away. “My daddy made me come,” he said in a cracked voice. Haze looked at him and saw he was crying, his face seamed and wet and a purple-pink color. “I ain’t but eighteen year old,” he cried, “an’ he made me come and I don’t know nobody, nobody here’ll have nothing to do with nobody else. They ain’t friendly. He done gone off with a woman and made me come but she ain’t going to stay for long, he’ll beat hell out of her before she gets herself stuck to a chair. You the first familer face I seen in two months. I seen you sommers before. I know I seen you sommers before.”

  Haze looked straight ahead with his face set and Enoch kept up the half mumble, half blubber. They passed a church and a hotel and an antique shop and turned up Mrs. Watts’s street.

  “If you want you a woman you don’t have to be follering nothing looked like that kid you give a peeler to,” Enoch said. “I heard about where there’s a house where we could have us some fun. I could pay you back next week.”

  “Look,” Haze said, “I’m going where I’m going—two doors from here. I got a woman. I
got a woman, see? And that’s where I’m going—to visit her. I don’t need to go with you.”

  “I could pay you back next week,” Enoch said. “I work at the city zoo. I guard a gate and I get paid ever’ week.”

  “Get away from me,” Haze said.

  “People ain’t friendly here. You ain’t from here but you ain’t friendly neither.”

  Haze didn’t answer him. He went on with his neck drawn close to his shoulder blades as if he were cold.

  “You don’t know nobody neither,” Enoch said. “You ain’t got no woman nor nothing to do. I knew when I first seen you you didn’t have nobody nor nothing but Jesus. I seen you and I knew it.”

  “This is where I’m going in at,” Haze said, and he turned up the walk without looking back at Enoch.

  Enoch stopped. “Yeah,” he cried, “oh yeah,” and he ran his sleeve under his nose to stop the snivel. “Yeah,” he cried, “go on where you goin’ but lookerhere.” He slapped at his pocket and ran up and caught Haze’s sleeve and rattled the peeler box at him. “She give me this. She give it to me and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. She told me where they lived and ast me to visit them and bring you—not you bring me, me bring you—and it was you follerin’ them.” His eyes glinted through his tears and his face stretched in an evil crooked grin. “You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,” he said, “but you ain’t! I’m the one has it. Not you. Me.”

  Haze didn’t say anything. He stood there for an instant, small in the middle of the steps, and then he raised his arm and hurled the stack of tracts he had been carrying. It hit Enoch in the chest and knocked his mouth open. He stood looking, with his mouth hanging open, at where it had hit his front, and then he turned and tore off down the street; and Haze went into the house.

  Since the night before was the first time he had slept with any woman, he had not been very successful with Mrs. Watts. When he finished, he was like something washed ashore on her, and she had made obscene comments about him, which he remembered off and on during the day. He was uneasy in the thought of going to her again. He didn’t know what she would say when he opened the door and she saw him there.

  When he opened the door and she saw him there, she said, “Ha ha.”

  The black hat sat on his head squarely. He came in with it on and when it knocked the electric light bulb that hung down from the middle of the ceiling, he took it off. Mrs. Watts was in bed, applying a grease to her face. She rested her chin on her hand and watched him. He began to move around the room, examining this and that. His throat got dryer and his heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching the bars of its cage. He sat down on the edge of her bed, with his hat in his hand.

  Mrs. Watts’s grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle. It was plain that she was so well-adjusted that she didn’t have to think any more. Her eyes took everything in whole, like quicksand. “That Jesus-seeing hat!” she said. She sat up and pulled her nightgown from under her and took it off. She reached for his hat and put it on her head and sat with her hands on her hips, walling her eyes in a comical way. Haze stared for a minute, then he made three quick noises that were laughs. He jumped for the electric light cord and took off his clothes in the dark.

  Once when he was small, his father took him to a carnival that stopped in Melsy. There was one tent that cost more money a little off to one side. A dried-up man with a horn voice was barking it. He didn’t say what was inside. He said it was so SINsational that it would cost any man that wanted to see it thirty-five cents, and it was so EXclusive, only fifteen could get in at a time. His father sent him to a tent where two monkeys danced, and then he made for it, moving close to the walls of things like he moved. Haze left the monkeys and followed him, but he didn’t have thirty-five cents. He asked the barker what was inside.

  “Beat it,” the man said. “There ain’t no pop and there ain’t no monkeys.”

  “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 wash-pot 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 wash-pot, 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 careful, 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.