Sheppard leaned forward and said in a low furious voice, “Put that Bible up, Rufus, and eat your dinner.”
Johnson continued searching for the passage.
“Put that Bible up!” Sheppard shouted.
The boy stopped and looked up. His expression was startled but pleased.
“That book is something for you to hide behind,” Sheppard said. “It’s for cowards, people who are afraid to stand on their own feet and figure things out for themselves.”
Johnson’s eyes snapped. He backed his chair a little way from the table. “Satan has you in his power,” he said. “Not only me. You too.”
Sheppard reached across the table to grab the book but Johnson snatched it and put it in his lap.
Sheppard laughed. “You don’t believe in that book and you know you don’t believe in it!”
“I believe it!” Johnson said. “You don’t know what I believe and what I don’t.”
Sheppard shook his head. “You don’t believe it. You’re too intelligent.”
“I ain’t too intelligent,” the boy muttered. “You don’t know nothing about me. Even if I didn’t believe it, it would still be true.”
“You don’t believe it!” Sheppard said. His face was a taunt.
“I believe it!” Johnson said breathlessly. “I’ll show you I believe it!” He opened the book in his lap and tore out a page of it and thrust it into his mouth. He fixed his eyes on Sheppard. His jaws worked furiously and the paper crackled as he chewed it.
“Stop this,” Sheppard said in a dry, burnt-out voice. “Stop it.”
The boy raised the Bible and tore out a page with his teeth and began grinding it in his mouth, his eyes burning.
Sheppard reached across the table and knocked the book out of his hand. “Leave the table,” he said coldly.
Johnson swallowed what was in his mouth. His eyes widened as if a vision of splendor were opening up before him. “I’ve eaten it!” he breathed. “I’ve eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth!”
“Leave this table,” Sheppard said. His hands were clenched beside his plate.
“I’ve eaten it!” the boy cried. Wonder transformed his face. “I’ve eaten it like Ezekiel and I don’t want none of your food after it nor no more ever.”
“Go then,” Sheppard said softly. “Go. Go.”
The boy rose and picked up the Bible and started toward the hall with it. At the door he paused, a small black figure on the threshold of some dark apocalypse. “The devil has you in his power,” he said in a jubilant voice and disappeared.
* * *
After supper Sheppard sat in the living room alone. Johnson had left the house but he could not believe that the boy had simply gone. The first feeling of release had passed. He felt dull and cold as at the onset of an illness and dread had settled in him like a fog. Just to leave would be too anticlimactic an end for Johnson’s taste; he would return and try to prove something. He might come back a week later and set fire to the place. Nothing seemed too outrageous now.
He picked up the paper and tried to read. In a moment he threw it down and got up and went into the hall and listened. He might be hiding in the attic. He went to the attic door and opened it.
The lantern was lit, casting a dim light on the stairs. He didn’t hear anything. “Norton,” he called, “are you up there?” There was no answer. He mounted the narrow stairs to see.
Amid the strange vine-like shadows cast by the lantern, Norton sat with his eye to the telescope. “Norton,” Sheppard said, “do you know where Rufus went?”
The child’s back was to him. He was sitting hunched, intent, his large ears directly above his shoulders. Suddenly he waved his hand and crouched closer to the telescope as if he could not get near enough to what he saw.
“Norton!” Sheppard said in a loud voice.
The child didn’t move.
“Norton!” Sheppard shouted.
Norton started. He turned around. There was an unnatural brightness about his eyes. After a moment he seemed to see that it was Sheppard. “I’ve found her!” he said breathlessly.
“Found who?” Sheppard said.
“Mamma!”
Sheppard steadied himself in the door way. The jungle of shadows around the child thickened.
“Come and look!” he cried. He wiped his sweaty face on the tail of his plaid shirt and then put his eye back to the telescope. His back became fixed in a rigid intensity. All at once he waved again.
“Norton,” Sheppard said, “you don’t see anything in the telescope but star clusters. Now you’ve had enough of that for one night. You’d better go to bed. Do you know where Rufus is?”
“She’s there!” he cried, not turning around from the telescope. “She waved at me!”
“I want you in bed in fifteen minutes,” Sheppard said. After a moment he said, “Do you hear me, Norton?”
The child began to wave frantically.
“I mean what I say,” Sheppard said. “I’m going to call in fifteen minutes and see if you’re in bed.”
He went down the steps again and returned to the parlor. He went to the front door and cast a cursory glance out. The sky was crowded with the stars he had been fool enough to think Johnson could reach. Somewhere in the small wood behind the house, a bull frog sounded a low hollow note. He went back to his chair and sat a few minutes. He decided to go to bed. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and leaned forward and heard, like the first shrill note of a disaster warning, the siren of a police car, moving slowly into the neighborhood and nearer until it subsided with a moan outside the house.
He felt a cold weight on his shoulders as if an icy cloak had been thrown about him. He went to the door and opened it.
Two policemen were coming up the walk with a dark snarling Johnson between them, handcuffed to each. A reporter jogged alongside and another policeman waited in the patrol car.
“Here’s your boy,” the dourest of the policemen said. “Didn’t I tell you we’d get him?”
Johnson jerked his arm down savagely. “I was waitin for you!” he said. “You wouldn’t have got me if I hadn’t of wanted to get caught. It was my idea.” He was addressing the policemen but leering at Sheppard.
Sheppard looked at him coldly.
“Why did you want to get caught?” the reporter asked, running around to get beside Johnson. “Why did you deliberately want to get caught?”
The question and the sight of Sheppard seemed to throw the boy into a fury. “To show up that big tin Jesus!” he hissed and kicked his leg out at Sheppard. “He thinks he’s God. I’d rather be in the reformatory than in his house, I’d rather be in the pen! The Devil has him in his power. He don’t know his left hand from his right, he don’t have as much sense as his crazy kid!” He paused and then swept on to his fantastic conclusion. “He made suggestions to me!”
Sheppard’s face blanched. He caught hold of the door facing.
“Suggestions?” the reporter said eagerly, “what kind of suggestions?”
“Immor’l suggestions!” Johnson said. “What kind of suggestions do you think? But I ain’t having none of it, I’m a Christian, I’m…”
Sheppard’s face was tight with pain. “He knows that’s not true,” he said in a shaken voice. “He knows he’s lying. I did everything I knew how for him. I did more for him than I did for my own child. I hoped to save him and I failed, but it was an honorable failure. I have nothing to reproach myself with. I made no suggestions to him.”
“Do you remember the suggestions?” the reporter asked. “Can you tell us exactly what he said?”
“He’s a dirty atheist,” Johnson said. “He said there wasn’t no hell.”
“Well, they seen each other now,” one of the policemen said with a knowing sigh. “Let’s us go.”
“Wait,” Sheppard said. He came down one step and fixed his eyes on Johnson’s eyes in a last desperate effort to save himself. “Tell the truth, Rufus,” he said. “You don’t
want to perpetrate this lie. You’re not evil, you’re mortally confused. You don’t have to make up for that foot, you don’t have to…”
Johnson hurled himself forward. “Listen at him!” he screamed. “I lie and steal because I’m good at it! My foot don’t have a thing to do with it! The lame shall enter first! The halt’ll be gathered together. When I get ready to be saved, Jesus’ll save me, not that lying stinking atheist, not that…”
“That’ll be enough out of you,” the policeman said and yanked him back. “We just wanted you to see we got him,” he said to Sheppard, and the two of them turned around and dragged Johnson away, half turned and screaming back at Sheppard.
“The lame’ll carry off the prey!” he screeched, but his voice was muffled inside the car. The reporter scrambled into the front seat with the driver and slammed the door and the siren wailed into the darkness.
Sheppard remained there, bent slightly like a man who has been shot but continues to stand. After a minute he turned and went back in the house and sat down in the chair he had left. He closed his eyes on a picture of Johnson in a circle of reporters at the police station, elaborating his lies. “I have nothing to reproach myself with,” he murmured. His every action had been selfless, his one aim had been to save Johnson for some decent kind of service, he had not spared himself, he had sacrificed his reputation, he had done more for Johnson than he had done for his own child. Foulness hung about him like an odor in the air, so close that it seemed to come from his own breath. “I have nothing to reproach myself with,” he repeated. His voice sounded dry and harsh. “I did more for him than I did for my own child.” He was swept with a sudden panic. He heard the boy’s jubilant voice. Satan has you in his power.
“I have nothing to reproach myself with,” he began again. “I did more for him than I did for my own child.” He heard his voice as if it were the voice of his accuser. He repeated the sentence silently.
Slowly his face drained of color. It became almost grey beneath the white halo of his hair. The sentence echoed in his mind, each syllable like a dull blow. His mouth twisted and he closed his eyes against the revelation. Norton’s face rose before him, empty, forlorn, his left eye listing almost imperceptibly toward the outer rim as if it could not bear a full view of grief. His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself. He saw the clear-eyed Devil, the sounder of hearts, leering at him from the eyes of Johnson. His image of himself shrivelled until everything was black before him. He sat there paralyzed, aghast.
He saw Norton at the telescope, all back and ears, saw his arm shoot up and wave frantically. A rush of agonizing love for the child rushed over him like a transfusion of life. The little boy’s face appeared to him transformed; the image of his salvation; all light. He groaned with joy. He would make everything up to him. He would never let him suffer again. He would be mother and father. He jumped up and ran to his room, to kiss him, to tell him that he loved him, that he would never fail him again.
The light was on in Norton’s room but the bed was empty. He turned and dashed up the attic stairs and at the top reeled back like a man on the edge of a pit. The tripod had fallen and the telescope lay on the floor. A few feet over it, the child hung in the jungle of shadows, just below the beam from which he had launched his flight into space.
Revelation
The doctor’s waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence. She stood looming at the head of the magazine table set in the center of it, a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took in all the patients as she sized up the seating situation. There was one vacant chair and a place on the sofa occupied by a blond child in a dirty blue romper who should have been told to move over and make room for the lady. He was five or six, but Mrs. Turpin saw at once that no one was going to tell him to move over. He was slumped down in the seat, his arms idle at his sides and his eyes idle in his head; his nose ran unchecked.
Mrs. Turpin put a firm hand on Claud’s shoulder and said in a voice that included anyone who wanted to listen, “Claud, you sit in that chair there,” and gave him a push down into the vacant one. Claud was florid and bald and sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin, but he sat down as if he were accustomed to doing what she told him to.
Mrs. Turpin remained standing. The only man in the room besides Claud was a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread out on each knee, whose eyes were closed as if he were asleep or dead or pretending to be so as not to get up and offer her his seat. Her gaze settled agreeably on a well-dressed grey-haired lady whose eyes met hers and whose expression said: if that child belonged to me, he would have some manners and move over—there’s plenty of room there for you and him too.
Claud looked up with a sigh and made as if to rise.
“Sit down,” Mrs. Turpin said. “You know you’re not supposed to stand on that leg. He has an ulcer on his leg,” she explained.
Claud lifted his foot onto the magazine table and rolled his trouser leg up to reveal a purple swelling on a plump marble-white calf.
“My!” the pleasant lady said. “How did you do that?”
“A cow kicked him,” Mrs. Turpin said.
“Goodness!” said the lady.
Claud rolled his trouser leg down.
“Maybe the little boy would move over,” the lady suggested, but the child did not stir.
“Somebody will be leaving in a minute,” Mrs. Turpin said. She could not understand why a doctor—with as much money as they made charging five dollars a day to just stick their head in the hospital door and look at you—couldn’t afford a decent-sized waiting room. This one was hardly bigger than a garage. The table was cluttered with limp-looking magazines and at one end of it there was a big green glass ash tray full of cigaret butts and cotton wads with little blood spots on them. If she had had anything to do with the running of the place, that would have been emptied every so often. There were no chairs against the wall at the head of the room. It had a rectangular-shaped panel in it that permitted a view of the office where the nurse came and went and the secretary listened to the radio. A plastic fern in a gold pot sat in the opening and trailed its fronds down almost to the floor. The radio was softly playing gospel music.
Just then the inner door opened and a nurse with the highest stack of yellow hair Mrs. Turpin had ever seen put her face in the crack and called for the next patient. The woman sitting beside Claud grasped the two arms of her chair and hoisted herself up; she pulled her dress free from her legs and lumbered through the door where the nurse had disappeared.
Mrs. Turpin eased into the vacant chair, which held her tight as a corset. “I wish I could reduce,” she said, and rolled her eyes and gave a comic sigh.
“Oh, you aren’t fat,” the stylish lady said.
“Ooooo I am too,” Mrs. Turpin said. “Claud he eats all he wants to and never weighs over one hundred and seventy-five pounds, but me I just look at something good to eat and I gain some weight,” and her stomach and shoulders shook with laughter. “You can eat all you want to, can’t you, Claud?” she asked, turning to him.
Claud only grinned.
“Well, as long as you have such a good disposition,” the stylish lady said, “I don’t think it makes a bit of difference what size you are. You just can’t beat a good disposition.”
Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling into a thick blue book which Mrs. Turpin saw was entitled Human Development. The girl raised her head and directed her scowl at Mrs. Turpin as if she did not like her looks. She appeared annoyed that anyone should speak while she tried to read. The poor girl’s face was blue with acne and Mrs. Turpin thought how pitiful it was to have a face like that at that age. She gave the girl a frie
ndly smile but the girl only scowled the harder. Mrs. Turpin herself was fat but she had always had good skin, and, though she was forty-seven years old, there was not a wrinkle in her face except around her eyes from laughing too much.
Next to the ugly girl was the child, still in exactly the same position, and next to him was a thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress. She and Claud had three sacks of chicken feed in their pump house that was in the same print. She had seen from the first that the child belonged with the old woman. She could tell by the way they sat—kind of vacant and white-trashy, as if they would sit there until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get up. And at right angles but next to the well-dressed pleasant lady was a lank-faced woman who was certainly the child’s mother. She had on a yellow sweat shirt and wine-colored slacks, both gritty-looking, and the rims of her lips were stained with snuff. Her dirty yellow hair was tied behind with a little piece of red paper ribbon. Worse than niggers any day, Mrs. Turpin thought.
The gospel hymn playing was, “When I looked up and He looked down,” and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line mentally, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.”
Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed people’s feet. The well-dressed lady had on red and grey suede shoes to match her dress. Mrs. Turpin had on her good black patent leather pumps. The ugly girl had on Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks. The old woman had on tennis shoes and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded through them—exactly what you would have expected her to have on.
Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please, Jesus, please,” she would have said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available,” and he would have said, “No, you have to go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind.” She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.