* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Wise Blood
Author: O'Connor, Flannery [Mary Flannery] (1925-1964)
Date of first publication: 1952
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 11 June 2017
Date last updated: 11 June 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1445

This ebook was produced by Al Haines, Cindy Beyer,
Mark Akrigg & the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada
Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






                               WISE BLOOD

                           FLANNERY O'CONNOR





                              FOR REGINA





                               CHAPTER 1


Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat,
looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it,
and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was
racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun
standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the
plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows
looked like large spotted stones. Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock, who was
facing Motes in the section, said that she thought the early evening
like this was the prettiest time of day and she asked him if he didn't
think so too. She was a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and
pear-shaped legs that slanted off the train seat and didn't reach the
floor.

He looked at her a second and, without answering, leaned forward and
stared down the length of the car again. She turned to see what was back
there but all she saw was a child peering around one of the sections
and, farther up at the end of the car, the porter opening the closet
where the sheets were kept.

"I guess you're going home," she said, turning back to him again. He
didn't look, to her, much over twenty, but he had a stiff black
broad-brimmed hat on his lap, a hat that an elderly country preacher
would wear. His suit was a glaring blue and the price tag was still
stapled on the sleeve of it.

He didn't answer her or move his eyes from whatever he was looking at.
The sack at his feet was an army duffel bag and she decided that he had
been in the army and had been released and that now he was going home.
She wanted to get close enough to see what the suit had cost him but she
found herself squinting instead at his eyes, trying almost to look into
them. They were the color of pecan shells and set in deep sockets. The
outline of a skull under his skin was plain and insistent.

She felt irked and wrenched her attention loose and squinted at the
price tag. The suit had cost him $11.98. She felt that that placed him
and looked at his face again as if she were fortified against it now. He
had a nose like a shrike's bill and a long vertical crease on either
side of his mouth; his hair looked as if it had been permanently
flattened under the heavy hat, but his eyes were what held her attention
longest. Their settings were so deep that they seemed, to her, almost
like passages leading somewhere and she leaned halfway across the space
that separated the two seats, trying to see into them. He turned toward
the window suddenly and then almost as quickly turned back again to
where his stare had been fixed.

What he was looking at was the porter. When he had first got on the
train, the porter had been standing between the two cars--a
thick-figured man with a round yellow bald head. Haze had stopped and
the porter's eyes had turned toward him and away, indicating which car
he was to go into. When he didn't go, the porter said, "To the left,"
irritably, "to the left," and Haze had moved on.

"Well," Mrs. Hitchcock said, "there's no place like home."

He gave her a glance and saw the flat of her face, reddish under a cap
of fox-colored hair. She had got on two stops back. He had never seen
her before that. "I got to go see the porter," he said. He got up and
went toward the end of the car where the porter had begun making up a
berth. He stopped beside him and leaned on a seat arm, but the porter
didn't look at him. He was pulling a wall of the section farther out.

"How long does it take you to make one up?"

"Seven minutes," the porter said, not looking at him.

Haze sat down on the seat arm. He said, "I'm from Eastrod."

"That isn't on this line," the porter said. "You on the wrong train."

"Going to the city," Haze said. "I said I was raised in Eastrod."

The porter didn't say anything.

"Eastrod," Haze said, louder.

The porter jerked the shade down. "You want your berth made up now, or
what you standing there for?" he asked.

"Eastrod," Haze said. "Near Melsy."

The porter wrenched one side of the seat flat. "I'm from Chicago," he
said. He wrenched the other side down. When he bent over, the back of
his neck came out in three bulges.

"Yeah, I bet you are," Haze said with a leer.

"Your feet in the middle of the aisle. Somebody going to want to get by
you," the porter said, turning suddenly and brushing past.

Haze got up and hung there a few seconds. He looked as if he were held
by a rope caught in the middle of his back and attached to the train
ceiling. He watched the porter move in a fine controlled lurch down the
aisle and disappear at the other end of the car. He knew him to be a
Parrum nigger from Eastrod. He went back to his section and folded into
a slouched position and settled one foot on a pipe that ran under the
window. Eastrod filled his head and then went out beyond and filled the
space that stretched from the train across the empty darkening fields.
He saw the two houses and the rust-colored road and the few Negro shacks
and the one barn and the stall with the red and white CCC snuff ad
peeling across the side of it.

"Are you going home?" Mrs. Hitchcock asked.

He looked at her sourly and gripped the black hat by the brim. "No, I
ain't," he said in a sharp high nasal Tennessee voice.

Mrs. Hitchcock said neither was she. She told him she had been a Miss
Weatherman before she married and that she was going to Florida to visit
her married daughter, Sarah Lucile. She said it seemed like she had
never had time to take a trip that far off. The way things happened, one
thing after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn't
tell if you were young or old.

He thought he could tell her she was old if she asked him. He stopped
listening to her after a while. The porter passed back up the aisle and
didn't look at him. Mrs. Hitchcock lost her train of talk. "I guess
you're on your way to visit somebody?" she asked.

"Going to Taulkinham," he said and ground himself into the seat and
looked at the window. "Don't know nobody there, but I'm going to do some
things.

"I'm going to do some things I never have done before," he said and gave
her a sidelong glance and curled his mouth slightly.

She said she knew an Albert Sparks from Taulkinham. She said he was her
sister-in-law's brother-in-law and that he...

"I ain't from Taulkinham," he said. "I said I'm going there, that's
all." Mrs. Hitchcock began to talk again but he cut her short and said,
"That porter was raised in the same place where I was raised but he says
he's from Chicago."

Mrs. Hitchcock said she knew a man who lived in Chi...

"You might as well go one place as another," he said. "That's all I
know."

Mrs. Hitchcock said well that time flies. She said she hadn't seen her
sister's children in five years and she didn't know if she'd know them
if she saw them. There were three of them, Roy, Bubber, and John Wesley.
John Wesley was six years old and he had written her a letter, dear
Mammadoll. They called her Mammadoll and her husband Papadoll...

"I reckon you think you been redeemed," he said.

Mrs. Hitchcock snatched at her collar.

"I reckon you think you been redeemed," he repeated.

She blushed. After a second she said yes, life was an inspiration and
then she said she was hungry and asked him if he didn't want to go into
the diner. He put on the fierce black hat and followed her out of the
car.

The dining car was full and people were waiting to get in it. He and
Mrs. Hitchcock stood in line for a half-hour, rocking in the narrow
passageway and every few minutes flattening themselves against the side
to let a trickle of people through. Mrs. Hitchcock talked to the woman
on the side of her. Hazel Motes looked at the wall. Mrs. Hitchcock told
the woman about her sister's husband who was with the City Water Works
in Toolafalls, Alabama, and the lady told about a cousin who had cancer
of the throat. Finally they got almost up to the entrance of the diner
and could see inside it. There was a steward beckoning people to places
and handing out menus. He was a white man with greased black hair and a
greased black look to his suit. He moved like a crow, darting from table
to table. He motioned for two people and the line moved up so that Haze
and Mrs. Hitchcock and the lady she was talking to were ready to go
next. In a minute two more people left. The steward beckoned and Mrs.
Hitchcock and the woman walked in and Haze followed them. The man
stopped him and said, "Only two," and pushed him back to the doorway.

Haze's face turned an ugly red. He tried to get behind the next person
and then he tried to get through the line to go back to the car he had
come from but there were too many people bunched in the opening. He had
to stand there while everyone around looked at him. No one left for a
while. Finally a woman at the far end of the car got up and the steward
jerked his hand. Haze hesitated and saw the hand jerk again. He lurched
up the aisle, falling against two tables on the way and getting his hand
wet in somebody's coffee. The steward placed him with three youngish
women dressed like parrots.

Their hands were resting on the table, red-speared at the tips. He sat
down and wiped his hand on the tablecloth. He didn't take off his hat.
The women had finished eating and were smoking cigarettes. They stopped
talking when he sat down. He pointed to the first thing on the menu and
the steward, standing over him, said, "Write it down, sonny," and winked
at one of the women; she made a noise in her nose. He wrote it down and
the steward went away with it. He sat and looked in front of him, glum
and intense, at the neck of the woman across from him. At intervals her
hand holding the cigarette would pass the spot on her neck; it would go
out of his sight and then it would pass again, going back down to the
table; in a second a straight line of smoke would blow in his face.
After it had blown at him three or four times, he looked at her. She had
a bold game-hen expression and small eyes pointed directly on him.

"If you've been redeemed," he said, "I wouldn't want to be." Then he
turned his head to the window. He saw his pale reflection with the dark
empty space outside coming through it. A boxcar roared past, chopping
the empty space in two, and one of the women laughed.

"Do you think I believe in Jesus?" he said, leaning toward her and
speaking almost as if he were breathless. "Well I wouldn't even if He
existed. Even if He was on this train."

"Who said you had to?" she asked in a poisonous Eastern voice.

He drew back.

The waiter brought his dinner. He began eating slowly at first, then
faster as the women concentrated on watching the muscles that stood out
on his jaw when he chewed. He was eating something spotted with eggs and
livers. He finished that and drank his coffee and then pulled his money
out. The steward saw him but he wouldn't come total the bill. Every time
he passed the table, he would wink at the women and stare at Haze. Mrs.
Hitchcock and the lady had already finished and gone. Finally the man
came and added up the bill. Haze shoved the money at him and then pushed
past him out of the car.

For a while he stood between two train cars where there was fresh air of
a sort and made a cigarette. Then the porter passed between the two
cars. "Hey you Parrum," he called.

The porter didn't stop.

Haze followed him into the car. All the berths were made up. The man in
the station in Melsy had sold him a berth because he said he would have
to sit up all night in the coaches; he had sold him an upper one. Haze
went to it and pulled his sack down and went into the men's room and got
ready for the night. He was too full and he wanted to hurry and get in
the berth and lie down. He thought he would lie there and look out the
window and watch how the country went by a train at night. A sign said
to get the porter to let you into the uppers. He stuck his sack up into
his berth and then went to look for the porter. He didn't find him at
one end of the car and he started back to the other. Going around the
corner he ran into something heavy and pink; it gasped and muttered,
"Clumsy!" It was Mrs. Hitchcock in a pink wrapper, with her hair in
knots around her head. She looked at him with her eyes squinted nearly
shut. The knobs framed her face like dark toadstools. She tried to get
past him and he tried to let her but they were both moving the same way
each time. Her face became purplish except for little white marks over
it that didn't heat up. She drew herself stiff and stopped and said,
"What is the matter with you?" He slipped past her and dashed down the
aisle and ran into the porter so that the porter fell down.

"You got to let me into the berth, Parrum," he said.

The porter picked himself up and went lurching down the aisle and after
a minute he came lurching back again, stone-faced, with the ladder. Haze
stood watching him while he put the ladder up; then he started up it.
Half-way up, he turned and said, "I remember you. Your father was a
nigger named Cash Parrum. You can't go back there neither, nor anybody
else, not if they wanted to."

"I'm from Chicago," the porter said in an irritated voice. "My name is
not Parrum."

"Cash is dead," Haze said. "He got the cholera from a pig."

The porter's mouth jerked down and he said, "My father was a railroad
man."

Haze laughed. The porter jerked the ladder off suddenly with a wrench of
his arm that sent the boy clutching at the blanket into the berth. He
lay on his stomach for a few minutes and didn't move. After a while he
turned and found the light and looked around him. There was no window.
He was closed up in the thing except for a little space over the
curtain. The top of the berth was low and curved over. He lay down and
noticed that the curved top looked as if it were not quite closed; it
looked as if it were closing. He lay there for a while, not moving.
There was something in his throat like a sponge with an egg taste; he
didn't want to turn over for fear it would move. He wanted the light
off. He reached up without turning and felt for the button and snapped
it and the darkness sank down on him and then faded a little with light
from the aisle that came in through the foot of space not closed. He
wanted it all dark, he didn't want it diluted. He heard the porter's
footsteps coming down the aisle, soft into the rug, coming steadily
down, brushing against the green curtains and fading up the other way
out of hearing. Then after a while when he was almost asleep, he thought
he heard them again coming back. His curtains stirred and the footsteps
faded.

In his half-sleep he thought where he was lying was like a coffin. The
first coffin he had seen with someone in it was his grandfather's. They
had left it propped open with a stick of kindling the night it had sat
in the house with the old man in it, and Haze had watched from a
distance, thinking: he ain't going to let them shut it on him; when the
time comes, his elbow is going to shoot into the crack. His grandfather
had been a circuit preacher, a waspish old man who had ridden over three
counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger. When it was time
to bury him, they shut the top of his box down and he didn't make a
move.

Haze had had two younger brothers; one died in infancy and was put in a
small box. The other fell in front of a mowing machine when he was
seven. His box was about half the size of an ordinary one, and when they
shut it, Haze ran and opened it up again. They said it was because he
was heartbroken to part with his brother, but it was not; it was because
he had thought, what if he had been in it and they had shut it on him.

He was asleep now and he dreamed he was at his father's burying again.
He saw him humped over on his hands and knees in his coffin, being
carried that way to the graveyard. "If I keep my can in the air," he
heard the old man say, "nobody can shut nothing on me," but when they
got his box to the hole, they let it drop down with a thud and his
father flattened out like anybody else. The train jolted and stirred him
half-awake again and he thought, there must have been twenty-five people
in Eastrod then, three Motes. Now there were no more Motes, no more
Ashfields, no more Blasengames, Feys, Jacksons... or Parrums--even
niggers wouldn't have it. Turning in the road, he saw in the dark the
store boarded and the barn leaning and the smaller house half carted
away, the porch gone and no floor in the hall.

It had not been that way when he was eighteen years old and had left it.
Then there had been ten people there and he had not noticed that it had
got smaller from his father's time. He had left it when he was eighteen
years old because the army had called him. He had thought at first he
would shoot his foot and not go. He was going to be a preacher like his
grandfather and a preacher can always do without a foot. A preacher's
power is in his neck and tongue and arm. His grandfather had traveled
three counties in a Ford automobile. Every fourth Saturday he had driven
into Eastrod as if he were just in time to save them all from Hell, and
he was shouting before he had the car door open. People gathered around
his Ford because he seemed to dare them to. He would climb up on the
nose of it and preach from there and sometimes he would climb onto the
top of it and shout down at them. They were like stones! he would shout.
But Jesus had died to redeem them! Jesus was so soul-hungry that He had
died, one death for all, but He would have died every soul's death for
one! Did they understand that? Did they understand that for each stone
soul, He would have died ten million deaths, had His arms and legs
stretched on the cross and nailed ten million times for one of them?
(The old man would point to his grandson, Haze. He had a particular
disrespect for him because his own face was repeated almost exactly in
the child's and seemed to mock him.) Did they know that even for that
boy there, for that mean sinful unthinking boy standing there with his
dirty hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, Jesus would die ten
million deaths before He would let him lose his soul? He would chase him
over the waters of sin! Did they doubt Jesus could walk on the waters of
sin? That boy had been redeemed and Jesus wasn't going to leave him
ever. Jesus would never let him forget he was redeemed. What did the
sinner think there was to be gained? Jesus would have him in the end!

The boy didn't need to hear it. There was already a deep black wordless
conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. He knew
by the time he was twelve years old that he was going to be a preacher.
Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a
wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the
dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on
the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. Where he
wanted to stay was in Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands
always handling the familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his
tongue not too loose. When he was eighteen and the army called him, he
saw the war as a trick to lead him into temptation, and he would have
shot his foot except that he trusted himself to get back in a few
months, uncorrupted. He had a strong confidence in his power to resist
evil; it was something he had inherited, like his face, from his
grandfather. He thought that if the government wasn't through with him
in four months, he would leave anyway. He had thought, then when he was
eighteen years old, that he would give them exactly four months of his
time. He was gone four years; he didn't get back, even for a visit.

The only things from Eastrod he took into the army with him were a black
Bible and a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles that had belonged to his
mother. He had gone to a country school where he had learned to read and
write but that it was wiser not to; the Bible was the only book he read.
He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses.
They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to
stop. He meant to tell anyone in the army who invited him to sin that he
was from Eastrod, Tennessee, and that he meant to get back there and
stay back there, that he was going to be a preacher of the gospel and
that he wasn't going to have his soul damned by the government or by any
foreign place it sent him to.

After a few weeks in the camp, when he had some friends--they were not
actually friends but he had to live with them--he was offered the chance
he had been waiting for; the invitation. He took his mother's glasses
out of his pocket and put them on. Then he told them he wouldn't go with
them for a million dollars and a feather bed to lie on; he said he was
from Eastrod, Tennessee, and that he was not going to have his soul
damned by the government or any foreign place they... but his voice
cracked and he didn't finish. He only stared at them, trying to steel
his face. His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam
soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest
taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told
him he didn't have any soul and left for their brothel.

He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them.
All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all,
and he saw the opportunity here to get rid of it without corruption, to
be converted to nothing instead of to evil. The army sent him halfway
around the world and forgot him. He was wounded and they remembered him
long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest--they said they took
it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there,
rusted, and poisoning him--and then they sent him to another desert and
forgot him again. He had all the time he could want to study his soul in
and assure himself that it was not there. When he was thoroughly
convinced, he saw that this was something that he had always known. The
misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus.
When the army finally let him go, he was pleased to think that he was
still uncorrupted. All he wanted was to get back to Eastrod, Tennessee.
The black Bible and his mother's glasses were still in the bottom of his
duffel bag. He didn't read any book now but he kept the Bible because it
had come from home. He kept the glasses in case his vision should ever
become dim.

When the army had released him two days before in a city about three
hundred miles north of where he wanted to be, he had gone immediately to
the railroad station there and bought a ticket to Melsy, the nearest
railroad stop to Eastrod. Then since he had to wait four hours for the
train, he went into a dark dry-goods store near the station. It was a
thin cardboard-smelling store that got darker as it got deeper. He went
deep into it and was sold a blue suit and a dark hat. He had his army
suit put in a paper sack and he stuffed it into a trashbox on the
corner. Once outside in the light, the new suit turned glare-blue and
the lines of the hat seemed to stiffen fiercely.

He was in Melsy at five o'clock in the afternoon and he caught a ride on
a cotton-seed truck that took him more than half the distance to
Eastrod. He walked the rest of the way and got there at nine o'clock at
night, when it had just got dark. The house was as dark as the night and
open to it and though he saw that the fence around it had partly fallen
and that weeds were growing through the porch floor, he didn't realize
all at once that it was only a shell, that there was nothing here but
the skeleton of a house. He twisted an envelope and struck a match to it
and went through all the empty rooms, upstairs and down. When the
envelope burnt out, he lit another one and went through them all again.
That night he slept on the floor in the kitchen, and a board fell on his
head out of the roof and cut his face.

There was nothing left in the house but the chifforobe in the kitchen.
His mother had always slept in the kitchen and had her walnut chifforobe
in there. She had given thirty dollars for it and hadn't bought herself
anything else big again. Whoever had got everything else, had left that.
He opened all the drawers. There were two lengths of wrapping cord in
the top one and nothing in the others. He was surprised nobody had come
and stolen a chifforobe like that. He took the wrapping cord and tied it
around the legs and through the floor boards and left a piece of paper
in each of the drawers: THIS SHIFFER-ROBE BELONGS TO HAZEL MOTES.
DO NOT STEAL IT OR YOU WILL BE HUNTED DOWN AND KILLED.

He thought about the chifforobe in his half-sleep and decided his mother
would rest easier in her grave, knowing it was guarded. If she came
looking any time at night, she would see. He wondered if she walked at
night and came there ever. She would come with that look on her face,
unrested and looking; the same look he had seen through the crack of her
coffin. He had seen her face through the crack when they were shutting
the top on her. He was sixteen then. He had seen the shadow that came
down over her face and pulled her mouth down as if she wasn't any more
satisfied dead than alive, as if she were going to spring up and shove
the lid back and fly out and satisfy herself: but they shut it. She
might have been going to fly out of there, she might have been going to
spring. He saw her in his sleep, terrible, like a huge bat, dart from
the closing, fly out of there, but it was falling dark on top of her,
closing down all the time. From inside he saw it closing, coming closer
down and cutting off the light and the room. He opened his eyes and saw
it closing and he sprang up between the crack and wedged his head and
shoulders through it and hung there, dizzy, with the dim light of the
train slowly showing the rug below. He hung there over the top of the
berth curtain and saw the porter at the other end of the car, a white
shape in the darkness, standing there watching him and not moving.

"I'm sick!" he called. "I can't be closed up in this thing. Get me out!"

The porter stood watching him and didn't move.

"Jesus," Haze said, "Jesus."

The porter didn't move. "Jesus been a long time gone," he said in a sour
triumphant voice.




                               CHAPTER 2


He didn't get to the city until six the next evening. That morning he
had got off the train at a junction stop to get some air and while he
had been looking the other way, the train had slid off. He had run after
it but his hat had blown away and he had had to run in the other
direction to save the hat. Fortunately, he had carried his duffel bag
out with him lest someone should steal something out of it. He had to
wait six hours at the junction stop until the right train came.

When he got to Taulkinham, as soon as he stepped off the train, he began
to see signs and lights. PEANUTS, WESTERN UNION, AJAX,
TAXI, HOTEL, CANDY. Most of them were electric and moved up and down or
blinked frantically. He walked very slowly, carrying his duffel bag by
the neck. His head turned to one side and then the other, first toward
one sign and then another. He walked the length of the station and then
he walked back as if he might be going to get on the train again. His
face was stern and determined under the heavy hat. No one observing him
would have known that he had no place to go. He walked up and down the
crowded waiting room two or three times, but he did not want to sit on
the benches there. He wanted a private place to go to.

Finally he pushed open a door at one end of the station where a plain
black and white sign said, MEN'S TOILET. WHITE. He went
into a narrow room lined on one side with washbasins and on the other
with a row of wooden stalls. The walls of this room had once been a
bright cheerful yellow but now they were more nearly green and were
decorated with handwriting and with various detailed drawings of the
parts of the body of both men and women. Some of the stalls had doors on
them and on one of the doors, written with what must have been a crayon,
was the large word, WELCOME, followed by three exclamation points and
something that looked like a snake. Haze entered this one.

He had been sitting in the narrow box for some time, studying the
inscriptions on the sides and door, before he noticed one that was to
the left over the toilet paper. It was written in a drunken-looking
hand. It said,

                    Mrs. Leora Watts!
                    60 Buckley Road
                    The friendliest bed in town!
                                    Brother.

After a while he took a pencil out of his pocket and wrote down the
address on the back of an envelope.

Outside he got in a yellow taxi and told the driver where he wanted to
go. The driver was a small man with a big leather cap on his head and
the tip of a cigar coming out from the center of his mouth. They had
driven a few blocks before Haze noticed him squinting at him through the
rear-view mirror. "You ain't no friend of hers, are you?" the driver
asked.

"I never saw her before," Haze said.

"Where'd you hear about her? She don't usually have no preachers for
company." He did not disturb the position of the cigar when he spoke; he
was able to speak on either side of it.

"I ain't any preacher," Haze said, frowning. "I only seen her name in
the toilet."

"You look like a preacher," the driver said. "That hat looks like a
preacher's hat."

"It ain't," Haze said, and leaned forward and gripped the back of the
front seat. "It's just a hat."

They stopped in front of a small one-story house between a filling
station and a vacant lot. Haze got out and paid his fare through the
window.

"It ain't only the hat," the driver said. "It's a look in your face
somewheres."

"Listen," Haze said, tilting the hat over one eye, "I'm not a preacher."

"I understand," the driver said. "It ain't anybody perfect on this green
earth of God's, preachers nor nobody else. And you can tell people
better how terrible sin is if you know from your own personal
experience."

Haze put his head in at the window, knocking the hat accidentally
straight again. He seemed to have knocked his face straight too for it
became completely expressionless. "Listen," he said, "get this: I don't
believe in anything."

The driver took the stump of cigar out of his mouth. "Not in nothing at
all?" he asked, leaving his mouth open after the question.

"I don't have to say it but once to nobody," Haze said.

The driver closed his mouth and after a second he returned the piece of
cigar to it. "That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've
all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look
of disgust and righteousness.

Haze turned and looked at the house he was going into. It was little
more than a shack but there was a warm glow in one front window. He went
up on the front porch and put his eye to a convenient crack in the
shade, and found himself looking directly at a large white knee. After
some time he moved away from the crack and tried the front door. It was
not locked and he went into a small dark hall with a door on either side
of it. The door to the left was cracked and let out a narrow shaft of
light. He moved into the light and looked through the crack.

Mrs. Watts was sitting alone in a white iron bed, cutting her toenails
with a large pair of scissors. She was a big woman with very yellow hair
and white skin that glistened with a greasy preparation. She had on a
pink nightgown that would better have fit a smaller figure.

Haze made a noise with the doorknob and she looked up and observed him
standing behind the crack. She had a bold steady penetrating stare.
After a minute, she turned it away from him and began cutting her
toenails again.

He went in and stood looking around him. There was nothing much in the
room but the bed and a bureau and a rocking chair full of dirty clothes.
He went to the bureau and fingered a nail file and then an empty jelly
glass while he looked into the yellowish mirror and watched Mrs. Watts,
slightly distorted, grinning at him. His senses were stirred to the
limit. He turned quickly and went to her bed and sat down on the far
corner of it. He drew a long draught of air through one side of his nose
and began to run his hand carefully along the sheet.

The pink tip of Mrs. Watts's tongue appeared and moistened her lower
lip. She seemed just as glad to see him as if he had been an old friend
but she didn't say anything.

He picked up her foot, which was heavy but not cold, and moved it about
an inch to one side, and kept his hand on it.

Mrs. Watts's mouth split in a wide full grin that showed her teeth. They
were small and pointed and speckled with green and there was a wide
space between each one. She reached out and gripped Haze's arm just
above the elbow. "You huntin' something?" she drawled.

If she had not had him so firmly by the arm, he might have leaped out
the window. Involuntarily his lips formed the words, "Yes, mam," but no
sound came through them.

"Something on your mind?" Mrs. Watts asked, pulling his rigid figure a
little closer.

"Listen," he said, keeping his voice tightly under control, "I come for
the usual business."

Mrs. Watts's mouth became more round, as if she were perplexed at this
waste of words. "Make yourself at home," she said simply.

They stared at each other for almost a minute and neither moved. Then he
said in a voice that was higher than his usual voice, "What I mean to
have you know is: I'm no goddam preacher."

Mrs. Watts eyed him steadily with only a slight smirk. Then she put her
other hand under his face and tickled it in a motherly way. "That's
okay, son," she said. "Momma don't mind if you ain't a preacher."




                               CHAPTER 3


His second night in Taulkinham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close
to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was
underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and
depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be
moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work
that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to
complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky. The stores in
Taulkinham stayed open on Thursday nights so that people could have an
extra opportunity to see what was for sale. Haze's shadow was now behind
him and now before him and now and then broken up by other people's
shadows, but when it was by itself, stretching behind him, it was a thin
nervous shadow walking backwards. His neck was thrust forward as if he
were trying to smell something that was always being drawn away. The
glary light from the store windows made his blue suit look purple.

