The Violent Bear It Away (3 page)

The shovel lay against the side of the hen house. “I’ll never set my foot in the city again,” the boy said to himself aloud. I’ll never go to him. Him nor nobody else will ever get me off this place.

He decided to dig the grave under the fig tree because the old man would be good for the figs. The ground was sandy on top and solid brick underneath and the shovel made a clanging sound when he struck it in the sand. Two hundred pounds of dead mountain to bury, he thought, and stood with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, studying the white sky through the leaves of the tree. It would take all day to get a hole big enough out of this rock and the schoolteacher would burn him in a minute.

Tarwater had seen the schoolteacher once from a distance of about twenty feet and he had seen the dim-witted child closer up. The little boy somewhat resembled old Tarwater except for his eyes which were grey like the old man’s but clear, as if the other side of them went down and down into two pools of light. It was plain to look at him that he did not have any sense. The old man had been so shocked by the likeness and the unlikeness that the time he and Tarwater had gone there, he had only stood in the door, staring at the little boy and rolling his tongue around outside his mouth as if he had no sense himself. That had been the first time he had seen the child and he could not forget him. “Married her and got one child out of her and that without sense,” he would murmur. “The Lord preserved him and now He means to see he’s baptized.”

“Well whyn’t you get on with it then?” the boy asked, for he wanted something to happen, wanted to see the old man in action, wanted him to kidnap the child and have the schoolteacher have to come after him so that he could get a closer look at his other uncle. “What ails you?” he asked. “What makes you tarry so long? Why don’t you make haste and steal him?”

“I take my directions from the Lord God,” the old man said, “Who moves in His own time. I don’t take them from you.”

The white fog had eased through the yard and disappeared into the next bottom and the air was clear and blank. His mind continued to dwell on the schoolteacher’s house. “Three months there,” his great-uncle had said. “It shames me. Betrayed for three months in the house of my own kin and if when I’m dead you want to turn me over to my betrayer and see my body burned, go ahead! Go ahead, boy,” he had shouted, sitting up splotch-faced in his box. “Go ahead and let him burn me but watch out for the Lord’s lion after that. Remember the Lord’s lion set in the path of the false prophet! I been leavened by the yeast he don’t believe in,” he had said, “and I won’t be burned! And when I’m gone, you’ll be better off in these woods by yourself with just as much light as the sun wants to let in than you’ll be in the city with him.”

He kept on digging but the grave did not get any deeper. “The dead are poor,” he said in the voice of the stranger. You can’t be any poorer than dead. He’ll have to take what he gets. Nobody to bother me, he thought. Ever. No hand uplifted to hinder me from anything; except the Lord’s and He ain’t said anything. He ain’t even noticed me yet.

A sand-colored hound beat its tail on the ground nearby and a few black chickens scratched in the raw clay he was turning up. The sun had slipped over the blue line of trees and circled by a haze of yellow was moving slowly across the sky. “Now I can do anything I want to,” he said, softening the stranger’s voice so that he could stand it. Could kill off all those chickens if I had a mind to, he thought, watching the worthless black game bantams that his uncle had been fond of keeping.

He favored a lot of foolishness, the stranger said. The truth is he was childish. Why, that schoolteacher never did him any harm. You take, all he did was to watch him and write down what he seen and heard and put it in a paper for schoolteachers to read. Now what was wrong in that? Why nothing. Who cares what a schoolteacher reads? And the old fool acted like he had been killed in his very soul. Well he wasn’t so near dead as he thought he was. Lived on fourteen years and raised up a boy to bury him, suitable to his own taste.

As Tarwater slashed at the ground with the shovel, the stranger’s voice took on a kind of restrained fury and he kept repeating, you got to bury him whole and completely by hand and that schoolteacher would burn him in a minute.

After he had dug for an hour or more, the grave was only a foot deep, not as deep yet as the corpse. He sat down on the edge of it for a while. The sun was like a furious white blister in the sky.

The dead are a heap more trouble than the living, the stranger said. That schoolteacher wouldn’t consider for a minute that on the last day all the bodies marked by crosses will be gathered. In the rest of the world they do things different than what you been taught.

“I been there once,” Tarwater muttered. “Nobody has to tell me.”

His uncle two or three years before had gone to call on the lawyers to try to get the property unentailed so that it would skip the schoolteacher and go to Tarwater. Tarwater had sat at the lawyer’s twelfth-story window and looked down into the pit of the street while his uncle transacted the business. On the way from the railroad station he had walked tall in the mass of moving metal and concrete speckled with the very small eyes of people. The glitter of his own eyes was shaded under the stiff roof-like brim of a new grey hat, balanced perfectly straight on his buttressing ears. Before coming he had read facts in the almanac and he knew that there were 75,000 people here who were seeing him for the first time. He wanted to stop and shake hands with each of them and say his name was F. M. Tarwater and that he was here only for the day to accompany his uncle on business at a lawyers. His head jerked backwards after each passing figure until they began to pass too thickly and he observed that their eyes didn’t grab at you like the eyes of country people. Several people bumped into him and this contact that should have made an acquaintance for life, made nothing because the hulks shoved on with ducked heads and muttered apologies that he would have accepted if they had waited.

