“Wait,” he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward him and opened it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-spaced row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a goddess. He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, she read, and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. “Take a swig,” he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her, but like one mesmerized, she did not move.
Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,” she murmured, “aren’t you just good country people?”
The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. “Yeah,” he said, curling his lip slightly, “but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week.”
“Give me my leg,” she said.
He pushed it farther away with his foot. “Come on now, let’s begin to have us a good time,” he said coaxingly. “We ain’t got to know one another good yet.”
“Give me my leg!” she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.
“What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. “You just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!”
Her face was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all—say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect Christian, you’re…“
The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”
“Give me my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box back into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had passed but his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any admiration in it. “I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” and then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.
Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging up onions, saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward the highway. “Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. “He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple,” she said, “but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.”
Mrs. Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she was lifting from the ground. “Some can’t be that simple,” she said. “I know I never could.”
You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead (1955)
FRANCIS MARION TARWATER’S uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon, and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still.
The old man had been Tarwater’s great uncle, or said he was, and they had always lived together so far as the child knew. His uncle had said he was seventy years of age at the time he had rescued him and undertaken to bring him up; he was eighty-four when he died. Tarwater figured this made his own age fourteen. His uncle had taught him figures, reading, writing, and historv beginning with Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment. Besides giving him a good education, he had rescued him from his only other connection, old Tarwater’s nephew, a school teacher who had no child of his own at the time and wanted this one of his dead sister’s to raise according to his own ideas. The old man was in a position to know what his ideas were.
He had lived for three months in the nephew’s house on what he had thought at the time was Charity but what he said he had found out was not Charity or anything like it. All the time he had lived there, the nephew had secretly been making a study of him. The nephew, who had taken him in under the name of Charity, had at the same time been creeping into his soul by the back door, asking him questions that meant more than one thing, planting traps around the house and watching him fall into them, and finally coming up with a written study of him for a school teacher magazine. The stench of his behavior had reached heaven and the Lord Himself had rescued the old man. He had sent him a rage of vision, had told him to fly with the orphan boy to the farthest part of the backwoods and raise him up to justify his Redemption. The Lord had assured him a long life and he had snatched the child from under the school teacher’s nose and taken him to live in a clearing that he had title to for his lifetime.
Eventually Rayber, the school teacher, had discovered where they were and had come out to the clearing to get the boy back. He had had to leave his car on the dirt road and walk a mile through the woods, on a path that appeared and disappeared, before he came to the corn patch with the gaunt two-story shack standing in the middle of it. The old man had been fond of recalling for Tarwater the red, sweating, bitten face of his nephew bobbing up and down through the corn and behind it the pink, flowered hat of a welfare woman he had brought along with him. The corn was planted up to two feet from the porch step, and as the nephew came out of it, the old man appeared in the door with his shotgun and said that he would shoot any foot that touched his step, and the two stood facing each other while the welfare woman bristled out of the corn like a peahen upset on the nest. The old man said if it hadn’t been for the welfare woman his nephew wouldn’t have taken a step, but she stood there waiting, pushing back the wisps of dyed red hair that were plastered on her long forehead. Both their faces were scratched and bleeding from thorn bushes, and the old man recalled a switch of blackberry bush hanging from the sleeve of the welfare woman’s blouse. She only had to let out her breath slowly as if she were releasing the last patience on earth and the nephew lifted his foot and set it down on the step and the old man shot him in the leg. The two of them had scuttled off, making a disappearing rattle in the corn, and the woman had screamed, “You knew he was crazy!”; but when they came out of the corn on the other side, old Tarwater had noted from the upstairs window where he had run that she had her arm around him and was holding him up while he hopped into the woods; and later he learned that he had married her though she was twice his age and he could only possibly get one child out of her. She
had never let him come back again.
The morning the old man died, he came down and cooked the breakfast as usual and died before he got the first spoonful to his mouth. The downstairs of their shack was all kitchen, large and dark, with a wood tove in the center of it and a board table drawn up to the stove. Sacks of feed and mash were stacked in the corners, and scrap metal, wood shavings, old rope, ladders, and other tinder were wherever he or Tarwater had let them fall. They had slept in the kitchen until a wild cat sprang in the window one night and frightened him into carrying the bed upstairs where there were two empty rooms. He prophesied at the time that the stairsteps would take ten years off his life. At the moment of his death, he had sat down to his breakfast and lifted his knife in one square red hand halfway to his mouth and then, with a look of complete astonishment, he had lowered it until the hand rested on the edge of the plate and tilted it up off the table.