After a while he stopped where a lean-faced man had a card table set up
in front of a department store and was demonstrating a potato peeler.
The man had on a small canvas hat and a shirt patterned with bunches of
upside-down pheasants and quail and bronze turkeys. He was pitching his
voice under the street noises so that it reached every ear distinctly as
if in a private conversation. A few people gathered around. There were
two buckets on the card table, one empty and the other full of potatoes.
Between the two buckets there was a pyramid of green cardboard boxes
and, on top of the stack, one peeler was open for demonstration. The man
stood in front of this altar, pointing over it at various people. "How
about you?" he said, pointing at a damp-haired pimpled boy. "You ain't
gonna let one of these go by?" He stuck a brown potato in one side of
the open machine. The machine was a square tin box with a red handle,
and as he turned the handle, the potato went into the box and then in a
second, backed out the other side, white. "You ain't gonna let one of
these go by!" he said.

The boy guffawed and looked at the other people gathered around. He had
yellow hair and a fox-shaped face.

"What's yer name?" the peeler man asked.

"Name Enoch Emery," the boy said and snuffled.

"Boy with a pretty name like that ought to have one of these," the man
said, rolling his eyes, trying to warm up the others. Nobody laughed but
the boy. Then a man standing across from Hazel Motes laughed, not a
pleasant laugh but one that had a sharp edge. He was a tall cadaverous
man with a black suit and a black hat on. He had on dark glasses and his
cheeks were streaked with lines that looked as if they had been painted
on and had faded. They gave him the expression of a grinning mandrill.
As soon as he laughed, he began to move forward in a deliberate way,
jiggling a tin cup in one hand and tapping a white cane in front of him
with the other. Just behind him there came a child, handing out
leaflets. She had on a black dress and a black knitted cap pulled down
low on her forehead; there was a fringe of brown hair sticking out from
it on either side; she had a long face and a short sharp nose. The man
selling peelers was irritated when he saw the people looking at this
pair instead of him. "How about you, you there," he said, pointing at
Haze. "You'll never be able to get a bargain like this in any store."

Haze was looking at the blind man and the child. "Hey!" Enoch Emery
said, reaching across a woman and punching his arm. "He's talking to
you! He's talking to you!" Enoch had to punch him again before he looked
at the peeler man.

"Whyn't you take one of these home to yer wife?" the peeler man was
saying.

"Don't have one," Haze muttered, looking back at the blind man again.

"Well, you got a dear old mother, ain't you?"

"No."

"Well pshaw," the man said, with his hand cupped to the people, "he
needs one theseyer just to keep him company."

Enoch Emery thought that was so funny that he doubled over and slapped
his knee, but Hazel Motes didn't look as if he had heard it yet. "I'm
going to give away a half a dozen peeled potatoes to the first person
purchasing one theseyer machines," the man said. "Who's gonna step up
first? Only a dollar and a half for a machine'd cost you three dollars
in any store!" Enoch Emery began fumbling in his pockets. "You'll thank
the day you ever stopped here," the man said, "you'll never forget it.
Ever' one of you people purchasing one theseyer machines'll never forget
it!"

The blind man was moving forward slowly, saying in a kind of garbled
mutter, "Help a blind preacher. If you won't repent, give up a nickel. I
can use it as good as you. Help a blind unemployed preacher. Wouldn't
you rather have me beg than preach? Come on and give a nickel if you
won't repent."

There were not many people gathered around but the ones who were began
to move off. When the machine-seller saw this, he leaned, glaring over
the card table. "Hey you!" he yelled at the blind man. "What you think
you doing? Who you think you are, running people off from here?" The
blind man didn't pay any attention to him. He kept on rattling the cup
and the child kept on handing out the pamphlets. He passed Enoch Emery
and came on toward Haze, hitting the white cane out at an angle from his
leg. Haze leaned forward and saw that the lines on his face were not
painted on; they were scars.

"What the hell you think you doing?" the man selling peelers yelled. "I
got these people together, how you think you can horn in?"

The child held one of the pamphlets out to Haze and he grabbed it. The
words on the outside of it said, "Jesus Calls You."

"I'd like to know who the hell you think you are!" the man with the
peelers was yelling. The child went back to where he was and handed him
a tract. He looked at it for an instant with his lip curled and then he
charged around the card table, upsetting the bucket of potatoes. "These
damn Jesus fanatics," he yelled, glaring around, trying to find the
blind man. New people gathered, hoping to see a disturbance. "These
goddam Communist foreigners!" the peeler man screamed. "I got this crowd
together!" He stopped, realizing there was a crowd.

"Listen folks," he said, "one at a time, there's plenty to go around,
just don't push, a half a dozen peeled potatoes to the first person
stepping up to buy." He got back behind the card table quietly and
started holding up the peeler boxes. "Step on up, plenty to go around,"
he said, "no need to crowd."

Haze didn't open his tract. He looked at the outside of it and then he
tore it across. He put the two pieces together and tore them across
again. He kept re-stacking the pieces and tearing them again until he
had a little handful of confetti. He turned his hand over and let the
shredded leaflet sprinkle to the ground. Then he looked up and saw the
blind man's child not three feet away, watching him. Her mouth was open
and her eyes glittered on him like two chips of green bottle glass. She
had a white gunny sack hung over her shoulder. Haze scowled and began
rubbing his sticky hands on his pants.

"I seen you," she said. Then she moved quickly over to where the blind
man was standing now, beside the card table, and turned her head and
looked at Haze from there. Most of the people had moved off.

The peeler man leaned over the card table and said, "Hey!" to the blind
man. "I reckon that showed you. Trying to horn in."

"Lookerhere," Enoch Emery said, "I ain't got but a dollar sixteen cent
but I..."

"Yah," the man said, "I reckon that'll show you you can't muscle in on
me. Sold eight peelers, sold..."

"Give me one of them," the blind man's child said, pointing to the
peelers.

"Hanh," he said.

She was untying a handkerchief. She untied two fifty-cent pieces out of
the knotted corner of it. "Give me one of them," she said, holding out
the money.

The man eyed it with his mouth hiked to one side. "A buck fifty,
sister," he said.

She pulled her hand in quickly and all at once glared at Hazel Motes as
if he had made a noise at her. The blind man was moving on. She stood a
second glaring at Haze, and then she turned and followed the blind man.
Haze started.

"Listen," Enoch Emery said, "I ain't got but a dollar sixteen cent and I
want me one of them..."

"You can keep it," the man said, taking the bucket off the card table.
"This ain't no cut-rate joint."

Haze could see the blind man moving down the street some distance away.
He stood staring after him, jerking his hands in and out of his pockets
as if he were trying to move forward and backward at the same time. Then
suddenly he thrust two dollars at the man selling peelers and snatched a
box off the card table and started running down the street. In a second
Enoch Emery was panting at his elbow. "My, I reckon you got a heap of
money," Enoch Emery said.

Haze saw the child catch up with the blind man and take him by the
elbow. They were about a block ahead of him. He slowed down some and saw
Enoch Emery there. Enoch had on a yellowish white suit and a pinkish
white shirt and his tie was the color of green peas. He was smiling. He
looked like a friendly hound dog with light mange. "How long you been
here?" he inquired.

"Two days," Haze muttered.

"I been here two months," Enoch said. "I work for the city. Where you
work?"

"Not working," Haze said.

"That's too bad," Enoch said. "I work for the city." He skipped a step
to get in line with Haze, then he said, "I'm eighteen year old and I
ain't been here but two months and I already work for the city."

"That's fine," Haze said. He pulled his hat down farther on the side
Enoch Emery was on and walked very fast. The blind man up ahead began to
make mock bows to the right and left.

"I didn't ketch your name good," Enoch said.

Haze said his name.

"You look like you might be follerin' them hicks," Enoch remarked. "You
go in for a lot of Jesus business?"

"No," Haze said.

"No, me neither, not much," Enoch agreed. "I went to thisyer Rodemill
Boys' Bible Academy for four weeks. Thisyer woman that traded me from my
daddy she sent me. She was a Welfare woman. Jesus, four weeks and I
thought I was going to be sanctified crazy."

Haze walked to the end of the block and Enoch stayed at his elbow,
panting and talking. When Haze started across the street, Enoch yelled,
"Don't you see theter light! That means you got to wait!" A cop blew a
whistle and a car blasted its horn and stopped short. Haze went on
across, keeping his eyes on the blind man in the middle of the block.
The policeman kept on blowing his whistle. He crossed the street to
where Haze was and stopped him. He had a thin face and oval-shaped
yellow eyes.

"You know what that little thing hanging up there is for?" he asked,
pointing to the traffic light over the intersection.

"I didn't see it," Haze said.

The policeman looked at him without saying anything. A few people
stopped. He rolled his eyes at them. "Maybe you thought the red ones was
for white folks and the green ones for niggers," he said.

"Yeah I thought that," Haze said. "Take your hand off me."

The policeman took his hand off and put it on his hip. He backed one
step away and said, "You tell all your friends about these lights. Red
is to stop, green is to go--men and women, white folks and niggers, all
go on the same light. You tell all your friends so when they come to
town, they'll know." The people laughed.

"I'll look after him," Enoch Emery said, pushing in by the policeman.
"He ain't been here but only two days. I'll look after him."

"How long you been here?" the cop asked.

"I was born and raised here," Enoch said. "This is my ol' home town.
I'll take care of him for you. Hey wait!" he yelled at Haze. "Wait on
me!" He pushed out of the crowd and caught up with him. "I reckon I
saved you that time," he said.

"I'm obliged," Haze said.

"It wasn't nothing," Enoch said. "Whyn't we go in Walgreen's and get us
a soda? Ain't no night clubs open this early."

"I don't like drug stores," Haze said. "Good-by."

"That's all right," Enoch said. "I reckon I'll go along and keep you
company for a while." He looked up ahead at the blind man and the child
and said, "I sho wouldn't want to get messed up with no hicks this time
of night, particularly the Jesus kind. I done had enough of them myself.
Thisyer Welfare woman that traded me from my daddy didn't do nothing but
pray. Me and daddy we moved around with a sawmill where we worked and it
set up outside Boonville one summer and here come thisyer woman." He
caught hold of Haze's coat. "Only objection I got to Taulkinham is
there's too many people on the streets," he said confidentially. "Look
like all they want to do is knock you down--well here she come and I
reckon she took a fancy to me. I was twelve year old and I could sing
some hymns good I learnt off a nigger. So here she comes taking a fancy
to me and traded me off my daddy and took me to Boonville to live with
her. She had a brick house but it was Jesus all day long." A little man
lost in a pair of faded overalls jostled him. "Whyn't you look wher you
going?" Enoch growled.

The little man stopped and raised his arm in a vicious gesture and a
nasty-dog look came on his face. "Who you tellin' what?" he snarled.

"You see," Enoch said, jumping to catch up with Haze, "all they want to
do is knock you down. I ain't never been to such a unfriendly place
before. Even with that woman. I stayed with her for two months in that
house of hers," he went on, "and then come fall she sent me to the
Rodemill Boys' Bible Academy and I thought that sho was going to be some
relief. This woman was hard to get along with--she wasn't old, I reckon
she was forty year old--but she sho was ugly. She had theseyer brown
glasses and her hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over
her skull. I thought it was going to be some certain relief to get to
theter Academy. I had run away oncet on her and she got me back and come
to find out she had papers on me and she could send me to the
penitentiary if I didn't stay with her so I sho was glad to get to
theter Academy. You ever been to a academy?"

Haze didn't seem to hear the question.

"Well, it won't no relief," Enoch said. "Good Jesus, it won't no relief.
I run away from there after four weeks and durn if she didn't get me
back and brought me to that house of hers again. I got out though." He
waited a minute. "You want to know how?"

After a second he said, "I scared hell out of that woman, that's how. I
studied on it and studied on it. I even prayed. I said, 'Jesus, show me
the way to get out of here without killing thisyer woman and getting
sent to the penitentiary,' and durn if He didn't. I got up one morning
at just daylight and I went in her room without my pants on and pulled
the sheet off her and giver a heart attact. Then I went back to my daddy
and we ain't seen hide of her since.

"Your jaw just crawls," he observed, watching the side of Haze's face.
"You don't never laugh. I wouldn't be surprised if you wasn't a real
wealthy man."

Haze turned down a side street. The blind man and the girl were on the
corner a block ahead. "Well, I reckon we going to ketch up with them
after all," Enoch said. "You know many people here?"

"No," Haze said.

"You ain't gonna know none neither. This is one more hard place to make
friends in. I been here two months and I don't know nobody. Look like
all they want to do is knock you down. I reckon you got a right heap of
money," he said. "I ain't got none. Had, I'd sho know what to do with
it." The blind man and his child stopped on the corner and turned up the
left side of the street. "We ketchin' up," he said. "I bet we'll be at
some meeting singing hymns with her and her daddy if we don't watch
out."

Up in the next block there was a large building with columns and a dome.
The blind man and the girl were going toward it. There was a car parked
in every space around the building and on the other side of the street
and up and down the streets near it. "That ain't no picture show," Enoch
said. The blind man and the girl turned up the steps to the building.
The steps went all the way across the front, and on either side there
were stone lions sitting on pedestals. "Ain't no church," Enoch said.
Haze stopped at the steps. He looked as if he were trying to settle his
face into an expression. He pulled the black hat forward at a sharp
angle and started toward the two, who had sat down in the corner by one
of the lions. He came up to where the blind man was without saying
anything and stood leaning forward in front of him as if he were trying
to see through the black glasses. The child stared at him.

The blind man's mouth thinned slightly. "I can smell the sin on your
breath," he said.

Haze drew back.

"What'd you follow me for?"

"I never followed you," Haze said.

"She said you were following," the blind man said, jerking his thumb in
the direction of the child.

"I ain't followed you," Haze said. He felt the peeler box in his hand
and looked at the girl. Her black knitted cap made a straight line
across her forehead. She grinned suddenly and then quickly drew her
expression back together as if she smelled something bad. "I ain't
followed you nowhere," Haze said. "I followed her." He stuck the peeler
out at her.

At first she looked as if she were going to grab it, but she didn't. "I
don't want that thing," she said. "What you think I want with that
thing? Take it. It ain't mine. I don't want it!"

"You take it," the blind man said. "You put it in your sack and shut up
before I hit you."

Haze thrust the peeler at her again.

"I won't have it," she muttered.

"You take it like I told you," the blind man said. "He never followed
you."

She took it and shoved it in the sack where the tracts were. "It ain't
mine," she said. "I got it but it ain't mine."

"I followed her to say I ain't beholden for none of her fast eye like
she gave me back there," Haze said, looking at the blind man.

"What you mean?" she shouted. "I never looked at you with no fast eye. I
only watched you tearing up that tract. He tore it up in little pieces,"
she said, pushing the blind man's shoulder. "He tore it up and sprinkled
it all over the ground like salt and wiped his hands on his pants."

"He followed me," the blind man said. "Nobody would follow you. I can
hear the urge for Jesus in his voice."

"Jesus," Haze muttered. "My Jesus." He sat down by the girl's leg and
set his hand on the step next to her foot. She had on sneakers and black
cotton stockings.

"Listen at him cursing," she said in a low tone. "He never followed you,
Papa."

The blind man gave his edgy laugh. "Listen boy," he said, "you can't run
away from Jesus. Jesus is a fact."

"I know a whole heap about Jesus," Enoch said. "I attended thisyer
Rodemill Boys' Bible Academy that a woman sent me to. If it's anything
you want to know about Jesus, just ast me." He had got up on the lion's
back and he was sitting there sideways, cross-legged.

"I come a long way," Haze said, "since I would believe anything. I come
halfway around the world."

"Me too," Enoch Emery said.

"You ain't come so far that you could keep from following me," the blind
man said. He reached out suddenly and his hands covered Haze's face. For
a second Haze didn't move or make any sound. Then he knocked the hands
off.

"Quit it," he said in a faint voice. "You don't know anything about me."

"My daddy looks just like Jesus," Enoch remarked from the lion's back.
"His hair hangs to his shoulders. Only difference is he's got a scar
acrost his chin. I ain't never seen who my mother is."

"Some preacher has left his mark on you," the blind man said with a kind
of snicker. "Did you follow for me to take it off or give you another
one?"

"Listen here, there's nothing for your pain but Jesus," the child said
suddenly. She tapped Haze on the shoulder. He sat there with his black
hat tilted forward over his face. "Listen," she said in a louder voice,
"this here man and woman killed this little baby. It was her own child
but it was ugly and she never give it any love. This child had Jesus and
this woman didn't have nothing but good looks and a man she was living
in sin with. She sent the child away and it come back and she sent it
away again and it come back again and ever' time she sent it away, it
come back to where her and this man was living in sin. They strangled it
with a silk stocking and hung it up in the chimney. It didn't give her
any peace after that, though. Everything she looked at was that child.
Jesus made it beautiful to haunt her. She couldn't lie with that man
without she saw it, staring through the chimney at her, shining through
the brick in the middle of the night."

"My Jesus," Haze muttered.

"She didn't have nothing but good looks," she said in the loud fast
voice. "That ain't enough. No sirree."

"I hear them scraping their feet inside there," the blind man said. "Get
out the tracts, they're fixing to come out."

"It ain't enough," she repeated.

"What we gonna do?" Enoch asked. "What's inside theter building?"

"A program letting out," the blind man said. "My congregation."

The child took the tracts out of the gunny sack and gave him two bunches
of them, tied with a string. "You and the other boy go over on that side
and give out," he said to her. "Me and the one that followed me'll stay
over here."

"He don't have no business touching them," she said. "He don't want to
do anything but shred them up."

"Go like I told you," the blind man said.

She stood there a second, scowling. Then she said, "You come on if
you're coming," to Enoch Emery and Enoch jumped off the lion and
followed her over to the other side.

Haze ducked down a step but the blind man's hand shot out and clamped
him around the arm. He said in a fast whisper, "Repent! Go to the head
of the stairs and renounce your sins and distribute these tracts to the
people!" and he thrust a stack of pamphlets into Haze's hand.

Haze jerked his arm away but he only pulled the blind man nearer.
"Listen," he said, "I'm as clean as you are."

"Fornication and blasphemy and what else?" the blind man said.

"They ain't nothing but words," Haze said. "If I was in sin I was in it
before I ever committed any. There's no change come in me." He was
trying to pry the fingers off from around his arm but the blind man kept
wrapping them tighter. "I don't believe in sin," Haze said, "take your
hand off me."

"Jesus loves you," the blind man said in a flat mocking voice, "Jesus
loves you, Jesus loves you..."

"Nothing matters but that Jesus don't exist," Haze said, pulling his arm
free.

"Go to the head of the stairs and distribute these tracts and..."

"I'll take them up there and throw them over into the bushes!" Haze
shouted. "You be watching and see can you see."

"I can see more than you!" the blind man yelled, laughing. "You got eyes
and see not, ears and hear not, but you'll have to see some time."

"You be watching if you can see!" Haze said, and started running up the
steps. A crowd of people were already coming out the auditorium doors
and some were halfway down the steps. He pushed through them with his
elbows out like sharp wings and when he got to the top, a new surge of
them pushed him back almost to where he had started up. He fought
through them again until somebody shouted, "Make room for this idiot!"
and people got out of his way. He rushed to the top and pushed his way
over to the side and stood there, glaring and panting.

"I never followed him," he said aloud. "I wouldn't follow a blind fool
like that. My Jesus." He stood against the building, holding the stack
of leaflets by the string. A fat man stopped near him to light a cigar
and Haze pushed his shoulder. "Look down yonder," he said. "See that
blind man down there? He's giving out tracts and begging. Jesus. You
ought to see him and he's got this here ugly child dressed up in woman's
clothes, giving them out too. My Jesus."

"There's always fanatics," the fat man said, moving on.

"My Jesus," Haze said. He leaned forward near an old woman with blue
hair and a collar of red wooden beads. "You better get on the other
side, lady," he said. "There's a fool down there giving out tracts." The
crowd behind the old woman pushed her on, but she looked at him for an
instant with two bright flea eyes. He started toward her through the
people but she was already too far away and he pushed back to where he
had been standing against the wall. "Sweet Jesus Christ Crucified," he
said, "I want to tell you people something. Maybe you think you're not
clean because you don't believe. Well you are clean, let me tell you
that. Every one of you people are clean and let me tell you why if you
think it's because of Jesus Christ Crucified you're wrong. I don't say
he wasn't crucified but I say it wasn't for you. Listenhere, I'm a
preacher myself and I preach the truth." The crowd was moving fast. It
was like a large spread raveling and the separate threads disappeared
down the dark streets. "Don't I know what exists and what don't?" he
cried. "Don't I have eyes in my head? Am I a blind man? Listenhere," he
called, "I'm going to preach a new church--the church of truth without
Jesus Christ Crucified. It won't cost you nothing to join my church.
It's not started yet but it's going to be." The few people who were left
glanced at him once or twice. There were tracts scattered below over the
sidewalk and out on the street. The blind man was sitting on the bottom
step. Enoch Emery was on the other side, standing on the lion's head,
trying to balance himself, and the child was standing near him, watching
Haze. "I don't need Jesus," Haze said. "What do I need with Jesus? I got
Leora Watts."

He went down the stairs quietly to where the blind man was and stopped.
He stood there a second and the blind man laughed. Haze moved away, and
started across the street. He was on the other side before the voice
pierced after him. He turned and saw the blind man standing in the
middle of the street, shouting, "Hawks, Hawks, my name is Asa Hawks when
you try to follow me again!" A car had to swerve to the side to keep
from hitting him. "Repent!" He shouted and laughed and ran forward a
little way, pretending he was going to come after Haze and grab him.

Haze drew his head down nearer his hunched shoulders and went on
quickly. He didn't look back until he heard other footsteps coming
behind him.

"Now that we got shut of them," Enoch Emery panted, "whyn't we go
somewher and have us some fun?"

"Listen," Haze said roughly, "I got business of my own. I seen all of
you I want." He began walking very fast.

Enoch kept skipping steps to keep up. "I been here two months," he said,
"and I don't know nobody. People ain't friendly here. I got me a room
and there ain't never nobody in it but me. My daddy said I had to come.
I wouldn't never have come but he made me. I think I seen you sommers
before. You ain't from Stockwell, are you?"

"No."

"Melsy?"

"No."

"Sawmill set up there oncet," Enoch said. "Look like you had a kind of
familer face."

They walked on without saying anything until they got on the main street
again. It was almost deserted. "Good-by," Haze said.

"I'm going thisaway too," Enoch said in a sullen voice. On the left
there was a movie house where the electric bill was being changed. "We
hadn't got tied up with them hicks we could have gone to a show," he
muttered. He strode along at Haze's elbow, talking in a half mumble,
half whine. Once he caught at his sleeve to slow him down and Haze
jerked it away. "My daddy made me come," he said in a cracked voice.
Haze looked at him and saw he was crying, his face seamed and wet and a
purple-pink color. "I ain't but eighteen year old," he cried, "an' he
made me come and I don't know nobody, nobody here'll have nothing to do
with nobody else. They ain't friendly. He done gone off with a woman and
made me come but she ain't going to stay for long, he'll beat hell out
of her before she gets herself stuck to a chair. You the first familer
face I seen in two months. I seen you sommers before. I know I seen you
sommers before."

Haze looked straight ahead with his face set and Enoch kept up the half
mumble, half blubber. They passed a church and a hotel and an antique
shop and turned up Mrs. Watts's street.

"If you want you a woman you don't have to be follering nothing looked
like that kid you give a peeler to," Enoch said. "I heard about where
there's a house where we could have us some fun. I could pay you back
next week."

"Look," Haze said, "I'm going where I'm going--two doors from here. I
got a woman. I got a woman, see? And that's where I'm going--to visit
her. I don't need to go with you."

"I could pay you back next week," Enoch said. "I work at the city zoo. I
guard a gate and I get paid ever' week."

"Get away from me," Haze said.

"People ain't friendly here. You ain't from here but you ain't friendly
neither."

Haze didn't answer him. He went on with his neck drawn close to his
shoulder blades as if he were cold.

"You don't know nobody neither," Enoch said. "You ain't got no woman nor
nothing to do. I knew when I first seen you you didn't have nobody nor
nothing but Jesus. I seen you and I knew it."

"This is where I'm going in at," Haze said, and he turned up the walk
without looking back at Enoch.

Enoch stopped. "Yeah," he cried, "oh yeah," and he ran his sleeve under
his nose to stop the snivel. "Yeah," he cried, "go on where you goin'
but lookerhere." He slapped at his pocket and ran up and caught Haze's
sleeve and rattled the peeler box at him. "She give me this. She give it
to me and there ain't nothing you can do about it. She told me where
they lived and ast me to visit them and bring you--not you bring me, me
bring you--and it was you follerin' them." His eyes glinted through his
tears and his face stretched in an evil crooked grin. "You act like you
think you got wiser blood than anybody else," he said, "but you ain't!
I'm the one has it. Not you. _Me._"

Haze didn't say anything. He stood there for an instant, small in the
middle of the steps, and then he raised his arm and hurled the stack of
tracts he had been carrying. It hit Enoch in the chest and knocked his
mouth open. He stood looking, with his mouth hanging open, at where it
had hit his front, and then he turned and tore off down the street; and
Haze went into the house.

Since the night before was the first time he had slept with any woman,
he had not been very successful with Mrs. Watts. When he finished, he
was like something washed ashore on her, and she had made obscene
comments about him, which he remembered off and on during the day. He
was uneasy in the thought of going to her again. He didn't know what she
would say when he opened the door and she saw him there.

When he opened the door and she saw him there, she said, "Ha ha."

The black hat sat on his head squarely. He came in with it on and when
it knocked the electric light bulb that hung down from the middle of the
ceiling, he took it off. Mrs. Watts was in bed, applying a grease to her
face. She rested her chin on her hand and watched him. He began to move
around the room, examining this and that. His throat got dryer and his
heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching the bars of its
cage. He sat down on the edge of her bed, with his hat in his hand.

Mrs. Watts's grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle. It
was plain that she was so well-adjusted that she didn't have to think
any more. Her eyes took everything in whole, like quicksand. "That
Jesus-seeing hat!" she said. She sat up and pulled her nightgown from
under her and took it off. She reached for his hat and put it on her
head and sat with her hands on her hips, walling her eyes in a comical
way. Haze stared for a minute, then he made three quick noises that were
laughs. He jumped for the electric light cord and took off his clothes
in the dark.

Once when he was small, his father took him to a carnival that stopped
in Melsy. There was one tent that cost more money a little off to one
side. A dried-up man with a horn voice was barking it. He didn't say
what was inside. He said it was so SINsational that it would cost any
man that wanted to see it thirty-five cents, and it was so EXclusive,
only fifteen could get in at a time. His father sent him to a tent where
two monkeys danced, and then he made for it, moving close to the walls
of things like he moved. Haze left the monkeys and followed him, but he
didn't have thirty-five cents. He asked the barker what was inside.

