Wise Blood

Another trickle of people came out of the Odeon and two stopped to look at him. “Who is that that says it’s your conscience?” he cried, looking around with a constricted face as if he could smell the particular person who thought that. “Your conscience is a trick,” he said, “it don’t exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you.”

He was preaching with such concentration that he didn’t notice a high rat-colored car that had been driven around the block three times already, while the two men in it hunted a place to park. He didn’t see it when it pulled in two cars over from him in a space that another car had just pulled out of, and he didn’t see Hoover Shoats and a man in a glare-blue suit and white hat get out of it, but after a few seconds, his head turned that way and he saw the man in the glare-blue suit and white hat up on the nose of it. He was so struck with how gaunt and thin he looked in the illusion that he stopped preaching. He had never pictured himself that way before. The man he saw was hollow-chested and carried his neck thrust forward and his arms down by his side; he stood there as if he were waiting for some signal he was afraid he might not catch.

Hoover Shoats was walking about on the sidewalk, striking a few chords on his guitar. “Friends/* he called, “I want to innerduce you to the True Prophet here and I want you all to listen to his words because I think they’re going to make you happy like they’ve made mel” If Haze had noticed Hoover he might have been impressed by how happy he looked, but his attention was fixed on the man on the nose of the car. He slid down from his own car and moved up closer, never taking his eyes from the bleak figure. Hoover Shoats raised his hand with two fingers pointed and the man suddenly cried out in a high nasal singsong voice. “The unredeemed are redeeming theirselves and the new jesus is at hand! Watch for this miracle! Help yourself to salvation in the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ! M He called it over again in exactly the same tone of voice, but faster. Then he began to cough. He had a loud consumptive cough that started somewhere deep in him and finished with a long wheeze. He expectorated a white fluid at the end of it.

Haze was standing next to a fat woman who after a minute turned her head and stared at him and then turned it again and stared at the True Prophet. Finally she touched his elbow with hers and grinned at him. “Him and you twins?” she asked.

“If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you,” Haze answered.

“Huh? Who?” she said.

He turned away and she stared at him as he got back in his car and drove off. Then she touched the elbow of a man on the other side of her. “He’s nuts,” she said. “I never seen no twins that hunted each other down.”

When he got back to his room, Sabbath Hawks was in his bed. She was pushed over into one corner of it, sitting with one arm drawn around her knees and one hand holding onto the sheet as if she meant to hang on by it. Her face was sullen and apprehensive. Haze sat down on the bed but he barely glanced at her. “I don’t care if you hit me with the table,” she said. “I’m not going. There’s no place for me to go. He’s run off on me and it was you run him off. I was watching last night and I seen you come in and hold that match to his face. I thought anybody would have seen what he was before that without having to strike no match. He’s just a crook. He ain’t even a big crook, just a little one, and when he gets tired of that, he begs on the street”

Haze leaned down and began untying his shoes. They were old army shoes that he had painted black to get the government off. He untied them and eased his feet out and sat there looking down, while she watched him cautiously.

“Are you going to hit me or not?” she asked. “If you are, go ahead and do it right now because I’m not going. I ain’t got any place to go.” He didn’t look as if he were going to hit anything; he looked as if he were going to sit there until he died. “Listen,” she said, with a quick change of tone, “from the minute I set eyes on you I said to myself, that’s what I got to have, just give me some of himt I said look at those pee-can eyes and go crazy, girl! That innocent look don’t hide a thing, he’s just pure filthy right down to the guts, like me. The only difference is I like being that way and he don’t. Yes sir!” she said. “I like being that way, and I can teach you how to like it. Don’t you want to learn how to like it?”

He turned his head slightly and just over his shoulder he saw a pinched homely little face with bright green eyes and a grin. “Yeah,” he said with no change in his stony expression, “I want to.” He stood up and took off his coat and his trousers and his drawers and put them on the straight chair. Then he turned off the light and sat down on the cot again and pulled off his socks. His feet were big and white and damp to the floor and he sat there, looking at the two white shapes they made, “Come on! Make haste,” she said, knocking his back with her knee.

He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off and wiped his face with it and dropped it on the floor. Then he slid his legs under the cover by her and sat there as if he were waiting to remember one more thing.

She was breathing very quickly. “Take off your hat, king of the beasts,” she said gruffly and her hand came up behind his head and snatched the hat off and sent it flying across the room in the dark.

CHAPTER 11

The next morning toward noon a person in a long black raincoat, with a lightish hat pulled down low on his face and the brim of it turned down to meet the turned-up collar of the raincoat, was moving rapidly along certain back streets, close to the walls of the buildings. He was carrying something about the size of a baby, wrapped up in newspapers, and he carried a dark umbrella too, as the sky was an unpredictable surly gray like the back of an old goat. He had on a pair of dark glasses and a black beard which a keen observer would have said was not a natural growth but was pinned onto his hat on either side with safety pins. As he walked along, the umbrella kept slipping from under his arm and getting tangled in his feet, as if it meant to keep him from going anywhere.

He had not gone half a block before large putty-colored drops began to splatter on the pavement and there was an ugly growl in the sky behind him. He began to run, clutching the bundle in one arm and the umbrella in the other.