He was a bull-like old man with a short head set directly into his shoulders and silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining to get out of a net of red threads. He had on a putty-colored hat with the brim turned up all around and over his undershirt a gray coat that had once been black. Tarwater, sitting across the table from him, saw red ropes appear in his face and a tremor pass over him. It was like the tremor of a quake that had begun at his heart and run outward and was just reaching the surface. His mouth twisted down sharply on one side and he remained exactly as he was, perfectly balanced, his back a good six inches from the chair back and his stomach caught just under the edge of the table. His eyes, dead silver, were focused on the boy across from him.
Tarwater felt the tremor transfer itself and run lightly over him. He knew the old man was dead without touching him and he continued to sit across the table from the corpse, finishing his breakfast in a kind of sullen embarrassment, as if he were in the presence of a new personality and couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally he said in a querulous tone, “Just hold your horses. I already told you I would do it right.” The voice sounded like a stranger’s voice, as if the death had changed him instead of the old man.
He got up and took his plate out the back door and set it down on the bottom step, and two long-legged black game roosters tore across the yard and finished what was on it. He sat down on a long pine box on the back porch, and his hands began absently to unravel a length of rope, while his long cross-shaped face stared ahead beyond the clearing over woods that ran in gray and purple folds until they touched the light-blue fortress line of trees set against the empty morning sky.
The clearing was not simply off the dirt road but off the wagon track and footpath, and the nearest neighbors, colored not white, still had to walk through the woods, pushing plum branches out of their way to get to it. The old man had started an acre of cotton to the left and had run it beyond the fence line almost up to the house on one side. The two strands of barbed wire ran through the middle of the patch. A line of fog, hump-shaped, was creeping toward it, ready like a white hound dog to crouch under and crawl across the yard.
“I’m going to move that fence,” Tarwater said. “I ain’t going to have my fence in the middle of a field.” The voice was loud and still strange and disagreeable and he finished the rest of his thought in his head: because this place is mine now whether I own it or not because I’m here and nobody can’t get me off. If any school teacher comes here to claim the property, I’ll kill him.
He had on a faded pair of overalls and a gray hat pulled down over his ears like a cap. He followed his uncle’s custom of never taking off his hat except in bed. He had always followed his uncle’s customs up to this date but: if I want to move that fence before I bury him, there wouldn’t be a soul to hinder me, he thought; no voice will be lifted.
“Bury him first and get it over with,” the loud stranger’s disagreeable voice said, and he got up and went to look for the shovel.
The pine box he had been sitting on was his uncle’s coffin but he didn’t intend to use it. The old man was too heavy for a thin boy to hoist over the side of a box, and though old Tarwater had built it himself a few years before, he had said that if it wasn’t feasible to get him into it when the time came, then just to put him in the hole as he was, only to be sure the hole was deep. He wanted it ten foot, he said, not just eight. He had worked on the box a long time, and when he finished it he had scratched on the top MASON TARWATER, WITH GOD, and had climbed into it where it stood on the back porch and had lain there for some time, nothing showing but his stomach which rose over the top like overleavened bread. The boy had stood at the side of the box, studying him. “This is the end of us all,” the old man said with satisfaction, his gravel voice hearty in the coffin.
“It’s too much of you for the box, ” Tarwater, aid. “I’ll have to sit on the lid or wait until you rot a little.”
“Don’t wait,” old Tarwater had said. “Listen. If it ain’t feasible to use the box when the time comes, if you can’t lift it or whatever, just get me in the hole, but I want it deep. I want it ten foot, not just eight-ten. You can roll me to it if nothing else. I’ll roll. Get two boards and set them down the steps and start me rolling and dig where I stop and don’t let me roll over into it until it’s deep enough. Prop me with some bricks so I won’t roll into it and don’t let the dogs nudge me over the edge before it’s finished. You better pen up the dogs,” he said.