"Beat it," the man said. "There ain't no pop and there ain't no
monkeys."

"I already seen them," he said.

"That's fine," the man said, "beat it."

"I got fifteen cents," he said. "Whyn't you lemme in and I could see
half of it?" It's something about a privy, he was thinking. It's some
men in a privy. Then he thought, maybe it's a man and a woman in a
privy. She wouldn't want me in there. "I got fifteen cents," he said.

"It's more than half over," the man said, fanning with his straw hat.
"You run along."

"That'll be fifteen cents worth then," Haze said.

"Scram," the man said.

"Is it a nigger?" Haze asked. "Are they doing something to a nigger?"

The man leaned off his platform and his dried-up face drew into a glare.
"Where'd you get that idear?" he said.

"I don't know," Haze said.

"How old are you?" the man asked.

"Twelve," Haze said. He was ten.

"Gimme that fifteen cents," the man said, "and get in there."

He slid the money on the platform and scrambled to get in before it was
over. He went through the flap of the tent and inside there was another
tent and he went through that. All he could see were the backs of the
men. He climbed up on a bench and looked over their heads. They were
looking down into a lowered place where something white was lying,
squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he
thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman. She was
fat and she had a face like an ordinary woman except there was a mole on
the corner of her lip, that moved when she grinned, and one on her side.

"Had one of themther built into ever' casket," his father, up toward the
front, said, "be a heap ready to go sooner."

Haze recognized the voice without looking. He slid down off the bench
and scrambled out of the tent. He crawled out under the side of the
outside one because he didn't want to pass the barker. He got in the
back of a truck and sat down in the far corner of it. The carnival was
making a tin roar outside.

His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at him, when
he got home. She wore black all the time and her dresses were longer
than other women's. She was standing there straight, looking at him. He
moved behind a tree and got out of her view, but in a few minutes, he
could feel her watching him through the tree. He saw the lowered place
and the casket again and a thin woman in the casket who was too long for
it. Her head stuck up at one end and her knees were raised to make her
fit. She had a cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head. He
stood flat against the tree, waiting. She left the washpot and came
toward him with a stick. She said, "What you seen?

"What you seen?" she said.

"What you seen," she said, using the same tone of voice all the time.
She hit him across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the
tree. "Jesus died to redeem you," she said.

"I never ast him," he muttered.

She didn't hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed, and
he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was
in him. In a minute she threw the stick away from her and went back to
the washpot, still shut-mouthed.

The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods. He didn't
wear them except for revivals and in the winter. He took them out of the
box and filled the bottoms of them with stones and small rocks and then
he put them on. He laced them up tight and walked in them through the
woods for what he knew to be a mile, until he came to a creek, and then
he sat down and took them off and eased his feet in the wet sand. He
thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had
fallen he would have taken it as a sign. After a while he drew his feet
out of the sand and let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again
with the rocks still in them and he walked a half-mile back before he
took them off.




                               CHAPTER 4


He got out of Mrs. Watts's bed early in the morning before any light
came in the room. When he woke up, her arm was flung across him. He
leaned up and lifted it off and eased it down by her side, but he didn't
look at her. There was only one thought in his mind: he was going to buy
a car. The thought was full grown in his head when he woke up, and he
didn't think of anything else. He had never thought before of buying a
car; he had never even wanted one before. He had driven one only a
little in his life and he didn't have any license. He had only fifty
dollars but he thought he could buy a car for that. He got stealthily
out the bed, without disturbing Mrs. Watts, and put his clothes on
silently. By six-thirty, he was down town, looking for used-car lots.

Used-car lots were scattered among the blocks of old buildings that
separated the business section from the railroad yards. He wandered
around in a few of them before they were open. He could tell from the
outside of the lot if it would have a fifty-dollar car in it. When they
began to be open for business, he went through them quickly, paying no
attention to anyone who tried to show him the stock. His black hat sat
on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile
look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a
gun no one knows is loaded.

It was a wet glary day. The sky was like a piece of thin polished silver
with a dark sour-looking sun in one corner of it. By ten o'clock he had
canvassed all the better lots and was nearing the railroad yards. Even
here, the lots were full of cars that cost more than fifty dollars.
Finally he came to one between two deserted warehouses. A sign over the
entrance said: SLADE'S FOR THE LATEST.

There was a gravel road going down the middle of the lot and over to one
side near the front, a tin shack with the word, OFFICE, painted on the
door. The rest of the lot was full of old cars and broken machinery. A
white boy was sitting on a gasoline can in front of the office. He had
the look of being there to keep people out. He wore a black raincoat and
his face was partly hidden under a leather cap. There was a cigarette
hanging out of one corner of his mouth and the ash on it was about an
inch long.

Haze started off toward the back of the lot where he saw a particular
car. "Hey!" the boy yelled. "You don't just walk in here like that. I'll
show you what I got to show," but Haze didn't pay any attention to him.
He went on toward the back of the lot where he saw the car. The boy came
huffing behind him, cursing. The car he saw was on the last row of cars.
It was a high rat-colored machine with large thin wheels and bulging
headlights. When he got up to it, he saw that one door was tied on with
a rope and that it had an oval window in the back. This was the car he
was going to buy.

"Lemme see Slade," he said.

"What you want to see him for?" the boy asked in a testy voice. He had a
wide mouth and when he talked he used one side only of it.

"I want to see him about this car," Haze said.

"I'm him," the boy said. His face under the cap was like a thin picked
eagle's. He sat down on the running board of a car across the gravel
road and kept on cursing.

Haze walked around the car. Then he looked through the window at the
inside of it. Inside it was a dull greenish dust-color. The back seat
was missing but it had a two-by-four stretched across the seat frame to
sit on. There were dark green fringed window shades on the two side-back
windows. He looked through the two front windows and he saw the boy
sitting on the running board of the car across the gravel road. He had
one trouser leg hitched up and he was scratching his ankle that stuck up
out of a pulp of yellow sock. He cursed far down in his throat as if he
were trying to get up phlegm. The two window glasses made him a yellow
color and distorted his shape. Haze moved quickly from the far side of
the car and came around in front. "How much is it?" he asked.

"Jesus on the cross," the boy said, "Christ nailed."

"How much is it?" Haze growled, paling a little.

"How much do you think it's worth?" the boy said. "Give us a estimit."

"It ain't worth what it would take to cart it off. I wouldn't have it."

The boy gave all his attention to his ankle where there was a scab. Haze
looked up and saw a man coming from between two cars over on the boy's
side. As he came closer, he saw that the man looked exactly like the boy
except that he was two heads taller and he had on a sweat-stained brown
felt hat. He was coming up behind the boy, between a row of cars. When
he got just behind him, he stopped and waited a second. Then he said in
a sort of controlled roar, "Get your butt off that running board!"

The boy snarled and disappeared, scrambling between two cars.

The man stood looking at Haze. "What you want?" he asked.

"This car here," Haze said.

"Seventy-fi' dollars," the man said.

On either side of the lot there were two old buildings, reddish with
black empty windows, and behind there was another without any windows.
"I'm obliged," Haze said, and he started back toward the office.

When he got to the entrance, he glanced back and saw the man about four
feet behind him. "We might argue it some," he said.

Haze followed him back to where the car was.

"You won't find a car like that ever' day," the man said. He sat down on
the running board that the boy had been sitting on. Haze didn't see the
boy but he was there, sitting up on the hood of a car two cars over. He
was sitting huddled up as if he were freezing but his face had a sour
composed look. "All new tires," the man said.

"They were new when it was built," Haze said.

"They was better cars built a few years ago," the man said. "They don't
make no more good cars."

"What you want for it?" Haze asked again.

The man stared off, thinking. After a while he said, "I might could let
you have it for sixty-fi'."

Haze leaned against the car and started to roll a cigarette but he
couldn't get it rolled. He kept spilling the tobacco and then the
papers.

"Well, what you want to pay for it?" the man asked. "I wouldn't trade me
a Chrysler for a Essex like that. That car yonder ain't been built by a
bunch of niggers.

"All the niggers are living in Detroit now, putting cars together," he
said, making conversation. "I was up there a while myself and I seen. I
come home."

"I wouldn't pay over thirty dollars for it," Haze said.

"They got one nigger up there," the man said, "is almost as light as you
or me." He took off his hat and ran his finger around the sweat band
inside it. He had a little bit of carrot-colored hair.

"We'll drive it around," the man said, "or would you like to get under
and look up it?"

"No," Haze said.

The man gave him a half look. "You pay when you leave," he said easily.
"You don't find what you looking for in one there's others for the same
price obliged to have it." Two cars over the boy began to curse again.
It was like a hacking cough. Haze turned suddenly and kicked his foot
into the front tire. "I done tole you them tires won't bust," the man
said.

"How much?" Haze said.

"I might could make it fifty dollar," the man offered.

Before Haze bought the car, the man put some gas in it and drove him
around a few blocks to prove it would run. The boy sat hunched up in the
back on the two-by-four, cursing. "Something's wrong with him howcome he
curses so much," the man said. "Just don't listen at him." The car rode
with a high growling noise. The man put on the brakes to show how well
they worked and the boy was thrown off the two-by-four at their heads.
"Goddam you," the man roared, "quit jumping at us thataway. Keep your
butt on the board." The boy didn't say anything. He didn't even curse.
Haze looked back and he was sitting huddled up in the black raincoat
with the black leather cap pulled down almost to his eyes. The only
thing different was that the ash had been knocked off his cigarette.

He bought the car for forty dollars and then he paid the man extra for
five gallons of gasoline. The man had the boy go in the office and bring
out a five-gallon can of gas to fill up the tank with. The boy came
cursing and lugging the yellow gas can, bent over almost double. "Give
it here," Haze said, "I'll do it myself." He was in a terrible hurry to
get away in the car. The boy jerked the can away from him and
straightened up. It was only half full but he held it over the tank
until five gallons would have spilled out slowly. All the time he kept
saying, "Sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus."

"Why don't he shut up?" Haze said suddenly. "What's he keep talking like
that for?"

"I don't never know what ails him," the man said and shrugged.

When the car was ready the man and the boy stood by to watch him drive
it off. He didn't want anybody watching him because he hadn't driven a
car in four or five years. The man and the boy didn't say anything while
he tried to start it. They only stood there, looking in at him. "I
wanted this car mostly to be a house for me," he said to the man. "I
ain't got any place to be."

"You ain't took the brake off yet," the man said.

He took off the brake and the car shot backward because the man had left
it in reverse. In a second he got it going forward and he drove off
crookedly, past the man and the boy still standing there watching. He
kept going forward, thinking nothing and sweating. For a long time he
stayed on the street he was on. He had a hard time holding the car in
the road. He went past railroad yards for about a half-mile and then
warehouses. When he tried to slow the car down, it stopped altogether
and then he had to start it again. He went past long blocks of gray
houses and then blocks of better, yellow houses. It began to drizzle
rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter
like two idiots clapping in church. He went past blocks of white houses,
each sitting with an ugly dog face on a square of grass. Finally he went
over a viaduct and found the highway.

He began going very fast.

The highway was ragged with filling stations and trailer camps and
roadhouses. After a while there were stretches where red gulleys dropped
off on either side of the road and behind them there were patches of
field buttoned together with 666 posts. The sky leaked over all of it
and then it began to leak into the car. The head of a string of pigs
appeared snout-up over the ditch and he had to screech to a stop and
watch the rear of the last pig disappear shaking into the ditch on the
other side. He started the car again and went on. He had the feeling
that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing
that he had forgotten had happened to him. A black pick-up truck turned
off a side road in front of him. On the back of it an iron bed and a
chair and table were tied, and on top of them, a crate of barred-rock
chickens. The truck went very slowly, with a rumbling sound, and in the
middle of the road. Haze started pounding his horn and he had hit it
three times before he realized it didn't make any sound. The crate was
stuffed so full of wet barred-rock chickens that the ones facing him had
their heads outside the bars. The truck didn't go any faster and he was
forced to drive slowly. The fields stretched sodden on either side until
they hit the scrub pines.

The road turned and went down hill and a high embankment appeared on one
side with pines standing on it, facing a gray boulder that jutted out of
the opposite gulley wall. White letters on the boulder said, WOE TO THE
BLASPHEMER AND WHOREMONGER! WILL HELL SWALLOW YOU UP? The pick-up truck
slowed even more as if it were reading the sign and Haze pounded his
empty horn. He beat on it and beat on it but it didn't make any sound.
The pick-up truck went on, bumping the glum barred-rock chickens over
the edge of the next hill. Haze's car was stopped and his eyes were
turned toward the two words at the bottom of the sign. They said in
smaller letters, "Jesus Saves."

He sat looking at the sign and he didn't hear the horn. An oil truck as
long as a railroad car was behind him. In a second a red square face was
at his car window. It watched the back of his neck and hat for a minute
and then a hand came in and sat on his shoulder. "What you doing parked
in the middle of the road?" the truck driver asked.

Haze turned his fragile placed-looking face toward him. "Take your hand
off me," he said. "I'm reading the sign."

The driver's expression and his hand stayed exactly the way they were,
as if he didn't hear very well.

"There's no person a whoremonger, who wasn't something worse first,"
Haze said. "That's not the sin, nor blasphemy. The sin came before
them."

The truck driver's face remained exactly the same.

"Jesus is a trick on niggers," Haze said.

The driver put both his hands on the window and gripped it. He looked as
if he intended to pick up the car. "Will you get your goddam outhouse
off the middle of the road?" he said.

"I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything,"
Haze said. He and the driver looked at each other for about a minute.
Haze's look was the more distant; another plan was forming in his mind.
"Which direction is the zoo in?" he asked.

"Back around the other way," the driver said. "Did you exscape from
there?"

"I got to see a boy that works in it," Haze said. He started the car up
and left the driver standing there, in front of the letters painted on
the boulder.




                               CHAPTER 5


That morning Enoch Emery knew when he woke up that today the person he
could show it to was going to come. He knew by his blood. He had wise
blood like his daddy.

At two o'clock that afternoon, he greeted the second-shift gate guard.
"You ain't but only fifteen minutes late," he said irritably. "But I
stayed. I could of went on but I stayed." He wore a green uniform with
yellow piping on the neck and sleeves and a yellow stripe down the
outside of each leg. The second-shift guard, a boy with a jutting
shale-textured face and a toothpick in his mouth, wore the same. The
gate they were standing by was made of iron bars and the concrete arch
that held it was fashioned to look like two trees; branches curved to
form the top of it where twisted letters said, CITY FOREST PARK. The
second-shift guard leaned against one of the trunks and began prodding
between his teeth with the pick.

"Ever' day," Enoch complained; "look like ever' day I lose fifteen good
minutes standing here waiting for you."

Every day when he got off duty, he went into the park, and every day
when he went in, he did the same things. He went first to the swimming
pool. He was afraid of the water but he liked to sit up on the bank
above it if there were any women in the pool, and watch them. There was
one woman who came every Monday who wore a bathing suit that was split
on each hip. At first he thought she didn't know it, and instead of
watching openly on the bank, he had crawled into some bushes, snickering
to himself, and had watched from there. There had been no one else in
the pool--the crowds didn't come until four o'clock--to tell her about
the splits and she had splashed around in the water and then lain up on
the edge of the pool asleep for almost an hour, all the time without
suspecting there was somebody in the bushes looking at her. Then on
another day when he stayed a little later, he saw three women, all with
their suits split, the pool full of people, and nobody paying them any
mind. That was how the city was--always surprising him. He visited a
whore when he felt like it but he was always being shocked by the
looseness he saw in the open. He crawled into the bushes out of a sense
of propriety. Very often the women would pull the suit straps down off
their shoulders and lie stretched out.

The park was the heart of the city. He had come to the city and--with a
knowing in his blood--he had established himself at the heart of it.
Every day he looked at the heart of it; every day; and he was so stunned
and awed and overwhelmed that just to think about it made him sweat.
There was something, in the center of the park, that he had discovered.
It was a mystery, although it was right there in a glass case for
everybody to see and there was a typewritten card over it telling all
about it. But there was something the card couldn't say and what it
couldn't say was inside him, a terrible knowledge without any words to
it, a terrible knowledge like a big nerve growing inside him. He could
not show the mystery to just anybody; but he had to show it to somebody.
Who he had to show it to was a special person. This person could not be
from the city but he didn't know why. He knew he would know him when he
saw him and he knew that he would have to see him soon or the nerve
inside him would grow so big that he would be forced to steal a car or
rob a bank or jump out of a dark alley onto a woman. His blood all
morning had been saying the person would come today.

He left the second-shift guard and approached the pool from a discreet
footpath that led behind the ladies' end of the bath house to a small
clearing where the entire pool could be seen at once. There was nobody
in it--the water was bottle-green and motionless--but he saw, coming up
the other side and heading for the bath house, the woman with the two
little boys. She came every other day or so and brought the two
children. She would go in the water with them and swim down the pool and
then she would lie up on the side in the sun. She had a stained white
bathing suit that fit her like a sack, and Enoch had watched her with
pleasure on several occasions. He moved from the clearing up a slope to
some abelia bushes. There was a nice tunnel under them and he crawled
into it until he came to a slightly wider place where he was accustomed
to sit. He settled himself and adjusted the abelia so that he could see
through it properly. His face was always very red in the bushes. Anyone
who parted the abelia sprigs at just that place, would think he saw a
devil and would fall down the slope and into the pool. The woman and the
two little boys entered the bath house.

Enoch never went immediately to the dark secret center of the park. That
was the peak of the afternoon. The other things he did built up to it.
When he left the bushes, he would go to the FROSTY BOTTLE, a hotdog
stand in the shape of an Orange Crush with frost painted in blue around
the top of it. Here he would have a chocolate malted milkshake and would
make some suggestive remarks to the waitress, whom he believed to be
secretly in love with him. After that he would go to see the animals.
They were in a long set of steel cages like Alcatraz Penitentiary in the
movies. The cages were electrically heated in the winter and
air-conditioned in the summer and there were six men hired to wait on
the animals and feed them T-bone steaks. The animals didn't do anything
but lie around. Enoch watched them every day, full of awe and hate. Then
he went _there_.

The two little boys ran out the bath house and dived into the water, and
simultaneously a grating noise issued from the driveway on the other
side of the pool. Enoch's head pierced out of the bushes. He saw a high
rat-colored car passing, which sounded as if its motor were dragging out
the back. The car passed and he could hear it rattle around the turn in
the drive and on away. He listened carefully, trying to hear if it would
stop. The noise receded and then gradually grew louder. The car passed
again. Enoch saw this time that there was only one person in it, a man.
The sound of it died away again and then grew louder. The car came
around a third time and stopped almost directly opposite Enoch across
the pool. The man in the car looked out the window and down the grass
slope to the water where the two little boys were splashing and
screaming. Enoch's head was as far out of the bushes as it would come
and he was squinting. The door by the man was tied on with a rope. The
man got out the other door and walked in front of the car and came
halfway down the slope to the pool. He stood there a minute as if he
were looking for somebody and then he sat down stiffly on the grass. He
had on a blue suit and a black hat. He sat with his knees drawn up.
"Well, I'll be dog," Enoch said. "Well, I'll be dog."

He began crawling out of the bushes immediately, his heart moving so
fast it was like one of those motorcycles at fairs that the fellow
drives around the walls of a pit. He even remembered the man's name--Mr.
Hazel Motes. In a second he appeared on all fours at the end of the
abelia and looked across the pool. The blue figure was still sitting
there in the same position. He had the look of being held there, as if
by an invisible hand, as if, if the hand lifted up, the figure would
spring across the pool in one leap without the expression on his face
changing once.

The woman came out of the bath house and went to the diving board. She
spread her arms out and began to bounce, making a big flapping sound
with the board. Then suddenly she swirled backward and disappeared below
the water. Mr. Hazel Motes's head turned very slowly, following her down
the pool.

Enoch got up and went down the path behind the bath house. He came
stealthily out on the other side and started walking toward Haze. He
stayed on the top of the slope, moving softly in the grass just off the
sidewalk, and making no noise. When he was directly behind him, he sat
down on the edge of the sidewalk. If his arms had been ten feet long, he
could have put his hands on Haze's shoulders. He studied him quietly.

The woman was climbing out of the pool, chinning herself up on the side.
First her face appeared, long and cadaverous, with a bandage-like
bathing cap coming down almost to her eyes, and sharp teeth protruding
from her mouth. Then she rose on her hands until a large foot and leg
came up from behind her and another on the other side and she was out,
squatting there, panting. She stood up loosely and shook herself, and
stamped in the water dripping off her. She was facing them and she
grinned. Enoch could see part of Hazel Motes's face watching the woman.
It didn't grin in return but it kept on watching her as she padded over
to a spot of sun almost directly under where they were sitting. Enoch
had to move a little closer to see.

The woman sat down in the spot of sun and took off her bathing cap. Her
hair was short and matted and all colors, from deep rust to a greenish
yellow. She shook her head and then she looked up at Hazel Motes again,
grinning through her pointed teeth. She stretched herself out in the
spot of sun, raising her knees and settling her backbone down against
the concrete. The two little boys, at the other end of the water, were
knocking each other's heads against the side of the pool. She settled
herself until she was flat against the concrete and then she reached up
and pulled the bathing suit straps off her shoulders.

"King Jesus!" Enoch whispered and before he could get his eyes off the
woman, Hazel Motes had sprung up and was almost to his car. The woman
was sitting straight up with the suit half off her in front, and Enoch
was looking both ways at once.

He wrenched his attention loose from the woman and darted after Hazel
Motes. "Wait on me!" he shouted and waved his arms in front of the car
which was already rattling and starting to go. Hazel Motes cut off the
motor. His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked
as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet
doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it
with a towel in his mouth.

"Well," Enoch said, "I declare if it ain't Hazel Motes. How are you,
Hazel?"

"The guard said I'd find you at the swimming pool," Hazel Motes said.
"He said you hid in the bushes and watched the swimming."

Enoch blushed. "I allus have admired swimming," he said. Then he stuck
his head farther through the window. "You were looking for me?" he
exclaimed.

"That blind man," Haze said, "that blind man named Hawks--did his child
tell you where they lived?"

Enoch didn't seem to hear. "You came out here special to see me?" he
said.

"Asa Hawks. His child gave you the peeler. Did she tell you where they
lived?"

Enoch eased his head out of the car. He opened the door and climbed in
beside Haze. For a minute he only looked at him, wetting his lips. Then
he whispered, "I got to show you something."

"I'm looking for those people," Haze said. "I got to see that man. Did
she tell you where they lived?"

"I got to show you this thing," Enoch said. "I got to show it to you,
here, this afternoon. I got to." He gripped Hazel Motes's arm and Haze
shook him off.

"Did she tell you where they live?" he said again.

Enoch kept wetting his lips. They were pale except for his fever
blister, which was purple. "Cert'nly," he said. "Ain't she invited me to
come to see her and bring my mouth organ? I got to show you this thing,
then I'll tell you."

"What thing?" Haze muttered.

"This thing I got to show you," Enoch said. "Drive straight on ahead and
I'll tell you where to stop."

"I don't want to see anything of yours," Haze Motes said. "I want that
address."

Enoch didn't look at Hazel Motes. He looked out the window. "I won't be
able to remember it unless you come," he said. In a minute the car
started. Enoch's blood was beating fast. He knew he had to go to the
FROSTY BOTTLE and the zoo before there, and he foresaw a terrible
struggle with Hazel Motes. He would have to get him there, even if he
had to hit him over the head with a rock and carry him on his back up to
it.

Enoch's brain was divided into two parts. The part in communication with
his blood did the figuring but it never said anything in words. The
other part was stocked up with all kinds of words and phrases. While the
first part was figuring how to get Hazel Motes through the FROSTY
BOTTLE and the zoo, the second inquired, "Where'd you git thisyer
fine car? You ought to paint you some signs on the outside it, like
'Step-in, baby'--I seen one with that on it, then I seen another,
said..."

Hazel Motes's face might have been cut out of the side of a rock.

"My daddy once owned a yeller Ford automobile he won on a ticket," Enoch
murmured. "It had a roll-top and two aerials and a squirrel tail all
come with it. He swapped it off. Stop here! Stop here!" he yelled--they
were passing the FROSTY BOTTLE.

"Where is it?" Hazel Motes said as soon as they were inside. They were
in a dark room with a counter across the back of it and brown stools
like toadstools in front of the counter. On the wall facing the door
there was a large advertisement for ice cream, showing a cow dressed up
like a housewife.

"It ain't here," Enoch said. "We have to stop here on the way and get
something to eat. What you want?"

"Nothing," Haze said. He stood stiffly in the middle of the room with
his hands in his pockets.

"Well, sit down," Enoch said. "I have to have a little drink."

Something stirred behind the counter and a woman with bobbed hair like a
man's got up from a chair where she had been reading the newspaper, and
came forward. She looked sourly at Enoch. She had on a once-white
uniform clotted with brown stains. "What you want?" she said in a loud
voice, leaning close to his ear. She had a man's face and big muscled
arms.

"I want a chocolate malted milkshake, baby girl," Enoch said softly. "I
want a lot of ice cream in it."

She turned fiercely from him and glared at Haze.

"He says he don't want nothing but to sit down and look at you for a
while," Enoch said. "He ain't hungry but for just to see you."

Haze looked woodenly at the woman and she turned her back on him and
began mixing the milkshake. He sat down on the last stool in the row and
started cracking his knuckles.

Enoch watched him carefully. "I reckon you done changed some," he said
after a few minutes.

Haze got up. "Give me those people's address. Right now," he said.

It came to Enoch in an instant--the police. His face was suddenly
suffused with secret knowledge. "I reckon you ain't as uppity as you was
last night," he said. "I reckon maybe," he said, "you ain't got so much
cause now as you had then." Stole theter automobile, he thought.

Hazel Motes sat back down.

"Howcome you jumped up so fast down yonder by the pool?" Enoch asked.
The woman turned around to him with the malted milk in her hand. "Of
course," he said evilly, "I wouldn't have had no truck with a ugly dish
like that neither."

The woman thumped the malted milk on the counter in front of him.
"Fifteen cents," she roared.

"You're worth more than that, baby girl," Enoch said. He snickered and
began gassing his malted milk through the straw.

The woman strode over to where Haze was. "What you come in here with a
son of a bitch like that for?" she shouted. "A nice quiet boy like you
to come in here with a son of a bitch. You ought to mind the company you
keep." Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar
under the counter. "Jesus," she said, wiping her hand under her nose.
She sat down in a straight chair in front of Haze but facing Enoch, and
folded her arms across her chest. "Ever' day," she said to Haze, looking
at Enoch, "ever' day that son of a bitch comes in here."

Enoch was thinking about the animals. They had to go next to see the
animals. He hated them; just thinking about them made his face turn a
chocolate purple color as if the malted milk were rising in his head.

