Wise Blood Read online

  “Come on,” Enoch whispered. He went past the two cases in the middle of the floor and toward the third one. He went to the farthest end of it and stopped. He stood looking down with his neck thrust forward and his hands clutched together; Hazel Motes moved up beside him.

  The two of them stood there, Enoch rigid and Hazel Motes bent slightly forward. There were three bowls and a row of blunt weapons and a man in the case. It was the man Enoch was looking at. He was about three feet long. He was naked and a dried yellow color and his eyes were drawn almost shut as if a giant block of steel were falling down on top of him.

  “See theter notice,” Enoch said in a church whisper, pointing to a typewritten card at the man’s foot, “it says he was once as tall as you or me. Some A-rabs did it to him in six months.” He turned his head cautiously to see Hazel Motes.

  All he could tell was that Hazel Motes’s eyes were on the shrunken man. He was bent forward so that his face was reflected on the glass top of the case. The reflection was pale and the eyes were like two clean bullet holes. Enoch waited, rigid. He heard footsteps in the hall. Oh Jesus Jesus, he prayed, let him hurry up and do whatever he’s going to do! The woman with the two little boys came in the door. She had one by each hand, and she was grinning. Hazel Motes had not raised his eyes once from the shrunken man. The woman came toward them. She stopped on the other side of the case and looked down into it and the reflection of her face appeared grinning on the glass, over Hazel Motes’s.

  She snickered and put two fingers in front of her teeth. The little boys’ faces were like pans set on either side to catch the grins that overflowed from her. When Haze saw her face on the glass, his neck jerked back and he made a noise. It might have come from the man inside the case. In a second Enoch knew it had. “Wait!” he screamed, and tore out of the room after Hazel Motes.

  He overtook him halfway up the hill. He caught him by the arm and swung him around and then he stood there, suddenly weak and light as a balloon, and stared. Hazel Motes grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “What is that address!” he shouted. “Give me that address!”

  Even if Enoch had been sure what the address was, he couldn’t have thought of it then. He could not even stand up. As soon as Hazel Motes let him go, he fell backward and landed against one of the white-socked trees. He rolled over and lay stretched out on the ground, with an exalted look on his face. He thought he was floating. A long way off he saw the blue figure spring and pick up a rock, and he saw the wild face turn, and the rock hurtle toward him; he shut his eyes tight and the rock hit him on the forehead.

  When he came to again, Hazel Motes was gone. He lay there a minute. He put his fingers to his forehead and then held them in front of his eyes. They were streaked with red. He turned his head and saw a drop of blood on the ground and as he looked at it, he thought it widened like a little spring. He sat straight up, frozen-skinned, and put his finger in it, and very faintly he could hear his blood beating, his secret blood, in the center of the city.

  Then he knew that whatever was expected of him was only just beginning.

  CHAPTER 6

  That evening Haze drove his car around the streets until he found the blind man and the child again. They were standing on a corner, waiting for the light to change. He drove the Essex at some distance behind them for about four blocks up the main street and then turned it after them down a side street. He followed them on into a dark section past the railroad yards and watched them go up on the porch of a box-like two-story house. When the blind man opened the door a shaft of light fell on him and Haze craned his neck to see him better. The child turned her head, slowly, as if it worked on a screw, and watched his car pass. His face was so close to the glass that it looked like a paper face pasted there. He noted the number of the house and a sign on it that said, ROOMS FOR RENT.

  Then he drove back down town and parked the Essex in front of a movie house where he could catch the drain of people coming out from the picture show. The lights around the marquee were so bright that the moon, moving overhead with a small procession of clouds behind it, looked pale and insignificant. Haze got out of the Essex and climbed up on the nose of it.

  A thin little man with a long upper lip was at the glass ticket box, buying tickets for three portly women who were behind him. “Gotta get these girls some refreshments too,” he said to the woman in the ticket box. “Can’t have ‘em starve right before my eyes.”

  “Ain’t he a card?” one of the women hollered. “He keeps me in stitches!”

  Three boys in red satin lumberjackets came out of the foyer. Haze raised his arms. “Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?” he cried.

  The women all turned around at once and stared at him.

  “A wise guy,” the little thin man said, and glared as if someone were about to insult him.

  The three boys moved up, pushing each other’s shoulders.

  Haze waited a second and then he cried again. “Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?”

  “Rabble rouser,” the little man said. “One thing I can’t stand it’s a rabble rouser.”

  “What church you belong to, you boy there?” Haze asked, pointing at the tallest boy in the red satin lumber-jacket.

  The boy giggled.

  “You then,” he said impatiently, pointing at the next one. “What church you belong to?”

  “Church of Christ,” the boy said in a falsetto to hide the truth.

  “Church of Christ!” Haze repeated. “Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”

  “He’s a preacher,” one of the women said. “Let’s go.”