In a second, the storm overtook him and he ducked between two show-windows into the blue and white tiled entrance of a drug store. He lowered his dark glasses a little. The pale eyes that looked over the rims belonged to Enoch Emery. Enoch was on his way to Hazel Motes’s room.

He had never been to Hazel Motes’s place before but the instinct that was guiding him was very sure of itself. What was in the bundle was what he had shown Hazel at the museum. He had stolen it the day before.

He had darkened his face and hands with brown shoe polish so that if he were seen in the act, he would be taken for a colored person; then he had sneaked into the museum while the guard was asleep and had broken the glass case with a wrench he’d borrowed from his landlady; then, shaking and sweating, he had lifted the shriveled man out and thrust him in a paper sack, and had crept out again past the guard, who was still asleep. He realized as soon as he got out of the museum that since no one had seen him to think he was a colored boy, he would be suspected immediately and would have to disguise himself. That was why he had on the black beard and dark glasses.

When he’d got back to his room, he had taken the new jesus out of the sack and, hardly daring to look at him, had laid him in the gilted cabinet; then he had sat down on the edge of his bed to wait. He was waiting for something to happen, he didn’t know what. He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in his life but apart from that, he didn’t have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.

He sat there for about five more.

Then he realized that he had to make the first move. He got up and tiptoed to the cabinet and squatted down at the door of it; in a second he opened it a crack and looked in. After a while, very slowly, he broadened the crack and inserted his head into the tabernacle.

Some time passed.

From directly behind him, only the soles of his shoes and the seat of his trousers were visible. The room was absolutely silent; there was no sound even from the street; the Universe might have been shut off; not a flea jumped. Then without any warning, a loud liquid noise burst from the cabinet and there was the thump of bone cracked once against a piece of wood. Enoch staggered backward, clutching his head and his face. He sat on the floor for a few minutes with a shocked expression on his whole figure. At the first instant, he had thought it was the shriveled man who had sneezed, but after a second, he perceived the condition of his own nose. He wiped it off with his sleeve and then he sat there on the floor for some time longer. His expression had showed that a deep unpleasant knowledge was breaking on him slowly. After a while he had kicked the ark door shut in the new jesus’ face, and then he had got up and begun to eat a candy bar very rapidly. He had eaten it as if he had something against it.

The next morning he had not got up until ten o’clock-it was his day off—and he had not set out until nearly noon to look for Hazel Motes. He remembered the address Sabbath Hawks had given him and that was where his instinct was leading him. He was very sullen and disgruntled at having to spend his day off in such a way as this, and in bad weather, but he wanted to get rid of the new jesus so that if the police had to catch anybody for the robbery, they could catch Hazel Motes instead of him. He couldn’t understand at all why he had let himself risk his skin for a dead shriveled-up part-nigger dwarf that had never done anything but get himself embalmed and then lain stinking in a museum the rest of his life. It was far beyond his understanding. He was very sullen. So far as he was now concerned, one jesus was as bad as another.

He had borrowed his landlady’s umbrella and he discovered as he stood in the entrance of the drug store, trying to open it, that it was at least as old as she was. When he finally got it hoisted, he pushed his dark glasses back on his eyes and re-entered the downpour.

The umbrella was one his landlady had stopped using fifteen years before (which was the only reason she had lent it to him) and as soon as the rain touched the top of it, it came down with a shriek and stabbed him in the back of the neck. He ran a few feet with it over his head and then backed into another store entrance and removed it. Then to get it up again, he had to place the tip of it on the ground and ram it open with his foot. He ran out again, holding his hand up near the spokes to keep them open and this allowed the handle, which was carved to represent the head of a fox terrier, to jab him every few seconds in the stomach. He proceeded for another quarter of a block this way before the back half of the silk stood up off the spokes and allowed the storm to sweep down his collar. Then he ducked under the marquee of a movie house. It was Saturday and there were a lot of children standing more or less in a line in front of the ticket box.

Enoch was not very fond of children but children always seemed to like to look at him. The line turned and twenty or thirty eyes began to observe him with a steady interest. The umbrella had assumed an ugly position, half up and half down, and the half that was up was about to come down and spill more water under his collar. When this happened the children laughed and jumped up and down. Enoch glared at them and turned his back and lowered his dark glasses. He found himself facing a life-size four-color picture of a gorilla. Over the gorilla’s head, written in red letters was, “GONGA! Giant Jungle Monarch and a Great Starl Here in Person!! 1” At the level of the gorilla’s knee, there was more that said, “Gonga will appear in person in front of this theater at 12 a.m. TODAY! A free pass to the first ten brave enough to step up and shake his handl”

Enoch was usually thinking of something else at the moment that Fate began drawing back her leg to kick him. When he was four years old, his father had brought him home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and green letters that said, A Nutty Surprise! When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth. His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger. He stood there and read the poster twice through carefully. To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand of Providence. He suddenly regained all his reverence for the new Jesus. He saw that he was going to be rewarded after all and have the supreme moment he had expected.