"You're a nice boy," she said. "I can see, you got a clean nose, well
keep it clean, don't go messin' with a son a bitch like that yonder. I
always know a clean boy when I see one." She was shouting at Enoch, but
Enoch watched Hazel Motes. It was as if something inside Hazel Motes was
winding up, although he didn't move on the outside. He only looked
pressed down in that blue suit, as if inside it, the thing winding was
getting tighter and tighter. Enoch's blood told him to hurry. He raced
the milkshake up the straw.

"Yes sir," she said, "there ain't anything sweeter than a clean boy. God
for my witness. And I know a clean one when I see him and I know a son a
bitch when I see him and there's a heap of difference and that
pus-marked bastard zlurping through that straw is a goddamned son a
bitch and you a clean boy had better mind how you keep him company. I
know a clean boy when I see one."

Enoch screeched in the bottom of his glass. He fished fifteen cents from
his pocket and laid it on the counter and got up. But Hazel Motes was
already up; he was leaning over the counter toward the woman. She didn't
see him right away because she was looking at Enoch. He leaned on his
hands over the counter until his face was just a foot from hers. She
turned around and stared at him.

"Come on," Enoch started, "we don't have no time to be sassing around
with her. I got to show you this right away, I got..."

"I AM clean," Haze said.

It was not until he said it again that Enoch caught the words.

"I AM clean," he said again, without any expression on his face or in
his voice, just looking at the woman as if he were looking at a wall.
"If Jesus existed, I wouldn't be clean," he said.

She stared at him, startled and then outraged. "What do you think I
care!" she yelled. "Why should I give a goddam what you are!"

"Come on," Enoch whined, "come on or I won't tell you where them people
live." He caught Haze's arm and pulled him back from the counter and
toward the door.

"You bastard!" the woman screamed, "what do you think I care about any
of you filthy boys?"

Hazel Motes pushed the door open quickly and went out. He got back in
his car and Enoch climbed in behind him. "Okay," Enoch said, "drive
straight on ahead down this road."

"What you want for telling me?" Haze said. "I'm not staying here. I have
to go. I can't stay here any longer."

Enoch shuddered. He began wetting his lips. "I got to show it to you,"
he said hoarsely. "I can't show it to nobody but you. I had a sign it
was you when I seen you drive up at the pool. I knew all morning
somebody was going to come and then when I saw you at the pool, I had
thisyer sign."

"I don't care about your signs," Haze said.

"I go to see it ever' day," Enoch said. "I go ever' day but I ain't ever
been able to take nobody else with me. I had to wait on the sign. I'll
tell you them people's address just as soon as you see it. You got to
see it," he said. "When you see it, something's going to happen."

"Nothing's going to happen," Haze said.

He started the car again and Enoch sat forward on the seat. "Them
animals," he muttered. "We got to walk by them first. It won't take long
for that. It won't take a minute." He saw the animals waiting evil-eyed
for him, ready to throw him off time. He thought what if the police were
screaming out here now with sirens and squad cars and they got Hazel
Motes just before he showed it to him.

"I got to see those people," Haze said.

"Stop here! Stop here!" Enoch yelled.

There was a long shining row of steel cages over to the left and behind
the bars, black shapes were sitting or pacing. "Get out," Enoch said.
"This won't take one second."

Haze got out. Then he stopped. "I got to see those people," he said.

"Okay, okay, come on," Enoch whined.

"I don't believe you know the address."

"I do! I do!" Enoch cried. "It begins with a three, now come on!" He
pulled Haze toward the cages. Two black bears sat in the first one,
facing each other like two matrons having tea, their faces polite and
self-absorbed. "They don't do nothing but sit there all day and stink,"
Enoch said. "A man comes and washes them cages out ever' morning with a
hose and it stinks just as much as if he'd left it." He went past two
more cages of bears, not looking at them, and then he stopped at the
next cage where there were two yellow-eyed wolves nosing around the
edges of the concrete. "Hyenas," he said. "I ain't got no use for
hyenas." He leaned closer and spit into the cage, hitting one of the
wolves on the leg. It shuttled to the side, giving him a slanted evil
look. For a second he forgot Hazel Motes. Then he looked back quickly to
make sure he was still there. He was right behind him. He was not
looking at the animals. Thinking about them police, Enoch thought. He
said, "Come on, we don't have time to look at all theseyer monkeys that
come next." Usually he stopped at every cage and made an obscene comment
aloud to himself, but today the animals were only a form he had to get
through. He hurried past the cages of monkeys, looking back two or three
times to make sure Hazel Motes was behind him. At the last of the monkey
cages, he stopped as if he couldn't help himself.

"Look at that ape," he said, glaring. The animal had its back to him,
gray except for a small pink seat. "If I had a ass like that," he said
prudishly, "I'd sit on it. I wouldn't be exposing it to all these people
come to this park. Come on, we don't have to look at theseyer birds that
come next." He ran past the cages of birds and then he was at the end of
the zoo. "Now we don't need the car," he said, going on ahead, "we'll go
right down that hill yonder through them trees." Haze had stopped at the
last cage for birds. "Oh Jesus," Enoch groaned. He stood and waved his
arms wildly and shouted, "Come on!" but Haze didn't move from where he
was looking into the cage.

Enoch ran back to him and grabbed him by the arm but Haze pushed him off
and kept on looking in the cage. It was empty. Enoch stared. "It's
empty!" he shouted. "What you have to look in that ole empty cage for?
You come on!" He stood there, sweating and purple. "It's empty!" he
shouted. And then he saw it wasn't empty. Over in one corner on the
floor of the cage, there was an eye. The eye was in the middle of
something that looked like a piece of mop sitting on an old rag. He
squinted close to the wire and saw that the piece of mop was an owl with
one eye open. It was looking directly at Hazel Motes. "That ain't
nothing but a ole hoot owl," he moaned. "You seen them things before."

"I AM clean," Haze said to the eye. He said it just the way he said it
to the woman in the FROSTY BOTTLE. The eye shut softly and the owl
turned its face to the wall.

He's done murdered somebody, Enoch thought. "Oh sweet Jesus, come on!"
he wailed. "I got to show you this right now." He pulled him away but a
few feet from the cage, Haze stopped again, looking at something in the
distance. Enoch's eyesight was very poor. He squinted and made out a
figure far down the road behind them. There were two smaller figures
jumping on either side of it.

Hazel Motes turned back to him suddenly and said, "Where's this thing?
Let's see it right now and get it over with. Come on."

"Ain't that where I been trying to take you?" Enoch said. He felt the
perspiration drying on him and stinging and his skin was pin-pointed,
even in his scalp. "We got to cross this road and go down this hill. We
got to go on foot," he said.

"Why?" Haze muttered.

"I don't know," Enoch said. He knew something was going to happen to
him. His blood stopped beating. All the time it had been beating like
drum noises and now it had stopped. They started down the hill. It was a
steep hill, full of trees painted white from the ground up four feet.
They looked as if they had on ankle-socks. He gripped Hazel Motes's arm.
"It gets damp as you go down," he said, looking around vaguely. Hazel
Motes shook him off. In a second, Enoch gripped his arm again and
stopped him. He pointed down through the trees. "Muvseevum," he said.
The strange word made him shiver. That was the first time he had ever
said it aloud. A piece of gray building was showing where he pointed. It
grew larger as they went down the hill, then as they came to the end of
the wood and stepped out on the gravel driveway, it seemed to shrink
suddenly. It was round and soot-colored. There were columns at the front
of it and in between each column there was an eyeless stone woman
holding a pot on her head. A concrete band was over the columns and the
letters, M V S E V M, were cut into it. Enoch was afraid to pronounce
the word again.

"We got to go up the steps and through the front door," he whispered.
There were ten steps up to the porch. The door was wide and black. Enoch
pushed it in cautiously and inserted his head in the crack. In a minute
he brought it out again and said, "All right, go on in and walk easy. I
don't want to wake up theter ole guard. He ain't very friendly with me."
They went into a dark hall. It was heavy with the odor of linoleum and
creosote and another odor behind these two. The third one was an
undersmell and Enoch couldn't name it as anything he had ever smelled
before. There was nothing in the hall but two urns and an old man asleep
in a straight chair against the wall. He had on the same kind of uniform
as Enoch and he looked like a dried-up spider stuck there. Enoch looked
at Hazel Motes to see if he was smelling the undersmell. He looked as if
he were. Enoch's blood began to beat again, urging him forward. He
gripped Haze's arm and tiptoed through the hall to another black door at
the end of it. He cracked it a little and inserted his head in the
crack. Then in a second he drew it out and crooked his finger in a
gesture for Haze to follow him. They went into another hall, like the
last one, but running crosswise. "It's in that first door yonder," Enoch
said in a small voice. They went into a dark room full of glass cases.
The glass cases covered the walls and there were three coffin-like ones
in the middle of the floor. The ones on the walls were full of birds
tilted on varnished sticks and looking down with dried piquant
expressions.

"Come on," Enoch whispered. He went past the two cases in the middle of
the floor and toward the third one. He went to the farthest end of it
and stopped. He stood looking down with his neck thrust forward and his
hands clutched together; Hazel Motes moved up beside him.

The two of them stood there, Enoch rigid and Hazel Motes bent slightly
forward. There were three bowls and a row of blunt weapons and a man in
the case. It was the man Enoch was looking at. He was about three feet
long. He was naked and a dried yellow color and his eyes were drawn
almost shut as if a giant block of steel were falling down on top of
him.

"See theter notice," Enoch said in a church whisper, pointing to a
typewritten card at the man's foot, "it says he was once as tall as you
or me. Some A-rabs did it to him in six months." He turned his head
cautiously to see Hazel Motes.

All he could tell was that Hazel Motes's eyes were on the shrunken man.
He was bent forward so that his face was reflected on the glass top of
the case. The reflection was pale and the eyes were like two clean
bullet holes. Enoch waited, rigid. He heard footsteps in the hall. Oh
Jesus, he prayed, let him hurry up and do whatever he's going to do! The
woman with the two little boys came in the door. She had one by each
hand, and she was grinning. Hazel Motes had not raised his eyes once
from the shrunken man. The woman came toward them. She stopped on the
other side of the case and looked down into it and the reflection of her
face appeared grinning on the glass, over Hazel Motes's.

She snickered and put two fingers in front of her teeth. The little
boys' faces were like pans set on either side to catch the grins that
overflowed from her. When Haze saw her face on the glass, his neck
jerked back and he made a noise. It might have come from the man inside
the case. In a second Enoch knew it had. "Wait!" he screamed, and tore
out of the room after Hazel Motes.

He overtook him halfway up the hill. He caught him by the arm and swung
him around and then he stood there, suddenly weak and light as a
balloon, and stared. Hazel Motes grabbed him by the shoulders and shook
him. "What is that address!" he shouted. "Give me that address!"

Even if Enoch had been sure what the address was, he couldn't have
thought of it then. He could not even stand up. As soon as Hazel Motes
let him go, he fell backward and landed against one of the white-socked
trees. He rolled over and lay stretched out on the ground, with an
exalted look on his face. He thought he was floating. A long way off he
saw the blue figure spring and pick up a rock, and he saw the wild face
turn, and the rock hurtle toward him; he shut his eyes tight and the
rock hit him on the forehead.

When he came to again, Hazel Motes was gone. He lay there a minute. He
put his fingers to his forehead and then held them in front of his eyes.
They were streaked with red. He turned his head and saw a drop of blood
on the ground and as he looked at it, he thought it widened like a
little spring. He sat straight up, frozen-skinned, and put his finger in
it, and very faintly he could hear his blood beating, his secret blood,
in the center of the city.

Then he knew that whatever was expected of him was only just beginning.




                               CHAPTER 6


That evening Haze drove his car around the streets until he found the
blind man and the child again. They were standing on a corner, waiting
for the light to change. He drove the Essex at some distance behind them
for about four blocks up the main street and then turned it after them
down a side street. He followed them on into a dark section past the
railroad yards and watched them go up on the porch of a box-like
two-story house. When the blind man opened the door a shaft of light
fell on him and Haze craned his neck to see him better. The child turned
her head, slowly, as if it worked on a screw, and watched his car pass.
His face was so close to the glass that it looked like a paper face
pasted there. He noted the number of the house and a sign on it that
said, ROOMS FOR RENT.

Then he drove back down town and parked the Essex in front of a movie
house where he could catch the drain of people coming out from the
picture show. The lights around the marquee were so bright that the
moon, moving overhead with a small procession of clouds behind it,
looked pale and insignificant. Haze got out of the Essex and climbed up
on the nose of it.

A thin little man with a long upper lip was at the glass ticket box,
buying tickets for three portly women who were behind him. "Gotta get
these girls some refreshments too," he said to the woman in the ticket
box. "Can't have 'em starve right before my eyes."

"Ain't he a card?" one of the women hollered. "He keeps me in stitches!"

Three boys in red satin lumberjackets came out of the foyer. Haze raised
his arms. "Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched
you?" he cried.

The women all turned around at once and stared at him.

"A wise guy," the little thin man said, and glared as if someone were
about to insult him.

The three boys moved up, pushing each other's shoulders.

Haze waited a second and then he cried again. "Where has the blood you
think you been redeemed by touched you?"

"Rabble rouser," the little man said. "One thing I can't stand it's a
rabble rouser."

"What church you belong to, you boy there?" Haze asked, pointing at the
tallest boy in the red satin lumberjacket.

The boy giggled.

"You then," he said impatiently, pointing at the next one. "What church
you belong to?"

"Church of Christ," the boy said in a falsetto to hide the truth.

"Church of Christ!" Haze repeated. "Well, I preach the Church Without
Christ. I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see
and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about
that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus
don't foul with redemption."

"He's a preacher," one of the women said. "Let's go."

"Listen, you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go,"
Haze called. "I'm going to preach it to whoever'll listen at whatever
place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing
to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment
because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a
liar."

The little man herded his girls into the picture show quickly and the
three boys left but more people came out and he began over and said the
same thing again. They left and some more came and he said it a third
time. Then they left and no one else came out; there was no one there
but the woman in the glass box. She had been glaring at him all the time
but he had not noticed her. She wore glasses with rhinestones in the
bows and she had white hair stacked in sausages around her head. She
stuck her mouth to a hole in the glass and shouted, "Listen, if you
don't have a church to do it in, you don't have to do it in front of
this show."

"My church is the Church Without Christ, lady," he said. "If there's no
Christ, there's no reason to have a set place to do it in."

"Listen," she said, "if you don't get from in front of this show, I'll
call the police."

"There's plenty of shows," he said and got down and got back in the
Essex and drove off. That night he preached in front of three other
picture shows before he went to Mrs. Watts.

In the morning he drove back to the house where the blind man and the
child had gone in the night before. It was yellow clapboard, the second
one in a block of them, all alike. He went up to the front door and rang
the bell. After a few minutes a woman with a mop opened it. He said he
wanted to rent a room.

"What you do?" she asked. She was a tall bony woman, resembling the mop
she carried upside-down.

He said he was a preacher.

The woman looked at him thoroughly and then she looked behind him at his
car. "What church?" she asked.

He said the Church Without Christ.

"Protestant?" she asked suspiciously, "or something foreign?"

He said no ma'm, it was Protestant.

After a minute she said, "Well, you can look at it," and he followed her
into a white plastered hall and up some steps at the side of it. She
opened a door into a back room that was a little larger than his car,
with a cot and a chest of drawers and a table and straight chair in it.
There were two nails on the wall to hang clothes on. "Three dollars a
week in advance," she said. There was one window and another door
opposite the door they had come in by. Haze opened the extra door,
expecting it to be a closet. It opened out onto a drop of about thirty
feet and looked down into a narrow bare back yard where the garbage was
collected. There was a plank nailed across the door frame at knee level
to keep anyone from falling out. "A man named Hawks lives here, don't
he?" Haze asked quickly.

"Downstairs in the front room," she said, "him and his child." She was
looking down into the drop too. "It used to be a fire-escape there," she
said, "but I don't know what happened to it."

He paid her three dollars and took possession of the room, and as soon
as she was out of the way, he went down the stairs and knocked on the
Hawks' door.

The blind man's child opened it a crack and stood looking at him. She
seemed at once to have to balance her face so that her expression would
be the same on both sides. "It's that boy, Papa," she said in a low
tone. "The one that keeps following me." She held the door close to her
head so he couldn't see in past her. The blind man came to the door but
he didn't open it any wider. His look was not the same as it had been
two nights before; it was sour and unfriendly, and he didn't speak, he
only stood there.

Haze had got what he had to say in mind before he left his room. "I live
here," he said. "I thought if your girl wanted to give me so much eye, I
might return her some of it." He wasn't looking at the girl; he was
staring at the black glasses and the curious scars that started
somewhere behind them and ran down the blind man's cheeks.

"What I give you the other night," she said, "was a looker indignation
for what I seen you do. It was you give me the eye. You should have seen
him, Papa," she said, "looked me up and down."

"I've started my own church," Haze said. "The Church Without Christ. I
preach on the street."

"You can't let me alone, can you?" Hawks said. His voice was flat,
nothing like it had been the other time. "I didn't ask you to come here
and I ain't asking you to hang around," he said.

Haze had expected a secret welcome. He waited, trying to think of
something to say. "What kind of a preacher are you?" he heard himself
murmur, "not to see if you can save my soul?" The blind man pushed the
door shut in his face. Haze stood there a second facing the blank door,
and then he ran his sleeve across his mouth and went out.

Inside, Hawks took off his dark glasses and, from a hole in the window
shade, watched him get in his car and drive off. The eye he put to the
hole was slightly rounder and smaller than his other one, but it was
obvious he could see out of both of them. The child watched from a lower
crack. "Howcome you don't like him, Papa?" she asked, "--because he's
after me?"

"If he was after you, that would be enough to make me welcome him," he
said.

"I like his eyes," she observed. "They don't look like they see what
he's looking at but they keep on looking."

Their room was the same size as Haze's but there were two cots and an
oil cooking stove and a wash basin in it and a trunk that they used for
a table. Hawks sat down on one of the cots and put a cigarette in his
mouth. "Goddam Jesus-hog," he muttered.

"Well, look what you used to be," she said. "Look what you tried to do.
You got over it and so will he."

"I don't want him hanging around," he said. "He makes me nervous."

"Listen here," she said, sitting down on the cot with him, "you help me
to get him and then you go away and do what you please and I can live
with him."

"He don't even know you exist," Hawks said.

"Even if he don't," she said, "that's all right. That's howcome I can
get him easy. I want him and you ought to help and then you could go on
off like you want to."

He lay down on the cot and finished the cigarette; his face was
thoughtful and evil. Once while he was lying there, he laughed and then
his expression constricted again. "Well, that might be fine," he said
after a while. "That might be the oil on Aaron's beard."

"Listen here," she said, "it would be the nuts! I'm just crazy about
him. I never seen a boy that I liked the looks of any better. Don't run
him off. Tell him how you blinded yourself for Jesus and show him that
clipping you got."

"Yeah, the clipping," he said.

Haze had gone out in his car to think and he had decided that he would
seduce Hawks' child. He thought that when the blind preacher saw his
daughter ruined, he would realize that he was in earnest when he said he
preached The Church Without Christ. Besides this reason, there was
another: he didn't want to go back to Mrs. Watts. The night before,
after he was asleep, she had got up and cut the top of his hat out in an
obscene shape. He felt that he should have a woman, not for the sake of
the pleasure in her, but to prove that he didn't believe in sin since he
practiced what was called it; but he had had enough of her. He wanted
someone he could teach something to and he took it for granted that the
blind man's child, since she was so homely, would also be innocent.

Before he went back to his room, he went to a dry-goods store to buy a
new hat. He wanted one that was completely opposite to the old one. This
time he was sold a white panama with a red and green and yellow band
around it. The man said they were really the thing and particularly if
he was going to Florida.

"I ain't going to Florida," he said. "This hat is opposite from the one
I used to have is all."

"You can use it anywheres," the man said; "it's new."

"I know that," Haze said. He went outside and took the red and green and
yellow band off it and thumped out the crease in the top and turned down
the brim. When he put it on, it looked just as fierce as the other one
had.

He didn't go back to the Hawks' door until late in the afternoon, when
he thought they would be eating their supper. It opened almost at once
and the child's head appeared in the crack. He pushed the door out of
her hand and went in without looking at her directly. Hawks was sitting
at the trunk. The remains of his supper were in front of him but he
wasn't eating. He had barely got the black glasses on in time.

"If Jesus cured blind men, howcome you don't get Him to cure you?" Haze
asked. He had prepared this sentence in his room.

"He blinded Paul," Hawks said.

Haze sat down on the edge of one of the cots. He looked around him and
then back at Hawks. He crossed and uncrossed his knees and then he
crossed them again. "Where'd you get them scars?" he asked.

The fake blind man leaned forward and smiled. "You still have a chance
to save yourself if you repent," he said. "I can't save you but you can
save yourself."

"That's what I've already done," Haze said. "Without the repenting. I
preach how I done it every night on the..."

"Look at this," Hawks said. He took a yellow newspaper clipping from his
pocket and handed it to him, and his mouth twisted out of the smile.
"This is how I got the scars," he muttered. The child made a sign to him
from the door to smile and not look sour. As he waited for Haze to
finish reading, the smile slowly returned.

The headline on the clipping said, EVANGELIST PROMISES TO BLIND
SELF. The rest of it said that Asa Hawks, an evangelist of the
Free Church of Christ, had promised to blind himself to justify his
belief that Christ Jesus had redeemed him. It said he would do it at a
revival on Saturday night at eight o'clock, the fourth of October. The
date on it was more than ten years before. Over the headline was a
picture of Hawks, a scarless, straight-mouthed man of about thirty, with
one eye a little smaller and rounder than the other. The mouth had a
look that might have been either holy or calculating, but there was a
wildness in the eyes that suggested terror.

Haze sat staring at the clipping after he had read it. He read it three
times. He took his hat off and put it on again and got up and stood
looking around the room as if he were trying to remember where the door
was.

"He did it with lime," the child said, "and there was hundreds
converted. Anybody that blinded himself for justification ought to be
able to save you--or even somebody of his blood," she added, inspired.

"Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," Haze murmured. He
scowled at her and hurried out the door, but as soon as it was shut
behind him, he remembered something. He turned around and opened it and
handed her a piece of paper, folded up several times into a small pellet
shape; then he hurried out to his car.

Hawks took the note away from her and opened it up. It said, BABE,
I NEVER SAW ANYBODY THAT LOOKED AS GOOD AS YOU BEFORE IS WHY I CAME
HERE. She read it over his arm, coloring pleasantly.

"Now you got the written proof for it, Papa," she said.

"That bastard got away with my clipping," Hawks muttered.

"Well you got another clipping, ain't you?" she asked, with a little
smirk.

"Shut your mouth," he said and flung himself down on the cot. The other
clipping was one that said, EVANGELIST'S NERVE FAILS.

"I can get it for you," she offered, standing close to the door so that
she could run if she disturbed him too much, but he had turned toward
the wall as if he were going to sleep.

Ten years ago at a revival he had intended to blind himself and two
hundred people or more were there, waiting for him to do it. He had
preached for an hour on the blindness of Paul, working himself up until
he saw himself struck blind by a Divine flash of lightning and, with
courage enough then, he had thrust his hands into the bucket of wet lime
and streaked them down his face; but he hadn't been able to let any of
it get into his eyes. He had been possessed of as many devils as were
necessary to do it, but at that instant, they disappeared, and he saw
himself standing there as he was. He fancied Jesus, Who had expelled
them, was standing there too, beckoning to him; and he had fled out of
the tent into the alley and disappeared.

"Okay, Pa," she said, "I'll go out for a while and leave you in peace."

Haze had driven his car immediately to the nearest garage where a man
with black bangs and a short expressionless face had come out to wait on
him. He told the man he wanted the horn made to blow and the leaks taken
out of the gas tank, the starter made to work smoother and the
windshield wipers tightened.

The man lifted the hood and glanced inside and then shut it again. Then
he walked around the car, stopping to lean on it here and there, and
thumping it in one place and another. Haze asked him how long it would
take to put it in the best order.

"It can't be done," the man said.

"This is a good car," Haze said. "I knew when I first saw it that it was
the car for me, and since I've had it, I've had a place to be that I can
always get away in."

"Was you going some place in this?" the man asked.

"To another garage," Haze said, and he got in the Essex and drove off.
At the other garage he went to, there was a man who said he could put
the car in the best shape overnight, because it was such a good car to
begin with, so well put together and with such good materials in it, and
because, he added, he was the best mechanic in town, working in the
best-equipped shop. Haze left it with him, certain that it was in honest
hands.




                               CHAPTER 7


The next afternoon when he got his car back, he drove it out into the
country to see how well it worked on the open road. The sky was just a
little lighter blue than his suit, clear and even, with only one cloud
in it, a large blinding white one with curls and a beard. He had gone
about a mile out of town when he heard a throat cleared behind him. He
slowed down and turned his head and saw Hawks' child getting up off the
floor onto the two-by-four that stretched across the seat frame. "I been
here all the time," she said, "and you never known it." She had a bunch
of dandelions in her hair and a wide red mouth on her pale face.

"What do you want to hide in my car for?" he said angrily. "I got
business before me. I don't have time for foolishness." Then he checked
his ugly tone and stretched his mouth a little, remembering that he was
going to seduce her. "Yeah sure," he said, "glad to see you."

She swung one thin black-stockinged leg over the back of the front seat
and then let the rest of herself over. "Did you mean 'good to look at'
in that note, or only 'good'?" she asked.

"The both," he said stiffly.

"My name is Sabbath," she said. "Sabbath Lily Hawks. My mother named me
that just after I was born because I was born on the Sabbath and then
she turned over in her bed and died and I never seen her."

"Unh," Haze said. His jaw tightened and he entrenched himself behind it
and drove on. He had not wanted any company. His sense of pleasure in
the car and in the afternoon was gone.

"Him and her wasn't married," she continued, "and that makes me a
bastard, but I can't help it. It was what he done to me and not what I
done to myself."

"A bastard?" he murmured. He couldn't see how a preacher who had blinded
himself for Jesus could have a bastard. He turned his head and looked at
her with interest for the first time.

She nodded and the corners of her mouth turned up. "A real bastard," she
said, catching his elbow, "and do you know what? A bastard shall not
enter the kingdom of heaven!" she said.

Haze was driving his car toward the ditch while he stared at her. "How
could you be...," he started and saw the red embankment in front of
him and pulled the car back on the road.

"Do you read the papers?" she asked.

"No," he said.

"Well, there's this woman in it named Mary Brittle that tells you what
to do when you don't know. I wrote her a letter and ast her what I was
to do."

"How could you be a bastard when he blinded him...," he started
again.

"I says, 'Dear Mary, I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter the
kingdom of heaven as we all know, but I have this personality that makes
boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not? I shall not enter the
kingdom of heaven anyway so I don't see what difference it makes.'"