“What if you die in bed?” the boy asked. “How’m I going to get you down the stairs?”
“I ain’t going to die in bed,” the old man said. “As soon as I hear the summons, I’m going to run downstairs. I’ll get as close to the door as I can. If I should get stuck up there, you’ll have to roll me down the stairs, that’s all.”
“My Lord,” the child said.
The old man sat up in the box and brought his fist down on the edge of it. “Listen,” he said. “I never asked much of you. I taken you and raised you and saved you from that ass in town and now all I’m asking in return is when I die to get me in the ground where the dead belong and set up a cross over me to show I’m there. That’s all in the world I’m asking you to do.”
“I’ll be doing good if I get you in the ground,” Tarwater said. “I’ll be too wore out set up any cross. I ain’t bothering with trifles.”
“Trifles!” his uncle hissed. “You’ll learn what a trifle is on the day those crosses are gathered! Burying the dead right may be the only honor you ever do yourself. I brought you out here to raise you a Christian,” he hollered, “and I’m damned if you won’t be one!”
“If I don’t have the strength to do it,” the child said, watching him with a careful detachment, “I’ll notify my uncle in town and he can come out and take care of you. The school teacher,” he drawled, observing that the pockmarks in his uncle’s face had already turned pale against the purple, “he’ll ‘tend to you.”
The threads that restrained the old man’s eyes thickened. He gripped both sides of the coffin and pushed forward as if he were going to drive it off the porch. “He’d burn me,” he said hoarsely. “He’d have me cremated in an oven and scatter my ashes. ‘Uncle,’ he said to me, ‘you’re a type that’s almost extinct!’ He’d be willing to pay the undertaker to burn me to be able to scatter my ashes,” he said. “He don’t believe in the Resurrection. He don’t believe in the Last Day. He don’t believe in…”
“The dead don’t bother with particulars,” the boy interrupted.
The old man grabbed the front of his overalls and pulled him up against the side of the box so that their faces were not two inches apart. “The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are,” he said and then, as if he had conceived the answer for all insolence, he said, “There’s a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive!” and he released him with a laugh.
The boy had shown only by a slight quiver in the eyes that he was shaken by this, and after a minute he had said, ‘The school teacher
is my uncle. The only blood connection I’ll have and a living man and if I wanted to go to him, I’d go, now.”
The old man looked at him silently for what seemed a full minute. Then he slammed his hands on the sides of the box and roared, “Whom the plague beckons, to the plague! Whom the sword, to the sword! Whom fire, to fire!” and the child trembled visibly.
A living man, he thought as he went to get the shovel, but he better not come out here and try to get me off this property because I’ll kill him. Go to him and be dammed, his uncle had said. I’ve saved you from him this far and if you go to him the minute I’m in the ground, there’s nothing I can do about it.
The shovel lay against the side of the hen house. “I’ll never set my foot in the city again,” Tarwater said. “I’ll never go to him. Him nor nobody else will ever get me off this place.” He decided to dig the grave under the fig tree because the old man would be good for the figs. The ground was sandy on top and solid brick underneath and the shovel made a clanging sound when he struck it in the sand. Two hundred pounds of dead mountain to bury, he thought, and stood with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, studying the white sky through the leaves of the tree. It would take all day to get a hole big enough out of this rock and the school teacher would burn him in a minute.
Tarwater had never seen the school teacher but he had seen his child, a boy who resembled old Tarwater himself. The old man had been so shocked by the likeness that the time he and Tarwater had gone there, he had only stood in the door, staring at the little boy and rolling his tongue around outside his mouth like an old idiot. That had been the first and only time the old man had seen the boy. “Three months there,” he would say. “It shames me. Betrayed for three months in the house of my own kin, and if when I’m dead you want to turn me over to my betrayer and see my body burned, go ahead. Go ahead, boy!” he had shouted, sitting up splotch-faced in his box. “Go ahead and let him burn me but watch out for the crab that begins to grip your neck after that!” and he had clawed his hand in the air to show Tarwater his grip. “I been leavened by the yeast he don’t believe in,” he said, “and I won’t be burned. And when I’m gone you’ll be better off in these woods by yourself with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in than you would be in the city with him!”
The Complete Stories Page 35