The Violent Bear It Away (16 page)

Rayber made a frantic grabbing motion in the boat and cried out. Then he reddened and scowled. “Don’t look,” he said, “she’ll take care of him. We need a break.”

The boy gazed darkly where the accident had been prevented. The child was a black spot in the glare of his vision. The woman turned him around and started leading him back to the lodge. “It wouldn’t have been no great loss if he had drowned,” he observed.

Rayber had an instant’s picture of himself, standing in the ocean, holding the child’s limp body in his arms. With a kind of convulsive motion, he cleared his head of the image. Then he saw that Tarwater had observed his discomposure; he was looking at him with a distinct attention, a peculiar prescient look as if he were about to penetrate some secret.

“Nothing ever happens to that kind of child,” Rayber said. “In a hundred years people may have learned enough to put them to sleep when they’re born.”

Something appeared to be working on the boy’s face, struggling there, some war between agreement and outrage.

Rayber’s blood burned beneath his skin. He tried to restrain the urge to confess. He leaned forward; his mouth opened and closed and then in a dry voice he said, “Once I tried to drown him,” and grinned horribly at the boy.

Tarwater’s lips parted as if only they had heard, but he said nothing.

“It was a failure of nerve,” Rayber said. The glare on the water gave him the sensation of glancing at white fire each time he looked up or out where it was reflected on the water. He turned down the brim of his hat all the way around.

“You didn’t have the guts,” Tarwater said as if he would put it in a more accurate way. “He always told me you couldn’t do nothing, couldn’t act.”

The schoolteacher leaned forward and said between his teeth, “I’ve resisted him. I’ve done that. What have you done? Maybe you attended to him the quickest way but it takes more than that to go against his will for good. Are you quite sure,” he said, “are you quite sure you’ve overcome him? I doubt it. I think you’re chained to him right now. I think you’re not going to be free of him without my help. I think you’ve got problems that you’re not capable of solving yourself.”

The boy scowled and was silent.

The glare pierced Rayber’s eyeballs fiercely. He did not think he could stand an afternoon of this. He felt recklessly compelled to pursue the subject. “How do you like being in the country again?” he growled. “Remind you of Powderhead?”

“I come to fish,” the boy said disagreeably.

Goddam you, his uncle thought, all I’m trying to do is save you from being a freak. He was holding his line unbaited in the blinding water. He felt a madness on him to talk about the old man. “I remember the first time I ever saw him,” he said. “I was six or seven. I was out in the yard playing and all of a sudden I felt something between me and the sun. Him. I looked up and there he was, those mad fish-coloured eyes looking down at me. Do you know what he said to me—a seven year old child?” He tried to make his voice sound like the old man’s. “‘Listen boy,’ he said, `the Lord Jesus Christ sent me to find you. You have to be born again.’” He laughed, glaring at the boy with his furious blistered-looking eyes. “The Lord Jesus Christ had my welfare so at heart that he sent a personal representative. Where was the calamity? The calamity was I believed him. For five or six years. I had nothing else but that. I waited on the Lord Jesus. I thought I’d been born again and that everything was going to be different or was different already because the Lord Jesus had a great interest in me.”

Tarwater shifted on the seat. He seemed to listen as if behind a wall.

“It was the eyes that got me,” Rayber said. “Children may be attracted to mad eyes. A grown person could have resisted. A child couldn’t. Children are cursed with believing.”

The boy recognized the sentence. “Some ain’t,” he said.

The schoolteacher smiled thinly. “And some who think they aren’t are,” he said, feeling that he was back in control. “It’s not as easy as you think to throw it off. Do you know,” he said, “that there’s a part of your mind that works all the time, that you’re not aware of yourself. Things go on in it. All sorts of things you don’t know about.”

Tarwater looked around him as if he were vainly searching for a way to get out of the boat and walk off.

“I think you’re basically very bright,” his uncle said. “I think you can understand the things that are said to you.”

“I never came for no school lesson,” the boy said rudely. “I come to fish. I ain’t worried what my underhead is doing. I know what I think when I do it and when I get ready to do it, I don’t talk no words. I do it.” There was a dull anger in his voice. He was becoming aware of how much he had eaten. The food appeared to be sinking like a leaden column inside him and to be pushed back at the same time by the hunger it had intruded upon.

