The schoolteacher had spent four days in the clearing because his mother had not missed him for three days and when Luella Munson had mentioned where he had gone, she had to wait another day before his father came home and she could send him after the child. She would not come herself, the old man said, for fear the wrath of God would strike her at Powderhead and she would not be able to get back to the city again. She had wired the schoolteacher’s father and when the simpleton arrived at the clearing, the schoolteacher was in despair at having to leave. The light had left his eyes. He had gone but the old man insisted that he had been able to tell by the look on his face that he would never be the same boy again.
“If he didn’t say he didn’t want to go, you can’t be sure he didn’t,” Tarwater would say contentiously.
“Then why did he try to come back?” the old man asked. “Answer me that. Why one week later did he run away and try to find his way back and got his picture in the paper when the state patrol found him in the woods? I ask you why. Tell me that if you know so much.”
“Because here was less bad than there,” Tarwater said. “Less bad don’t mean good, it only means better-than.”
“He tried to come back,” his uncle said slowly, emphasizing each word, “to hear more about God his Father, more about Jesus Christ Who had died to redeem him and more of the Truth I could tell him.”
“Well go on,” Tarwater would say irritably, “get on with the rest of it.” The story always had to be taken to completion. It was like a road that the boy had travelled on so often that half the time he didn’t look where they were going, and when at certain points he would become aware where they were, he would be surprised to see that the old man had not got farther on with it. Sometimes his uncle would lag at one point as if he didn’t want to face what was coming and then when he finally came to it, he would try to get past it in a rush. At such points, Tarwater plagued him for details. “Tell about when he came when he was fourteen years old and had already decided none of it was true and he give you all that sass.”
“Bah,” the old man would say. “He was living in confusion. I don’t say it was his fault then. They told him I was a crazy man. But I’ll tell you one thing: he never believed them neither. They kept him from believing me but I kept him from believing them and he never took on none of their ways though he took on worse ones. And when he got shut of the three of them in that crash, nobody was gladder than he was. Then he turned his mind to raising you. Said he was going to give you every advantage, every advantage.” The old man snorted. “You have me to thank for saving you from those advantages.”
The boy looked off into the distance as though he were staring blankly at his invisible advantages.
“When he got shut of the three of them in that crash, this was the first place he came. On the very day they were killed he came out here to tell me. Straight out here. Yes sir,” the old man said with the greatest satisfaction, “straight out here. He hadn’t seen me in years but this is where he came. I was the one he came to. I was the one he wanted to see. Me. I had never left his mind. I had taken my seat in it.”
“You skipped all that part about how he came when he was fourteen and give you all that sass,” Tarwater said.
“It was sass he had got from them,” the old man said. “Just parrot-mouthing all they had ever said about how I was a crazy man. The truth was even if they told him not to believe what I had taught him, he couldn’t forget it. He never could forget that there was a chance that that simpleton was not his only father. I planted the seed in him and it was there for good. Whether anybody liked it or not.”
“It fell amongst cockles,” Tarwater said. “Say the sass.”
“It fell in deep,” the old man said, “or else after that crash he wouldn’t have come out here hunting me.
“He only wanted to see if you were still crazy,” the boy offered.
“The day may come,” his great-uncle said slowly, “when a pit opens up inside you and you know some things you never known before,” and he would give him such a prescient piercing look that the child would turn his face away, scowling fiercely.
His great-uncle had gone to live with the schoolteacher and as soon as he had got there, he had baptized Tarwater, practically under the schoolteacher’s nose and the schoolteacher had made a blasphemous joke of it. But the old man could never tell this straight through. He always had to back up and tell why he had gone to live with the schoolteacher in the first place. He had gone for three reasons. One, he said, because he knew the schoolteacher wanted him. He was the only person in the schoolteacher’s life who had ever taken two steps out of his way in his behalf. And two, because his nephew was the proper person to bury him and he wanted to have it understood with him how he wanted it done. And three, because the old man meant to see that Tarwater was baptized.
“I know all that,” the boy would say, “get on with the rest of it.”
