Wise Blood (19 page)

After he paid his room and board every month, he had a good third of the government
check left but that she could see, he never spent any money. He didn’t use tobacco
or drink whisky; there was nothing for him to do with all that money but lose it,
since there was only himself. She thought of benefits that might accrue to his widow
should he leave one. She had seen money drop out of his pocket and him not bother
to reach down and feel for it. One day when she was cleaning his room, she found four
dollar bills and some change in his trash can. He came in about that time from one
of his walks. “Mr. Motes,” she said, “here’s a dollar bill and some change in this
waste basket. You know where your waste basket is. How did you make that mistake?”

“It was left over,” he said. “I didn’t need it.”

She dropped onto his straight chair. “Do you throw it away every month?” she asked
after a time.

“Only when it’s left over,” he said.

“The poor and needy,” she muttered. “The poor and needy. Don’t you ever think about
the poor and needy? If you don’t want that money somebody else might.”

“You can have it,” he said.

“Mr. Motes,” she said coldly, “I’m not charity yet!” She realized now that he was
a mad man and that he ought to be under the control of a sensible person

The landlady was past her middle years and her plate was too large but she had long
race-horse legs and a nose that had been called Grecian by one boarder. She wore her
hair clustered like grapes on her brow and over each ear and in the middle behind,
but none of these advantages were any use to her in attracting his attention. She
saw that the only way was to be interested in what he was interested in. “Mr. Motes,”
she said one afternoon when they were sitting on the porch, “why don’t you preach
any more? Being blind wouldn’t be a hinderance. People would like to go see a blind
preacher. It would be something different.” She was used to going on without an answer.
“You could get you one of those seeing dogs,” she said, “and he and you could get
up a good crowd. People’ll always go to see a dog.

“For myself,” she continued, “I don’t have that streak. I believe that what’s right
today is wrong tomorrow and that the time to enjoy yourself is now so long as you
let others do the same. I’m as good, Mr. Motes,” she said, “not believing in Jesus
as a many a one that does.”

“You’re better,” he said, leaning forward suddenly. “If you believed in Jesus, you
wouldn’t be so good.”

He had never paid her a compliment before! “Why Mr. Motes,” she said, “I expect you’re
a fine preacher! You certainly ought to start it again. It would give you something
to do. As it is, you don’t have anything to do but walk. Why don’t you start preaching
again?”

“I can’t preach any more,” he muttered.

“Why?”

“I don’t have time,” he said, and got up and walked off the porch as if she had reminded
him of some urgent business. He walked as if his feet hurt him but he had to go on.

Some time later she discovered why he limped. She was cleaning his room and happened
to knock over his extra pair of shoes. She picked them up and looked into them as
if she thought she might find something hidden there. The bottoms of them were lined
with gravel and broken glass and pieces of small stone. She spilled this out and sifted
it through her fingers, looking for a glitter that might mean something valuable,
but she saw that what she had in her hand was trash that anybody could pick up in
the alley. She stood for some time, holding the shoes, and finally she put them back
under the cot. In a few days she examined them again and they were lined with fresh
rocks. Who’s he doing this for? she asked herself. What’s he getting out of doing
it? Every now and then she would have an intimation of something hidden near her but
out of her reach. “Mr. Motes,” she said that day, when he was in her kitchen eating
his dinner, “what do you walk on rocks for?”

“To pay,” he said in a harsh voice.

“Pay for what?”

“It don’t make any difference for what,” he said. “I’m paying.”

“But what have you got to show that you’re paying for?” she persisted.

“Mind your business,” he said rudely. “You can’t see.”

The landlady continued to chew very slowly. “Do you think, Mr. Motes,” she said hoarsely,
“that when you’re dead, you’re blind?”

“I hope so,” he said after a minute.

“Why?” she asked, staring at him.

After a while he said, “If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.”

The landlady stared for a long time, seeing nothing at all.

