When Rayber had first opened the door in the middle of the night and had seen Tarwater’s face—white, drawn by some unfathomable hunger and pride—he had remained for an instant frozen before what might have been a mirror thrust toward him in a nightmare. The face before him was his own, but the eyes were not his own. They were the student’s eyes, singed with guilt. He had left the door hurriedly to get his glasses and his hearing aid.
As he sat that first night by the bed, he had recognized something rigid and recalcitrant about the boy even in repose. He lay with his teeth bared and the hat clenched in his fist like a weapon. Rayber’s conscience smote him that all these years he had left him to his fate, that he had not gone back and saved him. His throat had tightened, his eyes had begun to ache. He had vowed to make it up to him now, to lavish on him everything he would have lavished on his own child if he had had one who would have known the difference.
The next morning while Tarwater was still asleep, he had rushed out and bought him a decent suit, a plaid shirt, socks, and a red leather cap. He wanted him to have new clothes to wake up to, new clothes to indicate a new life.
After four days they were still untouched in the box on a chair in the room. The boy had looked at them as if the suggestion he put them on were equal to asking that he appear naked.
It was apparent from everything he did and said exactly who had brought him up. At every turn an almost uncontrollable fury would rise in Rayber at the brand of independence the old man had wrought—not a constructive independence but one that was irrational, backwoods, and ignorant. After Rayber had rushed back with the clothes, he had gone to the bed and put his hand on the still sleeping boy’s forehead and decided that he had a fever and should not get up. He had prepared a breakfast on a tray and brought it to the room. When he appeared in the door with it, Bishop at his side, Tarwater was sitting up in the bed, in the act of shaking out his hat and putting it on. Rayber had said, “Don’t you want to hang up your hat and stay a while?” and had given him such a smile of welcome and good will as he thought had possibly never been turned on him before.
The boy, with no look of appreciation or even interest, had pulled the hat down farther on his head. His gaze had turned with a peculiar glare of recognition to Bishop. The child had on a black cowboy hat and he was gaping over the top of a trashbasket that he clasped to his stomach. He kept a rock in it. Rayber remembered that Bishop had caused the boy some disturbance the night before and he pushed him back with his free hand so that he could not get in. Then stepping into the room, he closed the door and locked it. Tarwater looked at the closed door darkly as if he continued to see the child through it, still clasping his trashbasket.
Rayber set the tray down across his knees and stood back scrutinizing him. The boy seemed barely aware that he was in the room. “That’s your breakfast,” his uncle said as if he might not be able to identify it. It was a bowl of dry cereal and a glass of milk. “I thought you’d better stay in bed today,” he said. “You don’t look too chipper.” He pulled up a straight chair and sat down. “Now we can have a real talk,” he said, his smile spreading. “It’s high time we got to know each other.”
No expression of approval or pleasure lightened the boy’s face. He glanced at the breakfast but did not pick up the spoon. He began to look around the room. The walls were an insistent pink, the color chosen by Rayber’s wife. He used it now for a store room. There were trunks in the corners with crates piled on top of them. On the mantel, besides medicine bottles and dead electric lightbulbs and some old match boxes, was a picture of her. The boy’s attention paused there and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly as if in some kind of comic recognition. “The welfare woman,” he said.
His uncle reddened. The tone he detected under this was old Tarwater’s exactly. Without warning, irritation mounted in him. The old man might suddenly have obtruded his presence between them. He felt the same familiar fantastic anger, out of all proportion to its cause, that his uncle had always been able to stir in him. With an effort, he forced it out of his way. “That’s my wife,” he said, “but she doesn’t live with us anymore. This is her old room you’re in.”
The boy picked up the spoon. “My great-uncle said she wouldn’t hang around long,” he said and began to eat rapidly as if he had established enough independence by this remark to eat somebody else’s food. It was apparent from his expression that he found the quality of it poor.
Rayber sat and watched him, saying to himself in an effort to calm his irritation: this child hasn’t had a chance, remember he hasn’t had a chance. “God only knows what the old fool has told you and taught you!” he said with a sudden explosive force. “God only knows!”
The boy stopped eating and looked at him sharply. Then after a second he said, “He ain’t had no effect on me,” and returned to his eating.
“He did you a terrible injustice,” Rayber said, wishing to impress this on him as often as he could. “He kept you from having a normal life, from getting a decent education. He filled your head with God knows what rot!”
Tarwater continued to eat. Then with a stoney deliberateness, he looked up and his gaze fastened on the gash in his uncle’s ear. Somewhere in the depths of his eyes a glint appeared. “Shot yer, didn’t he?” he said.
Rayber took a package of cigarets from his shirt pocket and lit one, his motions inordinately slow from the effort he was making to calm himself. He blew the smoke straight into the boy’s face. Then he tilted back in the chair and gave him a long hard look. The cigaret hanging from the corner of his mouth trembled. “Yes, he shot me,” he said.
The glint in the boy’s eyes followed the wires of the hearing aid down to the metal box stuck in his belt. “What you wired for?” he drawled. “Does your head light up?”