"Listen here," Haze said, "if he blinded himself how..."

"Then she answered my letter in the paper. She said, 'Dear Sabbath,
Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of
adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to re-examine your
religious values to see if they meet your needs in Life. A religious
experience can be a beautiful addition to living if you put it in the
proper prespective and do not let it warf you. Read some books on
Ethical Culture.'"

"You couldn't be a bastard," Haze said, getting very pale. "You must be
mixed up. Your daddy blinded himself."

"Then I wrote her another letter," she said, scratching his ankle with
the toe of her sneaker, and smiling, "I says, 'Dear Mary, What I really
want to know is should I go the whole hog or not? That's my real
problem. I'm adjusted okay to the modern world.'"

"Your daddy blinded himself," Haze repeated.

"He wasn't always as good as he is now," she said. "She never answered
my second letter."

"You mean in his youth he didn't believe but he came to?" he asked. "Is
that what you mean or ain't it?" and he kicked her foot roughly away
from his.

"That's right," she said. Then she drew herself up a little. "Quit that
feeling my leg with yours," she said.

The blinding white cloud was a little ahead of them, moving to the left.
"Why don't you turn down that dirt road?" she asked. The highway forked
off onto a clay road and he turned onto it. It was hilly and shady and
the country showed to advantage on either side. One side was dense
honeysuckle and the other was open and slanted down to a telescoped view
of the city. The white cloud was directly in front of them.

"How did he come to believe?" Haze asked. "What changed him into a
preacher for Jesus?"

"I do like a dirt road," she said, "particularly when it's hilly like
this one here. Why don't we get out and sit under a tree where we could
get better acquainted?"

After a few hundred feet Haze stopped the car and they got out. "Was he
a very evil-seeming man before he came to believe," he asked, "or just
part way evil-seeming?"

"All the way evil," she said, going under the barbed wire fence on the
side of the road. Once under it she sat down and began to take off her
shoes and stockings. "How I like to walk in a field is barefooted," she
said with gusto.

"Listenhere," Haze muttered, "I got to be going back to town. I don't
have time to walk in any field," but he went under the fence and on the
other side he said, "I suppose before he came to believe he didn't
believe at all."

"Let's us go over that hill yonder and sit under the trees," she said.

They climbed the hill and went down the other side of it, she a little
ahead of Haze. He saw that sitting under a tree with her might help him
to seduce her, but he was in no hurry to get on with it, considering her
innocence. He felt it was too hard a job to be done in an afternoon. She
sat down under a large pine and patted the ground close beside her for
him to sit on, but he sat about five feet away from her on a rock. He
rested his chin on his knees and looked straight ahead.

"I can save you," she said. "I got a church in my heart where Jesus is
King."

He leaned in her direction, glaring. "I believe in a new kind of jesus,"
he said, "one that can't waste his blood redeeming people with it,
because he's all man and ain't got any God in him. My church is the
Church Without Christ!"

She moved up closer to him. "Can a bastard be saved in it?" she asked.

"There's no such thing as a bastard in the Church Without Christ," he
said. "Everything is all one. A bastard wouldn't be any different from
anybody else."

"That's good," she said.

He looked at her irritably, for something in his mind was already
contradicting him and saying that a bastard couldn't, that there was
only one truth--that Jesus was a liar--and that her case was hopeless.
She pulled open her collar and lay down on the ground full length.
"Ain't my feet white, though?" she asked raising them slightly.

Haze didn't look at her feet. The thing in his mind said that the truth
didn't contradict itself and that a bastard couldn't be saved in the
Church Without Christ. He decided he would forget it, that it was not
important.

"There was this child once," she said, turning over on her stomach,
"that nobody cared if it lived or died. Its kin sent it around from one
to another of them and finally to its grandmother who was a very evil
woman and she couldn't stand to have it around because the least good
thing made her break out in these welps. She would get all itching and
swoll. Even her eyes would itch her and swell up and there wasn't
nothing she could do but run up and down the road, shaking her hands and
cursing and it was twice as bad when this child was there so she kept
the child locked up in a chicken crate. It seen its granny in hell-fire,
swoll and burning, and it told her everything it seen and she got so
swoll until finally she went to the well and wrapped the well rope
around her neck and let down the bucket and broke her neck.

"Would you guess me to be fifteen years old?" she asked.

"There wouldn't be any sense to the word, bastard, in the Church Without
Christ," Haze said.

"Why don't you lie down and rest yourself?" she inquired.

Haze moved a few feet away and lay down. He put his hat over his face
and folded his arms across his chest. She lifted herself up on her hands
and knees and crawled over to him and gazed at the top of his hat. Then
she lifted it off like a lid and peered into his eyes. They stared
straight upward. "It don't make any difference to me," she said softly,
"how much you like me."

He trained his eyes into her neck. Gradually she lowered her head until
the tips of their noses almost touched but still he didn't look at her.
"I see you," she said in a playful voice.

"Git away!" he said, jumping violently.

She scrambled up and ran around behind the tree. Haze put his hat back
on and stood up, shaken. He wanted to get back in the Essex. He realized
suddenly that it was parked on a country road, unlocked, and that the
first person passing would drive off in it.

"I see you," a voice said from behind the tree.

He walked off quickly in the opposite direction toward the car. The
jubilant expression on the face that looked from around the tree,
flattened.

He got in his car and went through the motions of starting it but it
only made a noise like water lost somewhere in the pipes. A panic took
him and he began to pound the starter. There were two instruments on the
dashboard with needles that pointed dizzily in first one direction and
then another, but they worked on a private system, independent of the
whole car. He couldn't tell if it was out of gas or not. Sabbath Hawks
came running up to the fence. She got down on the ground and rolled
under the barbed wire and then stood at the window of the car, looking
in at him. He turned his head at her fiercely and said, "What did you do
to my car?" Then he got out and started walking down the road, without
waiting for her to answer. After a second, she followed him, keeping her
distance.

Where the highway had forked off onto the dirt road, there had been a
store with a gas pump in front of it. It was about a half-mile back;
Haze kept up a steady fast pace until he reached it. It had a deserted
look, but after a few minutes a man appeared from out of the woods
behind it, and Haze told him what he wanted. While the man got out his
pick-up truck to drive them back to the Essex, Sabbath Hawks arrived and
went over to a cage about six feet high that was at the side of the
shack. Haze had not noticed it until she came up. He saw that there was
something alive in it, and went near enough to read a sign that said,
TWO DEADLY ENEMIES. HAVE A LOOK FREE.

There was a black bear about four feet long and very thin, resting on
the floor of the cage; his back was spotted with bird lime that had been
shot down on him by a small chicken hawk that was sitting on a perch in
the upper part of the same apartment. Most of the hawk's tail was gone;
the bear had only one eye.

"Come on here if you don't want to get left," Haze said roughly,
grabbing her by the arm. The man had his truck ready and the three of
them drove back in it to the Essex. On the way Haze told him about the
Church Without Christ; he explained its principles and said there was no
such thing as a bastard in it. The man didn't comment. When they got out
at the Essex, he put a can of gas in the tank and Haze got in and tried
to start it but nothing happened. The man opened up the hood and studied
the inside for a while. He was a one-armed man with two sandy-colored
teeth and eyes that were slate-blue and thoughtful. He had not spoken
more than two words yet. He looked for a long time under the hood while
Haze stood by, but he didn't touch anything. After a while he shut it
and blew his nose.

"What's wrong in there?" Haze asked in an agitated voice. "It's a good
car, ain't it?"

The man didn't answer him. He sat down on the ground and eased under the
Essex. He wore hightop shoes and gray socks. He stayed under the car a
long time. Haze got down on his hands and knees and looked under to see
what he was doing but he wasn't doing anything. He was just lying there,
looking up, as if he were contemplating; his good arm was folded on his
chest. After a while, he eased himself out and wiped his face and neck
with a piece of flannel rag he had in his pocket.

"Listenhere," Haze said, "that's a good car. You just give me a push,
that's all. That car'll get me anywhere I want to go."

The man didn't say anything but he got back in the truck and Haze and
Sabbath Hawks got in the Essex and he pushed them. After a few hundred
yards the Essex began to belch and gasp and jiggle. Haze stuck his head
out the window and motioned for the truck to come alongside. "Ha!" he
said. "I told you, didn't I? This car'll get me anywhere I want to go.
It may stop here and there but it won't stop permanent. What do I owe
you?"

"Nothing," the man said, "not a thing."

"But the gas," Haze said, "how much for the gas?"

"Nothing," the man said with the same level look. "Not a thing."

"All right, I thank you," Haze said and drove on. "I don't need no
favors from him," he said.

"It's a grand auto," Sabbath Hawks said. "It goes as smooth as honey."

"It ain't been built by a bunch of foreigners or niggers or one-arm
men," Haze said. "It was built by people with their eyes open that knew
where they were at."

When they came to the end of the dirt road and were facing the paved
one, the pick-up truck pulled alongside again and while the two cars
paused side by side, Haze and the slate-eyed man looked at each other
out of their two windows. "I told you this car would get me anywhere I
wanted to go," Haze said sourly.

"Some things," the man said, "'ll get some folks somewheres," and he
turned the truck up the highway.

Haze drove on. The blinding white cloud had turned into a bird with long
thin wings and was disappearing in the opposite direction.




                               CHAPTER 8


Enoch Emery knew now that his life would never be the same again,
because the thing that was going to happen to him had started to happen.
He had always known that something was going to happen but he hadn't
known what. If he had been much given to thought, he might have thought
that now was the time for him to justify his daddy's blood, but he
didn't think in broad sweeps like that, he thought what he would do
next. Sometimes he didn't think, he only wondered; then before long he
would find himself doing this or that, like a bird finds itself building
a nest when it hasn't actually been planning to.

What was going to happen to him had started to happen when he showed
what was in the glass case to Haze Motes. That was a mystery beyond his
understanding, but he knew that what was going to be expected of him was
something awful. His blood was more sensitive than any other part of
him; it wrote doom all through him, except possibly in his brain, and
the result was that his tongue, which edged out every few minutes to
test his fever blister, knew more than he did.

The first thing that he found himself doing that was not normal was
saving his pay. He was saving all of it, except what his landlady came
to collect every week and what he had to use to buy something to eat
with. Then to his surprise, he found he wasn't eating very much and he
was saving that money too. He had a fondness for Supermarkets; it was
his custom to spend an hour or so in one every afternoon after he left
the city park, browsing around among the canned goods and reading the
cereal stories. Lately he had been compelled to pick up a few things
here and there that would not be bulky in his pockets, and he wondered
if this could be the reason he was saving so much money on food. It
could have been, but he had the suspicion that saving the money was
connected with some larger thing. He had always been given to stealing
but he had never saved before.

At the same time, he began cleaning up his room. It was a little green
room, or it had once been green, in the attic of an elderly rooming
house. There was a mummified look and feel to this residence, but Enoch
had never thought before of brightening the part (corresponding to the
head) that he lived in. Then he simply found himself doing it.

First, he removed the rug from the floor and hung it out the window.
This was a mistake because when he went to pull it back in, there were
only a few long strings left with a carpet tack caught in one of them.
He imagined that it must have been a very old rug and he decided to
handle the rest of the furniture with more care. He washed the bed frame
with soap and water and found that under the second layer of dirt, it
was pure gold, and this affected him so strongly that he washed the
chair. It was a low round chair that bulged around the legs so that it
seemed to be in the act of squatting. The gold began to appear with the
first touch of water but it disappeared with the second and with a
little more, the chair sat down as if this were the end of long years of
inner struggle. Enoch didn't know if it was for him or against him. He
had a nasty impulse to kick it to pieces, but he let it stay there,
exactly in the position it had sat down in, because for the time anyway,
he was not a foolhardy boy who took chances on the meanings of things.
For the time, he knew that what he didn't know was what mattered.

The only other piece of furniture in the room was a washstand. This was
built in three parts and stood on bird legs six inches high. The legs
had clawed feet that were each one gripped around a small cannon ball.
The lowest part was a tabernacle-like cabinet which was meant to contain
a slop-jar. Enoch didn't own a slop-jar but he had a certain reverence
for the purpose of things and since he didn't have the right thing to
put in it, he left it empty. Directly over this place for the treasure,
there was a gray marble slab and coming up from behind it was a wooden
trellis-work of hearts, scrolls and flowers, extending into a hunched
eagle wing on either side, and containing in the middle, just at the
level of Enoch's face when he stood in front of it, a small oval mirror.
The wooden frame continued again over the mirror and ended in a crowned,
horned headpiece, showing that the artist had not lost faith in his
work.

As far as Enoch was concerned, this piece had always been the center of
the room and the one that most connected him with what he didn't know.
More than once after a big supper, he had dreamed of unlocking the
cabinet and getting in it and then proceeding to certain rites and
mysteries that he had a very vague idea about in the morning. In his
cleaning up, his mind was on the washstand from the first, but as was
usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked
around and in toward the center where the meaning was. So before he
tackled the washstand, he took care of the pictures in the room.

These were three, one belonging to his landlady (who was almost totally
blind but moved about by an acute sense of smell) and two of his own.
Hers was a brown portrait of a moose standing in a small lake. The look
of superiority on this animal's face was so insufferable to Enoch that,
if he hadn't been afraid of him, he would have done something about it a
long time ago. As it was, he couldn't do anything in his room but what
the smug face was watching, not shocked because nothing better could be
expected and not amused because nothing was funny. If he had looked all
over for one, he couldn't have found a roommate that irritated him more.
He kept up a constant stream of inner comment, uncomplimentary to the
moose, though when he said anything aloud, he was more guarded. The
moose was in a heavy brown frame with leaf designs on it and this added
to his weight and his self-satisfied look. Enoch knew the time had come
when something had to be done; he didn't know what was going to happen
in his room, but when it happened, he didn't want to have the feeling
that the moose was running it. The answer came to him fully prepared: he
realized with a sudden intuition that taking the frame off him would be
equal to taking the clothes off him (although he didn't have on any) and
he was right because when he had done it, the animal looked so reduced
that Enoch could only snicker and look at him out the corner of his eye.

After this success he turned his attention to the other two pictures.
They were over calendars and had been sent him by the Hilltop Funeral
Home and the American Rubber Tire Company. One showed a small boy in a
pair of blue Doctor Denton sleepers, kneeling at his bed, saying, "And
bless daddy," while the moon looked in at the window. This was Enoch's
favorite painting and it hung directly over his bed. The other pictured
a lady wearing a rubber tire and it hung directly across from the moose
on the opposite wall. He left it where it was, pretty certain that the
moose only pretended not to see it. Immediately after he finished with
the pictures, he went out and bought chintz curtains, a bottle of gilt,
and a paint brush with all the money he had saved.

This was a disappointment to him because he had hoped that the money
would be for some new clothes for him, and here he saw it going into a
set of drapes. He didn't know what the gilt was for until he got home
with it; when he got home with it, he sat down in front of the slop-jar
cabinet in the washstand, unlocked it, and painted the inside of it with
the gilt. Then he realized that the cabinet was to be used FOR
something.

Enoch never nagged his blood to tell him a thing until it was ready. He
wasn't the kind of a boy who grabs at any possibility and runs off,
proposing this or that preposterous thing. In a large matter like this,
he was always willing to wait for a certainty, and he waited for this
one, certain at least that he would know in a few days. Then for about a
week his blood was in secret conference with itself every day, only
stopping now and then to shout some order at him.

On the following Monday, he was certain when he woke up that today was
the day he was going to know on. His blood was rushing around like a
woman who cleans up the house after the company has come, and he was
surly and rebellious. When he realized that today was the day, he
decided not to get up. He didn't want to justify his daddy's blood, he
didn't want to be always having to do something that something else
wanted him to do, that he didn't know what it was and that was always
dangerous.

Naturally, his blood was not going to put up with any attitude like
this. He was at the zoo by nine-thirty, only a half-hour later than he
was supposed to be. All morning his mind was not on the gate he was
supposed to guard but was chasing around after his blood, like a boy
with a mop and a bucket, beating something here and sloshing down
something there, without a second's rest. As soon as the second-shift
guard came, Enoch headed toward town.

Town was the last place he wanted to be because anything could happen
there. All the time his mind had been chasing around it had been
thinking how as soon as he got off duty he was going to sneak off home
and go to bed.

By the time he got into the center of the business district he was
exhausted and he had to lean against Walgreen's window and cool off.
Sweat crept down his back and provoked him to itch so that in just a few
minutes he appeared to be working his way across the glass by his
muscles, against a background of alarm clocks, toilet waters, candies,
sanitary pads, fountain pens, and pocket flashlights, displayed in all
colors to twice his height. He appeared to be working his way to a
rumbling noise which came from the center of a small alcove that formed
the entrance to the drug store. Here was a yellow and blue, glass and
steel machine, belching popcorn into a cauldron of butter and salt.
Enoch approached, already with his purse out, sorting his money. His
purse was a long gray leather pouch, tied at the top with a drawstring.
It was one he had stolen from his daddy and he treasured it because it
was the only thing he owned now that his daddy had touched (besides
himself). He sorted out two nickels and handed them to a pasty boy in a
white apron who was there to serve the machine. The boy felt around in
its vitals and filled a white paper bag with the corn, not taking his
eye off Enoch's purse the while. On any other day Enoch would have tried
to make friends with him but today he was too preoccupied even to see
him. He took the bag and began stuffing the pouch back where it had come
from. The youth's eye followed to the very edge of the pocket. "That
thang looks like a hawg bladder," he observed enviously.

"I got to go now," Enoch murmured and hurried into the drug store.
Inside, he walked abstractedly to the back of the store, and then up to
the front again by the other aisle as if he wanted any person who might
be looking for him to see he was there. He paused in front of the soda
fountain to see if he would sit down and have something to eat. The
fountain counter was pink and green marble linoleum and behind it there
was a red-headed waitress in a lime-colored uniform and a pink apron.
She had green eyes set in pink and they resembled a picture behind her
of a Lime-Cherry Surprise, a special that day for ten cents. She
confronted Enoch while he studied the information over her head. After a
minute she laid her chest on the counter and surrounded it by her folded
arms, to wait. Enoch couldn't decide which of several concoctions was
the one for him to have until she ended it by moving one arm under the
counter and bringing out a Lime-Cherry Surprise. "It's okay," she said,
"I fixed it this morning after breakfast."

"Something's going to happen to me today," Enoch said.

"I told you it was okay," she said. "I fixed it today."

"I seen it this morning when I woke up," he said, with the look of a
visionary.

"God," she said, and jerked it from under his face. She turned around
and began slapping things together; in a second she slammed
another--exactly like it, but fresh--in front of him.

"I got to go now," Enoch said, and hurried out. An eye caught at his
pocket as he passed the popcorn machine but he didn't stop. I don't want
to do it, he was saying to himself. Whatever it is, I don't want to do
it. I'm going home. It'll be something I don't want to do. It'll be
something I ain't got no business doing. And he thought of how he had
had to spend all his money on drapes and gilt when he could have bought
him a shirt and a phosphorescent tie. It'll be something against the
law, he said. It's always something against the law. I ain't going to do
it, he said, and stopped. He had stopped in front of a movie house where
there was a large illustration of a monster stuffing a young woman into
an incinerator.

I ain't going in no picture show like that, he said, giving it a nervous
look. I'm going home. I ain't going to wait around in no picture show. I
ain't got the money to buy a ticket, he said, taking out his purse
again. I ain't even going to count thisyer change.

It ain't but forty-three cent here, he said, that ain't enough. A sign
said the price of a ticket for adults was forty-five cents, balcony,
thirty-five. I ain't going to sit in no balcony, he said, buying a
thirty-five cent ticket.

I ain't going in, he said.

Two doors flew open and he found himself moving down a long red foyer
and then up a darker tunnel and then up a higher, still darker tunnel.
In a few minutes he was up in a high part of the maw, feeling around,
like Jonah, for a seat. I ain't going to look at it, he said furiously.
He didn't like any picture shows but colored musical ones.

The first picture was about a scientist named The Eye who performed
operations by remote control. You would wake up in the morning and find
a slit in your chest or head or stomach and something you couldn't do
without would be gone. Enoch pulled his hat down very low and drew his
knees up in front of his face; only his eyes looked at the screen. That
picture lasted an hour.

The second picture was about life at Devil's Island Penitentiary. After
a while, Enoch had to grip the two arms of his seat to keep himself from
falling over the rail in front of him.

The third picture was called, "Lonnie Comes Home Again." It was about a
baboon named Lonnie who rescued attractive children from a burning
orphanage. Enoch kept hoping Lonnie would get burned up but he didn't
appear to get even hot. In the end a nice-looking girl gave him a medal.
It was more than Enoch could stand. He made a dive for the aisle, fell
down the two higher tunnels, and raced out the red foyer and into the
street. He collapsed as soon as the air hit him.

When he recovered himself, he was sitting against the wall of the
picture show building and he was not thinking any more about escaping
his duty. It was night and he had the feeling that the knowledge he
couldn't avoid was almost on him. His resignation was perfect. He leaned
against the wall for about twenty minutes and then he got up and began
to walk down the street as if he were led by a silent melody or by one
of those whistles that only dogs hear. At the end of two blocks he
stopped, his attention directed across the street. There, facing him
under a street light, was a high rat-colored car and up on the nose of
it, a dark figure with a fierce white hat on. The figure's arms were
working up and down and he had thin, gesticulating hands, almost as pale
as the hat. "Hazel Motes!" Enoch breathed, and his heart began to slam
from side to side like a wild bell clapper.

There were a few people standing on the sidewalk near the car. Enoch
didn't know that Hazel Motes had started the Church Without Christ and
was preaching it every night on the street; he hadn't seen him since
that day at the park when he had showed him the shriveled man in the
glass case.

"If you had been redeemed," Hazel Motes was shouting, "you would care
about redemption but you don't. Look inside yourselves and see if you
hadn't rather it wasn't if it was. There's no peace for the redeemed,"
he shouted, "and I preach peace, I preach the Church Without Christ, the
church peaceful and satisfied!"

Two or three people who had stopped near the car started walking off the
other way. "Leave!" Hazel Motes cried. "Go ahead and leave! The truth
don't matter to you. Listen," he said, pointing his finger at the rest
of them, "the truth don't matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed you, what
difference would it make to you? You wouldn't do nothing about it. Your
faces wouldn't move, neither this way nor that, and if it was three
crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that one wouldn't mean no
more to you and me than the other two. Listen here. What you need is
something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain.
The Church Without Christ don't have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs
a new jesus! It needs one that's all man, without blood to waste, and it
needs one that don't look like any other man so you'll look at him. Give
me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you'll see how
far the Church Without Christ can go!"

One of the people watching walked off so there were only two left. Enoch
was standing in the middle of the street, paralyzed.

"Show me where this new jesus is," Hazel Motes cried, "and I'll set him
up in the Church Without Christ and then you'll see the truth. Then
you'll know once and for all that you haven't been redeemed. Give me
this new jesus, somebody, so we'll all be saved by the sight of him!"

Enoch began shouting without a sound. He shouted that way for a full
minute while Hazel Motes went on.

"Look at me!" Hazel Motes cried, with a tare in his throat, "and you
look at a peaceful man! Peaceful because my blood has set me free. Take
counsel from your blood and come into the Church Without Christ and
maybe somebody will bring us a new jesus and we'll all be saved by the
sight of him!"

An unintelligible sound spluttered out of Enoch. He tried to bellow, but
his blood held him back. He whispered, "Listenhere, I got him! I mean I
can get him! You know! Him! Him I shown you to. You seen him yourself!"

His blood reminded him that the last time he had seen Haze Motes was
when Haze Motes had hit him over the head with a rock. And he didn't
even know yet how he would steal it out of the glass case. The only
thing he knew was that he had a place in his room prepared to keep it in
until Haze was ready to take it. His blood suggested he just let it come
as a surprise to Haze Motes. He began to back away. He backed across the
street and over a piece of sidewalk and out into the other street and a
taxi had to stop short to keep from hitting him. The driver put his head
out the window and asked him how he got around so well when God had made
him by putting two backs together instead of a back and a front.

Enoch was too preoccupied to think about it. "I got to go now," he
murmured, and hurried off.




                               CHAPTER 9


Hawks kept his door bolted and whenever Haze knocked on it, which he did
two or three times a day, the ex-evangelist sent his child out to him
and bolted the door again behind her. It infuriated him to have Haze
lurking in the house, thinking up some excuse to get in and look at his
face; and he was often drunk and didn't want to be discovered that way.

Haze couldn't understand why the preacher didn't welcome him and act
like a preacher should when he sees what he believes is a lost soul. He
kept trying to get into the room again; the window he could have reached
was kept locked and the shade pulled down. He wanted to see, if he
could, _behind_ the black glasses.

Every time he went to the door, the girl came out and the bolt shut
inside; then he couldn't get rid of her. She followed him out to his car
and climbed in and spoiled his rides or she followed him up to his room
and sat. He abandoned the notion of seducing her and tried to protect
himself. He hadn't been in the house a week before she appeared in his
room one night after he had gone to bed. She was holding a candle
burning in a jelly glass and wore, hanging onto her thin shoulders, a
woman's nightgown that dragged on the floor behind her. Haze didn't wake
up until she was almost up to his bed, and when he did, he sprang from
under his cover into the middle of the room.

"What you want?" he said.

She didn't say anything and her grin widened in the candle light. He
stood glowering at her for an instant and then he picked up the straight
chair and raised it as if he were going to bring it down on her. She
lingered only a fraction of a second. His door didn't bolt so he propped
the chair under the knob before he went back to bed.

"Listen," she said when she got back to their room, "nothing works. He
would have hit me with a chair."

"I'm leaving out of here in a couple of days," Hawks said, "you better
make it work if you want to eat after I'm gone." He was drunk but he
meant it.

Nothing was working the way Haze had expected it to. He had spent every
evening preaching, but the membership of the Church Without Christ was
still only one person: himself. He had wanted to have a large following
quickly to impress the blind man with his powers, but no one had
followed him. There had been a sort of follower but that had been a
mistake. That had been a boy about sixteen years old who had wanted
someone to go to a whorehouse with him because he had never been to one
before. He knew where the place was but he didn't want to go without a
person of experience, and when he heard Haze, he hung around until he
stopped preaching and then asked him to go. But it was all a mistake
because after they had gone and got out again and Haze had asked him to
be a member of the Church Without Christ, or more than that, a disciple,
an apostle, the boy said he was sorry but he couldn't be a member of
that church because he was a Lapsed Catholic. He said that what they had
just done was a mortal sin, and that should they die unrepentant of it
they would suffer eternal punishment and never see God. Haze had not
enjoyed the whorehouse anywhere near as much as the boy had and he had
wasted half his evening. He shouted that there was no such thing as sin
or judgment, but the boy only shook his head and asked him if he would
like to go again the next night.