The schoolteacher watched him a moment and then said, “Well anyway, as far as the baptizing went, the old man could have spared himself. I was already baptized. My mother never overcame her upbringing and she had had it done. But the damage to me of having it done at the age of seven was tremendous. It made a lasting scar.”

The boy looked up suddenly as if there had been a tug at his line. “Him back there,” he said and jerked his head toward the lodge, “he ain’t been baptized?”

“No,” Rayber said. He looked at him narrowly. He thought that if he could get the right words in now, he might do some good, might give him a painless lesson. “I may not have the guts to drown him,” he said, “but I have the guts to maintain my self-respect and not to perform futile rites over him. I have the guts not to become the prey of superstitions. He is what he is and there’s nothing for him to be born into. My guts,” he finished, “are in my head.”

The boy only stared at him, his eyes filmed with a dull cast of nausea.

“The great dignity of man,” his uncle said, “is his ability to say: I am born once and no more. What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it. It’s enough to be a man.” There was a light ring in his voice. He watched the boy closely to see if he had struck a chord.

Tarwater turned an expressionless face toward the rim of trees that made a paling around the lake. He appeared to stare into emptiness.

Rayber subsided again but he could stand it only a few minutes. He finished the cigaret and lit another. Then he decided to start off on a new tack and leave the morbid alone for a while. “I’ll tell you what I’ve planned for us to do in a couple of weeks,” he said in an almost affable tone. “We’re going up for a plane ride. How about that?” He had been considering this, holding it in reserve, thinking it would be the greatest marvel he could produce, something that would surely stir the glum child out of himself.

There was no response. The boy’s eyes looked glazed.

“Flying is the greatest engineering achievement of man,” Rayber said in an irked voice. “Doesn’t it stir your imagination even slightly? If it doesn’t I’m afraid there’s something wrong with you.”

“I done flew,” Tarwater said and suppressed a belch. He was entirely occupied with his nausea which he could feel minutely rising.

“How could you have flown?” his uncle asked angrily.

“Him and me give a dollar to go up in one at a fair once,” he said. “The houses weren’t nothing but matchboxes and the people were invisible—like germs. I wouldn’t give you nothing for no airplane. A buzzard can fly.”

The schoolteacher gripped both sides of the boat and pushed forward. “He’s warped your whole life,” he said hoarsely. “You’re going to grow up to be a freak if you don’t let yourself be helped. You still believe all that crap he taught you. You’re eaten up with false guilt. I can read you like a book!” The words were out before he could stop them.

The boy did not even look at him. He leaned over the side of the boat and shuddered. The column, released, formed a sweetly sour circle on the water. A wave of dizziness came over him and then his head cleared. A ravenous emptiness raged in his stomach as if it had reestablished its rightful tenure. He washed his mouth out with a handful of the lake and then wiped his face on his sleeve.

Rayber trembled at his recklessness. He felt certain he had produced this by the word
guilt.
He put his hand on the boy’s knee and said, “You’ll feel better now.”

Tarwater said nothing, glaring with his red-lidded wet eyes at the water as if he were glad he had polluted it.

“It’s just as much relief,” his uncle said, pressing his advantage, “to get something off your mind as off your stomach. When you tell somebody else your troubles, then they don’t bother you so much, they don’t get in your blood and make you sick. Somebody else shares the weight. God boy,” he said, “you need help. You need to be saved right here now from the old man and everything he stands for. And I’m the one who can save you.” With his hat turned down all around he looked like a fanatical country preacher. His eyes glistened. “I know what your problem is,” he said. “I know and I can help you. Something’s eating you on the inside and I can tell you what it is.”

The boy looked at him fiercely. “Why don’t you shut your big mouth?” he said. “Why don’t you pull that plug out of your ear and turn yourself off? I come to fish. I never came to have no traffic with you.”

His uncle snapped the cigaret out of his fingers and it hit the water with a hiss. “Every day,” he said coldly, “you remind me more of the old man. You’re just like him. You have his future before you.”