Then he had realized, almost without warning, that this place was evil—the ducked heads, the muttered words, the hastening away. He saw in a burst of light that these people were hastening away from the Lord God Almighty. It was to the city that the prophets came and he was here in the midst of it. He was here enjoying what should have repelled him. His lids narrowed with caution and he looked at his uncle who was rolling on ahead of him, no more concerned with it all than a bear in the woods. “What kind of prophet are you?” the boy hissed.

His uncle paid him no attention, did not stop.

“Call yourself a prophet!” he continued in a high rasping carrying voice.

His uncle stopped and turned. “I’m here on bidnis,” he said mildly.

“You always said you were a prophet,” Tarwater said. “Now I see what kind of prophet you are. Elijah would think a heap of you.”

His uncle thrust his head forward and his eyes began to bulge. “I’m here on bidnis,” he said. “If you been called by the Lord, then be about your own mission.”

The boy paled slightly and his gaze shifted. “I ain’t been called
yet
,” he muttered. “It’s you that’s been called.”

“And I know what times I’m called and what times I ain’t,” his uncle said and turned and paid him no more attention.

At the lawyer’s window, he knelt down and let his face hang out upsidedown over the floating speckled street moving like a river of tin below and watched the glints on it from the sun which drifted pale in a pale sky, too far away to ignite anything. When he was called, on that day when he returned, he would set the city astir, he would return with fire in his eyes. You have to do something particular here to make them look at you, he thought. They ain’t going to look at you just because you’re here. He considered his uncle with renewed disgust. When I come for good, he said to himself, I’ll do something to make every eye stick on me, and leaning forward, he saw his new hat drop down gently, lost and casual, dallied slightly by the breeze on its way to be smashed in the tin river below. He clutched at his bare head and fell back inside the room.

His uncle was in argument with the lawyer, both hitting the desk that separated them, bending their knees and hitting their fists at the same time. The lawyer, a tall dome-headed man with an eagle’s nose, kept repeating in a restrained shriek, “But I didn’t make the will. I didn’t make the law,” and his uncle’s gravel voice grated, “I can’t help it. My daddy wouldn’t have seen a fool inherit his property. That’s not how he intended it.”

“My hat is gone,” Tarwater said.

The lawyer threw himself backwards into his chair and screaked it toward Tarwater and saw him without interest from pale blue eyes and screaked it forward again and said to his uncle, “There’s nothing I can do. You’re wasting your time and mine. You might as well resign yourself to this will.”

“Listen,” old Tarwater said, “at one time I thought I was finished, old and sick and about to die and no money, nothing, and I accepted his hospitality because he was my closest blood connection and you could have called it his duty to take me, only I thought it was Charity, I thought…”

“I can’t help what you thought or did or what your connection thought or did,” the lawyer said and closed his eyes.

“My hat fell,” Tarwater said.

“I’m only a lawyer,” the lawyer said, letting his glance rove over the lines of clay-colored books of law that fortressed his office.

“A car is liable to have run over it by now.”

“Listen,” his uncle said, “all the time he was studying me for this paper. Taking secret tests on me, his own kin, crawling into my soul through the back door and then says to me, ‘Uncle, you’re a type that’s almost extinct!’ Almost extinct!” the old man piped, barely able to force a thread of sound from his throat. “You see how extinct I am!”

The lawyer closed his eyes again and smiled into one cheek.

“Other lawyers,” the old man growled and they had left and visited three more, without stopping, and Tarwater had counted eleven men who might have had on his hat or might not. Finally when they came out of the fourth lawyer’s office, they sat down on the window ledge of a bank building and his uncle felt in his pocket for some biscuits he had brought and handed one to Tarwater. The old man unbuttoned his coat and allowed his stomach to ease forward and rest on his lap while he ate. His face worked wrathfully; the skin between the pockmarks appeared to jump from one spot to another. Tarwater was very pale and his eyes glittered with a peculiar hollow depth. He had an old work kerchief tied around his head, knotted at the four corners. He didn’t observe the passing people who observed him now. “Thank God we’re finished and can go home,” he muttered.

“We ain’t finished here,” the old man said and got up abruptly and started down the street.

“My Lord!” the boy groaned, jumping to catch up with him. “Can’t we sit down for one minute? Ain’t you got any sense? They all tell you the same thing. It’s only one law and it’s nothing you can do about it. I got sense enough to get that; why ain’t you? What’s the matter with you?”

The old man strode on with his head thrust forward as if he were smelling out an enemy.

“Where we going?” Tarwater asked after they had walked out of the business streets and were passing between rows of grey bulbous houses with sooty porches that overhung the sidewalks. “Listen,” he said, hitting at his uncle’s hip, “I never ast to come.”

“You would have ast to come soon enough,” the old man muttered. “Get your fill now.”

“I never ast for no fill. I never ast to come at all. I’m here before I knew this here was here.”

“Just remember,” the old man said, “just remember that I told you to remember when you ast to come that you never liked it when you were here,” and they kept on going, crossing one length of sidewalk after another, row after row of overhanging houses with half-open doors that let a little dried light fall on the stained passageways inside. Finally they came out into another section where the houses were clean and squat and almost identical and each had a square of grass in front of it. After a few blocks Tarwater dropped down on the sidewalk and said, “I ain’t going no further. I don’t even know where I’m going and I ain’t going no further.” His uncle didn’t stop or look back. In a second he jumped up and followed him again in a panic lest he be left.

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.”