If Haze had believed in praying, he would have prayed for a disciple,
but as it was all he could do was worry about it a lot. Then two nights
after the boy, the disciple appeared.

That night he preached outside of four different picture shows and every
time he looked up, he saw the same big face smiling at him. The man was
plumpish, and he had curly blond hair that was cut with showy sideburns.
He wore a black suit with a silver stripe in it and a wide-brimmed white
hat pushed onto the back of his head, and he had on tight-fitting black
pointed shoes and no socks. He looked like an ex-preacher turned cowboy,
or an ex-cowboy turned mortician. He was not handsome but under his
smile, there was an honest look that fitted into his face like a set of
false teeth.

Every time Haze looked at him, the man winked.

At the last picture show he preached in front of, there were three
people listening to him besides the man. "Do you people care anything
about the truth?" he asked. "The only way to the truth is through
blasphemy, but do you care? Are you going to pay any attention to what
I've been saying or are you just going to walk off like everybody else?"

There were two men and a woman with a cat-faced baby sprawled over her
shoulder. She had been looking at Haze as if he were in a booth at the
fair. "Well, come on," she said, "he's finished. We got to be going."
She turned away and the two men fell in behind her.

"Go ahead and go," Haze said, "but remember that the truth don't lurk
around every street corner."

The man who had been following reached up quickly and pulled Haze's
pantsleg and gave him a wink. "Come on back heah, you folks," he said.
"I want to tell you all about _me_."

The woman turned around again and he smiled at her as if he had been
struck all along with her good looks. She had a square red face and her
hair was freshly set. "I wisht I had my gittarr here," the man said,
"'cause I just somehow can say sweet things to music bettern plain. And
when you talk about Jesus you need a little music, don't you, friends?"
He looked at the two men as if he were appealing to the good judgment
that was impressed on their faces. They had on brown felt hats and black
town suits, and they looked like older and younger brother. "Listen,
friends," the disciple said confidentially, "two months ago before I met
the Prophet here, you wouldn't know me for the same man. I didn't have a
friend in the world. Do you know what it's like not to have a friend in
the world?"

"It ain't no worsen havinum that would put a knife in your back when you
wasn't looking," the older man said, barely parting his lips.

"Friend, you said a mouthful when you said that," the man said. "If we
had time, I would have you repeat that just so ever'body could hear it
like I did." The picture show was over and more people were coming up.
"Friends," the man said, "I know you're all interested in the Prophet
here," pointing to Haze on the nose of the car, "and if you'll just give
me time I'm going to tell you what him and his idears've done for me.
Don't crowd because I'm willing to stay here all night and tell you if
it takes that long."

Haze stood where he was, motionless, with his head slightly forward, as
if he weren't sure what he was hearing.

"Friends," the man said, "lemme innerduce myself. My name is Onnie Jay
Holy and I'm telling it to you so you can check up and see I don't tell
you any lie. I'm a preacher and I don't mind who knows it but I wouldn't
have you believe nothing you can't feel in your own hearts. You people
coming up on the edge push right on up in here where you can hear good,"
he said. "I'm not selling a thing, I'm giving something away!" A
considerable number of people had stopped.

"Friends," he said, "two months ago you wouldn't know me for the same
man. I didn't have a friend in the world. Do you know what it's like not
to have a friend in the world?"

A loud voice said, "It ain't no worsen havinum that would put..."

"Why, friends," Onnie Jay Holy said, "not to have a friend in the world
is just about the most miserable and lonesome thing that can happen to a
man or woman! And that's the way it was with me. I was ready to hang
myself or to despair completely. Not even my own dear old mother loved
me, and it wasn't because I wasn't sweet inside, it was because I never
known how to make the natural sweetness inside me show. Every person
that comes onto this earth," he said, stretching out his arms, "is born
sweet and full of love. A little child loves ever'body, friends, and its
nature is sweetness--until something happens. Something happens,
friends, I don't need to tell people like you that can think for
theirselves. As that little child gets bigger, its sweetness don't show
so much, cares and troubles come to perplext it, and all its sweetness
is driven inside it. Then it gets miserable and lonesome and sick,
friends. It says, 'Where is all my sweetness gone? where are all the
friends that loved me?' and all the time, that little beat-up rose of
its sweetness is inside, not a petal dropped, and on the outside is just
a mean lonesomeness. It may want to take its own life or yours or mine,
or to despair completely, friends." He said it in a sad nasal voice but
he was smiling all the time so that they could tell he had been through
what he was talking about and come out on top. "That was the way it was
with me, friends. I know what of I speak," he said, and folded his hands
in front of him. "But all the time that I was ready to hang myself or to
despair completely, I was sweet inside, like ever'body else, and I only
needed something to bring it out. I only needed a little help, friends.

"Then I met this Prophet here," he said, pointing at Haze on the nose of
the car. "That was two months ago, folks, that I heard how he was out to
help me, how he was preaching the Church of Christ Without Christ, the
church that was going to get a new jesus to help me bring my sweet
nature into the open where ever'body could enjoy it. That was two months
ago, friends, and now you wouldn't know me for the same man. I love
ever'one of you people and I want you to listen to him and me and join
our church, the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ, the new church
with the new jesus, and then you'll all be helped like me!"

Haze leaned forward. "This man is not true," he said. "I never saw him
before tonight. I wasn't preaching this church two months ago and the
name of it ain't the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ!"

The man ignored this and so did the people. There were ten or twelve
gathered around. "Friends," Onnie Jay Holy said, "I'm mighty glad you're
seeing me now instead of two months ago because then I couldn't have
testified to this new church and this Prophet here. If I had my gittarr
with me I could say all this better but I'll just have to do the best I
can by myself." He had a winning smile and it was evident that he didn't
think he was any better than anybody else even though he was.

"Now I just want to give you folks a few reasons why you can trust this
church," he said. "In the first place, friends, you can rely on it that
it's nothing foreign connected with it. You don't have to believe
nothing you don't understand and approve of. If you don't understand it,
it ain't true, and that's all there is to it. No jokers in the deck,
friends."

Haze leaned forward. "Blasphemy is the way to the truth," he said, "and
there's no other way whether you understand it or not!"

"Now, friends," Onnie Jay said, "I want to tell you a second reason why
you can absolutely trust this church--it's based on the Bible. Yes sir!
It's based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible, friends. You
can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your
heart it ought to be interpited. That's right," he said, "just the way
Jesus would have done it. Gee, I wisht I had my gittarr here," he
complained.

"This man is a liar," Haze said. "I never saw him before tonight. I
never..."

"That ought to be enough reasons, friends," Onnie Jay Holy said, "but
I'm going to tell you one more, just to show I can. This church is
up-to-date! When you're in this church you can know that there's nothing
or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don't know, all the
cards are on the table, friends, and that's a fack!"

Haze's face under the white hat began to take on a look of fierceness.
Just as he was about to open his mouth again, Onnie Jay Holy pointed in
astonishment to the baby in the blue bonnet who was sprawled limp over
the woman's shoulder. "Why yonder is a little babe," he said, "a little
bundle of helpless sweetness. Why, I know you people aren't going to let
that little thing grow up and have all his sweetness pushed inside him
when it could be on the outside to win friends and make him loved.
That's why I want ever' one of you people to join the Holy Church of
Christ Without Christ. It'll cost you each a dollar but what is a
dollar? A few dimes! Not too much to pay to unlock that little rose of
sweetness inside you!"

"Listen!" Haze shouted. "It don't cost you any money to know the truth!
You can't know it for money!"

"You hear what the Prophet says, friends," Onnie Jay Holy said, "a
dollar is not too much to pay. No amount of money is too much to learn
the truth! Now I want each of you people that are going to take
advantage of this church to sign on this little pad I have in my pocket
here and give me your dollar personally and let me shake your hand!"

Haze slid down from the nose of his car and got in it and slammed his
foot on the starter.

"Hey wait! Wait!" Onnie Jay Holy shouted, "I ain't got any of these
friends' names yet!"

The Essex had a tendency to develop a tic by nightfall. It would go
forward about six inches and then back about four; it did that now a
succession of times rapidly; otherwise Haze would have shot off in it
and been gone. He had to grip the steering wheel with both hands to keep
from being thrown either out the windshield or into the back. It stopped
this after a few seconds and slid about twenty feet and then began it
again.

Onnie Jay Holy's face showed a great strain; he put his hand to the side
of it as if the only way he could keep his smile on was to hold it. "I
got to go now, friends," he said quickly, "but I'll be at this same spot
tomorrow night, I got to go catch the Prophet now," and he ran off just
as the Essex began to slide again. He wouldn't have caught it, except
that it stopped before it had gone ten feet farther. He jumped on the
running board and got the door open and plumped in, panting, beside
Haze. "Friend," he said, "we just lost ten dollars. What you in such a
hurry for?" His face showed that he was in some kind of genuine pain
even though he looked at Haze with a smile that revealed all his upper
teeth and the tops of his lowers.

Haze turned his head and looked at him long enough to see the smile
before it was thrown forward at the windshield. After that the Essex
began running smoothly. Onnie Jay took out a lavender handkerchief and
held it in front of his mouth for some time. When he removed it, the
smile was back on his face. "Friend," he said, "you and me have to get
together on this thing. I said when I first heard you open your mouth,
'Why, yonder is a great man with great idears.'"

Haze didn't turn his head.

Onnie Jay took in a long breath. "Why, do you know who you put me in
mind of when I first saw you?" he asked. After a minute of waiting, he
said in a soft voice, "Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln, friend."

Haze's face was suddenly swamped with outrage. All the expression on it
was obliterated. "You ain't true," he said in a barely audible voice.

"Friend, how can you say that?" Onnie Jay said. "Why I was on the radio
for three years with a program that give real religious experiences to
the whole family. Didn't you ever listen to it--called, Soulsease, a
quarter hour of Mood, Melody, and Mentality? I'm a real preacher,
friend."

Haze stopped the Essex. "You get out," he said.

"Why friend!" Onnie Jay said. "You ought not to say such a thing! That's
the absolute truth that I'm a preacher and a radio star."

"Get out," Haze said, reaching across and opening the door for him.

"I never thought you would treat a friend thisaway," Onnie Jay said.
"All I wanted to ast you about was this new jesus."

"Get out," Haze said, and began to push him toward the door. He pushed
him to the edge of the seat and gave him a shove and Onnie Jay fell out
the door and into the road.

"I never thought a friend would treat me thisaway," he complained. Haze
kicked his leg off the running board and shut the door again. He put his
foot on the starter but nothing happened except a noise somewhere
underneath him that sounded like a person gargling without water. Onnie
Jay got up off the pavement and stood at the window. "If you would just
tell me where this new jesus is you was mentioning," he began.

Haze put his foot on the starter a succession of times but nothing
happened.

"Pull out the choke," Onnie Jay advised, getting up on the running
board.

"There's no choke on it," Haze snarled.

"Maybe it's flooded," Onnie Jay said. "While we're waiting, you and me
can talk about the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ."

"My church is the Church Without Christ," Haze said. "I've seen all of
you I want to."

"It don't make any difference how many Christs you add to the name if
you don't add none to the meaning, friend," Onnie Jay said in a hurt
tone. "You ought to listen to me because I'm not just an amateur. I'm an
artist-type. If you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep
it sweet. You got good idears but what you need is an artist-type to
work with you."

Haze rammed his foot on the gas and then on the starter and then on the
starter and then on the gas. Nothing happened. The street was
practically deserted. "Me and you could get behind it and push it over
to the curb," Onnie Jay suggested.

"I ain't asked for your help," Haze said.

"You know, friend, I certainly would like to see this new jesus," Onnie
Jay said. "I never heard a idear before that had more in it than that
one. All it would need is a little promotion."

Haze tried to start the car by forcing his weight forward on the
steering wheel, but that didn't work. He got out and got behind it and
began to push it over to the curb. Onnie Jay got behind with him and
added his weight. "I kind of have had that idear about a new jesus
myself," he remarked. "I seen how a new one would be more up-to-date."

"Where you keeping him, friend?" he asked. "Is he somebody you see ever'
day? I certainly would like to meet him and hear some of his idears."

They pushed the car into a parking space. There was no way to lock it
and Haze was afraid that if he left it out all night so far away from
where he lived someone would be able to steal it. There was nothing for
him to do but sleep in it. He got in the back and began to pull down the
fringed shades. Onnie Jay had his head in the front, however. "You
needn't to be afraid that if I seen this new jesus I would cut you out
of anything," he said. "Why friend, it would just mean a lot to me for
the good of my spirit."

Haze moved the two-by-four off the seat frame to make more room to fix
up his pallet. He kept a pillow and an army blanket back there and he
had a sterno stove and a coffee pot up on the shelf under the back oval
window. "Friend, I would even be glad to pay you a little something to
see him," Onnie Jay suggested.

"Listen here," Haze said, "you get away from here. I've seen all of you
I want to. There's no such thing as any new jesus. That ain't anything
but a way to say something."

The smile more or less slithered off Onnie Jay's face. "What you mean by
that?" he asked.

"That there's no such thing or person," Haze said. "It wasn't nothing
but a way to say a thing." He put his hand on the door handle and began
to close it in spite of Onnie Jay's head. "No such thing exists!" he
shouted.

"That's the trouble with you innerleckchuls," Onnie Jay muttered, "you
don't never have nothing to show for what you're saying."

"Get your head out my car door, Holy," Haze said.

"My name is Hoover Shoats," the man with his head in the door growled.
"I known when I first seen you that you wasn't nothing but a crackpot."

Haze opened the door enough to be able to slam it. Hoover Shoats got his
head out the way but not his thumb. A howl arose that would have rended
almost any heart. Haze opened the door and released the thumb and then
slammed the door again. He pulled down the front shades and lay down in
the back of the car on the army blanket. Outside he could hear Hoover
Shoats jumping around on the pavement and howling. When the howls died
down, Haze heard a few steps up to the car and then an impassioned,
breathless voice say through the tin, "You watch out, friend. I'm going
to run you out of business. I can get my own new jesus and I can get
Prophets for peanuts, you hear? Do you hear me, friend?" the hoarse
voice said.

Haze didn't answer.

"Yeah and I'll be out there doing my own preaching tomorrow night. What
you need is a little competition," the voice said. "Do you hear me,
friend?"

Haze got up and leaned over the front seat and banged his hand down on
the horn of the Essex. It made a sound like a goat's laugh cut off with
a buzz saw. Hoover Shoats jumped back as if a charge of electricity had
gone through him. "All right, friend," he said, standing about fifteen
feet away, trembling, "you just wait, you ain't heard the last of me
yet," and he turned and went off down the quiet street.

Haze stayed in his car about an hour and had a bad experience in it: he
dreamed he was not dead but only buried. He was not waiting on the
Judgment because there was no Judgment, he was waiting on nothing.
Various eyes looked through the back oval window at his situation, some
with considerable reverence, like the boy from the zoo, and some only to
see what they could see. There were three women with paper sacks who
looked at him critically as if he were something--a piece of fish--they
might buy, but they passed on after a minute. A man in a canvas hat
looked in and put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers. Then a
woman with two little boys on either side of her stopped and looked in,
grinning. After a second, she pushed the boys out of view and indicated
that she would climb in and keep him company for a while, but she
couldn't get through the glass and finally she went off. All this time
Haze was bent on getting out but since there was no use to try, he
didn't make any move one way or the other. He kept expecting Hawks to
appear at the oval window with a wrench, but the blind man didn't come.

Finally he shook off the dream and woke up. He thought it should be
morning but it was only midnight. He pulled himself over into the front
of the car and eased his foot on the starter and the Essex rolled off
quietly as if nothing were the matter with it. He drove back to the
house and let himself in but instead of going upstairs to his room, he
stood in the hall, looking at the blind man's door. He went over to it
and put his ear to the keyhole and heard the sound of snoring; he turned
the knob gently but the door didn't move.

For the first time, the idea of picking the lock occurred to him. He
felt in his pockets for an instrument and came on a small piece of wire
that he sometimes used for a toothpick. There was only a dim light in
the hall but it was enough for him to work by and he knelt down at the
keyhole and inserted the wire into it carefully, trying not to make a
noise.

After a while when he had tried the wire five or six different ways,
there was a slight click in the lock. He stood up, trembling, and opened
the door. His breath came short and his heart was palpitating as if he
had run all the way here from a great distance. He stood just inside the
room until his eyes got accustomed to the darkness and then he moved
slowly over to the iron bed and stood there. Hawks was lying across it.
His head was hanging over the edge. Haze squatted down by him and struck
a match close to his face and he opened his eyes. The two sets of eyes
looked at each other as long as the match lasted; Haze's expression
seemed to open onto a deeper blankness and reflect something and then
close again.

"Now you can get out," Hawks said in a short thick voice, "now you can
leave me alone," and he made a jab at the face over him without touching
it. It moved back, expressionless under the white hat, and was gone in a
second.




                               CHAPTER 10


The next night, Haze parked the Essex in front of the Odeon Theater and
climbed up on it and began to preach. "Let me tell you what I and this
church stand for!" he called from the nose of the car. "Stop one minute
to listen to the truth because you may never hear it again." He stood
there with his neck thrust forward, moving one arm upward in a vague
arc. Two women and a boy stopped.

"I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's,
but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's
no truth," he called. "No truth behind all truths is what I and this
church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were
going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can
get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

"Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't to
look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place
behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look
through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards
into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself
right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look
there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any
Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your
time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

"Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you?" he cried.
"Show me where because I don't see the place. If there was a place where
Jesus had redeemed you that would be the place for you to be, but which
of you can find it?"

Another trickle of people came out of the Odeon and two stopped to look
at him. "Who is that that says it's your conscience?" he cried, looking
around with a constricted face as if he could smell the particular
person who thought that. "Your conscience is a trick," he said, "it
don't exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you
had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because
it's no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you."

He was preaching with such concentration that he didn't notice a high
rat-colored car that had been driven around the block three times
already, while the two men in it hunted a place to park. He didn't see
it when it pulled in two cars over from him in a space that another car
had just pulled out of, and he didn't see Hoover Shoats and a man in a
glare-blue suit and white hat get out of it, but after a few seconds,
his head turned that way and he saw the man in the glare-blue suit and
white hat up on the nose of it. He was so struck with how gaunt and thin
he looked in the illusion that he stopped preaching. He had never
pictured himself that way before. The man he saw was hollow-chested and
carried his neck thrust forward and his arms down by his side; he stood
there as if he were waiting for some signal he was afraid he might not
catch.

Hoover Shoats was walking about on the sidewalk, striking a few chords
on his guitar. "Friends," he called, "I want to innerduce you to the
True Prophet here and I want you all to listen to his words because I
think they're going to make you happy like they've made me!" If Haze had
noticed Hoover he might have been impressed by how happy he looked, but
his attention was fixed on the man on the nose of the car. He slid down
from his own car and moved up closer, never taking his eyes from the
bleak figure. Hoover Shoats raised his hand with two fingers pointed and
the man suddenly cried out in a high nasal singsong voice. "The
unredeemed are redeeming theirselves and the new jesus is at hand! Watch
for this miracle! Help yourself to salvation in the Holy Church of
Christ Without Christ!" He called it over again in exactly the same tone
of voice, but faster. Then he began to cough. He had a loud consumptive
cough that started somewhere deep in him and finished with a long
wheeze. He expectorated a white fluid at the end of it.

Haze was standing next to a fat woman who after a minute turned her head
and stared at him and then turned it again and stared at the True
Prophet. Finally she touched his elbow with hers and grinned at him.
"Him and you twins?" she asked.

"If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it'll hunt you down and kill
you," Haze answered.

"Huh? Who?" she said.

He turned away and she stared at him as he got back in his car and drove
off. Then she touched the elbow of a man on the other side of her. "He's
nuts," she said. "I never seen no twins that hunted each other down."

When he got back to his room, Sabbath Hawks was in his bed. She was
pushed over into one corner of it, sitting with one arm drawn around her
knees and one hand holding onto the sheet as if she meant to hang on by
it. Her face was sullen and apprehensive. Haze sat down on the bed but
he barely glanced at her. "I don't care if you hit me with the table,"
she said. "I'm not going. There's no place for me to go. He's run off on
me and it was you run him off. I was watching last night and I seen you
come in and hold that match to his face. I thought anybody would have
seen what he was before that without having to strike no match. He's
just a crook. He ain't even a big crook, just a little one, and when he
gets tired of that, he begs on the street."

Haze leaned down and began untying his shoes. They were old army shoes
that he had painted black to get the government off. He untied them and
eased his feet out and sat there looking down, while she watched him
cautiously.

"Are you going to hit me or not?" she asked. "If you are, go ahead and
do it right now because I'm not going. I ain't got any place to go." He
didn't look as if he were going to hit anything; he looked as if he were
going to sit there until he died. "Listen," she said, with a quick
change of tone, "from the minute I set eyes on you I said to myself,
that's what I got to have, just give me some of him! I said look at
those pee-can eyes and go crazy, girl! That innocent look don't hide a
thing, he's just pure filthy right down to the guts, like me. The only
difference is I like being that way and he don't. Yes sir!" she said. "I
like being that way, and I can teach you how to like it. Don't you want
to learn how to like it?"

He turned his head slightly and just over his shoulder he saw a pinched
homely little face with bright green eyes and a grin. "Yeah," he said
with no change in his stony expression, "I want to." He stood up and
took off his coat and his trousers and his drawers and put them on the
straight chair. Then he turned off the light and sat down on the cot
again and pulled off his socks. His feet were big and white and damp to
the floor and he sat there, looking at the two white shapes they made.

"Come on! Make haste," she said, knocking his back with her knee.

He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off and wiped his face with it and
dropped it on the floor. Then he slid his legs under the cover by her
and sat there as if he were waiting to remember one more thing.

She was breathing very quickly. "Take off your hat, king of the beasts,"
she said gruffly and her hand came up behind his head and snatched the
hat off and sent it flying across the room in the dark.




                               CHAPTER 11


The next morning toward noon a person in a long black raincoat, with a
lightish hat pulled down low on his face and the brim of it turned down
to meet the turned-up collar of the raincoat, was moving rapidly along
certain back streets, close to the walls of the buildings. He was
carrying something about the size of a baby, wrapped up in newspapers,
and he carried a dark umbrella too, as the sky was an unpredictable
surly gray like the back of an old goat. He had on a pair of dark
glasses and a black beard which a keen observer would have said was not
a natural growth but was pinned onto his hat on either side with safety
pins. As he walked along, the umbrella kept slipping from under his arm
and getting tangled in his feet, as if it meant to keep him from going
anywhere.

He had not gone half a block before large putty-colored drops began to
splatter on the pavement and there was an ugly growl in the sky behind
him. He began to run, clutching the bundle in one arm and the umbrella
in the other. In a second, the storm overtook him and he ducked between
two show-windows into the blue and white tiled entrance of a drug store.
He lowered his dark glasses a little. The pale eyes that looked over the
rims belonged to Enoch Emery. Enoch was on his way to Hazel Motes's
room.

He had never been to Hazel Motes's place before but the instinct that
was guiding him was very sure of itself. What was in the bundle was what
he had shown Hazel at the museum. He had stolen it the day before.

He had darkened his face and hands with brown shoe polish so that if he
were seen in the act, he would be taken for a colored person; then he
had sneaked into the museum while the guard was asleep and had broken
the glass case with a wrench he'd borrowed from his landlady; then,
shaking and sweating, he had lifted the shriveled man out and thrust him
in a paper sack, and had crept out again past the guard, who was still
asleep. He realized as soon as he got out of the museum that since no
one had seen him to think he was a colored boy, he would be suspected
immediately and would have to disguise himself. That was why he had on
the black beard and dark glasses.

When he'd got back to his room, he had taken the new jesus out of the
sack and, hardly daring to look at him, had laid him in the gilted
cabinet; then he had sat down on the edge of his bed to wait. He was
waiting for something to happen, he didn't know what. He knew something
was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought
it was going to be one of the supreme moments in his life but apart from
that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured
himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better
personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and
nothing happened.

He sat there for about five more.

Then he realized that he had to make the first move. He got up and
tiptoed to the cabinet and squatted down at the door of it; in a second
he opened it a crack and looked in. After a while, very slowly, he
broadened the crack and inserted his head into the tabernacle.

Some time passed.

From directly behind him, only the soles of his shoes and the seat of
his trousers were visible. The room was absolutely silent; there was no
sound even from the street; the Universe might have been shut off; not a
flea jumped. Then without any warning, a loud liquid noise burst from
the cabinet and there was the thump of bone cracked once against a piece
of wood. Enoch staggered backward, clutching his head and his face. He
sat on the floor for a few minutes with a shocked expression on his
whole figure. At the first instant, he had thought it was the shriveled
man who had sneezed, but after a second, he perceived the condition of
his own nose. He wiped it off with his sleeve and then he sat there on
the floor for some time longer. His expression had showed that a deep
unpleasant knowledge was breaking on him slowly. After a while he had
kicked the ark door shut in the new jesus' face, and then he had got up
and begun to eat a candy bar very rapidly. He had eaten it as if he had
something against it.

The next morning he had not got up until ten o'clock--it was his day
off--and he had not set out until nearly noon to look for Hazel Motes.
He remembered the address Sabbath Hawks had given him and that was where
his instinct was leading him. He was very sullen and disgruntled at
having to spend his day off in such a way as this, and in bad weather,
but he wanted to get rid of the new jesus so that if the police had to
catch anybody for the robbery, they could catch Hazel Motes instead of
him. He couldn't understand at all why he had let himself risk his skin
for a dead shriveled-up part-nigger dwarf that had never done anything
but get himself embalmed and then lain stinking in a museum the rest of
his life. It was far beyond his understanding. He was very sullen. So
far as he was now concerned, one jesus was as bad as another.

He had borrowed his landlady's umbrella and he discovered as he stood in
the entrance of the drug store, trying to open it, that it was at least
as old as she was. When he finally got it hoisted, he pushed his dark
glasses back on his eyes and re-entered the downpour.

The umbrella was one his landlady had stopped using fifteen years before
(which was the only reason she had lent it to him) and as soon as the
rain touched the top of it, it came down with a shriek and stabbed him
in the back of the neck. He ran a few feet with it over his head and
then backed into another store entrance and removed it. Then to get it
up again, he had to place the tip of it on the ground and ram it open
with his foot. He ran out again, holding his hand up near the spokes to
keep them open and this allowed the handle, which was carved to
represent the head of a fox terrier, to jab him every few seconds in the
stomach. He proceeded for another quarter of a block this way before the
back half of the silk stood up off the spokes and allowed the storm to
sweep down his collar. Then he ducked under the marquee of a movie
house. It was Saturday and there were a lot of children standing more or
less in a line in front of the ticket box.