“After the three of them perished and the house was his, he cleared it out,” old Tarwater said. “He moved every stick of furniture out of it except a table and a chair or two and a bed or two and the crib he bought for you. Taken down all the pictures and all the curtains and taken up all the rugs. Even burned up all his mother’s and sister’s and the simpleton’s clothes, didn’t want a thing of theirs around. It wasn’t anything left but books and papers that he had collected. Papers everywhere,” the old man said. “Every room looked like the inside of a bird’s nest. I came a few days after the crash and when he saw me standing there, he was glad to see me. His eyes lit up. He was glad to see me. ‘Ha,’ he said, ‘my house is swept and garnished and here are the seven other devils, all rolled into one!’” The old man slapped his knee with pleasure.
“It don’t sound to me like…”
“No, he didn’t say so,” he uncle said, “but I ain’t an idiot.”
“If he didn’t say so you can’t be sure.”
“I’m as sure,” his uncle said, “as I am that this here,” and he held up his hand, every short thick finger stretched rigid in front of Tarwater’s face, “is my hand and not yours.” There was something final in this that always made the boy’s impudence subside.
“Well get on with it,” he would say. “If you don’t make haste, you’ll never get to where he blasphemed at.”
“He was glad to see me,” his uncle said. “He opened the door with all that house full of paper-trash behind him and there I stood and he was glad to see me. It was all underneath his face.”
“What did he say?” Tarwater asked.
“He looked at my satchel,” the old man said, “and he said, ‘Uncle, you can’t live with me. I know exactly what you want but I’m going to raise this child my way.’”
These words of the schoolteacher’s had always caused a quick charge of excitement to race through Tarwater, an almost sensuous satisfaction. “It might have sounded to you like he was glad to see you,” he said. “It don’t sound that way to me.”
“He wasn’t but twenty-four years old,” the old man said. “His expression hadn’t even set on his face yet. I could still see the seven-year-old boy that had gone off with me, except that now he had a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a nose big enough to hold them up. The size of his eyes had shrunk because his face had grown but it was the same face all right. You could see behind it to what he really wanted to say. When he came out here later to get you back after I had stolen you, it was already set. It was as set then as the outside of a penitentiary but not now when I’m telling you about. Then it wasn’t set and I could see he wanted me. Else why had he come out to Powderhead to tell me they were all dead? I ask you that? He could have let me alone.”
The boy couldn’t answer.
“Anyway,” the old man said, “what all he gone on and done proved he wanted me right then because he took me in. He looked at my satchel and I said, ‘I’m on your charity,’ and he said, ‘I’m sorry, Uncle. You can’t live with me and ruin another child’s life. This one is going to be brought up to live in the real world. He’s going to be brought up to expect exactly what he can do for himself. He’s going to be his own saviour. He’s going to be free!’” The old man turned his head to the side and spit. “Free,” he said. “He was full of such-like phrases. But then I said it. I said what changed his mind.”
The boy sighed at this. The old man considered it his master stroke. He had said, “I never come to live with you. I come to die!”
“And you should have seen his face,” he said. “He looked like he’d been pushed all of a sudden from behind. He hadn’t cared if the other three were wiped out but when he thought of me going, it was like he was losing somebody for the first time. He stood there staring at me.” And once, only once, the old man had leaned forward and said to Tarwater, in a voice that could no longer contain the pleasure of its secret, “He loved me like a daddy and he was ashamed of it!”
The boy’s face had remained unmoved. “Yes,” he said, “and you had told him a bare-face lie. You never had no intention of dying.”
“I was sixty-nine years of age,” his uncle said. “I could have died the next day as well as not. No man knows the hour of his death. I didn’t have my life in front of me. It was not a lie, it was only a speculation. I told him, I said, ‘I may live two months or two days.’ And I had on my clothes that I bought to be buried in—all new.”
“Ain’t it that same suit you got on now?” the boy asked indignantly, pointing to the threadbare knee. “Ain’t it that one you got on yourself right now?”
