Wise Blood (6 page)

His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at him, when he got home.
She wore black all the time and her dresses were longer than other women’s. She was
standing there straight, looking at him. He moved behind a tree and got out of her
view, but in a few minutes, he could feel her watching him through the tree. He saw
the lowered place and the casket again and a thin woman in the casket who was too
long for it. Her head stuck up at one end and her knees were raised to make her fit.
She had a cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head. He stood flat against
the tree, waiting. She left the wash-pot and came toward him with a stick. She said,
“What you seen?

“What you seen?” she said.

“What you seen,” she said, using the same tone of voice all the time. She hit him
across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the tree. “Jesus died to redeem
you,” she said.

“I never ast him,” he muttered.

She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed, and he forgot
the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him. In a minute
she threw the stick away from her and went back to the wash-pot, still shut-mouthed.

The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods. He didn’t wear them except
for revivals and in the winter. He took them out of the box and filled the bottoms
of them with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight
and walked in them through the woods for what he knew to be a mile, until he came
to a creek, and then he sat down and took them off and eased his feet in the wet sand.
He thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had fallen he
would have taken it as a sign. After a while he drew his feet out of the sand and
let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again with the rocks still in them and
he walked a half-mile back before he took them off.

CHAPTER
4

He got out of Mrs. Watts’s bed early in the morning before any light came in the room.
When he woke up, her arm was flung across him. He leaned up and lifted it off and
eased it down by her side, but he didn’t look at her. There was only one thought in
his mind: he was going to buy a car. The thought was full grown in his head when he
woke up, and he didn’t think of anything else. He had never thought before of buying
a car; he had never even wanted one before. He had driven one only a little in his
life and he didn’t have any license. He had only fifty dollars but he thought he could
buy a car for that. He got stealthily out the bed, without disturbing Mrs. Watts,
and put his clothes on silently. By six-thirty, he was down town, looking for used-car
lots.

Used-car lots were scattered among the blocks of old buildings that separated the
business section from the railroad yards. He wandered around in a few of them before
they were open. He could tell from the outside of the lot if it would have a fifty-dollar
car in it. When they began to be open for business, he went through them quickly,
paying no attention to anyone who tried to show him the stock. His black hat sat on
his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it
might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.

It was a wet glary day. The sky was like a piece of thin polished silver with a dark
sour-looking sun in one corner of it. By ten o’clock he had canvassed all the better
lots and was nearing the railroad yards. Even here, the lots were full of cars that
cost more than fifty dollars. Finally he came to one between two deserted warehouses.
A sign over the entrance said: S
LADE’S FOR THE
L
ATEST.

There was a gravel road going down the middle of the lot and over to one side near
the front, a tin shack with the word, O
FFICE
, painted on the door. The rest of the lot was full of old cars and broken machinery.
A white boy was sitting on a gasoline can in front of the office. He had the look
of being there to keep people out. He wore a black raincoat and his face was partly
hidden under a leather cap. There was a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his
mouth and the ash on it was about an inch long.

Haze started off toward the back of the lot where he saw a particular car. “Hey!”
the boy yelled. “You don’t just walk in here like that. I’ll show you what I got to
show,” but Haze didn’t pay any attention to him. He went on to ward the back of the
lot where he saw the car. The boy came huffing behind him, cursing. The car he saw
was on the last row of cars. It was a high rat-colored machine with large thin wheels
and bulging headlights. When he got up to it, he saw that one door was tied on with
a rope and that it had an oval window in the back. This was the car he was going to
buy.

“Lemme see Slade,” he said.

“What you want to see him for?” the boy asked in a testy voice. He had a wide mouth
and when he talked he used one side only of it.

“I want to see him about this car,” Haze said.

“I’m him,” the boy said. His face under the cap was like a thin picked eagle’s. He
sat down on the running board of a car across the gravel road and kept on cursing.

Haze walked around the car. Then he looked through the window at the inside of it.
Inside it was a dull greenish dust-color. The back seat was missing but it had a two-by-four
stretched across the seat frame to sit on. There were dark green fringed window shades
on the two side-back windows. He looked through the two front windows and he saw the
boy sitting on the running board of the car across the gravel road. He had one trouser
leg hitched up and he was scratching his ankle that stuck up out of a pulp of yellow
sock. He cursed far down in his throat as if he were trying to get up phlegm. The
two window glasses made him a yellow color and distorted his shape. Haze moved quickly
from the far side of the car and came around in front. “How much is it?” he asked.

“Jesus on the cross,” the boy said, “Christ nailed.”

“How much is it?” Haze growled, paling a little.

“How much do you think it’s worth?” the boy said. “Give us a estimit.”

“It ain’t worth what it would take to cart it off. I wouldn’t have it.”

The boy gave all his attention to his ankle where there was a scab. Haze looked up
and saw a man coming from between two cars over on the boy’s side. As he came closer,
he saw that the man looked exactly like the boy except that he was two heads taller
and he had on a sweat-stained brown felt hat. He was coming up behind the boy, between
a row of cars. When he got just behind him, he stopped and waited a second. Then he
said in a sort of controlled roar, “Get your butt off that running board!”

The boy snarled and disappeared, scrambling between two cars.

The man stood looking at Haze. “What you want?” he asked.

“This car here,” Haze said.

“Seventy-fi’ dollars,” the man said.

On either side of the lot there were two old buildings, reddish with black empty windows,
and behind there was another without any windows. “I’m obliged,” Haze said, and he
started back toward the office.

When he got to the entrance, he glanced back and saw the man about four feet behind
him. “We might argue it some,” he said.

Haze followed him back to where the car was.