He turned around and asked the nearest child what time it was. The child said it was twelve-ten and that Gonga was already ten minutes late. Another child said that maybe the rain had delayed him. Another said, no not the rain, his director was taking a plane from Hollywood. Enoch gritted his teeth. The first child said that if he wanted to shake the star’s hand, he would have to get in line like the rest of them and wait his turn. Enoch got in line. A child asked him how old he was. Another observed that he had funny-looking teeth. He ignored all this as best he could and began to straighten out the umbrella.

In a few minutes a black truck turned around the corner and came slowly up the street in the heavy rain. Enoch pushed the umbrella under his arm and began to squint through his dark glasses. As the truck approached, a phonograph inside it began to play “Tarara Boom Di Aye/’ but the music was almost drowned out by the rain. There was a large illustration of a blonde on the outside of the truck, advertising some picture other than the gorilla’s.

The children held their line carefully as the truck stopped in front of the movie house. The back door of it was constructed like a paddy wagon, with a grate, but the ape was not at it. Two men in raincoats got out of the cab part, cursing, and ran around to the back and opened the door. One of them stuck his head in and said, “Okay, make it snappy, willy a?” The other jerked his thumb at the children and said, “Get back willya, willya get back?”

A voice on the record inside the truck said, “Here’s Gonga, folks, Roaring Gonga and a Great Starl Give Gonga a big hand, folks!” The voice was barely a mumble in the rain.

The man who was waiting by the door of the truck stuck his head in again. “Okay willya get out?” he said.

There was a faint thump somewhere inside the van. After a second a dark furry arm emerged just enough for the rain to touch it and then drew back inside.

“Goddam,” the man who was under the marquee said; he took off his raincoat and threw it to the man by the door, who threw it into the wagon. After two or three minutes more, the gorilla appeared at the door, with the raincoat buttoned up to his chin and the collar turned up. There was an iron chain hanging from around his neck; the man grabbed it and pulled him down and the two of them bounded under the marquee together. A motherly-looking woman was in the glass ticket box, getting the passes ready for the first ten children brave enough to step up and shake hands.

The gorilla ignored the children entirely and followed the man over to the other side of the entrance where there was a small platform raised about a foot off the ground. He stepped up on it and turned facing the children and began to growl. His growls were not so much loud as poisonous; they appeared to issue from a black heart. Enoch was terrified and if he had not been surrounded by the children, he would have run away.

“Who’ll step up first?” the man said. “Come on come on, who’ll step up first? A free pass to the first kid stepping up.”

There was no movement from the group of children. The man glared at them. “What’s the matter with you kids?” he barked. “You yellow? He won’t hurt you as long as I got him by this chain.” He tightened his grip on the chain and jangled it at them to show he was holding it securely.

After a minute a little girl separated herself from the group. She had long wood-shaving curls and a fierce triangular face. She moved up to within four feet of the star.

“Okay okay,” the man said, rattling the chain, “make it snappy.”

The ape reached out and gave her hand a quick shake. By this time there was another little girl ready and then two boys. The line re-formed and began to move up.

The gorilla kept his hand extended and turned his head away with a bored look at the rain. Enoch had got over his fear and was trying frantically to think of an obscene remark that would be suitable to insult him with. Usually he didn’t have any trouble with this kind of composition but nothing came to him now. His brain, both parts, was completely empty. He couldn’t think even of the insulting phrases he used every day.

There were only two children in front of him by now. The first one shook hands and stepped aside. Enoch’s heart was beating violently. The child in front of him finished and stepped aside and left him facing the ape, who took his hand with an automatic motion.

It was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he had come to the city. It was warm and soft.

For a second he only stood there, clasping it. Then he began to stammer. “My name is Enoch Emery/’ he mumbled. “I attended the Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy. I work at the city zoo. I seen two of your pictures. I’m only eighteen year old but I already work for the city. My daddy made me com…” and his voice cracked.

The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes: an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the celluloid pair. “You go to hell/’ a surly voice inside the ape-suit said, low but distinctly, and the hand was jerked away.

Enoch’s humiliation was so sharp and painful that he turned around three times before he realized which direction he wanted to go in. Then he ran off into the rain as fast as he could.

By the time he reached Sabbath Hawks’s house, he was soaked through and so was his bundle. He held it in a fierce grip but all he wanted was to get rid of it and never see it again. Haze’s landlady was out on the porch, looking distrustfully into the storm. He found out from her where Haze’s room was and went up to it. The door was ajar and he stuck his head in the crack. Haze was lying on his cot, with a washrag over his eyes; the exposed part of his face was ashen and set in a grimace, as if he were in some permanent pain. Sabbath Hawks was sitting at the table by the window, studying herself in a pocket mirror. Enoch scratched on the wall and she looked up. She put the mirror down and tiptoed out into the hall and shut the door behind her.

“My man is sick today and sleeping,” she said, “because he didn’t sleep none last night. What you want?”

“This is for him, it ain’t for you,” Enoch said, handing her the wet bundle. “A friend of his give it to me to give to him. I don’t know what’s in it.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she said. “You needn’t to worry none.”

