Wise Blood (10 page)

He didn’t go back to the Hawkses’ door until late in the afternoon, when he thought
they would be eating their supper. It opened almost at once and the child’s head appeared
in the crack. He pushed the door out of her hand and went in without looking at her
directly. Hawks was sitting at the trunk. The remains of his supper were in front
of him but he wasn’t eating. He had barely got the black glasses on in time.

“If Jesus cured blind men, howcome you don’t get Him to cure you?” Haze asked. He
had prepared this sentence in his room.

“He blinded Paul,” Hawks said.

Haze sat down on the edge of one of the cots. He looked around him and then back at
Hawks. He crossed and uncrossed his knees and then he crossed them again. “Where’d
you get them scars?” he asked.

The fake blind man leaned forward and smiled. “You still have a chance to save yourself
if you repent,” he said. “I can’t save you but you can save yourself.”

“That’s what I’ve already done,” Haze said. “Without the repenting. I preach how I
done it every night on the…”

“Look at this,” Hawks said. He took a yellow newspaper clipping from his pocket and
handed it to him, and his mouth twisted out of the smile. “This is how I got the scars,”
he muttered. The child made a sign to him from the door to smile and not look sour.
As he waited for Haze to finish reading, the smile slowly returned.

The headline on the clipping said, E
VANGELIST PROMISES TO BLIND SELF.
The rest of it said that Asa Hawks, an evangelist of the Free Church of Christ, had
promised to blind himself to justify his belief that Christ Jesus had redeemed him.
It said he would do it at a revival on Saturday night at eight o’clock, the fourth
of October. The date on it was more than ten years before. Over the headline was a
picture of Hawks, a scarless, straight-mouthed man of about thirty, with one eye a
little smaller and rounder than the other. The mouth had a look that might have been
either holy or calculating, but there was a wildness in the eyes that suggested terror.

Haze sat staring at the clipping after he had read it. He read it three times. He
took his hat off and put it on again and got up and stood looking around the room
as if he were trying to remember where the door was.

“He did it with lime,” the child said, “and there was hundreds converted. Anybody
that blinded himself for justification ought to be able to save you—or even somebody
of his blood,” she added, inspired.

“Nobody with a good car needs to be justified,” Haze murmured. He scowled at her and
hurried out the door, but as soon as it was shut behind him, he remembered something.
He turned around and opened it and handed her a piece of paper, folded up several
times into a small pellet shape; then he hurried out to his car.

Hawks took the note away from her and opened it up. It said, B
ABE,
I
NEVER SAW ANYBODY THAT LOOKED AS GOOD AS YOU BEFORE IS WHY
I
CAME HERE.
She read it over his arm, coloring pleasantly.

“Now you got the written proof for it, Papa,” she said.

“That bastard got away with my clipping,” Hawks muttered.

“Well you got another clipping, ain’t you?” she asked, with a little smirk.

“Shut your mouth,” he said and flung himself down on the cot. The other clipping was
one that said, E
VANGELIST’S NERVE FAILS.

“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 down 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.”