“Let’s sit down,” he said, wanting both to rest and to observe the boy’s agitation. He sat down on a bench and stretched his legs in front of him. He suffered Bishop to climb into his lap. The child’s shoelaces were untied and he tied them, for the moment ignoring the boy who was standing there, his face furiously impatient. When he finished tying the shoes, he continued to hold the child, sprawled and grinning, in his lap. The little boy’s white head fitted under his chin. Above it Rayber looked at nothing in particular. Then he closed his eyes and in the isolating darkness, he forgot Tarwater’s presence. Without warning his hated love gripped him and held him in a vise. He should have known better than to let the child onto his lap.
His forehead became beady with sweat; he looked as if he might have been nailed to the bench. He knew that if he could once conquer this pain, face it and with a supreme effort of his will refuse to feel it, he would be a free man. He held Bishop rigidly. Although the child started the pain, he also limited it, contained it. He had learned this one terrible afternoon when he had tried to drown him.
He had taken him to the beach, two hundred miles away, intending to effect the accident as quickly as possible and return bereaved. It had been a beautiful calm day in May. The beach, almost empty, had stretched down into the gradual swell of ocean. There was nothing to be seen but an expanse of sea and sky and sand and an occasional figure, stick-like, in the distance. He had taken him out on his shoulders and when he was chest deep in the water, had lifted him off, swung the delighted child high in the air and then plunged him swiftly below the surface on his back and held him there, not looking down at what he was doing but up, at an impeturbable witnessing sky, not quite blue, not quite white.
A fierce surging pressure had begun upward beneath his hands and grimly he had exerted more and more force downward. In a second, he felt he was trying to hold a giant under. Astonished, he let himself look. The face under the water was wrathfully contorted, twisted by some primeval rage to save itself. Automatically he released his pressure. Then when he realized what he had done, he pushed down again angrily with all his force until the struggle ceased under his hands. He stood sweating in the water, his own mouth as slack as the child’s had been. The body, caught by an undertow, almost got away from him but he managed to come to himself and snatch it. Then as he looked at it, he had a moment of complete terror in which he envisioned his life without the child. He began to shout frantically. He plowed his way out of the water with the limp body. The beach which he had thought empty before had become peopled with strangers converging on him from all directions. A bald-headed man in red and blue Roman striped shorts began at once to administer artificial respiration. Three wailing women and a photographer appeared. The next day there had been a picture in the paper, showing the rescuer, striped bottom forward, working over the child. Rayber was beside him on his knees, watching with an agonized expression. The caption said, OVERJOYED FATHER SEES SON REVIVED.
The boy’s voice broke in on him harshly. “All you got to do is nurse an idiot!”
The schoolteacher opened his eyes. They were bloodshot and vague. He might have been returning to consciousness after a blow on the head.
Tarwater was glaring to the side of him. “Come on if you’re coming” he said, “and if you ain’t, I’m going on about my bidnis.”
Rayber didn’t answer.
“So long,” Tarwater said.
“And where would your business be?” Rayber asked sourly. “At another tabernacle?”
The boy reddened. He opened his mouth and said nothing.
“l nurse an idiot that you’re afraid to look at,” Rayber said. “Look him in the eye.”
Tarwater shot a glance at the top of Bishop’s head and left it there an instant like a finger on a candle flame. “I’d as soon be afraid to look at a dog,” he said and turned his back. After a moment, as if he were continuing the same conversation, he muttered, “I’d as soon baptize a dog as him. It would be as much use”
“Who said anything about baptizing anybody?” Rayber said. “Is that one of your fixations? Have you taken that bug up from the old man?”
The boy whirled around and faced him. “I told you I only gone there to spit on it,” he said tensely. “I ain’t going to tell you again.”
Rayber watched him without saying anything. He felt that his own sour words had helped him recover himself. He pushed Bishop off and stood up. “Let’s get going,” he said. He had no intention of discussing it further, but as they moved on silently, he thought better of it.
“Listen Frank,” he said, “I’ll grant that you went to spit on it. I’ve never for a second doubted your intelligence. Everything you’ve done, your very presence here proves that you’re above your background, that you’ve broken through the ceiling the old man set for you. After all, you escaped from Powderhead. You had the courage to attend to him the quickest way and then get out of there. And once out, you came directly to the right place.”
The boy reached up and picked a leaf from a tree branch and bit it. A wry expression spread over his face. He rolled the leaf into a ball and threw it away. Rayber continued to speak, his voice detached, as if he had no particular interest in the matter, and his were merely the voice of truth, as impersonal as air.
“Say that you went to spit on it,” he said, “the point is this: there’s no need to spit on it. It’s not worth spitting on. It’s not that important. You’ve somehow enlarged the significance of it in your mind. The old man used to enrage me until I learned better. He wasn’t worth my hate and he’s not worth yours. He’s only worth our pity.” He wondered if the boy were capable of the steadiness of pity. “You want to avoid extremes. They are for violent people and you don’t want… “—he broke off abruptly as Bishop let loose his hand and galloped away.
They had come out into the center of the park, a concrete circle with a fountain in the middle of it. Water rushed from the mouth of a stone lion’s head into a shallow pool and the little boy was flying toward it, his arms flailing like a windmill. In a second he was over the side and in. “Too late, goddammit,” Rayber muttered, “he’s in.” He glanced at Tarwater.
The boy stood arrested in the middle of a step. His eyes were on the child in the pool but they burned as if he beheld some terrible compelling vision. The sun shone brightly on Bishop’s white head and the little boy stood there with a look of attention. Tarwater began to move toward him.
He seemed to be drawn toward the child in the water but to be pulling back, exerting an almost equal pressure away from what attracted him. Rayber watched, puzzled and suspicious, moving along with him but somewhat to the side. As he drew closer to the pool, the skin on the boy’s face appeared to stretch tighter and tighter. Rayber had the sense that he was moving blindly, that where Bishop was he saw only a spot of light. He felt that something was being enacted before him and that if he could understand it, he would have the key to the boy’s future. His muscles were tensed and he was prepared somehow to act. Suddenly his sense of danger was so great that he cried out. In an instant of illumination he understood. Tarwater was moving toward Bishop to baptize him. Already he had reached the edge of the pool. Rayber sprang and snatched the child out of the water and set him down, howling, on the concrete.
His heart was beating furiously. He felt that he had just saved the boy from committing some enormous indignity. He saw it all now. The old man had transferred his fixation to the boy, had left him with the notion that he must baptize Bishop or suffer some terrible consequence. Tarwater put his foot down on the marble edge of the pool. He leaned forward, his elbow on his knee, looking over the side at his broken reflection in the water. His lips moved as if he were speaking silently to the face forming in the pool. Rayber said nothing. He realized now the magnitude of the boy’s affliction. He knew that there was no way to appeal to him with reason. There was no hope of discussing it sanely with him, for it was a compulsion. He saw no way of curing him except perhaps through some shock, some sudden concrete confrontation with the futility, the ridiculous absurdity of performing the empty rite.