The old man kept straining forward as if his blood scent were leading him closer and closer to the place where his enemy was hiding. He suddenly turned up the short walk of a pale yellow brick house and moved rigidly to the white door, his heavy shoulders hunched as if he were going to crash through it. He struck the wood with his fist, ignoring a polished brass knocker. At that instant Tarwater realized that this was where the schoolteacher lived, and he stopped where he was and remained rigid, his eye on the door. He knew by some obscure instinct that the door was going to open and reveal his destiny. In his mind’s eye, he saw the schoolteacher about to appear in it, lean and evil, waiting to engage whom the Lord would send to conquer him. The boy clamped his teeth together to keep them from chattering. The door opened.
A small pink-faced boy stood in it with his mouth hung in a silly smile. He had white hair and a knobby forehead. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had pale silver eyes like the old man’s except that they were clear and empty. He was gnawing on a brown apple core.
The old man stared at him, his lips parting slowly until his mouth hung open. He looked as if he beheld an unspeakable mystery. The little boy made an unintelligible noise and pushed the door almost shut, hiding himself all but one spectacled eye.
Suddenly a tremendous indignation seized Tarwater. He eyed the small face peering from the crack. He searched his mind fiercely for the right word to hurl at it. Finally he said in a slow emphatic voice, “Before you was here, I was here.”
The old man caught his shoulder and pulled him back. “He don’t have good sense,” he said. “Can’t you see he don’t have good sense? He don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The boy grew more furious than ever. He swung around on his heel to leave.
“Wait,” his uncle said and caught him. “Get behind that hedge yonder and hide yourself. I’m going in there and baptize him,’”
Tarwater’s mouth was agape.
“Get behind there like I told you,” he said and gave him a push toward the hedge. Then the old man braced himself. He turned and went back to the door. Just as he reached it, it was flung open and a lean young man with heavy black-rimmed spectacles stood in it, his head thrust forward, glaring at him.
Old Tarwater raised his fist. “The Lord Jesus Christ sent me to baptize that boy!” he shouted. “Stand aside. I mean to do it!”
Tarwater’s head popped up from behind the hedge.
Breathlessly he took the schoolteacher in—the narrow boney face slanting backwards from the jutting jaw, the hair that receded from the high forehead, the eyes encircled in glass. The white-haired child had caught hold of his father’s leg and was hanging onto it. The schoolteacher pushed him back inside the house. Then he stepped outside and slammed the door behind him and continued to glare at the old man as if he dared him to take a step.
“That boy cries out for his baptism,” the old man said. “Precious in the sight of the Lord even an idiot!”
“Get off my property,” the nephew said in a tight voice as if he were keeping it calm by force. “If you don’t, I’ll have you put back in the asylum where you belong.”
“You can’t touch the servant of the Lord!” the old man hollered.
“You get away from here!” the nephew shouted losing control of his voice. “Ask the Lord why He made him an idiot in the first place, uncle. Tell him I want to know why!”
The boy’s heart was beating so fast he was afraid it was going to gallop out of his chest and disappear forever. He was head and shoulders out of the shrubbery.
“Yours not to ask!” the old man shouted. “Yours not to question the mind of the Lord God Almighty. Yours not to grind the Lord into your head and spit out a number!”
“Where’s the boy?” the nephew asked, looking around suddenly as if he had just thought of it. “Where’s the boy you were going to raise into a prophet to burn my eyes clean?” and he laughed.
Tarwater lowered his head into the bush again, instantly disliking the schoolteacher’s laugh which seemed to reduce him to the least importance.
“His day is going to come,” the old man said. “Either him or me is going to baptize that child. If not me in my day, him in his.”
“You’ll never lay a hand on him,” the schoolteacher said. “You could slosh water on him for the rest of his life and he’d still be an idiot. Five years old for all eternity, useless forever. Listen,” he said, and the boy heard his taut voice turn low with a kind of subdued intensity, a passion equal and opposite to the old man’s, “he’ll never be baptized—just as a matter of principle, nothing else. As a gesture of human dignity, he’ll never be baptized.”
“Time will discover the hand that baptizes him,” the old man said.
“Time will discover it,” the nephew said and opened the door behind him and stepped back inside and slammed it on himself.
The boy had risen from the shrubbery, his head swirling with excitement. He had never been back there again, never seen his cousin again, never seen the schoolteacher again, and he hoped to God, he told the stranger digging the grave along with him now that he would never see him again though he had nothing against him himself and he would dislike to have to kill him but if he came out here, messing in what was none of his business except by law, then he would be obliged to.
Listen, the stranger said, what would he want to come out here for—where there’s nothing?
Tarwater didn’t answer. He didn’t search out the stranger’s face but he knew by now that it was sharp and friendly and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed panama hat that obscured the color of his eyes. He had lost his dislike for the thought of the voice. Only every now and then it sounded like a stranger’s voice to him. He began to feel that he was only just now meeting himself, as if as long as his uncle had lived, he had been deprived of his own acquaintance. I ain’t denying the old man was a good one, his new friend said, but like you said: you can’t be any poorer than dead. They have to take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his body is not going to feel the pinch, of fire or anything else.
“It was the last day he was thinking of,” Tarwater murmured.
Well now, the stranger said, don’t you think any cross you set up in the year 1952 would be rotted out by the year the Day of Judgment comes in? Rotted to as much dust as his ashes if you reduced him to ashes? And lemme ast you this: what’s God going to do with sailors drowned at sea that the fish have et and the fish that et them et by other fish and they et by yet others? And what about people that get burned up naturally in house fires? Burnt up one way or another or lost in machines until they’re pulp? And all those sojers blasted to nothing? What about all those that there’s nothing left of to burn or bury?
If I burnt him, Tarwater said, it wouldn’t be natural, it would be deliberate.
Oh I see, the stranger said. It ain’t the Day of Judgment for him you’re worried about. It’s the Day of Judgment for you.
That’s my bidnis, Tarwater said.
I ain’t buttin into your bidnis, the stranger said. It don’t mean a thing to me. You’re left by yourself in this empty place. Forever by yourself in this empty place with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in. You don’t mean a thing to a soul as far as I can see.