The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel Read online

  All right, the stranger said, I suppose you know what one of them is. But there’s a heap else you don’t know. You go ahead and put your feet in his shoes. Elisha after Elijah like he said. But just lemme ast you this: where is the voice of the Lord? I haven’t heard it. Who’s called you this morning? Or any morning? Have you been told what to do? You ain’t even heard the sound of natural thunder this morning. There ain’t a cloud in the sky. The trouble with you, I see, he concluded, is that you ain’t got but just enough sense to believe every word he told you.

  The sun was directly overhead, apparently dead still, holding its breath, waiting out the noontime. The grave was about two feet deep. Ten foot now, remember, the stranger said and laughed. Old men are selfish. You got to expect the least of them. The least of everybody, he added and let out a flat sigh that was like a gust of sand raised and dropped suddenly by the wind.

  Tarwater looked up and saw two figures cutting across the field, a colored man and woman, each dangling an empty vinegar jug by a finger. The woman, tall and Indianlike, had on a green sun hat. She stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the yard toward the grave; the man held the wire down and swung his leg over and followed at her elbow. They kept their eyes on the hole and stopped at the edge of it, looking down into the raw ground with shocked satisfied expressions. The man, Buford, had a crinkled face, darker than his hat. “Old man passed,” he said.

  The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail, piercing and formal. She set her jug down on the ground and crossed her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again.

  “Tell her to shut up that,” Tarwater said. “I’m in charge here now and I don’t want no nigger-mourning.”

  “I seen his spirit for two nights,” she said. “Seen him two nights and he was unrested.”

  “He ain’t been dead but since this morning,” Tarwater said. “If you all want your jugs filled, give them to me and dig while I’m gone.”

  “He’d been predicting his passing for many years,” Buford said. “She seen him in her dream several nights and he wasn’t rested. I known him well. I known him very well indeed.”

  “Poor sweet sugar boy,” the woman said to Tarwater, “what you going to do here now by yourself in this lonesome place?”

  “Mind my bidnis,” the boy said, jerking the jug out of her hand. He started off so quickly that he almost fell. He stalked across the back field toward the rim of trees that surrounded the clearing.

  The birds had gone into the deep woods to escape the noon sun and one thrush, hidden some distance ahead of him, called the same four notes again and again, stopping each time after them to make a silence. Tarwater began to walk faster, then he began to lope, and in a second he was running like something hunted, sliding down slopes waxed with pine needles and grasping the limbs of trees to pull himself, panting, up the slippery inclines. He crashed through a wall of honeysuckle and lept across a sandy near-dry stream bed and fell down against the high clay bank that formed the back wall of a cove where the old man kept his extra liquor hidden. He hid it in a hollow of the bank, covered with a large stone. Tarwater began to fight at the stone to pull it away, while the stranger stood over his shoulder panting, he was crazy! He was crazy! That’s the long and short of it, he was crazy!

  Tarwater got the stone away and pulled out a black jug and sat down against the bank with it. Crazy! the stranger hissed, collapsing by his side.

  The sun appeared, a furious white, edging its way secretly behind the tops of the trees that rose over the hiding place.

  A man, seventy years of age, to bring a baby out into the backwoods to raise him right! Suppose he had died when you were four years old instead of fourteen? Could you have toted mash to the still then and supported yourself? I never heard of no four-year-old running a still.

  Never did I hear of that, he continued. You weren’t anything to him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when the time came and now that he’s dead, he’s shut of you but you got two hundred and fifty pounds of him to put below the face of the earth. And don’t think he wouldn’t heat up like a coal stove to see you take a drop of liquor, he added. Though he had a weakness for it himself. When he couldn’t stand the Lord one instant longer, he got drunk, prophet or no prophet. Hah. He might say it would hurt you but what he meant was you might get so much you wouldn’t be in no fit condition to bury him. He said he brought you out here to raise you according to principle and that was the principle: that you should be fit when the time came to bury him so he would have a cross to mark where he was at.

  A prophet with a still! He’s the only prophet I ever heard of making liquor for a living.

  After a minute he said in a softer tone as the boy took a long swallow from the black jug, well, a little won’t interfere. Moderation never hurt no one.

  A burning arm slid down Tarwater’s throat as if the devil were already reaching inside him to finger his soul. He squinted at the angry sun creeping behind the topmost fringe of trees.

  Take it easy, his friend said. Do you remember them nigger gospel singers you saw one time, all drunk, all singing, all dancing around that black Ford automobile? Jesus, they wouldn’t have been near so glad they were Redeemed if they hadn’t had that liquor in them. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to my Redemption if I was you. Some people take everything too hard.

  Tarwater drank more slowly. He had been drunk only one time before and that time his uncle had beat him with a piece of crate for it, saying liquor would dissolve a child’s gut, another of his lies because his gut had not dissolved.