Enoch was not very fond of children but children always seemed to like
to look at him. The line turned and twenty or thirty eyes began to
observe him with a steady interest. The umbrella had assumed an ugly
position, half up and half down, and the half that was up was about to
come down and spill more water under his collar. When this happened the
children laughed and jumped up and down. Enoch glared at them and turned
his back and lowered his dark glasses. He found himself facing a
life-size four-color picture of a gorilla. Over the gorilla's head,
written in red letters was, "GONGA! Giant Jungle Monarch and a Great
Star! HERE IN PERSON!!!" At the level of the gorilla's knee, there was
more that said, "Gonga will appear in person in front of this theater at
12 A.M. _TODAY!_ A free pass to the first ten brave enough to step up
and shake his hand!"

Enoch was usually thinking of something else at the moment that Fate
began drawing back her leg to kick him. When he was four years old, his
father had brought him home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was
orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and
green letters that said, A NUTTY SURPRISE! When Enoch had opened it, a
coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of
his two front teeth. His life was full of so many happenings like that
that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of
danger. He stood there and read the poster twice through carefully. To
his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand
of Providence. He suddenly regained all his reverence for the new jesus.
He saw that he was going to be rewarded after all and have the supreme
moment he had expected.

He turned around and asked the nearest child what time it was. The child
said it was twelve-ten and that Gonga was already ten minutes late.
Another child said that maybe the rain had delayed him. Another said, no
not the rain, his director was taking a plane from Hollywood. Enoch
gritted his teeth. The first child said that if he wanted to shake the
star's hand, he would have to get in line like the rest of them and wait
his turn. Enoch got in line. A child asked him how old he was. Another
observed that he had funny-looking teeth. He ignored all this as best he
could and began to straighten out the umbrella.

In a few minutes a black truck turned around the corner and came slowly
up the street in the heavy rain. Enoch pushed the umbrella under his arm
and began to squint through his dark glasses. As the truck approached, a
phonograph inside it began to play "Tarara Boom Di Aye," but the music
was almost drowned out by the rain. There was a large illustration of a
blonde on the outside of the truck, advertising some picture other than
the gorilla's.

The children held their line carefully as the truck stopped in front of
the movie house. The back door of it was constructed like a paddy wagon,
with a grate, but the ape was not at it. Two men in raincoats got out of
the cab part, cursing, and ran around to the back and opened the door.
One of them stuck his head in and said, "Okay, make it snappy, willya?"
The other jerked his thumb at the children and said, "Get back willya,
willya get back?"

A voice on the record inside the truck said, "Here's Gonga, folks,
Roaring Gonga and a Great Star! Give Gonga a big hand, folks!" The voice
was barely a mumble in the rain.

The man who was waiting by the door of the truck stuck his head in
again. "Okay willya get out?" he said.

There was a faint thump somewhere inside the van. After a second a dark
furry arm emerged just enough for the rain to touch it and then drew
back inside.

"Goddam," the man who was under the marquee said; he took off his
raincoat and threw it to the man by the door, who threw it into the
wagon. After two or three minutes more, the gorilla appeared at the
door, with the raincoat buttoned up to his chin and the collar turned
up. There was an iron chain hanging from around his neck; the man
grabbed it and pulled him down and the two of them bounded under the
marquee together. A motherly-looking woman was in the glass ticket box,
getting the passes ready for the first ten children brave enough to step
up and shake hands.

The gorilla ignored the children entirely and followed the man over to
the other side of the entrance where there was a small platform raised
about a foot off the ground. He stepped up on it and turned facing the
children and began to growl. His growls were not so much loud as
poisonous; they appeared to issue from a black heart. Enoch was
terrified and if he had not been surrounded by the children, he would
have run away.

"Who'll step up first?" the man said. "Come on come on, who'll step up
first? A free pass to the first kid stepping up."

There was no movement from the group of children. The man glared at
them. "What's the matter with you kids?" he barked. "You yellow? He
won't hurt you as long as I got him by this chain." He tightened his
grip on the chain and jangled it at them to show he was holding it
securely.

After a minute a little girl separated herself from the group. She had
long wood-shaving curls and a fierce triangular face. She moved up to
within four feet of the star.

"Okay okay," the man said, rattling the chain, "make it snappy."

The ape reached out and gave her hand a quick shake. By this time there
was another little girl ready and then two boys. The line re-formed and
began to move up.

The gorilla kept his hand extended and turned his head away with a bored
look at the rain. Enoch had got over his fear and was trying frantically
to think of an obscene remark that would be suitable to insult him with.
Usually he didn't have any trouble with this kind of composition but
nothing came to him now. His brain, both parts, was completely empty. He
couldn't think even of the insulting phrases he used every day.

There were only two children in front of him by now. The first one shook
hands and stepped aside. Enoch's heart was beating violently. The child
in front of him finished and stepped aside and left him facing the ape,
who took his hand with an automatic motion.

It was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he had come
to the city. It was warm and soft.

For a second he only stood there, clasping it. Then he began to stammer.
"My name is Enoch Emery," he mumbled. "I attended the Rodemill Boys'
Bible Academy. I work at the city zoo. I seen two of your pictures. I'm
only eighteen year old but I already work for the city. My daddy made me
com..." and his voice cracked.

The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes: an ugly
pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the
celluloid pair. "You go to hell," a surly voice inside the ape-suit
said, low but distinctly, and the hand was jerked away.

Enoch's humiliation was so sharp and painful that he turned around three
times before he realized which direction he wanted to go in. Then he ran
off into the rain as fast as he could.

By the time he reached Sabbath Hawks' house, he was soaked through and
so was his bundle. He held it in a fierce grip but all he wanted was to
get rid of it and never see it again. Haze's landlady was out on the
porch, looking distrustfully into the storm. He found out from her where
Haze's room was and went up to it. The door was ajar and he stuck his
head in the crack. Haze was lying on his cot, with a washrag over his
eyes; the exposed part of his face was ashen and set in a grimace, as if
he were in some permanent pain. Sabbath Hawks was sitting at the table
by the window, studying herself in a pocket mirror. Enoch scratched on
the wall and she looked up. She put the mirror down and tiptoed out into
the hall and shut the door behind her.

"My man is sick today and sleeping," she said, "because he didn't sleep
none last night. What you want?"

"This is for him, it ain't for you," Enoch said, handing her the wet
bundle. "A friend of his give it to me to give to him. I don't know
what's in it."

"I'll take care of it," she said. "You needn't to worry none."

Enoch had an urgent need to insult somebody immediately; it was the only
thing that could give his feelings even a temporary relief. "I never
known he would have nothing to do with you," he remarked, giving her one
of his special looks.

"He couldn't leave off following me," she said. "Sometimes it's thataway
with them. You don't know what's in this package?"

"Lay-overs to catch meddlers," he said. "You just give it to him and
he'll know what it is and you can tell him I'm glad to get shut of it."
He started down the stairs and halfway he turned and gave her another
special look. "I see why he has to put theter washrag over his eyes," he
said.

"You keep your beeswax in your ears," she said. "Nobody asked you." When
she heard the front door slam behind him, she turned the bundle over and
began to examine it. There was no telling from the outside what was in
it; it was too hard to be clothes and too soft to be a machine. She tore
a hole in the paper at one end and saw what looked like five dried peas
in a row but the hall was too dark for her to see clearly what they
were. She decided to take the package to the bathroom, where there was a
good light, and open it up before she gave it to Haze. If he was so sick
as he said he was, he wouldn't want to be bothered with any bundle.

Early that morning he had claimed to have a terrible pain in his chest.
He had begun to cough during the night--a hard hollow cough that sounded
as if he were making it up as he went along. She was certain he was only
trying to drive her off by letting her think he had a catching disease.

He's not really sick, she said to herself going down the hall, he just
ain't used to me yet. She went in and sat down on the edge of a large
green claw-footed tub and ripped the string off the package. "But he'll
get used to me," she muttered. She pulled off the wet paper and let it
fall on the floor; then she sat with a stunned look, staring at what was
in her lap.

Two days out of the glass case had not improved the new jesus'
condition. One side of his face had been partly mashed in and on the
other side, his eyelid had split and a pale dust was seeping out of it.
For a while her face had an empty look, as if she didn't know what she
thought about him or didn't think anything. She might have sat there for
ten minutes, without a thought, held by whatever it was that was
familiar about him. She had never known anyone who looked like him
before, but there was something in him of everyone she had ever known,
as if they had all been rolled into one person and killed and shrunk and
dried.

She held him up and began to examine him and after a minute her hands
grew accustomed to the feel of his skin. Some of his hair had come
undone and she brushed it back where it belonged, holding him in the
crook of her arm and looking down into his squinched face. His mouth had
been knocked a little to one side so that there was just a trace of a
grin covering his terrified look. She began to rock him a little in her
arm and a slight reflection of the same grin appeared on her own face.
"Well I declare," she murmured, "you're right cute, ain't you?"

His head fitted exactly into the hollow of her shoulder. "Who's your
momma and daddy?" she asked.

An answer came into her mind at once and she let out a short little bark
and sat grinning, with a pleased expression in her eyes. "Well, let's go
give him a jolt," she said after a while.

Haze had already been jolted awake when the front door slammed behind
Enoch Emery. He had sat up and seeing she was not in the room, he had
jumped up and begun to put on his clothes. He had one thought in mind
and it had come to him, like his decision to buy a car, out of his sleep
and without any indication of it beforehand: he was going to move
immediately to some other city and preach the Church Without Christ
where they had never heard of it. He would get another room there and
another woman and make a new start with nothing on his mind. The entire
possibility of this came from the advantage of having a car--of having
something that moved fast, in privacy, to the place you wanted to be. He
looked out the window at the Essex. It sat high and square in the
pouring rain. He didn't notice the rain, only the car; if asked he would
not have been able to say that it was raining. He was charged with
energy and he left the window and finished putting on his clothes.
Earlier that morning, when he had waked up for the first time, he had
felt as if he were about to be caught by a complete consumption in his
chest; it had seemed to be growing hollow all night and yawning
underneath him, and he had kept hearing his coughs as if they came from
a distance. After a while he had been sucked down into a strengthless
sleep, but he had waked up with this plan, and with the energy to carry
it out right away.

He snatched his duffel bag from under the table and began plunging his
extra belongings into it. He didn't have much and a quarter of what he
had was already in. His hand managed the packing so that it never
touched the Bible that had sat like a rock in the bottom of the bag for
the last few years, but as he rooted out a place for his second shoes,
his fingers clutched around a small oblong object and he pulled it out.
It was the case with his mother's glasses in it. He had forgotten that
he had a pair of glasses. He put them on and the wall that he was facing
moved up closer and wavered. There was a small white-framed mirror hung
on the back of the door and he made his way to it and looked at himself.
His blurred face was dark with excitement and the lines in it were deep
and crooked. The little silver-rimmed glasses gave him a look of
deflected sharpness, as if they were hiding some dishonest plan that
would show in his naked eyes. His fingers began to snap nervously and he
forgot what he had been going to do. He saw his mother's face in his,
looking at the face in the mirror. He moved back quickly and raised his
hand to take off the glasses but the door opened and two more faces
floated into his line of vision; one of them said, "Call me Momma now."

The smaller dark one, just under the other, only squinted as if it were
trying to identify an old friend who was going to kill it.

Haze stood motionless with one hand still on the bow of the glasses and
the other arrested in the air at the level of his chest; his head was
thrust forward as if he had to use his whole face to see with. He was
about four feet from them but they seemed just under his eyes.

"Ask your daddy yonder where he was running off to--sick as he is?"
Sabbath said. "Ask him isn't he going to take you and me with him?"

The hand that had been arrested in the air moved forward and plucked at
the squinting face but without touching it; it reached again, slowly,
and plucked at nothing and then it lunged and snatched the shriveled
body and threw it against the wall. The head popped and the trash inside
sprayed out in a little cloud of dust.

"You've broken him!" Sabbath shouted, "and he was mine!"

Haze snatched the skin off the floor. He opened the outside door where
the landlady thought there had once been a fire-escape, and flung out
what he had in his hand. The rain blew in his face and he jumped back
and stood, with a cautious look, as if he were bracing himself for a
blow.

"You didn't have to throw him out," she yelled. "I might have fixed
him!"

He moved up closer and hung out the door, staring into the gray blur
around him. The rain fell on his hat with loud splatters as if it were
falling on tin.

"I knew when I first seen you you were mean and evil," a furious voice
behind him said. "I seen you wouldn't let nobody have nothing. I seen
you were mean enough to slam a baby against a wall. I seen you wouldn't
never have no fun or let anybody else because you didn't want nothing
but Jesus!"

He turned and raised his arm in a vicious gesture, almost losing his
balance in the door. Drops of rain water were splattered over the front
of the glasses and on his red face and here and there they hung
sparkling from the brim of his hat. "I don't want nothing but the
truth!" he shouted, "and what you see is the truth and I've seen it!"

"Preacher talk," she said. "Where were you going to run off to?"

"I've seen the only truth there is!" he shouted.

"Where were you going to run off to?"

"To some other city," he said in a loud hoarse voice, "to preach the
truth. The Church Without Christ! And I got a car to get there in,
I got..." but he was stopped by a cough. It was not much of a cough--it
sounded like a little yell for help at the bottom of a canyon--but the
color and the expression drained out of his face until it was as
straight and blank as the rain falling down behind him.

"And when were you going?" she asked.

"After I get some more sleep," he said, and pulled off the glasses and
threw them out the door.

"You ain't going to get none," she said.




                               CHAPTER 12


In spite of himself, Enoch couldn't get over the expectation that the
new jesus was going to do something for him in return for his services.
This was the virtue of Hope, which was made up, in Enoch, of two parts
suspicion and one part lust. It operated on him all the rest of the day
after he left Sabbath Hawks. He had only a vague idea how he wanted to
be rewarded, but he was not a boy without ambition: he wanted to become
something. He wanted to better his condition until it was the best. He
wanted to be THE young man of the future, like the ones in the insurance
ads. He wanted, some day, to see a line of people waiting to shake his
hand.

All afternoon, he fidgeted and fooled in his room, biting his nails and
shredding what was left of the silk off the landlady's umbrella. Finally
he denuded it entirely and broke off the spokes. What was left was a
black stick with a sharp steel point at one end and a dog's head at the
other. It might have been an instrument for some specialized kind of
torture that had gone out of fashion. Enoch walked up and down his room
with it under his arm and realized that it would distinguish him on the
sidewalk.

About seven o'clock in the evening, he put on his coat and took the
stick and headed for a little restaurant two blocks away. He had the
sense that he was setting off to get some honor, but he was very
nervous, as if he were afraid he might have to snatch it instead of
receive it.

He never set out for anything without eating first. The restaurant was
called the Paris Diner; it was a tunnel about six feet wide, located
between a shoe shine parlor and a dry-cleaning establishment. Enoch slid
in and climbed up on the far stool at the counter and said he would have
a bowl of split-pea soup and a chocolate malted milkshake.

The waitress was a tall woman with a big yellow dental plate and the
same color hair done up in a black hairnet. One hand never left her hip;
she filled orders with the other one. Although Enoch came in every
night, she had never learned to like him.

Instead of filling his order, she began to fry bacon; there was only one
other customer in the place and he had finished his meal and was reading
a newspaper; there was no one to eat the bacon but her. Enoch reached
over the counter and prodded her hip with his stick. "Listenhere," he
said, "I got to go. I'm in a hurry."

"Go then," she said. Her jaw began to work and she stared into the
skillet with a fixed attention.

"Lemme just have a piece of theter cake yonder," he said, pointing to a
half of pink and yellow cake on a round glass stand. "I think I got
something to do. I got to be going. Set it up there next to him," he
said, indicating the customer reading the newspaper. He slid over the
stools and began reading the outside sheet of the man's paper.

The man lowered the paper and looked at him. Enoch smiled. The man
raised the paper again. "Could I borrow some part of your paper that you
ain't studying?" Enoch asked. The man lowered it again and stared at
him; he had muddy unflinching eyes. He leafed deliberately through the
paper and shook out the sheet with the comic strips and handed it to
Enoch. It was Enoch's favorite part. He read it every evening like an
office. While he ate the cake that the waitress had torpedoed down the
counter at him, he read and felt himself surge with kindness and courage
and strength.

When he finished one side, he turned the sheet over and began to scan
the advertisements for movies, that filled the other side. His eye went
over three columns without stopping; then it came to a box that
advertised Gonga, Giant Jungle Monarch, and listed the theaters he would
visit on his tour and the hours he would be at each one. In thirty
minutes he would arrive at the Victory on 57th Street and that would be
his last appearance in the city.

If anyone had watched Enoch read this, he would have seen a certain
transformation in his countenance. It still shone with the inspiration
he had absorbed from the comic strips, but something else had come over
it: a look of awakening.

The waitress happened to turn around to see if he hadn't gone. "What's
the matter with you?" she said. "Did you swallow a seed?"

"I know what I want," Enoch murmured.

"I know what I want too," she said with a dark look.

Enoch felt for his stick and laid his change on the counter. "I got to
be going."

"Don't let me keep you," she said.

"You may not see me again," he said, "--the way I am."

"Any way I don't see you will be all right with me," she said.

Enoch left. It was a pleasant damp evening. The puddles on the sidewalk
shone and the store windows were steamy and bright with junk. He
disappeared down a side street and made his way rapidly along the darker
passages of the city, pausing only once or twice at the end of an alley
to dart a glance in each direction before he ran on. The Victory was a
small theater, suited to the needs of the family, in one of the closer
subdivisions; he passed through a succession of lighted areas and then
on through more alleys and back streets until he came to the business
section that surrounded it. Then he slowed up. He saw it about a block
away, glittering in its darker setting. He didn't cross the street to
the side it was on but kept on the far side, moving forward with his
squint fixed on the glary spot. He stopped when he was directly across
from it and hid himself in a narrow stair cavity that divided a
building.

The truck that carried Gonga was parked across the street and the star
was standing under the marquee, shaking hands with an elderly woman. She
moved aside and a gentleman in a polo shirt stepped up and shook hands
vigorously, like a sportsman. He was followed by a boy of about three
who wore a tall Western hat that nearly covered his face; he had to be
pushed ahead by the line. Enoch watched for some time, his face working
with envy. The small boy was followed by a lady in shorts, she by an old
man who tried to draw extra attention to himself by dancing up instead
of walking in a dignified way. Enoch suddenly darted across the street
and slipped noiselessly into the open back door of the truck.

The handshaking went on until the feature picture was ready to begin.
Then the star got back in the van and the people filed into the theater.
The driver and the man who was master of ceremonies climbed in the cab
part and the truck rumbled off. It crossed the city rapidly and
continued on the highway, going very fast.

There came from the van certain thumping noises, not those of the normal
gorilla, but they were drowned out by the drone of the motor and the
steady sound of wheels against the road. The night was pale and quiet,
with nothing to stir it but an occasional complaint from a hoot owl and
the distant muted jarring of a freight train. The truck sped on until it
slowed for a crossing, and as the van rattled over the tracks, a figure
slipped from the door and almost fell, and then limped hurriedly off
toward the woods.

Once in the darkness of a pine thicket, he laid down a pointed stick he
had been clutching and something bulky and loose that he had been
carrying under his arm, and began to undress. He folded each garment
neatly after he had taken it off and then stacked it on top of the last
thing he had removed. When all his clothes were in the pile, he took up
the stick and began making a hole in the ground with it.

The darkness of the pine grove was broken by paler moonlit spots that
moved over him now and again and showed him to be Enoch. His natural
appearance was marred by a gash that ran from the corner of his lip to
his collarbone and by a lump under his eye that gave him a dulled
insensitive look. Nothing could have been more deceptive for he was
burning with the intensest kind of happiness.

He dug rapidly until he had made a trench about a foot long and a foot
deep. Then he placed the stack of clothes in it and stood aside to rest
a second. Burying his clothes was not a symbol to him of burying his
former self; he only knew he wouldn't need them any more. As soon as he
got his breath, he pushed the displaced dirt over the hole and stamped
it down with his foot. He discovered while he did this that he still had
his shoes on, and when he finished, he removed them and threw them from
him. Then he picked up the loose bulky object and shook it vigorously.

In the uncertain light, one of his lean white legs could be seen to
disappear and then the other, one arm and then the other: a black
heavier shaggier figure replaced his. For an instant, it had two heads,
one light and one dark, but after a second, it pulled the dark back head
over the other and corrected this. It busied itself with certain hidden
fastenings and what appeared to be minor adjustments of its hide.

For a time after this, it stood very still and didn't do anything. Then
it began to growl and beat its chest; it jumped up and down and flung
its arms and thrust its head forward. The growls were thin and uncertain
at first but they grew louder after a second. They became low and
poisonous, louder again, low and poisonous again; they stopped
altogether. The figure extended its hand, clutched nothing, and shook
its arm vigorously; it withdrew the arm, extended it again, clutched
nothing, and shook. It repeated this four or five times. Then it picked
up the pointed stick and placed it at a cocky angle under its arm and
left the woods for the highway. No gorilla in existence, whether in the
jungles of Africa or California, or in New York City in the finest
apartment in the world, was happier at that moment than this one, whose
god had finally rewarded it.

A man and woman sitting close together on a rock just off the highway
were looking across an open stretch of valley at a view of the city in
the distance and they didn't see the shaggy figure approaching. The
smokestacks and square tops of buildings made a black uneven wall
against the lighter sky and here and there a steeple cut a sharp wedge
out of a cloud. The young man turned his neck just in time to see the
gorilla standing a few feet away, hideous and black, with its hand
extended. He eased his arm from around the woman and disappeared
silently into the woods. She, as soon as she turned her eyes, fled
screaming down the highway. The gorilla stood as though surprised and
presently its arm fell to its side. It sat down on the rock where they
had been sitting and stared over the valley at the uneven skyline of the
city.




                               CHAPTER 13


On his second night out, working with his hired Prophet and the Holy
Church of Christ Without Christ, Hoover Shoats made fifteen dollars and
thirty-five cents clear. The Prophet got three dollars an evening for
his services and the use of his car. His name was Solace Layfield; he
had consumption and a wife and six children and being a Prophet was as
much work as he wanted to do. It never occurred to him that it might be
a dangerous job. The second night out, he failed to observe a high
rat-colored car parked about a half-block away and a white face inside
it, watching him with the kind of intensity that means something is
going to happen no matter what is done to keep it from happening.

The face watched him for almost an hour while he performed on the nose
of his car every time Hoover Shoats raised his hand with two fingers
pointed. When the last showing of the movie was over and there were no
more people to attract, Hoover paid him and the two of them got in his
car and drove off. They drove about ten blocks to where Hoover lived;
the car stopped and Hoover jumped out, calling, "See you tomorrow night,
friend"; then he went inside a dark doorway and Solace Layfield drove
on. A half-block behind him the other rat-colored car was following
steadily. The driver was Hazel Motes.

Both cars increased their speed and in a few minutes they were heading
rapidly toward the outskirts of town. The first car cut off onto a
lonesome road where the trees were hung over with moss and the only
light came like stiff antennae from the two cars. Haze gradually
shortened the distance between them and then, grinding his motor
suddenly, he shot ahead and rammed the back end of the other car. Both
cars came to a stop.

Haze backed the Essex a little way down the road, while the other
Prophet got out of his car and stood squinting in the glare from Haze's
lights. After a second, he came up to the window of the Essex and looked
in. There was no sound but from crickets and tree frogs. "What you
want?" he said in a nervous voice. Haze didn't answer, he only looked at
him, and in a second the man's jaw slackened and he seemed to perceive
the resemblance in their clothes and possibly in their faces. "What you
want?" he said in a higher voice. "I ain't done nothing to you."

Haze ground the motor of the Essex again and shot forward. This time he
rammed the other car at such an angle that it rolled to the side of the
road and over into the ditch.

The man got up off the ground where he had been thrown and ran back to
the window of the Essex. He stood about four feet away, looking in.

"What you keep a thing like that on the road for?" Haze said.

"It ain't nothing wrong with that car," the man said. "Howcome you
knockt it in the ditch?"

"Take off that hat," Haze said.

"Listenere," the man said, beginning to cough, "what you want? Quit just
looking at me. Say what you want."

"You ain't true," Haze said. "What do you get up on top of a car and say
you don't believe in what you do believe in for?"

"Whatsit to you?" the man wheezed. "Whatsit to you what I do?"

"What do you do it for?" Haze said. "That's what I asked you."

"A man has to look out for hisself," the other Prophet said.

"You ain't true," Haze said. "You believe in Jesus."

"Whatsit to you?" the man said. "What you knockt my car off the road
for?"

"Take off that hat and that suit," Haze said.

"Listenere," the man said, "I ain't trying to mock you. He bought me
thisyer suit. I thrown my othern away."

Haze reached out and brushed the man's white hat off. "And take off that
suit," he said.

The man began to sidle off, out into the middle of the road.

"Take off that suit," Haze shouted and started the car forward after
him. Solace began to lope down the road, taking off his coat as he went.
"Take it all off," Haze yelled, with his face close to the windshield.

The Prophet began to run in earnest. He tore off his shirt and unbuckled
his belt and ran out of his trousers. He began grabbing for his feet as
if he would take off his shoes too, but before he could get at them, the
Essex knocked him flat and ran over him. Haze drove about twenty feet
and stopped the car and then began to back it. He backed it over the
body and then stopped and got out. The Essex stood half over the other
Prophet as if it were pleased to guard what it had finally brought down.
The man didn't look so much like Haze, lying on the ground on his face
without his hat or suit on. A lot of blood was coming out of him and
forming a puddle around his head. He was motionless all but for one
finger that moved up and down in front of his face as if he were marking
time with it. Haze poked his toe in his side and he wheezed for a second
and then was quiet. "Two things I can't stand," Haze said, "--a man that
ain't true and one that mocks what is. You shouldn't ever have tampered
with me if you didn't want what you got."

The man was trying to say something but he was only wheezing. Haze
squatted down by his face to listen. "Give my mother a lot of trouble,"
he said through a kind of bubbling in his throat. "Never giver no rest.
Stole theter car. Never told the truth to my daddy or give Henry what,
never give him..."

"You shut up," Haze said, leaning his head closer to hear the
confession.

"Told where his still was and got five dollars for it," the man gasped.

"You shut up now," Haze said.

"Jesus..." the man said.

"Shut up like I told you to now," Haze said.

"Jesus hep me," the man wheezed.

Haze gave him a hard slap on the back and he was quiet. He leaned down
to hear if he was going to say anything else but he wasn't breathing any
more. Haze turned around and examined the front of the Essex to see if
there had been any damage done to it. The bumper had a few splurts of
blood on it but that was all. Before he turned around and drove back to
town, he wiped them off with a rag.

Early the next morning he got out of the back of the car and drove to a
filling station to get the Essex filled up and checked for his trip. He
hadn't gone back to his room but had spent the night parked in an alley,
not sleeping but thinking about the life he was going to begin,
preaching the Church Without Christ in the new city.

