The boy blanched. In his mind’s eye he saw the old man, a dark shape standing behind the corner of the house, restraining his wheezing breath while he waited impatiently for him to baptize the dimwitted child. He stared shocked at the schoolteacher’s face. There was a wedge-shaped gash in his new uncle’s ear. The sight of it brought old Tarwater so close that the boy thought he could hear him laugh. With a terrible clarity he saw that the schoolteacher was no more than a decoy the old man had set up to lure him to the city to do his unfinished business.
His eyes began to burn in his fierce fragile face. A new energy seized him. “He’s dead,” he said. “You can’t be any deader than he is. He’s reduced to ashes. He don’t even have a cross set up over him. If it’s anything left of him, the buzzards wouldn’t have it and the bones the dogs’ll carry off. That’s how dead he is.”
The schoolteacher winced, but almost at once he was smiling again. He held Tarwater’s arms tightly and peered into his face as if he were beginning to see a solution, one that intrigued him with its symmetry and rightness. “It’s a perfect irony,” he murmured, “a perfect irony that you should have taken care of the matter in that way. He got what he deserved.”
The boy’s pride swelled. “I done the needful,” he said.
“Everything he touched he warped,” the schoolteacher said. “He lived a long and useless life and he did you a great injustice. It’s a blessing he’s dead at last. You could have had everything and you’ve had nothing. All that can be changed now. Now you belong to someone who can help you and understand you.” His eyes were alight with pleasure. “It’s not too late for me to make a man of you!”
The boy’s face darkened. His expression hardened until it was a fortress wall to keep his thoughts from being exposed; but the schoolteacher did not notice any change. He gazed through the actual insignificant boy before him to an image of him that he held fully developed in his mind.
“You and I will make up for lost time,” he said. “We’ll get you started now in the right direction.”
Tarwater was not looking at him. His neck had suddenly snapped forward and he was staring straight ahead over the schoolteacher’s shoulder. He heard a faint familiar sound of heavy breathing. It was closer to him than the beating of his own heart. His eyes widened and an inner door in them opened in preparation for some inevitable vision.
The small white-haired boy shambled into the back of the hall and stood peering forward at the stranger. He had on the bottoms to a pair of blue pajamas drawn up as high as they would go, the string tied over his chest and then again, harness-like, around his neck to keep them on. His eyes were slightly sunken beneath his forehead and his cheekbones were lower than they should have been. He stood there, dim and ancient, like a child who had been a child for centuries.
Tarwater clenched his fists. He stood like one condemned, waiting at the spot of execution. Then the revelation came, silent, implacable, direct as a bullet. He did not look into the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush. He only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair, that he was expected to baptize the child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle had prepared him for. He knew that he was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable. His black pupils, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf. The Lord out of dust had created him, had made him blood and nerve and mind, had made him to bleed and weep and think, and set him in a world of loss and fire all to baptize one idiot child that He need not have created in the first place and to cry out a gospel just as foolish. He tried to shout, “NO!” but it was like trying to shout in his sleep. The sound was saturated in silence, lost.
His uncle put a hand on his shoulder and shook him slightly to penetrate his inattention. “Listen boy,” he said, “getting out from under the old man is just like coming out of the darkness into the light. You’re going to have a chance now for the first time in your life. A chance to develop into a useful man, a chance to use your talents, to do what you want to do and not what he wanted—whatever idiocy it was.”
The boy’s eyes were focussed beyond him, the pupils dilated. The schoolteacher turned his head to see what it was that was keeping him from being responsive. His own face tightened. The little boy was creeping forward, grinning.
“That’s only Bishop,” he said. “He’s not all right. Don’t mind him. All he can do is stare at you and he’s very friendly. He stares at everything that way.” His hand tightened on the boy’s shoulder and his mouth stretched painfully. “All the things that I would do for him—if it were any use—I’ll do for you,” he said. “Now do you see why I’m so glad to have you here?”
The boy heard nothing he said. The muscles in his neck stood out like cables. The dimwitted child was not five feet from him and was coming every instant closer with his lopsided smile. Suddenly he knew that the child recognized him, that the old man himself had primed him from on high that here was the forced servant of God come to see that he was born again. The little boy was sticking out his hand to touch him.
“Git!” Tarwater screamed. His arm shot out like a whip and knocked the hand away. The child let out a bellow startlingly loud. He clambered up his father’s leg, pulling himself up by the schoolteacher’s pajama coat until he was almost on his shoulder.
“All right, all right,” the schoolteacher said, “there, there, shut up, it’s all right, he didn’t mean to hit you,” and he righted the child on his back and tried to slide him off but the little boy hung on, thrusting his head against his father’s neck and never taking his eyes off Tarwater.
The boy had a vision of the schoolteacher and his child as inseparably joined. The schoolteacher’s face was red and pained. The child might have been a deformed part of himself that had been accidentally revealed.
“You’ll get used to him,” he said.
“No!” the boy shouted. It was like a shout that had been waiting, straining to burst out. “I won’t get used to him! I won’t have anything to do with him!” He clenched his fist and lifted it. “I won’t have anything to do with him!” he shouted and the words were clear and positive and defiant like a challenge hurled in the face of his silent adversary.
IV
AFTER four days of Tarwater, the schoolteacher’s enthusiasm had passed. He would admit no more than that. It had passed the first day and had been succeeded by determination, and while he knew that determination was a less powerful tool, he thought that in this case, it was the one best fitted for the job. It had taken him barely half a day to find out that the old man had made a wreck of the boy and that what was called for was a monumental job of reconstruction. The first day enthusiasm had given him energy but ever since, determination had exhausted him.
Although it was only eight o’clock in the evening, he had put Bishop to bed and had told the boy that he could go to his room and read. He had bought him books, among other things still ignored. Tarwater had gone to his room and had closed the door, not saying whether he intended to read or not, and Rayber was in bed for the night, lying too exhausted to sleep, watching the late evening light fade through the hedge that grew in front of his window. He had left his hearing aid on so that if the boy tried to escape, he would hear and could go after him. For the last two days he had looked poised to leave, and not simply to leave but to be gone, silently and in the night when he would not be followed. This was the fourth night and the schoolteacher lay thinking, with a wry expression on his face, how it differed from the first.