  It should be clear to you, his kind friend said, how all your life you been tricked by that old man. You could have been a city slicker for the last fourteen years. Instead, you been deprived of any company but his, you been living in a two-story barn in the middle of this earth’s bald patch, following behind a mule and plow since you were seven. And how do you know the education he give you is true to the facts? Maybe he taught you a system of figures nobody else uses? How do you know that two added to two makes four? Four added to four makes eight? Maybe other people don’t think so. How do you know if there was an Adam or if Jesus eased your situation any when He redeemed you? Or how do you know if He actually done it? Nothing but that old man’s word and it ought to be obvious to you by now that he was crazy. And as for Judgment Day, the stranger said, every day is Judgment Day.

  Ain’t you old enough to have learnt that yet for yourself? Don’t everything you do, everything you have ever done, work itself out right or wrong before your eye and usually before the sun has set? Have you ever got by with anything? No you ain’t nor ever thought you would. You might as well drink all that liquor since you’ve already drunk so much. Once you pass the moderation mark you’ve passed it, and that gyration you feel working down from the top of your brain, he said, that’s the Hand of God laying a blessing on you. He has given you your release. That old man was the stone before your door and the Lord has rolled it away. He ain’t rolled it quite far enough, of course. You got to finish up yourself but He’s done the main part. Praise Him.

  Tarwater had ceased to have any feeling in his legs. He dozed for a while, his head hanging to the side and his mouth open and the liquor trickling slowly down the side of his overalls where the jug had overturned in his lap. Eventually there was only a drip at the neck of the bottle, forming and filling and dropping, silent and measured and sun-colored. The bright even sky began to fade, coarsening with clouds until every shadow had gone in. He woke with a wrench forward, his eyes focussing and unfocussing on something that looked like a burnt rag hanging close to his face.

  Buford said, “This ain’t no way for you to act. Old man don’t deserve this. There’s no rest until the dead is buried.” He was squatting on his heels, one hand gripped around Tarwater’s arm. “I gone yonder to the door and seen him sitting there at the table, not even laid out on a cooling board. He ought to be laid out and have some salt on hi
s bosom if you mean to keep him overnight.”

  The boy’s lids pinched together to hold the image steady and in a second he made out two small red blistered eyes.

  “He deserves to lie in a grave that fits him,” Buford said. “He was deep in this life, he was deep in Jesus’ misery.”

  “Nigger,” the child said, working his strange swollen tongue, “take your hand off me.”

  Buford lifted his hand. “He needs to be rested,” he said.

  “He’ll be rested all right when I get through with him,” Tarwater said vaguely. “Go on and lea’ me to my bidnis.”

  “Nobody going to bother you,” Buford said, standing up. He waited a minute, bent, looking down at the limp figure sprawled against the bank. The boy’s head was tilted backwards over a root that jutted out of the clay wall. His mouth hung open and his turned-up hat cut a straight line across his forehead, just over his half-open unseeing eyes. His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them had an ancient look as if the child’s skeleton beneath were as old as the world. “Nobody going to bother you,” the Negro muttered, pushing through the wall of honeysuckle without looking back. “That going to be your trouble.”

  Tarwater closed his eyes again.

  * * *

  Some night bird complaining close by woke him up. It was not a screeching noise, only an intermittent hump-hump as if the bird had to recall his grievance each time before he repeated it. Clouds were moving convulsively across a black sky and there was a pink unsteady moon that appeared to be jerked up a foot or so and then dropped and jerked up again. This was because, as he observed in an instant, the sky was lowering, coming down fast to smother him. The bird screeched and flew off in time and Tarwater lurched into the middle of the stream bed and crouched on his hands and knees. The moon was reflected like pale fire in the few spots of water in the sand. He sprang at the wall of honeysuckle and began to tear through it, confusing the sweet familiar odor with the weight coming down on him. When he stood up on the other side, the black ground swung slowly and threw him down again. A flare of pink lightning lit the woods and he saw the black shapes of trees pierce out of the ground all around him. The night bird began to hump again from a thicket where he had settled.

  He got up and began to move in the direction of the clearing, feeling his way from tree to tree, the trunks very cold and dry to his touch. There was distant thunder and a continuous flicker of pale lightning firing one section of woods and then another. Finally he saw the shack, standing gaunt-black and tall in the middle of the clearing, with the pink moon trembling directly over it. His eyes glittered like open pits of light as he moved across the sand, dragging his crushed shadow behind him. He didn’t turn his head to that side of the yard where he had started the grave. He stopped at the far back corner of the house and squatted down on the ground and looked underneath at the litter there, chicken crates and barrels and old rags and boxes. He had a small box of wooden matches in his pocket.

  He crawled under and began to set small fires, building one from another, and working his way out at the front porch, leaving the fire behind him eating greedily at the dry tinder and the floor boards of the house. He crossed the front side of the yard and went through the rutted field without looking back until he reached the edge of the opposite woods. Then he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the pink moon had dropped through the roof of the shack and was bursting and he began to run, forced on through the woods by two bulging silver eyes that grew in immense astonishment in the center of the fire behind him. He could hear it moving up through the black night like a whirling chariot.

  * * *

  Toward midnight he came out on the highway and caught a ride with a salesman who was a manufacturer’s representative, selling copper flues throughout the Southeast, and who gave the silent boy what he said was the best advice he could give any young fellow setting out to find himself a place in the world. While they sped forward on the black untwisting highway, watched on either side by a dark wall of trees, the salesman said that it had been his personal experience that you couldn’t sell a copper flue to a man you didn’t love. He was a thin fellow with a narrow face that appeared to have been worn down to the sharpest possible depressions. He wore a broad-brimmed stiff grey hat of the kind used by businessmen who would like to look like cowboys. He said love was the only policy that worked 95% of the time. He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man’s wife’s health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customer’s families in and what was wrong with them. A man’s wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man’s hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word cancer and wrote dead there. “And I say thank God when they’re dead,” the salesman said; “that’s one less to remember.”

  “You don’t owe the dead anything,” Tarwater said in a loud voice, speaking for almost the first time since he had got in the car.

  “Nor they you,” said the stranger. “And that’s the way it ought to be in this world—nobody owing nobody nothing.”

  “Look,” Tarwater said suddenly, sitting forward, his face close to the windshield, “we’re headed in the wrong direction. We’re going back where we came from. There’s the fire again. There’s the fire we left!”

  Ahead of them in the sky there was a faint glow, steady, and not made by lightning. “That’s the same fire we came from!” the boy said in a high voice.

  “Boy, you must be nuts,” the salesman said. “That’s the city we’re coming to. That’s the glow from the city lights. I reckon this is your first trip anywhere.”

  “You’re turned around,” the child said; “it’s the same fire.”

  The stranger twisted his rutted face sharply. “I’ve never been turned around in my life,” he said. “And I didn’t come from any fire. I come from Mobile. And I know where I’m going. What’s the matter with you?”

  Tarwater sat staring at the glow in front of him. “I was asleep,” he muttered. “I’m just now waking up.”

  “You should have been listening to me,” the salesman said. “I been telling you things you ought to know.”

  II

  IF THE boy had actually trusted his new friend, Meeks, the copper flue salesman, he would have accepted Meeks’ offer to take him directly to his uncle’s door and let him out. Meeks had turned on the car light and told him to climb over onto the back seat and root around until he found the telephone book and when Tarwater had climbed back with it, he had showed him how to find his uncle’s name in the book. Tarwater wrote the address and the telephone number down on the back of one of Meeks’ cards. Meeks’ telephone number was on the other side and he said any time Tarwater wanted to contact him for a little loan or any assistance, not to be afraid to use it. What Meeks had decided after about a half hour of the boy was that he was just enough off in the head and just ignorant enough to be a very hard worker, and he wanted a very ignorant energetic boy to work for him. But Tarwater was evasive. “I got to contact this uncle of mine, my only blood connection,” he said.

  Meeks could look at this boy and tell that he was running away from home, that he had left a mother and probably a sot-father and probably four or five brothers and sisters in a two-room shack set in a brush-swept bare-ground clearing just off the highway and that he was hightailing it for the big world, having first, from the way he reeked, fortified himself with stump liquor. He didn’t for a minute believe he had any uncle at any such respectable address. He thought the boy had set his finger down on the name, Rayber, by chance and said, “That’s him. A schoolteacher. My uncle.”

  “I’ll take you right to his door,” Meeks had said, fox-like. “We pass there going through town. We pass right by there.”

  “No,” Tarwater said. He was sitting forward on the seat, looking out the window at a hill covered with old used-car bodies. In t
he indistinct darkness, they seemed to be drowning into the ground, to be about half-submerged already. The city hung in front of them on the side of the mountain as if it were a larger part of the same pile, not yet buried so deep. The fire had gone out of it and it appeared settled into its unbreakable parts.

  The boy did not intend to go to the schoolteacher’s until daylight and when he went he intended to make it plain that he had not come to be beholden or to be studied for a schoolteacher magazine. He began trying to remember the schoolteacher’s face so that he could stare him down in his mind before he actually faced him. He felt that the more he could recall about him, the less advantage the new uncle would have over him. The face had not been one that held together in his mind, though he remembered the sloping jaw and the black-rimmed glasses. What he could not picture were the eyes behind the glasses. He had no memory of them and there was every kind of contradiction in the rubble of his great-uncle’s descriptions. Sometimes the old man had said the nephew’s eyes were black and sometimes brown. The boy kept trying to find eyes that fit mouth, nose that fit chin, but every time he thought he had a face put together, it fell apart and he had to begin on a new one. It was as if the schoolteacher, like the devil, could take on any look that suited him.

  Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbor. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know.