Enoch had an urgent need to insult somebody immediately; it was the only thing that could give his feelings even a temporary relief. “I never known he would have nothing to do with you,” he remarked, giving her one of his special looks.

“He couldn’t leave off following me,” she said. “Sometimes it’s thataway with them. You don’t know what’s in this package?”

“Lay-overs to catch meddlers,” he said. “You just give it to him and he’ll know what it is and you can tell him I’m glad to get shut of it.” He started down the stairs and halfway he turned and gave her another special look. “I see why he has to put theter washrag over his eyes,” he said.

“You keep your beeswax in your ears,” she said. “Nobody asked you.” When she heard the front door slam behind him, she turned the bundle over and began to examine it. There was no telling from the outside what was in it; it was too hard to be clothes and too soft to be a machine. She tore a hole in the paper at one end and saw what looked like five dried peas in a row but the hall was too dark for her to see clearly what they were. She decided to take the package to the bathroom, where there was a good light, and open it up before she gave it to Haze. If he was so sick as he said he was, he wouldn’t want to be bothered with any bundle.

Early that morning he had claimed to have a terrible pain in his chest. He had begun to cough during the night—a hard hollow cough that sounded as if he were making it up as he went along. She was certain he was only trying to drive her off by letting her think he had a catching disease.

He’s not really sick, she said to herself going down the hall, he just ain’t used to me yet. She went in and sat down on the edge of a large green claw-footed tub and ripped the string off the package. “But hell get used to me,” she muttered. She pulled off the wet paper and let it fall on the floor; then she sat with a stunned look, staring at what was in her lap.

Two days out of the glass case had not improved the new jesus* condition. One side of his face had been partly mashed in and on the other side, his eyelid had split and a pale dust was seeping out of it. For a while her face had an empty look, as if she didn’t know what she thought about him or didn’t think anything. She might have sat there for ten minutes, without a thought, held by whatever it was that was familiar about him. She had never known anyone who looked like him before, but there was something in him of everyone she had ever known, as if they had all been rolled into one person and killed and shrunk and dried.

She held him up and began to examine him and after a minute her hands grew accustomed to the feel of his skin. Some of his hair had come undone and she brushed it back where it belonged, holding him in the crook of her arm and looking down into his squinched face. His mouth had been knocked a little to one side so that there was just a trace of a grin covering his terrified look. She began to rock him a little in her arm and a slight reflection of the same grin appeared on her own face. “Well I declare/’ she murmured, “you’re right cute, ain’t you?”

His head fitted exactly into the hollow of her shoulder. “Who’s your momma and daddy?” she asked.

An answer came into her mind at once and she let out a short little bark and sat grinning, with a pleased expression in her eyes. “Well, let’s go give him a jolt,” she said after a while.

Haze had already been jolted awake when the front door slammed behind Enoch Emery. He had sat up and seeing she was not in the room, he had jumped up and begun to put on his clothes. He had one thought in mind and it had come to him, like his decision to buy a car, out of his sleep and without any indication of it beforehand: he was going to move immediately to some other city and preach the Church Without Christ where they had never heard of it. He would get another room there and another woman and make a new start with nothing on his mind. The entire possibility of this came from the advantage of having a car—of having something that moved fast, in privacy, to the place you wanted to be. He looked out the window at the Essex. It sat high and square in the pouring rain. He didn’t notice the rain, only the car; if asked he would not have been able to say that it was raining. He was charged with energy and he left the window and finished putting on his clothes. Earlier that morning, when he had waked up for the first time, he had felt as if he were about to be caught by a complete consumption in his chest; it had seemed to be growing hollow all night and yawning underneath him, and he had kept hearing his coughs as if they came from a distance. After a while he had been sucked down into a strengthless sleep, but he had waked up with this plan, and with the energy to carry it out right away. He snatched his duffel bag from under the table and began plunging his extra belongings into it. He didn’t have much and a quarter of what he had was already in. His hand managed the packing so that it never touched the Bible that had sat like a rock in the bottom of the bag for the last few years, but as he rooted out a place for his second shoes, his fingers clutched around a small oblong object and he pulled it out. It was the case with his mother’s glasses in it. He had forgotten that he had a pair of glasses.

He put them on and the wall that he was facing moved up closer and wavered. There was a small white-framed mirror hung on the back of the door and he made his way to it and looked at himself. His blurred face was dark with excitement and the lines in it were deep and crooked. The little silver-rimmed glasses gave him a look of deflected sharpness, as if they were hiding some dishonest plan that would show in his naked eyes. His fingers began to snap nervously and he forgot what he had been going to do. He saw his mother’s face in his, looking at the face in the mirror. He moved back quickly and raised his hand to take off the glasses but the door opened and two more faces floated into his line of vision; one of them said, “Call me Momma now/’

The smaller dark one, just under the other, only squinted as if it were trying to identify an old friend who was going to kill it.

Haze stood motionless with one hand still on the bow of the glasses and the other arrested in the air at the level of his chest; his head was thrust forward as if he had to use his whole face to see with. He was about four feet from them but they seemed just under his eyes.

“Ask your daddy yonder where he was running off to-sick as he is?” Sabbath said. “Ask him isn’t he going to take you and me with him?”