The boy put down his line. With rigid deliberate movements he lifted his right foot and pulled off his shoe, then his left foot and pulled off that shoe. Then he jerked the straps of his overalls off his shoulders and pulled them down, over his bottom and off. He had on a pair of long thin old man’s drawers. He pulled his hat tight down on his head so that it would not possibly come off, then he threw himself out of the boat and swam away, smashing the glassy lake with his cupped fists as if he would like to make it sting and bleed.

My God! Rayber thought, I touched a nerve that time! He kept his eye on the hat in the receding spasm of water. The empty overalls lay at his feet. He grabbed them and felt in the pockets. He took out two stones, a nickel, a box of wooden matches and three nails. He had brought along the new suit and shirt and laid them out on a chair.

Tarwater reached the dock and climbed onto it, the drawers clinging to him, the hat still ground down on his forehead. He turned just in time to see his uncle thrust the bundled overalls below the surface of the water.

Rayber felt as if he had just run across a mined field. At once he was afraid he had made a mistake. The thin rigid figure on the dock did not move. It seemed no more than a wraith-like column of fragile white-hot rage, materialized for an instant, the makings of some pure unfathomable passion. The boy turned and started rapidly toward the lodge and Rayber decided it would be best to linger on the lake a while.

*   *   *

When he came in, he was startled to see Tarwater lying on the far cot in his new clothes and to see Bishop sitting on the other end of it, watching him as if he were mesmerized by the steel-like glint that came from the boy’s eyes and was directed into his own. In the plaid shirt and new blue trousers, he looked like a changeling, half his old self and half his new, already half the boy he would be when he was rehabilitated.

Rayber’s spirits rose cautiously. He was holding the shoes with the contents of the overall pockets in them. He set them down on the bed and said, “No hard feelings about the clothes, old man. That was just my round.”

There was a strange suppressed excitement about the boy’s whole figure, as if he had settled on an inevitable course of action. He did not get up, did not acknowledge the shoes, but he acknowledged his uncle’s presence by shifting the glint in his eyes slightly, on him and then away. The schoolteacher might have been just enough present to be ignored. Then he looked back at Bishop, triumphantly, boldly, into the very center of his eyes.

Rayber stood puzzled in the doorway. “Who wants to go for a ride?” he asked.

Bishop jumped off the bed and was at his side in an instant. Tarwater started at the little boy’s abrupt disappearance from his field of vision, but he did not get up or turn his face toward the schoolteacher in the door.

“Well, we’ll leave Frank to his meditations,” Rayber said and swung the child around by the shoulder and left with him, hastily. He wanted to escape before the boy changed his mind.

IX

THE heat was not as intense on the road as it had been on the lake and he drove with a sense of refreshment he had not felt in the five days Tarwater had been with him. Once out of sight of the boy, he felt a pressure had been lifted from the atmosphere. He eliminated the oppressive presence from his thoughts and retained only those aspects of it that could be abstracted, clean, into the future person he envisioned.

The sky was a cloudless even blue and he drove without destination, though he meant before they returned to the lodge to stop and have the car filled for tomorrow’s trip to Powderhead. Bishop was hanging out the window, his mouth open, letting the air dry his tongue. Automatically, Rayber reached over and locked the door and pulled him back in by his shirt. The child sat, solemnly taking his hat off his head and putting it on his feet, then taking it off his feet and putting it on his head. After he had done this a while, he climbed over the seat and disappeared into the back of the car.

Rayber continued to think of Tarwater’s future, his thoughts rewarding except when every now and then the boy’s actual face would lodge in the path of a plan. The sudden intrusion of the face made him think of his wife. He seldom thought of her anymore. She would not divorce him for fear she would be given custody of the child and she was now as far away as she could get, in Japan, in some welfare capacity. He was aware of his good fortune in getting rid of her. It was she who had prevented his going back and getting Tarwater away from the old man. She would have been glad enough to have had him if she had not seen him that day when they went to Powderhead to face the old man down. The baby had crawled into the door behind old Tarwater and had sat there, unblinking, as the old man raised his gun and shot Rayber in the leg and then in the ear. She had seen him; Rayber had not; but she would not forget the face. It was not simply that the child was dirty, thin, and grey; it was that its expression had no more changed when the gun went off than the old man’s had. This had affected her deeply.