Wise Blood (2 page)

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. Halfway 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: T
HIS SHIFFER-ROBE BELONGS TO
H
AZEL
M
OTES.
D
O 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 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.