The hand that had been arrested in the air moved forward and plucked at the squinting face but without touching it; it reached again, slowly, and plucked at nothing and then it lunged and snatched the shriveled body and threw it against the walL The head popped and the trash inside sprayed out in a little cloud of dust.

“You’ve broken him!” Sabbath shouted, “and he was mine!”

Haze snatched the skin off the floor. He opened the outside door where the landlady thought there had once been a fireescape, and flung out what he had in his hand. The rain blew in his face and he jumped back and stood, with a cautious look, as if he were bracing himself for a blow.

“You didn’t have to throw him out,” she yelled. “I might have fixed him!”

He moved up closer and hung out the door, staring into the gray blur around him. The rain fell on his hat with loud splatters as if it were falling on tin.

“I knew when I first seen you you were mean and evil,” a furious voice behind him said. “I seen you wouldn’t let nobody have nothing. I seen you were mean enough to slam a baby against a wall. I seen you wouldn’t never have no fun or let anybody else because you didn’t want nothing but Jesus!”

He turned and raised his arm in a vicious gesture, almost losing his balance in the door. Drops of rain water were splattered over the front of the glasses and on his red face and here and there they hung sparkling from the brim of his hat. “I don’t want nothing but the truth!” he shouted, “and what you see is the truth and I’ve seen it!”

“Preacher talk,” she said. “Where were you going to run off to?”

“I’ve seen the only truth there is!” he shouted.

“Where were you going to run off to?”

“To some other city,” he said in a loud hoarse voice, “to preach the truth. The Church Without Christ! And I got a car to get there in, I got…” but he was stopped by a cough. It was not much of a cough—it sounded like a little yell for help at the bottom of a canyon—but the color and the expression drained out of his face until it was as straight and blank as the rain falling down behind him.

“And when were you going?” she asked.

“After I get some more sleep,” he said, and pulled off the glasses and threw them out the door.

“You ain’t going to get none,” she said.

CHAPTER 12

In spite of himself, Enoch couldn’t get over the expectation that the new jesus was going to do something for him in return for his services. This was the virtue of Hope, which was made up, in Enoch, of two parts suspicion and one part lust. It operated on him all the rest of the day after he left Sabbath Hawks. He had only a vague idea how he wanted to be rewarded, but he was not a boy without ambition: he wanted to become something. He wanted to better his condition until it was the best. He wanted to be THE young man of the future, like the ones in the insurance ads. He wanted, some day, to see a line of people waiting to shake his hand.

All afternoon, he fidgeted and fooled in his room, biting his nails and shredding what was left of the silk off the landlady’s umbrella. Finally he denuded it entirely and broke off the spokes. What was left was a black stick with a sharp steel point at one end and a dog’s head at the other. It might have been an instrument for some specialized kind of torture that had gone out of fashion. Enoch walked up and down his room with it under his arm and realized that it would distinguish him on the sidewalk.

About seven o’clock in the evening, he put on his coat and took the stick and headed for a little restaurant two blocks away. He had the sense that he was setting off to get some honor, but he was very nervous, as if he were afraid he might have to snatch it instead of receive it.

He never set out for anything without eating first. The restaurant was called the Paris Diner; it was a tunnel about six feet wide, located between a shoe shine parlor and a dry-cleaning establishment. Enoch slid in and climbed up on the far stool at the counter and said he would have a bowl of split-pea soup and a chocolate malted milkshake.

The waitress was a tall woman with a big yellow dental plate and the same color hair done up in a black hairnet. One hand never left her hip; she filled orders with the other one. Although Enoch came in every night, she had never learned to like him.

Instead of filling his order, she began to fry bacon; there was only one other customer in the place and he had finished his meal and was reading a newspaper; there was no one to eat the bacon but her. Enoch reached over the counter and prodded her hip with his stick. “Listenhere,” he said, “I got to go. I’m in a hurry.”

“Go then,” she said. Her jaw began to work and she stared into the skillet with a fixed attention.

“Lemme just have a piece of theter cake yonder,” he said, pointing to a half of pink and yellow cake on a round glass stand. “I think I got something to do. I got to be going. Set it up there next to him,” he said, indicating the customer reading the newspaper. He slid over the stools and began reading the outside sheet of the man’s paper.

The man lowered the paper and looked at him. Enoch smiled. The man raised the paper again. “Could I borrow some part of your paper that you ain’t studying?” Enoch asked. The man lowered it again and stared at him; he had muddy unflinching eyes. He leafed deliberately through the paper and shook out the sheet with the comic strips and handed it to Enoch. It was Enoch’s favorite part. He read it every evening like an office. While he ate the cake that the waitress had torpedoed down the counter at him, he read and felt himself surge with kindness and courage and strength.

When he finished one side, he turned the sheet over and began to scan the advertisements for movies, that filled the other side. His eye went over three columns without stopping; then it came to a box that advertised Gonga, Giant Jungle Monarch, and listed the theaters he would visit on his tour and the hours he would be at each one. In thirty minutes he would arrive at the Victory on 57th Street and that would be his last appearance in the city.

