He squatted down and began to take off Bishop’s wet shoes. The child had stopped howling and was crying quietly, his face red and hideously distorted. Rayber turned his eyes away.
Tarwater was walking off. He was past the pool, his back strangely bent as if he were being driven away with a whip. He was moving off onto one of the narrow tree-shaded paths.
“Wait!” Rayber shouted. “We can’t go to the museum now. We’ll have to go home and change Bishop’s shoes.”
Tarwater could not have failed to hear but he kept on walking and in a second was lost to view.
Goddam backwoods imbecile, Rayber said under his breath. He stood looking at the path where the boy had disappeared. He felt no urge to go after him for he knew that he would be back, that he was held by Bishop. His feeling of oppression was caused now by the certain knowledge that there was no way to get rid of him. He would be with them until he had either accomplished what he came for, or until he was cured. The words the old man had scrawled on the back of the journal rose before him: THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN. The sentence was like a challenge renewed. I will cure him, he said grimly. I will cure him or know the reason why.
VII
THE Cherokee Lodge was a two-story converted warehouse, the lower part painted white and the upper green. One end sat on land and the other was set on stilts in a glassy little lake across which were dense woods, green and black farther toward the skyline, grey-blue. The long front side of the building, plastered with beer and cigaret signs, faced the highway, which ran about thirty feet away across a dirt road and beyond a narrow stretch of iron weed. Rayber had passed the place before but had never been tempted to stop.
He had selected it because it was only thirty miles from Powderhead and because it was cheap and he arrived there the next day with the two boys in time for them to take a walk and look around before they ate. The ride up had been oppressively silent, the boy sitting as usual on his side of the car like some foreign dignitary who would not admit speaking the language—the filthy hat, the stinking overalls, worn defiantly like a national costume.
Rayber had hit upon his plan in the night. It was to take him back to Powderhead and make him face what he had done. What he hoped was that if seeing and feeling the place again were a real shock, the boy’s trauma might suddenly be revealed. His irrational fears and impulses would burst out and his uncle—sympathetic, knowing, uniquely able to understand—would be there to explain them to him. He had not said they were going to Powderhead. So far as the boy knew, this was to be a fishing trip. He thought that an afternoon of relaxation in a boat before the experiment would help ease the tension, his own as well as Tarwater’s.
On the drive up, his thoughts had been interrupted once when he saw Bishop’s face rise unorganized into the rearview mirror and then disappear as he attempted to crawl over the top of the front seat and climb into Tarwater’s lap. The boy had turned and without looking at him had given the panting child a firm push onto the back seat again. One of Raybers immediate goals was to make him understand that his urge to baptize the child was a kind of sickness and that a sign of returning health would be his ability to begin looking Bishop in the eye. Rayber felt that once he could look the child in the eye, he would have confidence in his ability to resist the morbid impulse to baptize him.
When they got out of the car, he watched the boy closely, trying to discover his first reaction to being in the country again. Tarwater stood for a moment, his head lifted sharply as if he detected some familiar odor moving from the pine forest across the lake. His long face, depending from the bulb-shaped hat, made Rayber think of a root jerked suddenly out of the ground and exposed to the light. The boy’s eyes narrowed so that the lake must have been reduced to the width of a knife-blade in his sight. He looked at the water with a peculiar undisguised hostility. Rayber even thought that as his eye fell on it, he began to tremble. At least he was certain that his hands clenched. His glare steadied, then with his usual precipitous gait, he set off around the building without looking back.
Bishop climbed out of the car and thrust his face against his father’s side. Absently Rayber put his hand on the little boy’s ear and rubbed it gingerly, his fingers tingling as if they touched the sensitive scar of some old wound. Then he pushed the child aside, picked up the bag and started toward the screen door of the lodge. As he reached it, Tarwater came quickly around the side of the building with the distinct look to Rayber of being pursued. His feeling for the boy alternated drastically between compassion for his haunted look and fury at the way he was treated by him. Tarwater acted as if to see him at all required a special effort. Rayber opened the screen door and stepped inside, leaving the two boys to come in or not as they pleased.
The interior was dark. To the left he made out a reception desk with a heavy plain-looking woman behind it, leaning on her elbows. He set the bags down and gave her his name. He had the feeling that though her eyes were on him, they were looking behind him. He glanced around. Bishop was a few feet away, gaping at her.
“What’s your name, Sugarpie?” she asked.
“His name is Bishop,” Rayber said shortly. He was always irked when the child was stared at.
The woman tilted her head sympathetically. “I reckon you’re taking him off to give his mother a little rest,” she said, her eyes full of curiosity and compassion.
“I have him all the time,” he said and added before he could stop himself, “his mother abandoned him.”
“No!” she breathed. Well,” she said, “it takes all kinds of women. I couldn’t leave a child like that.”
You can’t even take your eyes off him, he thought irritably and began to fill out the card. “Are the boats for rent?” he asked without looking up.
“Free for the guests,” she said, “but anybody gets drowned, that’s their lookout. How about him? Can he sit still in a boat?”
“Nothing ever happens to him,” he murmured, finishing the card and turning it around to her.
She read it, then she glanced up and stared at Tarwater. He was standing a few feet behind Bishop, looking around him suspiciously, his hands in his pockets and his hat pulled down. She began to scowl “That boy there—is yours too?” she asked, pointing the pen at him as if this were inconceivable.
Rayber realized that she must think he was someone hired for a guide. “Certainly, he’s mine too,” he said quickly and in a voice the boy could not fail to hear. He made it a point to impress on him that he was wanted, whether he cared to be wanted or not.
Tarwater lifted his head and returned the woman’s stare. Then he took a stride forward and thrust his face at her. “What do you mean—is his?” he demanded.
“Is his,” she said, drawing back. “You don’t look it is all.” Then she frowned as if, continuing to study him, she began to see a likeness.
“And I ain’t it,” he said. He snatched the card from her and read it. Rayber had written, “George F. Rayber, Frank and Bishop Rayber,” and their address. The boy put the card down on the desk and picked up the pen, gripping it so hard that his fingers turned red at the tips. He crossed out the name Frank and underneath in an old man’s meticulous hand he began to write something else.