Rayber looked at the woman helplessly and lifted his shoulders as if to say, “I have more than one problem,” and shrug it off, but the gesture ended in a violent tremor. To his horror he felt the side of his mouth give a series of quick jerks. He had an instant’s premonition that if he wished to save himself, he should leave at once, that the trip was doomed.
The woman handed him the key and, looking at him suspiciously, said, “Up the steps yonder and four doors down to the right. We don’t have anybody to tote the bags.”
He took the key and started up a rickety flight of steps to the left. Hallway up, he paused and said in a voice in which there was a remnant of authority, “Bring up that bag when you come, Frank.”
The boy was finishing his essay on the card and gave no indication of hearing.
The woman’s curious gaze followed Rayber up the stairs until he disappeared. She observed as his feet passed the level of her head that he had on one brown sock and one grey. His shoes were not run-down but he might have slept in his seersucker suit every night. He was in bad need of a haircut and his eyes had a peculiar look—like something human trapped in a switch box. Has come here to have a nervous breakdown, she said to herself. Then she turned her head. Her eyes rested on the two boys, who had not moved. And who wouldn’t? she asked herself.
The afflicted child looked as if he must have dressed himself. He had on a black cowboy hat and a pair of short khaki pants that were too tight even for his narrow hips and a yellow t-shirt that had not been washed any time lately. Both his brown hightop shoes were untied. The upper part of him looked like an old man and the lower part like a child. The other, the mean-looking one, had picked up the desk card again and was reading over what he had written on it. He was so taken up with it that he did not see the little boy reaching out to touch him. The instant the child touched him, the country boy’s shoulders leapt. He snatched his touched hand up and jammed it in his pocket. “Leave off!” he said in a high voice. “Git away and quit bothering me!”
“Mind how you talk to one of them there, you boy!” the woman hissed.
He looked at her as if it were the first time she had spoken to him. “Them there what?” he murmured.
“That there kind,” she said, looking at him fiercely as if he had profaned the holy.
He looked back at the afflicted child and the woman was startled by the expression on his face. He seemed to see the little boy and nothing else, no air around him, no room, no nothing, as if his gaze had slipped and fallen into the center of the child’s eyes and was still falling down and down and down. The little boy turned after a second and skipped off toward the steps and the country boy followed, so directly that he might have been attached to him by a tow-line. The child began to scramble up the steps on his hands and knees, kicking his feet up on each one.
Then suddenly he flipped himself around and sat down squarely in the country boy’s way and stuck his feet out in front of him, apparently wanting his shoes tied. The country boy stopped still. He hung over him like some one bewitched, his long arms bent uncertainly.
The woman watched fascinated. He ain’t going to tie them, she said, not him.
He leaned over and began to tie them. Frowning furiously, he tied one and then the other and the child watched, completely absorbed in the operation. When the boy finished tying them, he straightened himself and said in a querulous voice, “Now git on and quit bothering me with them laces,” and the child flipped over on his hands and feet and scrambled up the stairs, making a great din.
Confused by this kindness, the woman called, “Hey boy.”
She had intended to say, “Whose boy are you?” but she said nothing, her mouth opening on a vanished sentence. His eyes as they turned and looked down at her were the color of the lake just before dark when the last daylight has faded and the moon has not risen yet, and for an instant she thought she saw something fleeing across the surface of them, a lost light that came from nowhere and vanished into nothing. For some moments they stared at each other without issue. Finally, convinced she had not seen it. she muttered, “Whatever devil’s work you mean to do, don’t do it here.”
He continued to look down at her. “You can’t just say NO,” he said. “You got to do NO. You got to show it. You got to show you mean it by doing it. You got to show you’re not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another.”
“Don’t you do nothing here,” she said, wondering what he would do here.
“I never ast to come here,” he said. “I never ast for that lake to be set down in front of me,” and he turned and moved on up the stairs.
The woman looked in front of her for some time as if she were seeing her own thoughts before her like unintelligible handwriting on the wall. Then she looked down at the card on the counter and turned it over. “Francis Marion Tarwater,” he had written. “Powderhead, Tennessee. NOT HIS SON.”
VIII
AFTER they had had their lunch, the schoolteacher suggested they get a boat and fish awhile. Tarwater could tell that he was watching him again, his little eyes protected and precise behind his glasses. He had been watching him ever since he came but now he was watching in a different way: he was watching for something that he planned to make happen. The trip was designed to be a trap but the boy had no attention to spare for it. His mind was entirely occupied with saving himself from the larger grander trap that he felt set all about him. Ever since his first night in the city when he had seen once and for all that the schoolteacher was of no significance—nothing but a piece of bait, an insult to his intelligence—his mind had been engaged in a continual struggle with the silence that confronted him, that demanded he baptize the child and begin at once the life the old man had prepared him for.
It was a strange waiting silence. It seemed to lie all around him like an invisible country whose borders he was always on the edge of, always in danger of crossing. From time to time as they had walked in the city, he had looked to the side and seen his own form alongside him in a store window, transparent as a snakeskin. It moved beside him like some violent ghost who had already crossed over and was reproaching him from the other side. If he turned his head the opposite way, there would be the dimwitted boy, hanging onto the schoolteacher’s coat, watching him. His mouth hung in a lopsided smile but there was a judging sternness about his forehead. The boy never looked lower than the top of his head except by accident for the silent country appeared to be reflected again in the center of his eyes. It stretched out there, limitless and clear.
Tarwater could have baptized him anyone of a hundred times without so much as touching him. Each time the temptation came, he would feel that the silence was about to surround him and he was going to be lost in it forever. He would have fallen but for the wise voice that sustained him—the stranger who had kept him company while he dug his uncle’s grave.
Sensations, his friend—no longer a stranger—said. Feelings. What you want is a sign, a real sign, suitable to a prophet. If you are a prophet, it’s only right you should be treated like one. When Jonah dallied, he was cast three days in a belly of darkness and vomited up in the place of his mission. That was a sign; it wasn’t no sensation.
It takes all my time to set you straight. Look at you, he said—going to that fancy-house of God. sitting there like an ape letting that girl-child bend your ear. What did you expect to see there? What did you expect to hear? The Lord speaks to prophets personally and He’s never spoke to you, never lifted a finger, never dropped a gesture. And as for that strangeness in your gut, that comes from you, not the Lord. When you were a child you had worms. As likely as not you have them again.