If anyone had watched Enoch read this, he would have seen a certain transformation in his countenance. It still shone with the inspiration he had absorbed from the comic strips, but something else had come over it: a look of awakening.

The waitress happened to turn around to see if he hadn’t gone. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Did you swallow a seed?”

“1 know what I want/’ Enoch murmured, “I know what I want too,” she said with a dark look.

Enoch felt for his stick and laid his change on the counter. “I got to be going.”

“Don’t let me keep you,” she said.

“You may not see me again,” he said, “—the way I am.”

“Any way I don’t see you will be all right with me,” she said.

Enoch left. It was a pleasant damp evening. The puddles on the sidewalk shone and the store windows were steamy and bright with junk. He disappeared down a side street and made his way rapidly along the darker passages of the city, pausing only once or twice at the end of an alley to dart a glance in each direction before he ran on. The Victory was a small theater, suited to the needs of the family, in one of the closer subdivisions; he passed through a succession of lighted areas and then on through more alleys and back streets until he came to the business section that surrounded it. Then he slowed up. He saw it about a block away, glittering in its darker setting. He didn’t cross the street to the side it was on but kept on the far side, moving forward with his squint fixed on the glary spot. He stopped when he was directly across from it and hid himself in a narrow stair cavity that divided a building.

The truck that carried Gonga was parked across the street and the star was standing under the marquee, shaking hands with an elderly woman. She moved aside and a gentleman in a polo shirt stepped up and shook hands vigorously, like a sportsman. He was followed by a boy of about three who wore a tall Western hat that nearly covered his face; he had to be pushed ahead by the line. Enoch watched for some time, his face working with envy. The small boy was followed by a lady in shorts, she by an old man who tried to draw extra attention to himself by dancing up instead of walking in a dignified way. Enoch suddenly darted across the street and slipped noiselessly into the open back door of the truck.

The handshaking went on until the feature picture was ready to begin. Then the star got back in the van and the people filed into the theater. The driver and the man who was master of ceremonies climbed in the cab part and the truck rumbled off. It crossed the city rapidly and continued on the highway, going very fast.

There came from the van certain thumping noises, not those of the normal gorilla, but they were drowned out by the drone of the motor and the steady sound of wheels against the road. The night was pale and quiet, with nothing to stir it but an occasional complaint from a hoot owl and the distant muted jarring of a freight train. The truck sped on until it slowed for a crossing, and as the van rattled over the tracks, a figure slipped from the door and almost fell, and then limped hurriedly off toward the woods.

Once in the darkness of a pine thicket, he laid down a pointed stick he had been clutching and something bulky and loose that he had been carrying under his arm, and began to undress. He folded each garment neatly after he had taken it off and then stacked it on top of the last thing he had removed. When all his clothes were in the pile, he took up the stick and began making a hole in the ground with it.

The darkness of the pine grove was broken by paler moonlit spots that moved over him now and again and showed him to be Enoch. His natural appearance was marred by a gash that ran from the corner of his lip to his collarbone and by a lump under his eye that gave him a dulled insensitive look. Nothing could have been more deceptive for he was burning with the in tensest kind of happiness.

He dug rapidly until he had made a trench about a foot long and a foot deep. Then he placed the stack of clothes in it and stood aside to rest a second. Burying his clothes was not a symbol to him of burying his former self; he only knew he wouldn’t need them any more. As soon as he got his breath, he pushed the displaced dirt over the hole and stamped it down with his foot. He discovered while he did this that he still had his shoes on, and when he finished, he removed them and threw them from him. Then he picked up the loose bulky object and shook it vigorously.

In the uncertain light, one of his lean white legs could be seen to disappear and then the other, one arm and then the other: a black heavier shaggier figure replaced his. For an instant, it had two heads, one light and one dark, but after a second, it pulled the dark back head over the other and corrected this. It busied itself with certain hidden fastenings and what appeared to be minor adjustments of its hide.

For a time after this, it stood very still and didn’t do anything. Then it began to growl and beat its chest; it jumped up and down and flung its arms and thrust its head forward. The growls were thin and uncertain at first but they grew louder after a second. They became low and poisonous, louder again, low and poisonous again; they stopped altogether. The figure extended its hand, clutched nothing, and shook its arm vigorously; it withdrew the arm, extended it again, clutched nothing, and shook. It repeated this four or five times. Then it picked up the pointed stick and placed it at a cocky angle under its arm and left the woods for the highway. No gorilla in existence, whether in the jungles of Africa or California, or in New York City in the finest apartment in the world, was happier at that moment than this one, whose god had finally rewarded it.

A man and woman sitting close together on a rock just off the highway were looking across an open stretch of valley at a view of the city in the distance and they didn’t see the shaggy figure approaching. The smokestacks and square tops of buildings made a black uneven wall against the lighter sky and here and there a steeple cut a sharp wedge out of a cloud. The young man turned his neck just in time to see the gorilla standing a few feet away, hideous and black, with its hand extended. He eased his arm from around the woman and disappeared silently into the woods. She, as soon as she turned her eyes, fled screaming down the highway. The gorilla stood as though surprised and presently its arm fell to its side. It sat down on the rock where they had been sitting and stared over the valley at the uneven skyline of the city.

CHAPTER 13

On his second night out, working with his hired Prophet and the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ, Hoover Shoats made fifteen dollars and thirty-five cents clear. The Prophet got three dollars an evening for his services and the use of his car. His name was Solace Lay field; he had consumption and a wife and six children and being a Prophet was as much work as he wanted to do. It never occurred to him that it might be a dangerous job. The second night out, he failed to observe a high rat-colored car parked about a half-block away and a white face inside it, watching him with the idnd of intensity that means something is going to happen no matter what is done to keep it from happening.

The face watched him for almost an hour while he performed on the nose of his car every time Hoover Shoats raised his hand with two fingers pointed. When the last showing of the movie was over and there were no more people to attract, Hoover paid him and the two of them got in his car and drove off. They drove about ten blocks to where Hoover lived; the car stopped and Hoover jumped out, calling, “See you tomorrow night, friend”; then he went inside a dark doorway and Solace Layfield drove on. A half-block behind him the other rat-colored car was following steadily. The driver was Hazel Motes.

Both cars increased their speed and in a few minutes they were heading rapidly toward the outskirts of town. The first car cut off onto a lonesome road where the trees were hung over with moss and the only light came like stiff antennae from the two cars. Haze gradually shortened the distance between them and then, grinding his motor suddenly, he shot ahead and rammed the back end of the other car. Both cars came to a stop.

Haze backed the Essex a little way down the road, while the other Prophet got out of his car and stood squinting in the glare from Haze’s lights. After a second, he came up to the window of the Essex and looked in. There was no sound but from crickets and tree frogs. “What you want?” he said in a nervous voice. Haze didn’t answer, he only looked at him, and in a second the man’s jaw slackened and he seemed to perceive the resemblance in their clothes and possibly in their faces. “What you want?” he said in a higher voice. “I ain’t done nothing to you.”

Haze ground the motor of the Essex again and shot forward. This time he rammed the other car at such an angle that it rolled to the side of the road and over into the ditch.

The man got up off the ground where he had been thrown and ran back to the window of the Essex. He stood about four feet away, looking in.

“What you keep a thing like that on the road for?” Haze said.

“It ain’t nothing wrong with that car,” the man said. “Howcome you knockt it in the ditch?”

“Take off that hat,” Haze said.

“Listenere,” the man said, beginning to cough, “what you want? Quit just looking at me. Say what you want.”

“You ain’t true,” Haze said. “What do you get up on top of a car and say you don’t believe in what you do believe in for?”

“Whatsit to you?” the man wheezed. “Whatsit to you what I do?”

“What do you do it for?” Haze said. “That’s what I asked you.”

“A man has to look out for hisself,” the other Prophet said.

“You ain’t true,” Haze said. “You believe in Jesus.”

“Whatsit to you?” the man said. “What you knockt my car off the road for?”

“Take off that hat and that suit,” Haze said.

“Listenere,” the man said, “I ain’t trying to mock you. He bought me thisyer suit. I thrown my othern away.”

Haze reached out and brushed the man’s white hat off. “And take off that suit,” he said.

The man began to sidle off, out into the middle of the road.

“Take off that suit/’ Haze shouted and started the car forward after him. Solace began to lope down the road, taking off his coat as he went. “Take it all off,” Haze yelled, with his face close to the windshield.

The Prophet began to run in earnest. He tore off his shirt and unbuckled his belt and ran out of his trousers. He began grabbing for his feet as if he would take off his shoes too, but before he could get at them, the Essex knocked him flat and ran over him. Haze drove about twenty feet and stopped the car and then began to back it. He backed it over the body and then stopped and got out. The Essex stood half over the other Prophet as if it were pleased to guard what it had finally brought down. The man didn’t look so much like Haze, lying on the ground on his face without his hat or suit on. A lot of blood was coming out of him and forming a puddle around his head. He was motionless all but for one finger that moved up and down in front of his face as if he were marking time with it. Haze poked his toe in his side and he wheezed for a second and then was quiet. “Two things I can’t stand,” Haze said, “—a man that ain’t true and one that mocks what is. You shouldn’t ever have tampered with me if you didn’t want what you got.”

The man was trying to say something but he was only wheezing. Haze squatted down by his face to listen. “Give my mother a lot of trouble,” he said through a kind of bubbling in his throat. “Never giver no rest. Stole theter car. Never told the truth to my daddy or give Henry what, never give him…”

“You shut up,” Haze said, leaning his head closer to hear the confession.

“Told where his still was and got five dollars for it,” the man gasped.

“You shut up now,” Haze said.

“Jesus…” the man said.

“Shut up like I told you to now,” Haze said.

“Jesus hep me,” the man wheezed.

Haze gave him a hard slap on the back and he was quiet. He leaned down to hear if he was going to say anything else but he wasn’t breathing any more. Haze turned around and examined the front of the Essex to see if there had been any damage done to it. The bumper had a few splurts of blood on it but that was all. Before he turned around and drove back to town, he wiped them off with a rag.