“I may live two months or two days, I said to him,” his uncle said.
Or ten years or twenty, Tarwater thought.
“Oh it was a shock to him,” the old man said.
It might have been a shock, the boy thought, but he wasn’t all that sorry about it. The schoolteacher had merely said, “So I’m to put you away, Uncle? All right, I’ll put you away. I’ll do it with pleasure. I’ll put you away for good and all,” but the old man insisted that his words were one thing and his actions and the look on his face another.
His great-uncle had not been in the nephew’s house ten minutes before he had baptized Tarwater. They had gone into the room where the crib was with Tarwater in it and as the old man looked at him for the first time—a wizened grey-faced scrawny sleeping baby—the voice of the Lord had come to him and said:
HERE IS THE PROPHET TO TAKE YOUR PLACE. BAPTIZE HIM.
That? the old man had asked, that wizened grey-faced … and then as he wondered how he could baptize him with the nephew standing there, the Lord had sent the paper boy to knock on the door and the schoolteacher had gone to answer it.
When he came back in a few minutes, his uncle was holding Tarwater in one hand and with the other he was pouring water over his head out of the bottle that had been on the table by the crib. He had pulled off the nipple and stuck it in his pocket. He was just finishing the words of baptism as the schoolteacher came back in the door and he had had to laugh when he looked up and saw his nephew’s face. It looked hacked, the old man said. Not even angry at first, just hacked.
Old Tarwater had said, “He’s been born again and there ain’t a thing you can do about it,” and then he had seen the rage rise in the nephew’s face and had seen him try to conceal it.
“Time has passed you by, Uncle,” the nephew said. “That can’t even irritate me. That only makes me laugh,” and he laughed, a short forced bark, but the old man said his face was mottled. “Just as well you did it now,” he said. “If you had got me when I was seven days instead of seven years, you might not have ruined my life.”
“If it’s ruined,” the old man said, “it wasn’t me that ruined it.”
“Oh yes it was,” the nephew said, advancing across the room, his face very red. “You’re too blind to see what you did to me. A child can’t defend himself. Children are cursed with believing. You pushed me out of the real world and I stayed out of it until I didn’t know which was which. You infected me with your idiot hopes, your foolish violence. I’m not always myself, I’m not al…” but he stopped. He wouldn’t admit what the old man knew. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said. “I’ve straightened the tangle you made. Straightened it by pure will power. I’ve made myself straight.”
“You see,” the old man said, “he admitted himself the seed was still in him.”
Old Tarwater had laid the baby back in the crib but the nephew took him out again, a peculiar smile, the old man said, stiffening on his face. “If one baptism is good, two will be better,” he said and he had turned Tarwater over and poured what was left in the bottle over his bottom and said the words of baptism again. Old Tarwater had stood there, aghast at this blasphemy. “Now Jesus has a claim on both ends,” the nephew said.
The old man had roared, “Blasphemy never changed a plan of the Lord’s!”
“And the Lord hasn’t changed any of mine either,” said the nephew coolly and put the baby back.
“And what did I do?” Tarwater asked.
“You didn’t do nothing,” the old man said as if what he did or didn’t do was of no consequence whatsoever.
“It was me that was the prophet,” the boy said sullenly.
“You didn’t even know what was going on,” his uncle said.
“Oh yes I did,” the child said. “I was laying there thinking.”
His uncle would ignore this and go on. He had thought for a while that by living with the schoolteacher, he might convince him again of all that he had convinced him of when he had kidnapped him as a child and he had had hope of it up until the time when the schoolteacher showed him the study he had written of him for the magazine. Then the old man had realized at last that there was no hope of his doing anything for the schoolteacher. He had failed the schoolteacher’s mother and he had failed the schoolteacher, and now there was nothing to do but try to save Tarwater from being brought up by a fool. In this he had not failed.
The boy felt that the schoolteacher could have made more of an effort to get him back. He had come out and got shot in the leg and the ear but if he had used his head, he might have avoided that and got him back at the same time. “Why didn’t he bring the law out here and get me back?” he had asked.