“It don’t speak,” he murmured.
“Give him time,” Meeks said, “maybe he don’t like to get up in the middle of the night.”
The buzzing continued for a minute and then stopped abruptly. Tarwater stood speechless, holding the earpiece tight against his head, his face rigid as if he were afraid that the Lord might be about to speak to him over the machine. All at once he heard what sounded like heavy breathing in his ear.
“Ask for your party,” Meeks prompted. “How do you expect to get your party if you don’t ask for him?”
The boy remained exactly as he was, saying nothing.
“I told you to ask for your party,” Meeks said irritably. “Ain’t you got good sense?”
“I want to speak with my uncle,” Tarwater whispered.
There was a silence over the telephone but it was not a silence that seemed to be empty. It was the kind where the breath is drawn in and held. Suddenly the boy realized that it was the schoolteacher’s child on the other side of the machine. The white-haired, blunted face rose before him. He said in a furious shaking voice, “I want to speak with my uncle. Not you!”
The heavy breathing began again as if in answer. It was a kind of bubbling noise, the kind of noise someone would make who was struggling to breathe in water. In a second it faded away. The horn of the machine dropped out of Tarwater’s hand. He stood there blankly as if he had received a revelation he could not yet decipher. He seemed to have been stunned by some deep internal blow that had not yet made its way to the surface of his mind.
Meeks picked up the earpiece and listened but there was no sound. He put it back on the hook and said, “Come on. I ain’t got this kind of time.” He gave the stupefied boy a shove and they left, driving off into the city again. Meeks told him to learn to work every machine he saw. The greatest invention of man, he said, was the wheel and he asked Tarwater if he had ever thought how things were before it was a wheel, but the boy didn’t answer him. He didn’t even appear to be listening. He sat slightly forward and from time to time his lips moved as if he were speaking silently with himself.
“Well, it was terrible,” Meeks said sourly. He knew the boy didn’t have any uncle at any such respectable address and to prove it, he turned down the street the uncle was supposed to live on and drove slowly past the small shapes of squat houses until he found the number, visible in phosphorescent letters on a small stick set on the edge of the grass plot. He stopped the car and said, “Okay, kiddo, that’s it.”
“That’s what?” Tarwater mumbled.
“That’s your uncle’s house,” Meeks said.
The boy grabbed the edge of the window with both hands and stared out at what appeared to be only a black shape crouched in a greater darkness a little distance away. “I told you I wasn’t going there until daylight,” he said angrily, “go on.”
“You’re going there right now,” Meeks said. “Because I ain’t getting stuck with you. You can’t go with me where I’m going.”
“I ain’t getting out here,” the boy said.
Meeks reached across him and opened the car door. “So long, son,” he said, “if you get real hungry by next week, you can contack me from that card and we might make a deal.”
The boy gave him one white-faced outraged look and flung himself from the car. He moved up the short concrete walk to the doorstep and sat down abruptly, absorbed into the darkness. Meeks pulled the car door shut. His face hung for a moment watching the barely visible outline of the boy’s shape on the step. Then he drew back and drove on. He won’t come to no good end, he said to himself.
III
TARWATER sat in the corner of the doorstep, scowling in the dark as the car disappeared down the block. He did not look up at the sky but he was unpleasantly aware of the stars. They seemed to be holes in his skull through which some distant unmoving light was watching him. It was as if he were alone in the presence of an immense silent eye. He had an intense desire to make himself known to the schoolteacher at once, to tell him what he had done and why and to be congratulated by him. At the same time, his deep suspicion of the man continued to work in him. He tried to bring the schoolteacher’s face again to mind, but all he could manage was the face of the seven-year-old boy the old man had kidnapped. He stared at it boldly, hardening himself for the encounter.
Then he rose and faced the heavy brass knocker on the door. He touched it and jerked his hand away, burnt by a metallic coldness. He looked quickly over his shoulder. The houses across the street formed a dark jagged wall. The quiet seemed palpable, waiting. It seemed almost to be waiting patiently, biding its time until it should reveal itself and demand to be named. He turned back to the cold knocker and grabbed it and shattered the silence as if it were a personal enemy. The noise filled his head. He was aware of nothing but the racket he was making.
He beat louder and louder, bamming at the same time with his free fist until he felt he was shaking the house. The empty street echoed with his blows. He stopped once to get his breath and then began again, kicking the door frenziedly with the blunt toe of his heavy work shoe. Nothing happened. Finally he stopped and the implacable silence descended around him, immune to his fury. A mysterious dread filled him. His whole body felt hollow as if he had been lifted like Habakkuk by the hair of his head, borne swiftly through the night and set down in the place of his mission. He had a sudden foreboding that he was about to step into a trap laid for him by the old man. He half-turned to run.
At once the glass panels on either side of the door filled with light. There was a click and the knob turned. Tarwater jerked his hands up automatically as if he were pointing an invisible gun and his uncle, who had opened the door, jumped back at the sight of him.
The image of the seven-year-old boy disappeared forever from Tarwater’s mind. His uncle’s face was so familiar to him that he might have seen it every day of his life. He steadied himself and shouted, “My great-uncle is dead and burnt, just like you would have burnt him yourself!”