Rayber’s jaw snapped and then relaxed. After a moment, after extending his arm stiffly and knocking the ash off his cigaret onto the floor, he replied that his head did not light up. “This is a hearing aid,” he said patiently. “After the old man shot me I began to lose my hearing. I didn’t have a gun when I went to get you back. If I’d stayed he would have killed me and I wouldn’t have done you any good dead.”
The boy continued to study the machine. His uncle’s face might have been only an appendage to it. “You ain’t done me no good alive neither,” he remarked.
“Do you understand me?” Rayber persisted. “I didn’t have a gun. He would have killed me. He was a mad man. The time when I can do you good is beginning now, and I want to help you. I want to make up for all those years.”
For an instant the boy’s eyes left the hearing aid and rested on his uncle’s eyes. “Could have got you a gun and come back terreckly,” he said.
Stricken by the distinct sound of betrayal in his voice, Rayber could not say a word. He looked at him helplessly. The boy returned to his eating.
Finally Rayber said, “Listen.” He took hold of the fist with the spoon in it and held it. “I want you to understand. He was crazy and if he had killed me, you wouldn’t have this place to come to now. I’m no fool. I don’t believe in senseless sacrifice. A dead man is not going to do you any good, don’t you know that? Now I can do something for you. Now I can make up for all the time we’ve lost. I can help correct what he’s done to you, help you to correct it yourself.” He kept hold of the fist all the while it was being drawn insistently back. “This is our problem together,” he said, seeing himself so clearly in the face before him that he might have been beseeching his own image.
With a quick yank, Tarwater managed to free his hand. Then he gave the schoolteacher a long appraising look, tracing the line of his jaw, the two creases on either side of his mouth, the forehead extending into skull until it reached the pie-shaped hairline. He gazed briefly at the pained eyes behind his uncle’s glasses, appearing to abandon a search for something that could not possibly be there. The glint in his eye fell on the metal box half-sticking out of Rayber’s shirt. “Do you think in the box,” h
e asked, “or do you think in your head?”
His uncle had wanted to tear the machine out of his ear and fling it against the wall. “It’s because of you I can’t hear!” he said, glaring at the impassive face. “It’s because once I tried to help you!”
“You never helped me none.”
“I can help you now,” he said.
After a second he sank back in his chair. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said, letting his hands fall in a helpless gesture. “It was my mistake. I should have gone back and killed him or let him kill me. Instead I let something in you be killed.”
The boy put down his milk glass. “Nothing in me has been killed,” he said in a positive voice, and then he added, “And you needn’t to worry. I done your work for you. I tended to him. It was me put him away. I was drunk as a coot and I tended to him.” He said it as if he were recalling the most vivid point in his history.
Rayber heard his own heart, magnified by the hearing aid, suddenly begin to pound like the works of a gigantic machine in his chest. The boy’s delicate defiant face, his glowering eyes still shocked by some violent memory, brought back instantly to him the vision of himself when he was fourteen and had found his way to Powderhead to shout imprecations at the old man.
An insight came to him that he was not to question until the end. He understood that the boy was held in bondage by his great-uncle, that he suffered a terrible false guilt for burning and not burying him, and he saw that he was engaged in a desperate heroic struggle to free himself from the old man’s ghostly grasp. He leaned forward and said in a voice so full of feeling that it was barely balanced, “Listen, listen Frankie,” he said, “you’re not alone any more. You have a friend. You have more than a friend now.” He swallowed. “You have a father.”
The boy turned very white. His eyes were blackened by the shadow of some unspeakable outrage. “I ain’t ast for no father,” he said and the sentence struck like a whip across his uncle’s face. “I ain’t ast for no father,” he repeated. “I’m out of the womb of a whore. I was born in a wreck.” He flung this forth as if he were declaring a royal birth. “And my name ain’t Frankie. I go by Tarwater and…”
“Your mother was not a whore,” the schoolteacher said angrily. “That’s just some rot he’s taught you. She was a good healthy American girl, just beginning to find herself when she was struck down. She was…”
“I ain’t fixing to hang around here,” the boy said, looking about him as if he might throw over the breakfast tray and jump out the window. “I only come to find out a few things and when I find them out, then I’m going.”
“What did you come to find out?” the schoolteacher asked evenly. “I can help you. All I want to do is help you any way I can.”
“I don’t need noner yer help,” the boy said, looking away.
His uncle felt something tightening around him like an invisible strait jacket. “How do you mean to find out if you don’t have help?”
“I’ll wait,” he said, “and see what happens.”
“And suppose,” his uncle asked, “nothing happens?”
An odd smile, like some strange inverted sign of grief, came over the boy’s face. “Then I’ll make it happen,” he said, “like I done before.”
In four days nothing had happened and nothing had been made to happen. They had simply covered—the three of them—the entire city, walking and all night Rayber rewalked the same territory backwards in his sleep. It would not have been so tiring if he had not had Bishop. The child dragged backwards on his hand, always attracted by something they had already passed. Every block or so he would squat down to pick up a stick or a piece of trash and have to be pulled up and along. Whereas Tarwater was always slightly in advance of them, pushing forward on the scent of something. In four days they had been to the art gallery and the movies, they had toured department stores, ridden escalators, visited the supermarkets, inspected the water works, the post office, the railroad yards and the city hall. Rayber had explained how the city was run and detailed the duties of a good citizen. He had talked as much as he had walked, and the boy for all the interest he showed might have been the one who was deaf. Silent, he viewed everything with the same noncommittal eye as if he found nothing here worth holding his attention but must keep moving, must keep searching for whatever it was that appeared just beyond his vision.
Once he had paused at a window where a small red car turned slowly on a revolving platform. Seizing on the display of interest, Rayber had said that perhaps when he was sixteen, he could have a car of his own. It might have been the old man who had replied that he could walk on his two feet for nothing without being beholden. Rayber had never, even when Old Tarwater had lived under his roof, been so conscious of the old man’s presence.
Once the boy had stopped suddenly in front of a tall building and had stood glaring up at it with a peculiar ravaged look of recognition. Puzzled, Rayber said, “You look as if you’ve been here before.”
“I lost my hat there,” he muttered.
“Your hat is on your head,” Rayber said. He could not look at the object without irritation. He wished to God there were some way to get it off him.
“My first hat,” the boy said. “It fell,” and he had rushed on, away from the place as if he could not stand to be near it.
Only one other time had he shown a particular interest. He had stopped with a kind of lurch backwards in front of a large grimey garage-like structure with two yellow and blue painted windows in the front of it, and had stood there, precariously balanced as if he were arresting himself in the middle of a fall. Rayber recognized the place for some kind of pentecostal tabernacle. Over the door was a paper banner bearing the words, UNLESS YE BE BORN AGAIN YE SHALL NOT HAVE EVERLASTING LIFE. Beneath it a poster showed a man and woman and child holding hands. “Hear the Carmodys for Christ!” it said. “Thrill to the Music, Message, and Magic of this team!”
Rayber was well enough aware of the boy’s trouble to understand the sinister pull such a place would have on his mind. “Does this interest you?” he asked drily. “Does it remind you of something in particular?”
Tarwater was very pale. “Horse manure,” he whispered.
Rayber smiled. Then he laughed. “All such people have in life,” he said, “is the conviction they’ll rise again.”
The boy steadied himself, his eyes still on the banner but as if he had reduced it to a small spot a great distance away.
“They won’t rise again?” he said. The statement had the lilt of a question and Rayber realized with an intense thrill of pleasure that his opinion, for the first time, was being called for.
“No,” he said simply, “they won’t rise again.” There was a profound finality in his tone. The grimey structure might have been the carcass of a beast he had just brought down. He put his hand experimentally on the boy’s shoulder. It was suffered to remain there.
In a voice unsteady with the sudden return of enthusiasm he said, “That’s why I want you to learn all you can. I want you to be educated so that you can take your place as an intelligent man in the world. This fall when you start school…”
The shoulder was roughly withdrawn and the boy, throwing him one dark look, removed himself to the farthest edge of the sidewalk.
He wore his isolation like a mantle, wrapped it around himself as if it were a garment signifying the elect. Rayber had intended to keep notes on him and write up his most important observations but each night his energy had been too depleted to permit him to do any work. He had dropped off every night into a restless sleep, afraid that he would wake up and find the boy gone. He felt he had hastened his urge to leave by confronting him with the test. He had intended giving him the standard ones, intelligence and aptitude, and then going on to some he had perfected himself dealing with emotional factors. He had thought that in this way he could ferret to the center of the emotional infection. He had laid a simple aptitude test out on the kitchen table—the printed book and a few newly sharp
ened pencils. “This is a kind of game,” he said. “Sit down and see what you can make of it. I’ll help you begin.”
The expression that came over the boy’s face was very peculiar. His eyelids lowered just slightly; his mouth failed a smile by only a fraction; his look was compounded of fury and superiority. “Play with it yourself,” he said. “I ain’t taking no test,” and he spit the word out as if it were not fit to pass between his lips.
Rayber sized up the situation. Then he said, “Maybe you don’t really know how to read and write. Is that the trouble?”
The boy thrust his head forward. “I’m free,” he hissed. “I’m outside your head. I ain’t in it. I ain’t in it and I ain’t about to be.”
His uncle laughed. “You don’t know what freedom is,” he said, “you don’t…” but the boy turned and strode off.
It was no use. He could no more be reasoned with than a jackal. Nothing gave him pause—except Bishop, and Rayber knew that the reason Bishop gave him pause was because the child reminded him of the old man. Bishop looked like the old man grown backwards to the lowest form of innocence, and Rayber observed that the boy strictly avoided looking him in the eye. Wherever the child happened to be standing or sitting or walking seemed to be for Tarwater a dangerous hole in space that he must keep away from at all costs. Rayber was afraid that Bishop would drive him away with his friendliness. He was always creeping up to touch him and when the boy was aware of his being near, he would draw himself up like a snake ready to strike and hiss, “Git!” and Bishop would scurry off to watch him again from behind the nearest piece of furniture.