At the filling station a sleepy-looking white boy came out to wait on
him and he said he wanted the tank filled up, the oil and water checked,
and the tires tested for air, that he was going on a long trip. The boy
asked him where he was going and he told him to another city. The boy
asked him if he was going that far in this car here and he said yes he
was. He tapped the boy on the front of his shirt. He said nobody with a
good car needed to worry about anything, and he asked the boy if he
understood that. The boy said yes he did, that that was his opinion too.
Haze introduced himself and said that he was a preacher for the Church
Without Christ and that he preached every night on the nose of this very
car here. He explained that he was going to another city to preach. The
boy filled up the gas tank and checked the water and oil and tested the
tires, and while he was working, Haze followed him around, telling him
what it was right to believe. He said it was not right to believe
anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.
He said he had only a few days ago believed in blasphemy as the way to
salvation, but that you couldn't even believe in that because then you
were believing in something to blaspheme. As for the Jesus who was
reported to have been born at Bethlehem and crucified on Calvary for
man's sins, Haze said, He was too foul a notion for a sane person to
carry in his head, and he picked up the boy's water bucket and bammed it
on the concrete pavement to emphasize what he was saying. He began to
curse and blaspheme Jesus in a quiet intense way but with such
conviction that the boy paused from his work to listen. When he had
finished checking the Essex, he said that there was a leak in the gas
tank and two in the radiator and that the rear tire would probably last
twenty miles if he went slow.

"Listen," Haze said, "this car is just beginning its life. A lightening
bolt couldn't stop it!"

"It ain't any use to put water in it," the boy said, "because it won't
hold it."

"You put it in just the same," Haze said, and he stood there and watched
while the boy put it in. Then he got a road map from him and drove off,
leaving little bead-chains of water and oil and gas on the road.

He drove very fast out onto the highway, but once he had gone a few
miles, he had the sense that he was not gaining ground. Shacks and
filling stations and road camps and 666 signs passed him, and deserted
barns with CCC snuff ads peeling across them, even a sign that said,
"Jesus Died for YOU," which he saw and deliberately did not read. He had
the sense that the road was really slipping back under him. He had known
all along that there was no more country but he didn't know that there
was not another city.

He had not gone five miles on the highway before he heard a siren behind
him. He looked around and saw a black patrol car coming up. It drove
alongside him and the patrolman in it motioned for him to pull over to
the edge of the road. The patrolman had a red pleasant face and eyes the
color of clear fresh ice.

"I wasn't speeding," Haze said.

"No," the patrolman agreed, "you wasn't."

"I was on the right side of the road."

"Yes you was, that's right," the cop said.

"What you want with me?"

"I just don't like your face," the patrolman said. "Where's your
license?"

"I don't like your face either," Haze said, "and I don't have a
license."

"Well," the patrolman said in a kindly voice, "I don't reckon _you_ need
one."

"Well I ain't got one if I do," Haze said.

"Listen," the patrolman said, taking another tone, "would you mind
driving your car up to the top of the next hill? I want you to see the
view from up there, puttiest view you ever did see."

Haze shrugged but he started the car up. He didn't mind fighting the
patrolman if that was what he wanted. He drove to the top of the hill,
with the patrol car following close behind him. "Now you turn it facing
the embankment," the patrolman called. "You'll be able to see better
thataway." Haze turned it facing the embankment. "Now maybe you better
had get out," the cop said. "I think you could see better if you was
out."

Haze got out and glanced at the view. The embankment dropped down for
about thirty feet, sheer washed-out red clay, into a partly burnt
pasture where there was one scrub cow lying near a puddle. Over in the
middle distance there was a one-room shack with a buzzard standing
hunch-shouldered on the roof.

The patrolman got behind the Essex and pushed it over the embankment and
the cow stumbled up and galloped across the field and into the woods;
the buzzard flapped off to a tree at the edge of the clearing. The car
landed on its top, with the three wheels that stayed on, spinning. The
motor bounced out and rolled some distance away and various odd pieces
scattered this way and that.

"Them that don't have a car, don't need a license," the patrolman said,
dusting his hands on his pants.

Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed
to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the
entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank gray sky that
went on, depth after depth, into space. His knees bent under him and he
sat down on the edge of the embankment with his feet hanging over.

The patrolman stood staring at him. "Could I give you a lift to where
you was going?" he asked.

After a minute he came a little closer and said, "Where was you going?"

He leaned on down with his hands on his knees and said in an anxious
voice, "Was you going anywheres?"

"No," Haze said.

The patrolman squatted down and put his hand on Haze's shoulder. "You
hadn't planned to go anywheres?" he asked anxiously.

Haze shook his head. His face didn't change and he didn't turn it toward
the patrolman. It seemed to be concentrated on space.

The patrolman got up and went back to his car and stood at the door of
it, staring at the back of Haze's hat and shoulder. Then he said, "Well,
I'll be seeing you," and got in and drove off.

After a while Haze got up and started walking back to town. It took him
three hours to get inside the city again. He stopped at a supply store
and bought a tin bucket and a sack of quicklime and then he went on to
where he lived, carrying these. When he reached the house, he stopped
outside on the sidewalk and opened the sack of lime and poured the
bucket half full of it. Then he went to a water spigot by the front
steps and filled up the rest of the bucket with water and started up the
steps. His landlady was sitting on the porch, rocking a cat. "What you
going to do with that, Mr. Motes?" she asked.

"Blind myself," he said and went on in the house.

The landlady sat there for a while longer. She was not a woman who felt
more violence in one word than in another; she took every word at its
face value but all the faces were the same. Still, instead of blinding
herself, if she had felt that bad, she would have killed herself and she
wondered why anybody wouldn't do that. She would simply have put her
head in an oven or maybe have given herself too many painless sleeping
pills and that would have been that. Perhaps Mr. Motes was only being
ugly, for what possible reason could a person have for wanting to
destroy their sight? A woman like her, who was so clear-sighted, could
never stand to be blind. If she had to be blind she would rather be
dead. It occurred to her suddenly that when she was dead she would be
blind too. She stared in front of her intensely, facing this for the
first time. She recalled the phrase, "eternal death," that preachers
used, but she cleared it out of her mind immediately, with no more
change of expression than the cat. She was not religious or morbid, for
which every day she thanked her stars. She would credit a person who had
that streak with anything, though, and Mr. Motes had it or he wouldn't
be a preacher. He might put lime in his eyes and she wouldn't doubt it a
bit, because they were all, if the truth was only known, a little bit
off in their heads. What possible reason could a sane person have for
wanting to not enjoy himself any more?

She certainly couldn't say.




                               CHAPTER 14


But she kept it in mind because after he had done it, he continued to
live in her house and every day the sight of him presented her with the
question. She first told him he couldn't stay because he wouldn't wear
dark glasses and she didn't like to look at the mess he had made in his
eye sockets. At least she didn't think she did. If she didn't keep her
mind going on something else when he was near her, she would find
herself leaning forward, staring into his face as if she expected to see
something she hadn't seen before. This irritated her with him and gave
her the sense that he was cheating her in some secret way. He sat on her
porch a good part of every afternoon, but sitting out there with him was
like sitting by yourself; he didn't talk except when it suited him. You
asked him a question in the morning and he might answer it in the
afternoon, or he might never. He offered to pay her extra to let him
keep his room because he knew his way in and out, and she decided to let
him stay, at least until she found out how she was being cheated.

He got money from the government every month for something the war had
done to his insides and so he was not obliged to work. The landlady had
always been impressed with the ability to pay. When she found a stream
of wealth, she followed it to its source and before long, it was not
distinguishable from her own. She felt that the money she paid out in
taxes returned to all the worthless pockets in the world, that the
government not only sent it to foreign niggers and A-rabs, but wasted it
at home on blind fools and on every idiot who could sign his name on a
card. She felt justified in getting any of it back that she could. She
felt justified in getting anything at all back that she could, money or
anything else, as if she had once owned the earth and been dispossessed
of it. She couldn't look at anything steadily without wanting it, and
what provoked her most was the thought that there might be something
valuable hidden near her, something she couldn't see.

To her, the blind man had the look of seeing something. His face had a
peculiar pushing look, as if it were going forward after something it
could just distinguish in the distance. Even when he was sitting
motionless in a chair, his face had the look of straining toward
something. But she knew he was totally blind. She had satisfied herself
of that as soon as he took off the rag he used for a while as a bandage.
She had got one long good look and it had been enough to tell her he had
done what he'd said he was going to do. The other boarders, after he had
taken off the rag, would pass him slowly in the hall, tiptoeing, and
looking as long as they could, but now they didn't pay any attention to
him; some of the new ones didn't know he had done it himself. The Hawks
girl had spread it over the house as soon as it happened. She had
watched him do it and then she had run to every room, yelling what he
had done, and all the boarders had come running. That girl was a harpy
if one ever lived, the landlady felt. She had hung around pestering him
for a few days and then she had gone on off; she said she hadn't counted
on no honest-to-Jesus blind man and she was homesick for her papa; he
had deserted her, gone off on a banana boat. The landlady hoped he was
at the bottom of the salt sea; he had been a month behind in his rent.
In two weeks, of course, she was back, ready to start pestering him
again. She had the disposition of a yellow jacket and you could hear her
a block away, shouting and screaming at him, and him never opening his
mouth.

The landlady conducted an orderly house and she told him so. She told
him that when the girl lived with him, he would have to pay double; she
said there were things she didn't mind and things she did. She left him
to draw his own conclusions about what she meant by that, but she
waited, with her arms folded, until he had drawn them. He didn't say
anything, he only counted out three more dollars and handed them to her.
"That girl, Mr. Motes," she said, "is only after your money."

"If that was what she wanted she could have it," he said. "I'd pay her
to stay away."

The thought that her tax money would go to support such trash was more
than the landlady could bear. "Don't do that," she said quickly. "She's
got no right to it." The next day she called the Welfare people and made
arrangements to have the girl sent to a detention home; she was
eligible.

She was curious to know how much he got every month from the government
and with that set of eyes removed, she felt at liberty to find out. She
steamed open the government envelope as soon as she found it in the
mailbox the next time; in a few days she felt obliged to raise his rent.
He had made arrangements with her to give him his meals and as the price
of food went up, she was obliged to raise his board also; but she didn't
get rid of the feeling that she was being cheated. Why had he destroyed
his eyes and saved himself unless he had some plan, unless he saw
something that he couldn't get without being blind to everything else?
She meant to find out everything she could about him.

"Where were your people from, Mr. Motes?" she asked him one afternoon
when they were sitting on the porch. "I don't suppose they're alive?"

She supposed she might suppose what she pleased; he didn't disturb his
doing nothing to answer her. "None of my people's alive either," she
said. "All Mr. Flood's people's alive but him." She was a Mrs. Flood.
"They all come here when they want a hand-out," she said, "but Mr. Flood
had money. He died in the crack-up of an airplane."

After a while he said, "My people are all dead."

"Mr. Flood," she said, "died in the crack-up of an airplane."

She began to enjoy sitting on the porch with him, but she could never
tell if he knew she was there or not. Even when he answered her, she
couldn't tell if he knew it was she. She herself. Mrs. Flood, the
landlady. Not just anybody. They would sit, he only sit, and she sit
rocking, for half an afternoon and not two words seemed to pass between
them, though she might talk at length. If she didn't talk and keep her
mind going, she would find herself sitting forward in her chair, looking
at him with her mouth not closed. Anyone who saw her from the sidewalk
would think she was being courted by a corpse.

She observed his habits carefully. He didn't eat much or seem to mind
anything she gave him. If she had been blind, she would have sat by the
radio all day, eating cake and ice cream, and soaking her feet. He ate
anything and never knew the difference. He kept getting thinner and his
cough deepened and he developed a limp. During the first cold months, he
took the virus, but he walked out every day in spite of that. He walked
about half of each day. He got up early in the morning and walked in his
room--she could hear him below in hers, up and down, up and down--and
then he went out and walked before breakfast and after breakfast, he
went out again and walked until midday. He knew the four or five blocks
around the house and he didn't go any farther than those. He could have
kept on one for all she saw. He could have stayed in his room, in one
spot, moving his feet up and down. He could have been dead and get all
he got out of life but the exercise. He might as well be one of them
monks, she thought, he might as well be in a monkery. She didn't
understand it. She didn't like the thought that something was being put
over her head. She liked the clear light of day. She liked to see
things.

She could not make up her mind what would be inside his head and what
out. She thought of her own head as a switchbox where she controlled
from; but with him, she could only imagine the outside in, the whole
black world in his head and his head bigger than the world, his head big
enough to include the sky and planets and whatever was or had been or
would be. How would he know if time was going backwards or forwards or
if he was going with it? She imagined it was like you were walking in a
tunnel and all you could see was a pin point of light. She had to
imagine the pin point of light; she couldn't think of it at all without
that. She saw it as some kind of a star, like the star on Christmas
cards. She saw him going backwards to Bethlehem and she had to laugh.

She thought it would be a good thing if he had something to do with his
hands, something to bring him out of himself and get him in connection
with the real world again. She was certain he was out of connection with
it; she was not certain at times that he even knew she existed. She
suggested he get himself a guitar and learn to strum it; she had a
picture of them sitting on the porch in the evening and him strumming
it. She had bought two rubber plants to make where they sat more private
from the street, and she thought that the sound of him strumming it from
behind the rubber plant would take away the dead look he had. She
suggested it but he never answered the suggestion.

After he paid his room and board every month, he had a good third of the
government check left but that she could see, he never spent any money.
He didn't use tobacco or drink whisky; there was nothing for him to do
with all that money but lose it, since there was only himself. She
thought of benefits that might accrue to his widow should he leave one.
She had seen money drop out of his pocket and him not bother to reach
down and feel for it. One day when she was cleaning his room, she found
four dollar bills and some change in his trash can. He came in about
that time from one of his walks. "Mr. Motes," she said, "here's a dollar
bill and some change in this waste basket. You know where your waste
basket is. How did you make that mistake?"

"It was left over," he said. "I didn't need it."

She dropped onto his straight chair. "Do you throw it away every month?"
she asked after a time.

"Only when it's left over," he said.

"The poor and needy," she muttered. "The poor and needy. Don't you ever
think about the poor and needy? If you don't want that money somebody
else might."

"You can have it," he said.

"Mr. Motes," she said coldly, "I'm not charity yet!" She realized now
that he was a mad man and that he ought to be under the control of a
sensible person.

The landlady was past her middle years and her plate was too large but
she had long race-horse legs and a nose that had been called Grecian by
one boarder. She wore her hair clustered like grapes on her brow and
over each ear and in the middle behind, but none of these advantages
were any use to her in attracting his attention. She saw that the only
way was to be interested in what he was interested in. "Mr. Motes," she
said one afternoon when they were sitting on the porch, "why don't you
preach any more? Being blind wouldn't be a hinderance. People would like
to go see a blind preacher. It would be something different." She was
used to going on without an answer. "You could get you one of those
seeing dogs," she said, "and he and you could get up a good crowd.
People'll always go to see a dog.

"For myself," she continued, "I don't have that streak. I believe that
what's right today is wrong tomorrow and that the time to enjoy yourself
is now so long as you let others do the same. I'm as good, Mr. Motes,"
she said, "not believing in Jesus as a many a one that does."

"You're better," he said, leaning forward suddenly. "If you believed in
Jesus, you wouldn't be so good."

He had never paid her a compliment before! "Why Mr. Motes," she said, "I
expect you're a fine preacher! You certainly ought to start it again. It
would give you something to do. As it is, you don't have anything to do
but walk. Why don't you start preaching again?"

"I can't preach any more," he muttered.

"Why?"

"I don't have time," he said, and got up and walked off the porch as if
she had reminded him of some urgent business. He walked as if his feet
hurt him but he had to go on.

Some time later she discovered why he limped. She was cleaning his room
and happened to knock over his extra pair of shoes. She picked them up
and looked into them as if she thought she might find something hidden
there. The bottoms of them were lined with gravel and broken glass and
pieces of small stone. She spilled this out and sifted it through her
fingers, looking for a glitter that might mean something valuable, but
she saw that what she had in her hand was trash that anybody could pick
up in the alley. She stood for some time, holding the shoes, and finally
she put them back under the cot. In a few days she examined them again
and they were lined with fresh rocks. Who's he doing this for? she asked
herself. What's he getting out of doing it? Every now and then she would
have an intimation of something hidden near her but out of her reach.
"Mr. Motes," she said that day, when he was in her kitchen eating his
dinner, "what do you walk on rocks for?"

"To pay," he said in a harsh voice.

"Pay for what?"

"It don't make any difference for what," he said. "I'm paying."

"But what have you got to show that you're paying for?" she persisted.

"Mind your business," he said rudely. "You can't see."

The landlady continued to chew very slowly. "Do you think, Mr. Motes,"
she said hoarsely, "that when you're dead, you're blind?"

"I hope so," he said after a minute.

"Why?" she asked, staring at him.

After a while he said, "If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold
more."

The landlady stared for a long time, seeing nothing at all.

She began to fasten all her attention on him, to the neglect of other
things. She began to follow him in his walks, meeting him accidentally
and accompanying him. He didn't seem to know she was there, except
occasionally when he would slap at his face as if her voice bothered
him, like the singing of a mosquito. He had a deep wheezing cough and
she began to badger him about his health. "There's no one," she would
say, "to look after you but me, Mr. Motes. No one that has your interest
at heart but me. Nobody would care if I didn't." She began to make him
tasty dishes and carry them to his room. He would eat what she brought,
immediately, with a wry face, and hand back the plate without thanking
her, as if all his attention were directed elsewhere and this was an
interruption he had to suffer. One morning he told her abruptly that he
was going to get his food somewhere else, and named the place, a diner
around the corner, run by a foreigner. "And you'll rue the day!" she
said. "You'll pick up an infection. No sane person eats there. A dark
and filthy place. Encrusted! It's you that can't see, Mr. Motes.

"Crazy fool," she muttered when he had walked off. "Wait till winter
comes. Where will you eat when winter comes, when the first wind blows
the virus into you?"

She didn't have to wait long. He caught influenza before winter and for
a while he was too weak to walk out and she had the satisfaction of
bringing his meals to his room. She came earlier than usual one morning
and found him asleep, breathing heavily. The old shirt he wore to sleep
in was open down the front and showed three strands of barbed wire,
wrapped around his chest. She retreated backwards to the door and then
she dropped the tray. "Mr. Motes," she said in a thick voice, "what do
you do these things for? It's not natural."

He pulled himself up.

"What's that wire around you for? It's not natural," she repeated.

After a second he began to button the shirt. "It's natural," he said.

"Well, it's not normal. It's like one of them gory stories, it's
something that people have quit doing--like boiling in oil or being a
saint or walling up cats," she said. "There's no reason for it. People
have quit doing it."

"They ain't quit doing it as long as I'm doing it," he said.

"People have quit doing it," she repeated. "What do you do it for?"

"I'm not clean," he said.

She stood staring at him, unmindful of the broken dishes at her feet. "I
know it," she said after a minute, "you got blood on that night shirt
and on the bed. You ought to get you a washwoman..."

"That's not the kind of clean," he said.

"There's only one kind of clean, Mr. Motes," she muttered. She looked
down and observed the dishes he had made her break and the mess she
would have to get up and she left for the hall closet and returned in a
minute with the dust pan and broom. "It's easier to bleed than sweat,
Mr. Motes," she said in the voice of High Sarcasm. "You must believe in
Jesus or you wouldn't do these foolish things. You must have been lying
to me when you named your fine church. I wouldn't be surprised if you
weren't some kind of a agent of the pope or got some connection with
something funny."

"I ain't treatin' with you," he said and lay back down, coughing.

"You got nobody to take care of you but me," she reminded him.

Her first plan had been to marry him and then have him committed to the
state institution for the insane, but gradually her plan had become to
marry him and keep him. Watching his face had become a habit with her;
she wanted to penetrate the darkness behind it and see for herself what
was there. She had the sense that she had tarried long enough and that
she must get him now while he was weak, or not at all. He was so weak
from the influenza that he tottered when he walked; winter had already
begun and the wind slashed at the house from every angle, making a sound
like sharp knives swirling in the air.

"Nobody in their right mind would like to be out on a day like this,"
she said, putting her head suddenly into his room in the middle of the
morning on one of the coldest days of the year. "Do you hear that wind,
Mr. Motes? It's fortunate for you that you have this warm place to be
and someone to take care of you." She made her voice more than usually
soft. "Every blind and sick man is not so fortunate," she said, "as to
have somebody that cares about him." She came in and sat down on the
straight chair that was just at the door. She sat on the edge of it,
leaning forward with her legs apart and her hands braced on her knees.
"Let me tell you, Mr. Motes," she said, "few men are as fortunate as you
but I can't keep climbing these stairs. It wears me out. I've been
thinking what we could do about it."

He had been lying motionless on the bed but he sat up suddenly as if he
were listening, almost as if he had been alarmed by the tone of her
voice. "I know you wouldn't want to give up your room here," she said,
and waited for the effect of this. He turned his face toward her; she
could tell she had his attention. "I know you like it here and wouldn't
want to leave and you're a sick man and need somebody to take care of
you as well as being blind," she said and found herself breathless and
her heart beginning to flutter. He reached to the foot of the bed and
felt for his clothes that were rolled up there. He began to put them on
hurriedly over his night shirt. "I been thinking how we could arrange it
so you would have a home and somebody to take care of you and I wouldn't
have to climb these stairs, what you dressing for today, Mr. Motes? You
don't want to go out in this weather.

"I been thinking," she went on, watching him as he went on with what he
was doing, "and I see there's only one thing for you and me to do. Get
married. I wouldn't do it under any ordinary condition but I would do it
for a blind man and a sick one. If we don't help each other, Mr. Motes,
there's nobody to help us," she said. "Nobody. The world is a empty
place."

The suit that had been glare-blue when it was bought was a softer shade
now. The panama hat was wheat-colored. He kept it on the floor by his
shoes when he was not wearing it. He reached for it and put it on and
then he began to put on his shoes that were still lined with rocks.

"Nobody ought to be without a place of their own to be," she said, "and
I'm willing to give you a home here with me, a place where you can
always stay, Mr. Motes, and never worry yourself about."

His cane was on the floor near where his shoes had been. He felt for it
and then stood up and began to walk slowly toward her. "I got a place
for you in my heart, Mr. Motes," she said and felt it shaking like a
bird cage; she didn't know whether he was coming toward her to embrace
her or not. He passed her, expressionless, out the door and into the
hall. "Mr. Motes!" she said, turning sharply in the chair, "I can't
allow you to stay here under no other circumstances. I can't climb these
stairs. I don't want a thing," she said, "but to help you. You don't
have anybody to look after you but me. Nobody to care if you live or die
but me! No other place to be but mine!"

He was feeling for the first step with his cane.

"Or were you planning to find you another rooming house?" she asked in a
voice getting higher. "Maybe you were planning to go to some other
city!"

"That's not where I'm going," he said. "There's no other house nor no
other city."

"There's nothing, Mr. Motes," she said, "and time goes forward, it don't
go backward and unless you take what's offered you, you'll find yourself
out in the cold pitch black and just how far do you think you'll get?"

He felt for each step with his cane before he put his foot on it. When
he reached the bottom, she called down to him. "You needn't to return to
a place you don't value, Mr. Motes. The door won't be open to you. You
can come back and get your belongings and then go on to wherever you
think you're going." She stood at the top of the stairs for a long time.
"He'll be back," she muttered. "Let the wind cut into him a little."

                                   *

That night a driving icy rain came up and lying in her bed, awake at
midnight, Mrs. Flood, the landlady, began to weep. She wanted to run out
into the rain and cold and hunt him and find him huddled in some
half-sheltered place and bring him back and say, Mr. Motes, Mr. Motes,
you can stay here forever, or the two of us will go where you're going,
the two of us will go. She had had a hard life, without pain and without
pleasure, and she thought that now that she was coming to the last part
of it, she deserved a friend. If she was going to be blind when she was
dead, who better to guide her than a blind man? Who better to lead the
blind than the blind, who knew what it was like?

As soon as it was daylight, she went out in the rain and searched the
five or six blocks he knew and went from door to door, asking for him,
but no one had seen him. She came back and called the police and
described him and asked for him to be picked up and brought back to her
to pay his rent. She waited all day for them to bring him in the squad
car, or for him to come back of his own accord, but he didn't come. The
rain and wind continued and she thought he was probably drowned in some
alley by now. She paced up and down in her room, walking faster and
faster, thinking of his eyes without any bottom in them and of the
blindness of death.

Two days later, two young policemen cruising in a squad car found him
lying in a drainage ditch near an abandoned construction project. The
driver drew the squad car up to the edge of the ditch and looked into it
for some time. "Ain't we been looking for a blind one?" he asked.

The other consulted a pad. "Blind and got on a blue suit and ain't paid
his rent," he said.

"Yonder he is," the first one said, and pointed into the ditch. The
other moved up closer and looked out of the window too.

"His suit ain't blue," he said.

"Yes it is blue," the first one said. "Quit pushing up so close to me.
Get out and I'll show you it's blue." They got out and walked around the
car and squatted down on the edge of the ditch. They both had on tall
new boots and new policemen's clothes; they both had yellow hair with
sideburns, and they were both fat, but one was much fatter than the
other.

"It might have uster been blue," the fatter one admitted.

"You reckon he's daid?" the first one asked.

"Ast him," the other said.

"No, he ain't daid. He's moving."

"Maybe he's just unconscious," the fatter one said, taking out his new
billy. They watched him for a few seconds. His hand was moving along the
edge of the ditch as if it were hunting something to grip. He asked them
in a hoarse whisper where he was and if it was day or night.

"It's day," the thinner one said, looking at the sky. "We got to take
you back to pay your rent."

"I want to go on where I'm going," the blind man said.

"You got to pay your rent first," the policeman said. "Ever' bit of it!"

The other, perceiving that he was conscious, hit him over the head with
his new billy. "We don't want to have no trouble with him," he said.
"You take his feet."

He died in the squad car but they didn't notice and took him on to the
landlady's. She had them put him on her bed and when she had pushed them
out the door, she locked it behind them and drew up a straight chair and
sat down close to his face where she could talk to him. "Well, Mr.
Motes," she said, "I see you've come home!"

His face was stern and tranquil. "I knew you'd come back," she said.
"And I've been waiting for you. And you needn't to pay any more rent but
have it free here, any way you like, upstairs or down. Just however you
want it and with me to wait on you, or if you want to go on somewhere,
we'll both go."

She had never observed his face more composed and she grabbed his hand
and held it to her heart. It was resistless and dry. The outline of a
skull was plain under his skin and the deep burned eye sockets seemed to
lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared. She leaned closer
and closer to his face, looking deep into them, trying to see how she
had been cheated or what had cheated her, but she couldn't see anything.
She shut her eyes and saw the pin point of light but so far away that
she could not hold it steady in her mind. She felt as if she were
blocked at the entrance of something. She sat staring with her eyes
shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning
of something she couldn't begin, and she saw him moving farther and
farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin
point of light.






[End of Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor]