The Complete Short Stories

  “A man, seventy years of age, to bring a baby out into the backwoods to raise him right! Suppose he had died when you were four years old? Could you have toted mash to the still then and supported yourself? I never heard of no four-year-old running a still.

  “Never did I hear of that,” he continued. “You weren’t anything to him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when the time came, and now that he’s dead, he’s shut of you but you got two hundred pounds of him to carry below the face of the earth. And don’t think he wouldn’t heat up like a coal stove to see you take a drop of liquor,” he added. “He might say it would hurt you but what he would mean was you might get so much you wouldn’t be in no fit condition to bury him. He said he brought you out here to raise you according to principle and that was the principle: that you should be fit when the time came to bury him so he would have a cross to mark where he was at.

  “Well,” he said in a softer tone, when the boy had taken a long swallow from the black jug, “a little won’t interfere. Moderation never hurt no one.”

  A burning arm slid down Tarwater’s throat as if the devil were already reaching inside him to finger his soul. He squinted at the angry sun creeping behind the topmost fringe of the trees.

  “Take it easy,” his friend said. “Do you remember them nigger gospel singers you saw one time, all drunk, all singing, all dancing around that black Ford automobile? Jesus, they wouldn’t have been near so glad they were redeemed if they hadn’t had that liquor in them. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to my Redemption if I was you,” he said. “Some people take everything too hard.”

  Tarwater drank more slowly. He had been drunk only one time before and that time his uncle had beat him with a board for it, saying liquor would dissolve a child’s gut; another of his lies because his gut had not dissolved.

  “It should be clear to you,” his kind friend said, “how all your life you been tricked by that old man. You could have been a city slicker for the last ten years. Instead, you been deprived of any company but his, you been living in a two-story barn in the middle of this earth’s bald patch, following behind a mule and plow since you were seven. And how do you know the education he give you is true to the fact? Maybe he taught you a system of figures nobody else uses? How do you know that two added to two makes four? Four added to four makes eight? Maybe other people don’t use that system. How do you know if there was an Adam or if Jesus eased your situation any when He redeemed you? Or how you know if He actually done it? Nothing but that old man’s word and it ought to be obvious to you by now that he was crazy. And as for Judgment Day,” the stranger said, “every day is Judgment Day.

  “Ain’t you old enough to have learnt that yet for yourself? Don’t everything you do, everything you have ever done, work itself out right or wrong before your eye and usually before the sun has set? Have you ever got by with anything? No you ain’t nor ever thought you would,” he said. “You might as well drink all that liquor since you’ve already drunk so much. Once you pass the moderation mark you’ve passed it, and that gyration you feel working down from the top of your brain,” he said, “that’s the Hand of God laying a blessing on you. He has given you your release. That old man was the stone before your door and the Lord has rolled it away. He ain’t rolled it quite far enough yet, of course. You got to finish up yourself but He’s done the main part. Praise Him.”

  Tarwater had ceased to have any feeling in his legs. He dozed for a while, his head hanging to the side and his mouth open and the liquor trickling slowly down the side of his overalls where the jug had overturned in his lap. Eventually there was just a drip at the neck of the bottle, forming and filling and dropping, silent and measured and sun-colored. The bright, even sky began to fade, coarsening with clouds until every shadow had gone in. He woke with a wrench forward, his eyes focusing and unfocusing on something that looked like burnt rag hanging close to his face.

  Buford said, “This ain’t no way for you to act. Old man don’t deserve this. There’s no rest until the dead is buried.” He was squatting on his heels, one hand gripped around Tarwater’s arm. “I gone yonder to the door and seen him sitting there at the table, not even laid out on a cooling board. He ought to be laid out and have some salt on his bosom if you mean to keep him overnight.”

  The boy’s lids pinched together to hold the image steady and in a second he made out the two small red blistered eyes. “He deserves to lie in a grave that fits him,” Buford said. “He was deep in this life, he was deep in Jesus’ misery.”

  “Nigger,” the child said, working his strange swollen tongue, “take your hand off me.”

  Buford lifted his hand. “He needs to be rested,” he said.

  “He’ll be rested all right when I get through with him,” Tarwater said vaguely. “Go on and lea’ me to my bidnis.”

  “Nobody going to bother you,” Buford said, standing up. He waited a minute, bent, looking down at the limp figure sprawled against the bank. The boy’s head was tilted backwards over a root that jutted out of the clay wall. His mouth hung open, and his hat, turned up in front, cut a straight line across his forehead, just over his half-open eyes. His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them had an ancient look as if the child’s skeleton beneath were as old as the world. “Nobody going to bother you,” the Negro muttered, pushing through the wall of honeysuckle without looking back. “That going to be your trouble.”

  Tarwater closed his eyes again.

  Some night bird complaining close by woke him up. It was not a screeching noise, only an intermittent hump-hump as if the bird had to recall his grievance each time before he repeated it. Clouds were moving convulsively across a black sky and there was a pink unsteady moon that appeared to be jerked up a foot or so and then dropped and jerked up again. This was because, as he observed in an instant, the sky was lowering, coming down fast to smother him. The bird screeched and flew off in time and Tarwater lurched into the middle of the stream bed and crouched on his hands and knees. The moon was reflected like pale fire in the few spots of water in the sand. He sprang at the wall of honeysuckle and began to tear through it, confusing the sweet familiar odor with the weight coming down on him. When he stood up on the other side, the black ground swung slowly and threw him down again. A flare of pink lightning lit the woods and he saw the black shapes of trees pierce out of the ground all around him. The night bird began to hump again from a thicket where he had settled.

  Tarwater got up and started moving in the direction of the clearing, feeling his way from tree to tree, the trunks very cold and dry to his touch. There was distant thunder and a continuous flicker of pale lightning firing one section of woods and then another. Finally he saw the shack, standing gaunt-black and tall in the middle of the clearing, with the pink moon trembling directly over it. His eyes glittered like open pits of light as he moved across the sand, dragging his crushed shadow behind him. He didn’t turn his head to that side of the yard where he had started the grave.

  He stopped at the far back corner of the house and squatted down on the ground and looked underneath at the litter there, chicken crates and barrels and old rags and boxes. He had four matches in his pocket. He crawled under and began to set small fires, building one from another and working his way out at the front porch, leaving the fire behind him eating greedily at the dry tinder and the floorboards of the house. He crossed the front side of the clearing and went under the barbed-wire fence and through the rutted field without looking back until he reached the edge of the opposite woods. Then he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the pink moon had dropped through the roof of the shack and was bursting and he began to run, forced on through the woods by two bulging silver eyes that grew in immense astonishment in the center of the fire behind him.

  Toward midnight he came out on the highway and caught a ride with a salesman who was a manufacturer’s representati
ve selling copper flues throughout the southeast and who gave the silent boy what he said was the best advice he could give any young fellow setting out to find himself a place in the world. While they sped forward on the black untwisting highway watched on either side by a dark wall of trees, the salesman said that it had been his personal experience that you couldn’t sell a copper flue to a man you didn’t love. He was a thin fellow with a narrow gorge-like face that appeared to have been worn down to the sharpest possible depressions. He wore a broad-brimmed stiff gray hat of the kind used by businessmen who would like to look like cowboys. He said love was the only policy that worked ninety-five percent of the time. He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man’s wife’s health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customer’s families in and what was wrong with them. A man’s wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man’s hardware store until she died; then he scratched her name out and wrote dead there “And I say thank God when they’re dead,” the salesman said, “that’s one less to remember.”

  “You don’t owe the dead anything,” Tarwater said in a loud voice, speaking for almost the first time since he had got in the car.

  “Nor they you,” said the stranger. “And that’s the way it ought to be in this world—nobody owing nobody nothing.”

  “Look,” Tarwater said suddenly, sitting forward, his face close to the windshield, “we’re headed in the wrong direction. We’re going back where we came from. There’s the fire again. There’s the fire we left.” Ahead of them in the sky there was a faint glow, steady and not made by lightning. “That’s the same fire we come from!” the boy said in a high wild voice.

  “Boy, you must be nuts,” the salesman said. “That’s the city we’re coming to. That’s the glow from the city lights. I reckon this is your first trip anywhere.”

  You’re turned around,” the child said. “It’s the same fire.”

  The stranger twisted his rutted face sharply. “I’ve never been turned around in my life,” he said. “And I didn’t come from any fire. I come from Mobile. And I know where I’m going. What’s the matter with you?”

  Tarwater sat staring at the glow in front of him. “I was asleep,” he muttered. “I’m just now waking up.”

  “Well you should have been listening to me,” the salesman said. “I been telling you things you ought to know.”

  Greenleaf

  Mrs. May’s bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened—like some patient god come down to woo her—for a stir inside the room. The window was dark and the sound of her breathing too light to be carried outside. Clouds crossing the moon blackened him and in the dark he began to tear at the hedge. Presently they passed and he appeared again in the same spot, chewing steadily, with a hedge-wreath that he had ripped loose for himself caught in the tips of his horns. When the moon drifted into retirement again, there was nothing to mark his place but the sound of steady chewing. Then abruptly a pink glow filled the window. Bars of light slid across him as the venetian blind was slit. He took a step backward and lowered his head as if to show the wreath across his horns.

  For almost a minute there was no sound from inside, then as he raised his crowned head again, a woman’s voice, guttural as if addressed to a dog, said, “Get away from here, sir!” and in a second muttered, “Some nigger’s scrub bull.”

  The animal pawed the ground and Mrs. May, standing bent forward behind the blind, closed it quickly lest the light make him charge into the shrubbery. For a second she waited, still bent forward, her nightgown hanging loosely from her narrow shoulders. Green rubber curlers sprouted neatly over her forehead and her face beneath them was smooth as concrete with an egg-white paste that drew the wrinkles out while she slept.

  She had been conscious in her sleep of a steady rhythmic chewing as if something were eating one wall of the house. She had been aware that whatever it was had been eating as long as she had had the place and had eaten everything from the beginning of her fence line up to the house and now was eating the house and calmly with the same steady rhythm would continue through the house, eating her and the boys, and then on, eating everything but the Greenleafs, on and on, eating everything until nothing was left but the Greenleafs on a little island all their own in the middle of what had been her place. When the munching reached her elbow, she jumped up and found herself, fully awake, standing in the middle of her room. She identified the sound at once: a cow was tearing at the shrubbery under her window. Mr. Greenleaf had left the lane gate open and she didn’t doubt that the entire herd was on her lawn. She turned on the dim pink table lamp and then went to the window and slit the blind. The bull, gaunt and long-legged, was standing about four feet from her, chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor.

  For fifteen years, she thought as she squinted at him fiercely, she had been having shiftless people’s hogs root up her oats, their mules wallow on her lawn, their scrub bulls breed her cows. If this one was not put up now, he would be over the fence, ruining her herd before morning—and Mr. Greenleaf was soundly sleeping a half mile down the road in the tenant house. There was no way to get him unless she dressed and got in her car and rode down there and woke him up. He would come but his expression, his whole figure, his every pause, would say: “Hit looks to me like one or both of them boys would not make their maw ride out in the middle of the night thisaway. If hit was my boys, they would have got thet bull up theirself.”

  The bull lowered his head and shook it and the wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown. She had closed the blind then; in a few seconds she heard him move off heavily.

  Mr. Greenleaf would say, “If hit was my boys they would never have allowed their maw to go after hired help in the middle of the night. They would have did it theirself.”

  Weighing it, she decided not to bother Mr. Greenleaf. She returned to bed thinking that if the Greenleaf boys had risen in the world it was because she had given their father employment when no one else would have him. She had had Mr. Greenleaf fifteen years but no one else would have had him five minutes. Just the way he approached an object was enough to tell anybody with eyes what kind of a worker he was. He walked with a high-shouldered creep and he never appeared to come directly forward. He walked on the perimeter of some invisible circle and if you wanted to look him in the face, you had to move and get in front of him. She had not fired him because she had always doubted she could do better. He was too shiftless to go out and look for another job; he didn’t have the initiative to steal, and after she had told him three or four times to do a thing, he did it; but he never told her about a sick cow until it was too late to call the veterinarian and if her barn had caught on fire, he would have called his wife to see the flames before he began to put them out. And of the wife, she didn’t even like to think. Beside the wife, Mr. Greenleaf was an aristocrat.

  “If it had been my boys,” he would have said, “they would have cut off their right arm before they would have allowed their maw to. . . .”

  “If your boys had any pride, Mr. Greenleaf,” she would like to say to him some day, “there are many things that they would not allow their mother to do.”

  The next morning as soon as Mr. Greenleaf came to the back door, she told him there was a stray bull on the place and that she wanted him penned up at once.

  “Done already been here three days,” he said, addressing his right foot which he held forward, turned slightly as if he were trying to look at the sole. He was standing at the bottom of the three back steps while she leaned out the kitchen door, a small woman with pale nearsighted eyes and gray hair that rose on top like the crest of some disturbed bird.

  “Three days!” she said in the restrained screech that h
ad become habitual with her.

  Mr. Greenleaf, looking into the distance over the near pasture, removed a package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and let one fall into his hand. He put the package back and stood for a while looking at the cigarette. “I put him in the bull pen but he torn out of there,” he said presently. “I didn’t see him none after that.” He bent over the cigarette and lit it and then turned his head briefly in her direction. The upper part of his face sloped gradually into the lower which was long and narrow, shaped like a rough chalice. He had deep-set fox-colored eyes shadowed under a gray felt hat that he wore slanted forward following the line of his nose. His build was insignificant.

  “Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, “get that bull up this morning before you do anything else. You know he’ll ruin the breeding schedule. Get him up and keep him up and the next time there’s a stray bull on this place, tell me at once. Do you understand?”

  “Where you want him put at?” Mr. Greenleaf asked.

  “I don’t care where you put him,” she said. “You are supposed to have some sense. Put him where he can’t get out. Whose bull is he?”

  For a moment Mr. Greenleaf seemed to hesitate between silence and speech. He studied the air to the left of him. “He must be somebody’s bull,” he said after a while.