“You won’t find a car like that ever’ day,” the man said. He sat down on the running
board that the boy had been sitting on. Haze didn’t see the boy but he was there,
sitting up on the hood of a car two cars over. He was sitting huddled up as if he
were freezing but his face had a sour composed look. “All new tires,” the man said.

“They were new when it was built,” Haze said.

“They was better cars built a few years ago,” the man said. “They don’t make no more
good cars.”

“What you want for it?” Haze asked again.

The man stared off, thinking. After a while he said, “I might could let you have it
for sixty-fi’.”

Haze leaned against the car and started to roll a cigarette but he couldn’t get it
rolled. He kept spilling the tobacco and then the papers.

“Well, what you want to pay for it?” the man asked. “I wouldn’t trade me a Chrysler
for a Essex like that. That car yonder ain’t been built by a bunch of niggers.

“All the niggers are living in Detroit now, putting cars together,” he said, making
conversation. “I was up there a while myself and I seen. I come home.”

“I wouldn’t pay over thirty dollars for it,” Haze said.

“They got one nigger up there,” the man said, “is almost as light as you or me.” He
took off his hat and ran his finger around the sweat band inside it. He had a little
bit of carrot-colored hair.

“We’ll drive it around,” the man said, “or would you like to get under and look up
it?”

“No,” Haze said.

The man gave him a half look. “You pay when you leave,” he said easily. “You don’t
find what you looking for in one there’s others for the same price obliged to have
it.” Two cars over the boy began to curse again. It was like a hacking cough. Haze
turned suddenly and kicked his foot into the front tire. “I done tole you them tires
won’t bust,” the man said.

“How much?” Haze said.

“I might could make it fifty dollar,” the man offered.

Before Haze bought the car, the man put some gas in it and drove him around a few
blocks to prove it would run. The boy sat hunched up in the back on the two-by-four,
cursing. “Something’s wrong with him howcome he curses so much,” the man said. “Just
don’t listen at him.” The car rode with a high growling noise. The man put on the
brakes to show how well they worked and the boy was thrown off the two-by-four at
their heads. “Goddam you,” the man roared, “quit jumping at us thataway. Keep your
butt on the board.” The boy didn’t say anything. He didn’t even curse. Haze looked
back and he was sitting huddled up in the black raincoat with the black leather cap
pulled down almost to his eyes. The only thing different was that the ash had been
knocked off his cigarette.

He bought the car for forty dollars and then he paid the man extra for five gallons
of gasoline. The man had the boy go in the office and bring out a five-gallon can
of gas to fill up the tank with. The boy came cursing and lugging the yellow gas can,
bent over almost double. “Give it here,” Haze said, “I’ll do it myself.” He was in
a terrible hurry to get away in the car. The boy jerked the can away from him and
straightened up. It was only half full but he held it over the tank until five gallons
would have spilled out slowly. All the time he kept saying, “Sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus,
sweet Jesus.”

“Why don’t he shut up?” Haze said suddenly. “What’s he keep talking like that for?”

“I don’t never know what ails him,” the man said and shrugged.

When the car was ready the man and the boy stood by to watch him drive it off. He
didn’t want anybody watching him because he hadn’t driven a car in four or five years.
The man and the boy didn’t say anything while he tried to start it. They only stood
there, looking in at him. “I wanted this car mostly to be a house for me,” he said
to the man. “I ain’t got any place to be.”

“You ain’t took the brake off yet,” the man said.

He took off the brake and the car shot backward because the man had left it in reverse.
In a second he got it going forward and he drove off crookedly, past the man and the
boy still standing there watching. He kept going forward, thinking nothing and sweating.
For a long time he stayed on the street he was on. He had a hard time holding the
car in the road. He went past railroad yards for about a half-mile and then warehouses.
When he tried to slow the car down, it stopped altogether and then he had to start
it again. He went past long blocks of gray houses and then blocks of better, yellow
houses. It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made
a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church. He went past blocks of white houses,
each sitting with an ugly dog face on a square of grass. Finally he went over a viaduct
and found the highway.

He began going very fast.

The highway was ragged with filling stations and trailer camps and roadhouses. After
a while there were stretches where red gulleys dropped off on either side of the road
and behind them there were patches of field buttoned together with 666 posts. The
sky leaked over all of it and then it began to leak into the car. The head of a string
of pigs appeared snout-up over the ditch and he had to screech to a stop and watch
the rear of the last pig disappear shaking into the ditch on the other side. He started
the car again and went on. He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off
piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him. A black
pick-up truck turned off a side road in front of him. On the back of it an iron bed
and a chair and table were tied, and on top of them, a crate of barred-rock chickens.
The truck went very slowly, with a rumbling sound, and in the middle of the road.
Haze started pounding his horn and he had hit it three times before he realized it
didn’t make any sound. The crate was stuffed so full of wet barred-rock chickens that
the ones facing him had their heads outside the bars. The truck didn’t go any faster
and he was forced to drive slowly. The fields stretched sodden on either side until
they hit the scrub pines.

The road turned and went down hill and a high embankment appeared on one side with
pines standing on it, facing a gray boulder that jutted out of the opposite gulley
wall. White letters on the boulder said, WOE TO THE BLASPHEMER AND WHOREMONGER! WILL
HELL SWALLOW YOU UP? The pick-up truck slowed even more as if it were reading the
sign and Haze pounded his empty horn. He beat on it and beat on it but it didn’t make
any sound. The pick-up truck went on, bumping the glum barred-rock chickens over the
edge of the next hill. Haze’s car was stopped and his eyes were turned toward the
two words at the bottom of the sign. They said in smaller letters, “Jesus Saves.”