The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel Read online

  “My hat is gone,” Tarwater said.

  The lawyer threw himself backwards into his chair and screaked it toward Tarwater and saw him without interest from pale blue eyes and screaked it forward again and said to his uncle, “There’s nothing I can do. You’re wasting your time and mine. You might as well resign yourself to this will.”

  “Listen,” old Tarwater said, “at one time I thought I was finished, old and sick and about to die and no money, nothing, and I accepted his hospitality because he was my closest blood connection and you could have called it his duty to take me, only I thought it was Charity, I thought…”

  “I can’t help what you thought or did or what your connection thought or did,” the lawyer said and closed his eyes.

  “My hat fell,” Tarwater said.

  “I’m only a lawyer,” the lawyer said, letting his glance rove over the lines of clay-colored books of law that fortressed his office.

  “A car is liable to have run over it by now.”

  “Listen,” his uncle said, “all the time he was studying me for this paper. Taking secret tests on me, his own kin, crawling into my soul through the back door and then says to me, ‘Uncle, you’re a type that’s almost extinct!’ Almost extinct!” the old man piped, barely able to force a thread of sound from his throat. “You see how extinct I am!”

  The lawyer closed his eyes again and smiled into one cheek.

  “Other lawyers,” the old man growled and they had left and visited three more, without stopping, and Tarwater had counted eleven men who might have had on his hat or might not. Finally when they came out of the fourth lawyer’s office, they sat down on the window ledge of a bank building and his uncle felt in his pocket for some biscuits he had brought and handed one to Tarwater. The old man unbuttoned his coat and allowed his stomach to ease forward and rest on his lap while he ate. His face worked wrathfully; the skin between the pockmarks appeared to jump from one spot to another. Tarwater was very pale and his eyes glittered with a peculiar hollow depth. He had an old work kerchief tied around his head, knotted at the four corners. He didn’t observe the passing people who observed him now. “Thank God we’re finished and can go home,” he muttered.

  “We ain’t finished here,” the old man said and got up abruptly and started down the street.

  “My Lord!” the boy groaned, jumping to catch up with him. “Can’t we sit down for one minute? Ain’t you got any sense? They all tell you the same thing. It’s only one law and it’s nothing you can do about it. I got sense enough to get that; why ain’t you? What’s the matter with you?”

  The old man strode on with his head thrust forward as if he were smelling out an enemy.

  “Where we going?” Tarwater asked after they had walked out of the business streets and were passing between rows of grey bulbous houses with sooty porches that overhung the sidewalks. “Listen,” he said, hitting at his uncle’s hip, “I never ast to come.”

  “You would have ast to come soon enough,” the old man muttered. “Get your fill now.”

  “I never ast for no fill. I never ast to come at all. I’m here before I knew this here was here.”

  “Just remember,” the old man said, “just remember that I told you to remember when you ast to come that you never liked it when you were here,” and they kept on going, crossing one length of sidewalk after another, row after row of overhanging houses with half-open doors that let a little dried light fall on the stained passageways inside. Finally they came out into another section where the houses were clean and squat and almost identical and each had a square of grass in front of it. After a few blocks Tarwater dropped down on the sidewalk and said, “I ain’t going no further. I don’t even know where I’m going and I ain’t going no further.” His uncle didn’t stop or look back. In a second he jumped up and followed him again in a panic lest he be left.

  The old man kept straining forward as if his blood scent were leading him closer and closer to the place where his enemy was hiding. He suddenly turned up the short walk of a pale yellow brick house and moved rigidly to the white door, his heavy shoulders hunched as if he were going to crash through it. He struck the wood with his fist, ignoring a polished brass knocker. At that instant Tarwater realized that this was where the schoolteacher lived, and he stopped where he was and remained rigid, his eye on the door. He knew by some obscure instinct that the door was going to open and reveal his destiny. In his mind’s eye, he saw the schoolteacher about to appear in it, lean and evil, waiting to engage whom the Lord would send to conquer him. The boy clamped his teeth together to keep them from chattering. The door opened.

