The Complete Stories (47 page)

“Tell your father,” he roared, “that I'm not extinct!”

The little boy shook as if a blast had hit him and pushed the door almost shut, hiding himself all but one spectacled eye. The old man grabbed Tarwater by the shoulder and swung him around and pushed him down the path away from the place.

He had never been back there again, never seen his cousin again, never seen the school teacher at all, and he hoped to God, he told the stranger digging the grave along with him now, that he would never see him, though he had nothing against him and he would dislike to kill him, but if he came out here, messing with 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 began to dig again and didn't answer. He didn't search out the stranger's face, but he knew by now it was sharp and friendly and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed hat. He had lost his dislike for the sound 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 said.

“Well now,” the stranger said, “don't you think any cross you set up in the year 1954 or 5 or 6 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 a pulp? And all these sojers blasted to nothing? What about all these naturally left without a piece to fit a piece?”

“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 the 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 child shut the door quickly and went back to the grave. He was cold in spite of the sweat that stuck his shirt to his back.

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 from them. The least from 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 Indian-like, had on a green sunhat. 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, burnt-rag 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 perdicting 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 by bidnis,” the boy growled, jerking the jug out of her hand, and 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 leapt across a sandy stream bed that was almost dry now and fell down against the high clay bank that formed the back wall of a cove where the old man had 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, 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? 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 pounds of him to carry 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. “He might say it would hurt you but what he would mean 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.

“Well,” he said in a softer tone, when the boy had taken a long swallow from the black jug, “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 the 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,” he said. “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 board 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 ten 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 fact? 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 use that system. How do you know if there was an Adam or if Jesus eased your situation any when He redeemed you? Or how 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,” he said. “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 yet, 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 just 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 focusing and unfocusing on something that looked like 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 his 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 the 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 hat, turned up in front, cut a straight line across his forehead, just over his half-open 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.

Tarwater got up and started moving 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 four 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 clearing and went under the barbed-wire fence and 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.