The schoolteacher remained absolutely still as if he thought that by looking long enough his hallucination would disappear. He had been roused by the vibration in the house and had run, half-asleep, to the door. His face was like the face of a sleep-walker who wakes and sees some horror of his dreams take shape before him. After a moment he muttered, “Wait here, deaf,” and turned and went quickly out of the hall. He was barefooted and in his pajamas. He came back almost at once, plugging something into his ear. He had thrust on the black-rimmed glasses and he was sticking a metal box into the waist-band of his pajamas. This was joined by a cord to the plug in his ear. For an instant the boy had the thought that his head ran by electricity. He caught Tarwater by the arm and pulled him into the hall under a lantern-shaped light that hung from the ceiling. The boy found himself scrutinized by two small drill-like eyes set in the depths of twin glass caverns. He drew away. Already he felt his privacy imperilled.
“My great-uncle is dead and burnt,” he said again. “I was the only one there to do it and I done it. I done your work for you,” and as he said the last, a perceptible trace of scorn crossed his face.
“Dead?” the schoolteacher said. “My uncle? The old man’s dead?” he asked in a blank unbelieving tone. He caught Tarwater abruptly by the arms and stared into his face. In the depths of his eyes, the boy, shocked, saw an instant’s stricken look, plain and awful. It vanished at once. The straight line of the schoolteacher’s mouth began turning into a smile. “And how did he go—with his fist in the air?” he asked. “Did the Lord arrive for him in a chariot of fire?”
“He didn’t have no warning,” Tarwater said, suddenly breathless. “He was eating his breakfast and I never moved him from the table. I set him on fire where he was and the house with him.”
The schoolteacher said nothing but the boy read in his look a doubt that this had happened, a suspicion that he dealt with an interesting liar.
“You can go there and see for yourself,” Tarwater said.
“He was too big to bury. I done it the quickest way.”
His uncle’s eyes had the look now of being trained on a fascinating problem. “How did you get here? How did you know this was where you belonged?” he asked.
The boy had expended all his energy announcing himself. He was suddenly blank and stunned and he remained stupidly silent. He had never been this tired before. He felt he was about to fall.
The schoolteacher waited, searching his face impatiently. Then his expression changed again. He tightened his grip on Tarwater’s arm and his eyes turned, glowering, toward the front door, which was still open. “Is he out there?” he asked in a low enraged voice. “Is this one of his tricks? Is he out there waiting to sneak in a window and baptize Bishop while you’re here baiting me? Is that his senile game this time?”
The boy blanched. In his mind’s eye he saw the old man, a dark shape standing behind the corner of the house, restraining his wheezing breath while he waited impatiently for him to baptize the dim-witted child. He stared shocked at the schoolteacher’s face. There was a wedge-shaped gash in his new uncle’s ear. The sight of it brought old Tarwater so close that the boy thought he could hear him laugh. With a terrible clarity he saw that the schoolteacher was no more than a decoy the old man had set up to lure him to the city to do his unfinished business.
His eyes began to burn in his fierce fragile face. A new energy seized him. “He’s dead,” he said. “You can’t be any deader than he is. He’s reduced to ashes. He don’t even have a cross set up over him. If it’s anything left of him, the buzzards wouldn’t have it and the bones the dogs’ll carry off. That’s how dead he is.”
The schoolteacher winced, but almost at once he was smiling again. He held Tarwater’s arms tightly and peered into his face as if he were beginning to see a solution, one that intrigued him with its symmetry and rightness. “It’s a perfect irony,” he murmured, “a perfect irony that you should have taken care of the matter in that way. He got what he deserved.”
The boy’s pride swelled. “I done the needful,” he said.
“Everything he touched he warped,” the schoolteacher said. “He lived a long and useless life and he did you a great injustice. It’s a blessing he’s dead at last. You could have had everything and you’ve had nothing. All that can be changed now. Now you belong to someone who can help you and understand you.” His eyes were alight with pleasure. “It’s not too late for me to make a man of you!”
The boy’s face darkened. His expression hardened until it was a fortress wall to keep his thoughts from being exposed; but the schoolteacher did not notice any change. He gazed through the actual insignificant boy before him to an image of him that he held fully developed in his mind.
“You and I will make up for lost time,” he said. “We’ll get you started now in the right direction.”
Tarwater was not looking at him. His neck had suddenly snapped forward and he was staring straight ahead over the schoolteacher’s shoulder. He heard a faint familiar sound of heavy breathing. It was closer to him than the beating of his own heart. His eyes widened and an inner door in them opened in preparation for some inevitable vision.
The small white-haired boy shambled into the back of the hall and stood peering forward at the stranger. He had on the bottoms to a pair of blue pajamas drawn up as high as they would go, the string tied over his chest and then again, harness-like, around his neck to keep them on. His eyes were slightly sunken beneath his forehead and his cheekbones were lower than they should have been. He stood there, dim and ancient, like a child who had been a child for centuries.