She began to fasten all her attention on him, to the neglect of other things. She
began to follow him in his walks, meeting him accidentally and accompanying him. He
didn’t seem to know she was there, except occasionally when he would slap at his face
as if her voice bothered him, like the singing of a mosquito. He had a deep wheezing
cough and she began to badger him about his health. “There’s no one,” she would say,
“to look after you but me, Mr. Motes. No one that has your interest at heart but me.
Nobody would care if I didn’t.” She began to make him tasty dishes and carry them
to his room. He would eat what she brought, immediately, with a wry face, and hand
back the plate without thanking her, as if all his attention were directed elsewhere
and this was an interruption he had to suffer. One morning he told her abruptly that
he was going to get his food somewhere else, and named the place, a diner around the
corner, run by a foreigner. “And you’ll rue the day!” she said. “You’ll pick up an
infection. No sane person eats there. A dark and filthy place. Encrusted! It’s you
that can’t see, Mr. Motes.

“Crazy fool,” she muttered when he had walked off. “Wait till winter comes. Where
will you eat when winter comes, when the first wind blows the virus into you?”

She didn’t have to wait long. He caught influenza before winter and for a while he
was too weak to walk out and she had the satisfaction of bringing his meals to his
room. She came earlier than usual one morning and found him asleep, breathing heavily.
The old shirt he wore to sleep in was open down the front and showed three strands
of barbed wire, wrapped around his chest. She retreated backwards to the door and
then she dropped the tray. “Mr. Motes,” she said in a thick voice, “what do you do
these things for? It’s not natural.”

He pulled himself up.

“What’s that wire around you for? It’s not natural,” she repeated.

After a second he began to button the shirt. “It’s natural,” he said.

“Well, it’s not normal. It’s like one of them gory stories, it’s something that people
have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats,” she said.
“There’s no reason for it. People have quit doing it.”

“They ain’t quit doing it as long as I’m doing it,” he said.

“People have quit doing it,” she repeated. “What do you do it for?”

“I’m not clean,” he said.

She stood staring at him, unmindful of the broken dishes at her feet. “I know it,”
she said after a minute, “you got blood on that night shirt and on the bed. You ought
to get you a washwoman…”

“That’s not the kind of clean,” he said.

“There’s only one kind of clean, Mr. Motes,” she muttered. She looked down and observed
the dishes he had made her break and the mess she would have to get up and she left
for the hall closet and returned in a minute with the dust pan and broom. “It’s easier
to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes,” she said in the voice of High Sarcasm. “You must
believe in Jesus or you wouldn’t do these foolish things. You must have been lying
to me when you named your fine church. I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t some
kind of a agent of the pope or got some connection with something funny.”

“I ain’t treatin’ with you,” he said and lay back down, coughing.

“You got nobody to take care of you but me,” she reminded him.

Her first plan had been to marry him and then have him committed to the state institution
for the insane, but gradually her plan had become to marry him and keep him. Watching
his face had become a habit with her; she wanted to penetrate the darkness behind
it and see for herself what was there. She had the sense that she had tarried long
enough and that she must get him now while he was weak, or not at all. He was so weak
from the influenza that he tottered when he walked; winter had already begun and the
wind slashed at the house from every angle, making a sound like sharp knives swirling
in the air.

“Nobody in their right mind would like to be out on a day like this,” she said, putting
her head suddenly into his room in the middle of the morning on one of the coldest
days of the year. “Do you hear that wind, Mr. Motes? It’s fortunate for you that you
have this warm place to be and someone to take care of you.” She made her voice more
than usually soft. “Every blind and sick man is not so fortunate,” she said, “as to
have somebody that cares about him.” She came in and sat down on the straight chair
that was just at the door. She sat on the edge of it, leaning forward with her legs
apart and her hands braced on her knees. “Let me tell you, Mr. Motes,” she said, “few
men are as fortunate as you but I can’t keep climbing these stairs. It wears me out.
I’ve been thinking what we could do about it.”