  A small pink-faced boy stood in it with his mouth hung in a silly smile. He had white hair and a knobby forehead. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had pale silver eyes like the old man’s except that they were clear and empty. He was gnawing on a brown apple core.

  The old man stared at him, his lips parting slowly until his mouth hung open. He looked as if he beheld an unspeakable mystery. The little boy made an unintelligible noise and pushed the door almost shut, hiding himself all but one spectacled eye.

  Suddenly a tremendous indignation seized Tarwater. He eyed the small face peering from the crack. He searched his mind fiercely for the right word to hurl at it. Finally he said in a slow emphatic voice, “Before you was here, I was here.”

  The old man caught his shoulder and pulled him back. “He don’t have good sense,” he said. “Can’t you see he don’t have good sense? He don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The boy grew more furious than ever. He swung around on his heel to leave.

  “Wait,” his uncle said and caught him. “Get behind that hedge yonder and hide yourself. I’m going in there and baptize him.”

  Tarwater’s mouth was agape.

  “Get behind there like I told you,” he said and gave him a push toward the hedge. Then the old man braced himself. He turned and went back to the door. Just as he reached it, it was flung open and a lean young man with heavy black-rimmed spectacles stood in it, his head thrust forward, glaring at him.

  Old Tarwater raised his fist. “The Lord Jesus Christ sent me to baptize that boy!” he shouted. “Stand aside. I mean to do it!”

  Tarwater’s head popped up from behind the hedge. Breathlessly he took the schoolteacher in—the narrow boney face slanting backwards from the jutting jaw, the hair that receded from the high forehead, the eyes encircled in glass. The white-haired child had caught hold of his father’s leg and was hanging onto it. The schoolteacher pushed him back inside the house. Then he stepped outside and slammed the door behind him and continued to glare at the old man as if he dared him to take a step.

  “That boy cries out for his baptism,” the old man said. “Precious in the sight of the Lord even an idiot!”

  “Get off my property,” the nephew said in a tight voice as if he were keeping it calm by force. “If you don’t, I’ll have you put back in the asylum where you belong.”

  “You can’t touch the servant of the Lord!” the old man hollered.

  “You get away from here!” the nephew shouted, losing control of his voice. “Ask the Lord why He made him an idiot in the first place, uncle. Tell him I want to know why!”

  The boy’s heart was beating so fast he was afraid it was going to gallop out of his chest and disappear forever. He was head and shoulders out of the shrubbery.

  “Yours not to ask!” the old man shouted. “Yours not to question the mind of the Lord God Almighty. Yours not to grind the Lord into your head and spit out a number!”

  “Where’s the boy?” the nephew asked, looking around suddenly as if he had just thought of it. “Where’s the boy you were going to raise into a prophet to burn my eyes clean?” and he laughed.

  Tarwater lowered his head into the bush again, instantly disliking the schoolteacher’s laugh which seemed to reduce him to the least importance.

  “His day is going to come,” the old man said. “Either him or me is
going to baptize that child. If not me in my day, him in his.”

  “You’ll never lay a hand on him,” the schoolteacher said. “You could slosh water on him for the rest of his life and he’d still be an idiot. Five years old for all eternity, useless forever. Listen,” he said, and the boy heard his taut voice turn low with a kind of subdued intensity, a passion equal and opposite to the old man’s, “he’ll never be baptized—just as a matter of principle, nothing else. As a gesture of human dignity, he’ll never be baptized.”

  “Time will discover the hand that baptizes him,” the old man said.

  “Time will discover it,” the nephew said and opened the door behind him and stepped back inside and slammed it on himself.

  The boy had risen from the shrubbery, his head swirling with excitement. He had never been back there again, never seen his cousin again, never seen the schoolteacher again, and he hoped to God, he told the stranger digging the grave along with him now that he would never see him again though he had nothing against him himself and he would dislike to have to kill him but if he came out here, messing in what was none of his business except by law, then he would be obliged to.