Tarwater clenched his fists. He stood like one condemned, waiting at the spot of execution. Then the revelation came, silent, implacable, direct as a bullet. He did not look into the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush. He only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair, that he was expected to baptize the child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle had prepared him for. He knew that he was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable. His black pupils, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf. The Lord out of dust had created him, had made him blood and nerve and mind, had made him to bleed and weep and think, and set him in a world of loss and fire all to baptize one idiot child that He need not have created in the first place and to cry out a gospel just as foolish. He tried to shout, “NO!” but it was like trying to shout in his sleep. The sound was saturated in silence, lost.
His uncle put a hand on his shoulder and shook him slightly to penetrate his inattention. “Listen boy,” he said, “getting out from under the old man is just like coming out of the darkness into the light. You’re going to have a chance now for the first time in your life. A chance to develop into a useful man, a chance to use your talents, to do what you want to do and not what he wanted—whatever idiocy it was.”
The boy’s eyes were focussed beyond him, the pupils dilated. The schoolteacher turned his head to see what it was that was keeping him from being responsive. His own face tightened. The little boy was creeping forward, grinning.
“That’s only Bishop,” he said. “He’s not all right. Don’t mind him. All he can do is stare at you and he’s very friendly. He stares at everything that way.” His hand tightened on the boy’s shoulder and his mouth stretched painfully. “All the things that I would do for him—if it were any use—I’ll do for you,” he said. “Now do you see why I’m so glad to have you here?”
The boy heard nothing he said. The muscles in his neck stood out like cables. The dim-witted child was not five feet from him and was coming every instant closer with his lop-sided smile. Suddenly he knew that the child recognized him, that the old man himself had primed him from on high that here was the forced servant of God come to see that he was born again. The little boy was sticking out his hand to touch him.
“Git!” Tarwater screamed. His arm shot out like a whip and knocked the hand away. The child let out a bellow startlingly loud. He clambered up his father’s leg, pulling himself up by the schoolteacher’s pajama coat until he was almost on his shoulder.
“All right, all right,” the schoolteacher said, “there, there, shut up, it’s all right, he didn’t mean to hit you,” and he righted the child on his back and tried to slide him off but the little boy hung on, thrusting his head against his father’s neck and never taking his eyes off Tarwater.
The boy had a vision of the schoolteacher and his child as inseparably joined. The schoolteacher’s face was red and pained. The child might have been a deformed part of himself that had been accidentally revealed.
“You’ll get used to him,” he said.
“No!” the boy shouted.
It was like a shout that had been waiting, straining to burst out. “I won’t get used to him! I won’t have anything to do with him!” He clenched his fist and lifted it. “I won’t have anything to do with him!” he shouted and the words were clear and positive and defiant like a challenge hurled in the face of his silent adversary.
TWO
IV
AFTER four days of Tarwater, the schoolteacher’s enthusiasm had passed. He would admit no more than that. It had passed the first day and had been succeeded by determination, and while he knew that determination was a less powerful tool, he thought that in this case, it was the one best fitted for the job. It had taken him barely half a day to find out that the old man had made a wreck of the boy and that what was called for was a monumental job of reconstruction. The first day enthusiasm had given him energy but ever since, determination had exhausted him.
Although it was only eight o’clock in the evening, he had put Bishop to bed and had told the boy that he could go to his room and read. He had bought him books, among other things still ignored. Tarwater had gone to his room and had closed the door, not saying whether he intended to read
or not, and Rayber was in bed for the night, lying too exhausted to sleep, watching the late evening light fade through the hedge that grew in front of his window. He had left his hearing aid on so that if the boy tried to escape, he would hear and could go after him. For the last two days he had looked poised to leave, and not simply to leave but to be gone, silently and in the night when he would not be followed. This was the fourth night and the schoolteacher lay thinking, with a wry expression on his face, how it differed from the first.
The first night he had sat until daylight by the side of the bed where, still dressed, the boy had fallen. He had sat there, his eyes shining, like a man who sits before a treasure he is not yet convinced is real. His eyes had moved over and over the sprawled thin figure which had appeared lost in an exhaustion so profound that it seemed doubtful it would ever move again. As he followed the outline of the face, he had realized with an intense stab of joy that his nephew looked enough like him to be his son. The heavy work shoes, the worn overalls, the atrocious stained hat filled him with pain and pity. He thought of his poor sister. The only real pleasure she had had in her life was the time she had had the lover who had given her this child, the hollow-cheeked boy who had come from the country to study divinity but whose mind Rayber (a graduate student at the time) had seen at once was too good for that. He had befriended him, had helped him to discover himself and then to discover her. He had engineered their meeting purposely and then had observed to his delight how it prospered and how the relationship developed them both. If there had been no accident, he felt sure the boy would have become completely stable. As it was, after the calamity he had killed himself, a prey to morbid guilt. He had come to Rayber’s apartment and had stood confronting him with the gun. He saw again the long brittle face as raw red as if a blast of fire had singed the skin off it and the eyes that had seemed burnt too. He had not felt they were entirely human eyes. They were the eyes of repentence and lacked all dignity. The boy had looked at him for what seemed an age but was perhaps only a second, then he had turned without a word and left and killed himself as soon as he reached his own room.
The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel Page 7