He had been lying motionless on the bed but he sat up suddenly as if he were listening,
almost as if he had been alarmed by the tone of her voice. “I know you wouldn’t want
to give up your room here,” she said, and waited for the effect of this. He turned
his face toward her; she could tell she had his attention. “I know you like it here
and wouldn’t want to leave and you’re a sick man and need somebody to take care of
you as well as being blind,” she said and found herself breathless and her heart beginning
to flutter. He reached to the foot of the bed and felt for his clothes that were rolled
up there. He began to put them on hurriedly over his night shirt. “I been thinking
how we could arrange it so you would have a home and somebody to take care of you
and I wouldn’t have to climb these stairs, what you dressing for today, Mr. Motes?
You don’t want to go out in this weather.

“I been thinking,” she went on, watching him as he went on with what he was doing,
“and I see there’s only one thing for you and me to do. Get married. I wouldn’t do
it under any ordinary condition but I would do it for a blind man and a sick one.
If we don’t help each other, Mr. Motes, there’s nobody to help us,” she said. “Nobody.
The world is a empty place.”

The suit that had been glare-blue when it was bought was a softer shade now. The panama
hat was wheat-colored. He kept it on the floor by his shoes when he was not wearing
it. He reached for it and put it on and then he began to put on his shoes that were
still lined with rocks.

“Nobody ought to be without a place of their own to be,” she said, “and I’m willing
to give you a home here with me, a place where you can always stay, Mr. Motes, and
never worry yourself about.”

His cane was on the floor near where his shoes had been. He felt for it and then stood
up and began to walk slowly toward her. “I got a place for you in my heart, Mr. Motes,”
she said and felt it shaking like a bird cage; she didn’t know whether he was coming
toward her to embrace her or not. He passed her, expressionless, out the door and
into the hall. “Mr. Motes!” she said, turning sharply in the chair, “I can’t allow
you to stay here under no other circumstances. I can’t climb these stairs. I don’t
want a thing,” she said, “but to help you. You don’t have anybody to look after you
but me. Nobody to care if you live or die but me! No other place to be but mine!”

He was feeling for the first step with his cane.

“Or were you planning to find you another rooming house?” she asked in a voice getting
higher. “Maybe you were planning to go to some other city!”

“That’s not where I’m going,” he said. “There’s no other house nor no other city.”

“There’s nothing, Mr. Motes,” she said, “and time goes forward, it don’t go backward
and unless you take what’s offered you, you’ll find yourself out in the cold pitch
black and just how far do you think you’ll get?”

He felt for each step with his cane before he put his foot on it. When he reached
the bottom, she called down to him. “You needn’t to return to a place you don’t value,
Mr. Motes. The door won’t be open to you. You can come back and get your belongings
and then go on to wherever you think you’re going.” She stood at the top of the stairs
for a long time. “He’ll be back,” she muttered. “Let the wind cut into him a little.”

*   *   *

That night a driving icy rain came up and lying in her bed, awake at midnight, Mrs.
Flood, the landlady, began to weep. She wanted to run out into the rain and cold and
hunt him and find him huddled in some half-sheltered place and bring him back and
say, Mr. Motes, Mr. Motes, you can stay here forever, or the two of us will go where
you’re going, the two of us will go. She had had a hard life, without pain and without
pleasure, and she thought that now that she was coming to the last part of it, she
deserved a friend. If she was going to be blind when she was dead, who better to guide
her than a blind man? Who better to lead the blind than the blind, who knew what it
was like?

As soon as it was daylight, she went out in the rain and searched the five or six
blocks he knew and went from door to door, asking for him, but no one had seen him.
She came back and called the police and described him and asked for him to be picked
up and brought back to her to pay his rent. She waited all day for them to bring him
in the squad car, or for him to come back of his own accord, but he didn’t come. The
rain and wind continued and she thought he was probably drowned in some alley by now.
She paced up and down in her room, walking faster and faster, thinking of his eyes
without any bottom in them and of the blindness of death.