  Listen, the stranger said, what would he want to come out here for—where there’s nothing?

  Tarwater didn’t answer. He didn’t search out the stranger’s face but he knew by now that it was sharp and friendly and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed panama hat that obscured the color of his eyes. He had lost his dislike for the thought of the voice. Only every now and then it sounded like a stranger’s voice to him. He began to feel that he was only just now meeting himself, as if as long as his uncle had lived, he had been deprived of his own acquaintance. I ain’t denying the old man was a good one, his new friend said, but like you said: you can’t be any poorer than dead. They have to take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his body is not going to feel the pinch, of fire or anything else.

  “It was the last day he was thinking of,” Tarwater murmured.

  Well now, the stranger said, don’t you think any cross you set up in the year 1952 would be rotted out by the year the Day of Judgment comes in? Rotted to as much dust as his ashes if you reduced him to ashes? And lemme ast you this: what’s God going to do with sailors drowned at sea that the fish have et and the fish that et them et by other fish and they et by yet others? And what about people that get burned up naturally in house fires? Burnt up one way or another or lost in machines until they’re pulp? And all those sojers blasted to nothing? What about all those that there’s nothing left of to burn or bury?

  If I burnt him, Tarwater said, it wouldn’t be natural, it would be deliberate.

  Oh I see, the stranger said. It ain’t the Day of Judgment for him you’re worried about. It’s the Day of Judgment for you.

  That’s my bidnis, Tarwater said.

  I ain’t buttin into your bidnis, the stranger said. It don’t mean a thing to me. You’re left by yourself in this empty place. Forever by yourself in this empty place with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in. You don’t mean a thing to a soul as far as I can see.

  “Redeemed,” Tarwater muttered.

  Do you smoke? the stranger asked.

  Smoke if I want to and don’t if I don’t, Tarwater said. Bury if need be and don’t if don’t.

  Go take a look at him and see if he’s fell off his chair, his friend suggested.

  Tarwater let the shovel drop in the grave and returned to the house. He opened the front door a crack and put his face to it. His uncle glared slightly to the side of him like a judge intent upon some terrible evidence. The boy shut the door quickly and went back to the grave, cold in spite of the sweat that stuck his shirt to his back. He began digging again.

  The schooolteacher was too smart for him, that’s all, the stranger said presently. You remember well enough how he said he kidnapped him when the schoolteacher was seven years of age. Gone to town and persuaded him out of his own backyard and brought him out here and baptized him. And what come of it? Nothing. The schoolteacher don’t care now if he’s baptized or if he ain’t. It don’t mean a thing to him one way or the other. Don’t care if he’s Redeemed or not neither. He only spent four days out here; you’ve spent fourteen years and now got to spend the rest of your life.

  You see he was crazy all along, he continued. Wanted to make a prophet out of that schoolteacher too, but the schoolteacher was too smart for him. He got away.

  He had somebody to come for him, Tarwater said. His daddy came and got him back. Nobody came and got me back.

  The schoolteacher himself come after you, the stranger said, and got shot in the leg and the ear for his trouble.

  I was not yet one year old, Tarwater said. A baby can’t walk off and leave.

  You ain’t a baby now, his friend said.

  The grave did not appear to get any deeper though he continued to dig. Look at the big prophet, the stranger jeered, and watched him from the shade of the speckled tree shadows. Lemme hear you prophesy something. The truth is the Lord ain’t studying about you. You ain’t entered His Head.

  Tarwater turned around abruptly and worked from the other side and the voice continued from behind him. Anybody that’s a prophet has got to have somebody to prophesy to. Unless you’re just going to prophesy to yourself, he amended—or go baptize that dim-witted child, he added in a tone of high sarcasm.

