Wise Blood

  “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’s 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 dow
n 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 twicet 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, “’Il 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 opp
osite 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.