  “Listen, you people, I’m going to take the truth with me wherever I go,” Haze called. “I’m going to preach it to whoever’ll listen at whatever place. I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”

  The little man herded his girls into the picture show quickly and the three boys left but more people came out and he began over and said the same thing again. They left and some more came and he said it a third time. Then they left and no one else came out; there was no one there but the woman in the glass box. She had been glaring at him all the time but he had not noticed her. She wore glasses with rhinestones in the bows and she had white hair stacked in sausages around her head. She stuck her mouth to a hole in the glass and shouted, “Listen, if you don’t have a church to do it in, you don’t have to do it in front of this show.”

  “My church is the Church Without Christ, lady,” he said. “If there’s no Christ, there’s no reason to have a set place to do it in.”

  “Listen,” she said, “if you don’t get from in front of this show, I’ll call the police.”

  “There’s plenty of shows,” he said and got down and got back in the Essex and drove off. That night he preached in front of three other picture shows before he went to Mrs. Watts.

  In the morning he drove back to the house where the blind man and the child had gone in the night before. It was yellow clapboard, the second one in a block of them, all alike. He went up to the front door and rang the bell. After a few minutes a woman with a mop opened it. He said he wanted to rent a room.

  “What you do?” she asked. She was a tall bony woman, resembling the mop she carried upside-down.

  He said he was a preacher.

  The woman looked at him thoroughly and then she looked behind him at his car. “What church?” she asked.

  He said the Church Without Christ.

  “Protestant?” she asked suspiciously, “or something foreign?”

  He said no mam, it was Protestant.

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bsp; After a minute she said, “Well, you can look at it,” and he followed her into a white plastered hall and up some steps at the side of it. She opened a door into a back room that was a little larger than his car, with a cot and a chest of drawers and a table and straight chair in it. There were two nails on the wall to hang clothes on. “Three dollars a week in advance,” she said. There was one window and another door opposite the door they had come in by. Haze opened the extra door, expecting it to be a closet. It opened out onto a drop of about thirty feet and looked down into a narrow bare back yard where the garbage was collected. There was a plank nailed across the door frame at knee level to keep anyone from falling out. “A man named Hawks lives here, don’t he?” Haze asked quickly.

  “Downstairs in the front room,” she said, “him and his child.” She was looking down into the drop too. “It used to be a fire-escape there,” she said, “but I don’t know what happened to it.”

  He paid her three dollars and took possession of the room, and as soon as she was out of the way, he went down the stairs and knocked on the Hawkses’ door.

  The blind man’s child opened it a crack and stood looking at him. She seemed at once to have to balance her face so that her expression would be the same on both sides. “It’s that boy, Papa,” she said in a low tone. “The one that keeps following me.” She held the door close to her head so he couldn’t see in past her. The blind man came to the door but he didn’t open it any wider. His look was not the same as it had been two nights before; it was sour and unfriendly, and he didn’t speak, he only stood there.

  Haze had got what he had to say in mind before he left his room. “I live here,” he said. “I thought if your girl wanted to give me so much eye, I might return her some of it.” He wasn’t looking at the girl; he was staring at the black glasses and the curious scars that started somewhere behind them and ran down the blind man’s cheeks.

  “What I give you the other night,” she said, “was a looker indignation for what I seen you do. It was you give me the eye. You should have seen him, Papa,” she said, “looked me up and down.”

  “I’ve started my own church,” Haze said. “The Church Without Christ. I preach on the street.”

  “You can’t let me alone, can you?” Hawks said. His voice was flat, nothing like it had been the other time. “I didn’t ask you to come here and I ain’t asking you to hang around,” he said.

  Haze had expected a secret welcome. He waited, trying to think of something to say. “What kind of a preacher are you?” he heard himself murmur, “not to see if you can save my soul?” The blind man pushed the door shut in his face. Haze stood there a second facing the blank door, and then he ran his sleeve across his mouth and went out.

  Inside, Hawks took off his dark glasses and, from a hole in the window shade, watched him get in his car and drive off. The eye he put to the hole was slightly rounder and smaller than his other one, but it was obvious he could see out of both of them. The child watched from a lower crack. “Howcome you don’t like him, Papa?” she asked, “—because he’s after me?”

  “If he was after you, that would be enough to make me welcome him,” he said.

  “I like his eyes,” she observed. “They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking.”

  Their room was the same size as Haze’s but there were two cots and an oil cooking stove and a wash basin in it and a trunk that they used for a table. Hawks sat down on one of the cots and put a cigarette in his mouth. “Goddam Jesus-hog,” he muttered.

  “Well, look what you used to be,” she said. “Look what you tried to do. You got over it and so will he.”

  “I don’t want him hanging around,” he said. “He makes me nervous.”

  “Listen here,” she said, sitting down on the cot with him, “you help me to get him and then you go away and do what you please and I can live with him.”

  “He don’t even know you exist,” Hawks said.

  “Even if he don’t,” she said, “that’s all right. That’s howcome I can get him easy. I want him and you ought to help and then you could go on off like you want to.”

  He lay down on the cot and finished the cigarette; his face was thoughtful and evil. Once while he was lying there, he laughed and then his expression constricted again. “Well, that might be fine,” he said after a while. “That might be the oil on Aaron’s beard.”

  “Listen here,” she said, “it would be the nuts! I’m just crazy about him. I never seen a boy that I liked the looks of any better. Don’t run him off. Tell him how you blinded yourself for Jesus and show him that clipping you got.”

  “Yeah, the clipping,” he said.

  Haze had gone out in his car to think and he had decided that he would seduce Hawks’s child. He thought that when the blind preacher saw his daughter ruined, he would realize that he was in earnest when he said he preached The Church Without Christ. Besides this reason, there was another: he didn’t want to go back to Mrs. Watts. The night before, after he was asleep, she had got up and cut the top of his hat out in an obscene shape. He felt that he should have a woman, not for the sake of the pleasure in her, but to prove that he didn’t believe in sin since he practiced what was called it; but he had had enough of her. He wanted someone he could teach something to and he took it for granted that the blind man’s child, since she was so homely, would also be innocent.

  Before he went back to his room, he went to a dry-goods store to buy a new hat. He wanted one that was completely opposite to the old one. This time he was sold a white panama with a red and green and yellow band around it. The man said they were really the thing and particularly if he was going to Florida.

  “I ain’t going to Florida,” he said. “This hat is opposite from the one I used to have is all.”

  “You can use it anywheres,” the man said; “it’s new.”

  “I know that,” Haze said. He went outside and took the red and green and yellow band off it and thumped out the crease in the top and turned down the brim. When he put it on, it looked just as fierce as the other one had.

  He didn’t go back to the Hawkses’ door until late in the afternoon, when he thought they would be eating their supper. It opened almost at once and the child’s head appeared in the crack. He pushed the door out of her hand and went in without looking at her directly. Hawks was sitting at the trunk. The remains of his supper were in front of him but he wasn’t eating. He had barely got the black glasses on in time.

  “If Jesus cured blind men, howcome you don’t get Him to cure you?” Haze asked. He had prepared this sentence in his room.

  “He blinded Paul,” Hawks said.

  Haze sat down on the edge of one of the cots. He looked around him and then back at Hawks. He crossed and uncrossed his knees and then he crossed them again. “Where’d you get them scars?” he asked.

  The fake blind man leaned forward and smiled. “You still have a chance to save yourself if you repent,” he said. “I can’t save you but you can save yourself.”

  “That’s what I’ve already done,” Haze said. “Without the repenting. I preach how I done it every night on the…”

  “Look at this,” Hawks said. He took a yellow newspaper clipping from his pocket and handed it to him, and his mouth twisted out of the smile. “This is how I got the scars,” he muttered. The child made a sign to him from the door to smile and not look sour. As he waited for Haze to finish reading, the smile slowly returned.

  The headline on the clipping said, EVANGELIST PROMISES TO BLIND SELF. The rest of it said that Asa Hawks, an evangelist of the Free Church of Christ, had promised to blind himself to justify his belief that Christ Jesus had redeemed him. It said he would do it at a revival on Saturday night at eight o’clock, the fourth of October. The date on it was more than ten years before. Over the headline was a picture of Hawks, a scarless, straight-mouthed man of about thirty, with one eye a little smaller and rounder than the other. The mouth had a look that might have been e
ither holy or calculating, but there was a wildness in the eyes that suggested terror.

  Haze sat staring at the clipping after he had read it. He read it three times. He took his hat off and put it on again and got up and stood looking around the room as if he were trying to remember where the door was.

  “He did it with lime,” the child said, “and there was hundreds converted. Anybody that blinded himself for justification ought to be able to save you—or even somebody of his blood,” she added, inspired.

  “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified,” Haze murmured. He scowled at her and hurried out the door, but as soon as it was shut behind him, he remembered something. He turned around and opened it and handed her a piece of paper, folded up several times into a small pellet shape; then he hurried out to his car.

  Hawks took the note away from her and opened it up. It said, BABE, I NEVER SAW ANYBODY THAT LOOKED AS GOOD AS YOU BEFORE IS WHY I CAME HERE. She read it over his arm, coloring pleasantly.

  “Now you got the written proof for it, Papa,” she said.

  “That bastard got away with my clipping,” Hawks muttered.

  “Well you got another clipping, ain’t you?” she asked, with a little smirk.

  “Shut your mouth,” he said and flung himself down on the cot. The other clipping was one that said, EVANGELIST’S NERVE FAILS.