  The truth is, he said after a minute, the truth is that you’re just as smart, if you ain’t actually smarter, than the schoolteacher. Because he had somebody—his daddy and his mother—to tell him the old man was crazy, whereas you ain’t had anybody and yet you’ve figured it out for yourself. Of course, it’s taken you longer, but you’ve come to the right conclusion: you know he was a crazy man even when he wasn’t in the asylum, even those last years.

  Or if he wasn’t actually crazy, he was the same thing in a different way: he didn’t have but one thing on his mind. He was a one-notion man. Jesus. Jesus this and Jesus that. Ain’t you in all your fourteen years of supporting his foolishness fed up and sick to the roof of your mouth with Jesus? My Lord and Saviour, the stranger sighed, I am if you ain’t.

  After a pause he continued. The way I see it, he said, you can do one of two things. One of them, not both. Nobody can do both of two things without straining themselves. You can do one thing or you can do the opposite.

  Jesus or the devil, the boy said.

  No no no, the stranger said, there ain’t no such thing as a devil. I can tell you that from my own self-experience. I know that for a fact. It ain’t Jesus or the devil. It’s Jesus or you.

  Jesus or me, Tarwater repeated. He put the shovel down for a rest and thought: he said the schoolteacher was glad to come. He said all he had to do was go out in the schoolteacher’s back yard where he was playing and say, Let’s you and me go to the country for a while—you have to be born again. The Lord Jesus Christ sent me to see to it. And the schoolteacher got up and took hold of his hand without a word and came with him and all the four days while he was out here he said the schoolteacher was hoping they wouldn’t come for him.

  Well that’s all the sense a seven-year-old boy’s got, the stranger said. You can’t expect no more from a child. He learned better as soon as he got back to town; his daddy told him the old man was crazy and not to believe a word of what all he had learnt him.

  That’s not the way he told it, Tarwater said. He said that when the schoolteacher was seven years old, he had good sense but later it dried up. His daddy was an ass and not fit to raise him and his mother was a whore. She ran away from here when she was eighteen years old.

  It took her that long? the stranger said in an incredulous tone. My, she was kind of a ass herself.

  My great uncle said he hated to admit it that his own sister was a whore but he had to say it to say the truth, the boy said.

  Shaw, you know yourself that it give him great satisfaction to admit she was a whore, the stranger said. He w
as always admitting somebody was an ass or a whore. That’s all a prophet is good for—to admit somebody else is an ass or a whore. And anyway, he asked slyly, what do you know about whores? Where have you ever run up on one of them?

  Certainly I know what one of them is, the boy said.

  The Bible was full of them. He knew what they were and to what they were liable to come, and just as Jezebel was discovered by dogs, an arm here and a foot there, so said his great-uncle, it had almost been with his own mother and grandmother. The two of them, along with his grandfather, had been killed in an automobile crash, leaving only the schoolteacher alive in that family, and Tarwater himself, for his mother (unmarried and shameless) had lived just long enough after the crash for him to be born. He had been born at the scene of the wreck.

  The boy was very proud that he had been born in a wreck. He had always felt that it set his existence apart from the ordinary one and he had understood from it that the plans of God for him were special, even though nothing of consequence had happened to him so far. Often when he walked in the woods and came upon some bush a little removed from the rest, his breath would catch in his throat and he would stop and wait for the bush to burst into flame. It had not done it yet.

  His uncle had never seemed to be aware of the importance of the way he had been born, only of how he had been born again. He would often ask him why he thought the Lord had rescued him out of the womb of a whore and let him see the light of day at all, and then why, having done it once, He had gone and done it again, allowing him to be baptized by his great-uncle into the death of Christ, and then having done it twice, gone on and done it a third time, allowing him to be rescued by his great-uncle from the schoolteacher and brought to the backwoods and given a chance to be brought up according to the truth. It was because, his uncle said, the Lord meant him to be trained for a prophet, even though he was a bastard, and to take his great-uncle’s place when he died. The old man compared their situation to that of Elijah and Elisha.