Early the next morning he got out of the back of the car and drove to a filling station to get the Essex filled up and checked for his trip. He hadn’t gone back to his room but had spent the night parked in an alley, not sleeping but thinking about the life he was going to begin, preaching the Church Without Christ in the new city.

At the filling station a sleepy-looking white boy came out to wait on him and he said he wanted the tank filled up, the oil and water checked, and the tires tested for air, that he was going on a long trip. The boy asked him where he was going and he told him to another city. The boy asked him if he was going that far in this car here and he said yes he was. He tapped the boy on the front of his shirt. He said nobody with a good car needed to worry about anything, and he asked the boy if he understood that. The boy said yes he did, that that was his opinion too. Haze introduced himself and said that he was a preacher for the Church Without Christ and that he preached every night on the nose of this very car here. He explained that he was going to another city to preach. The boy filled up the gas tank and checked the water and oil and tested the tires, and while he was working, Haze followed him around, telling him what it was right to believe. He said it was not right to believe anything you couldn’t see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth. He said he had only a few days ago believed in blasphemy as the way to salvation, but that you couldn’t even believe in that because then you were believing in something to blaspheme. As for the Jesus who was reported to have been born at Bethlehem and crucified on Calvary for man’s sins, Haze said, He was too foul a notion for a sane person to carry in his head, and he picked up the boy’s water bucket and bammed it on the concrete pavement to emphasize what he was saying. He began to curse and blaspheme Jesus in a quiet intense way but with such conviction that the boy paused from his work to listen. When he had finished checking the Essexť he said that there was a leak in the gas tank and two in the radiator and that the rear tire would probably last twenty miles if he went slow.

“Listen,” Haze said, “this car is just beginning its life. A lightening bolt couldn’t stop it!”

“It ain’t any use to put water in it/* the boy said, “because it won’t hold it/’

“You put it in just the same/’ Haze said, and he stood there and watched while the boy put it in. Then he got a road map from him and drove off, leaving little bead-chains of water and oil and gas on the road.

He drove very fast out onto the highway, but once he had gone a few miles, he had the sense that he was not gaining ground. Shacks and filling stations and road camps and 666 signs passed him, and deserted barns with CCC snuff ads peeling across them, even a sign that saidť “Jesus Died for YOU/’ which he saw and deliberately did not read. He had the sense that the road was really slipping back under him. He had known all along that there was no more country but he didn’t know that there was not another city.

He had not gone five miles on the highway before he heard a siren behind him. He looked around and saw a black patrol car coming up. It drove alongside him and the patrolman in it motioned for him to pull over to the edge of the road. The patrolman had a red pleasant face and eyes the color of clear fresh ice.

“I wasn’t speeding,” Haze said.

“No,” the patrolman agreed, “you wasn’t.”

“I was on the right side of the road.”

“Yes you was, that’s right,” the cop said.

“What you want with me?”

“I just don’t like your face,” the patrolman said. “Where’s your license?”

“I don’t like your face either,” Haze said, “and I don’t have a license.”

“Well,” the patrolman said in a kindly voice, “I don’t reckon you need one.”

“Well I ain’t got one if I do,” Haze said.

“Listen,” the patrolman said, taking another tone, “would you mind driving your car up to the top of the next hill? I want you to see the view from up there, put-tiest view you ever did see.”

Haze shrugged but he started the car up. He didn’t mind fighting the patrolman if that was what he wanted. He drove to the top of the hill, with the patrol car following close behind him. “Now you turn it facing the embankment,” the patrolman called. “You’ll be able to see better thataway.” Haze turned it facing the embankment. “Now maybe you better had get out,” the cop said. “I think you could see better if you was out.”

Haze got out and glanced at the view. The embankment dropped down for about thirty feet, sheer washed-out red clay, into a partly burnt pasture where there was one scrub cow lying near a puddle. Over in the middle distance there was a one-room shack with a buzzard standing hunch-shouldered on the roof.

The patrolman got behind the Essex and pushed it over the embankment and the cow stumbled up and galloped across the field and into the woods; the buzzard flapped off to a tree at the edge of the clearing. The car landed on its top, with the three wheels that stayed on, spinning. The motor bounced out and rolled some distance away and various odd pieces scattered this way and that.

“Them that don’t have a car, don’t need a license,” the patrolman said, dusting his hands on his pants.

Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space. His knees bent under him and he sat down on the edge of the embankment with his feet hanging over.

The patrolman stood staring at him. “Could I give you a lift to where you was going?*’ he asked.

After a minute he came a little closer and said, “Where was you going?”

He leaned on down with his hands on his knees and said in an anxious voice, “Was you going anywheres?”

“No,” Haze said.

The patrolman squatted down and put his hand on Haze’s shoulder. “You hadn’t planned to go anywheres?” he asked anxiously.

Haze shook his head. His face didn’t change and he didn’t turn it toward the patrolman. It seemed to be concentrated on space.

The patrolman got up and went back to his car and stood at the door of it, staring at the back of Haze’s hat and shoulder. Then he said, “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” and got in and drove off.

After a while Haze got up and started walking back to town. It took him three hours to get inside the city again. He stopped at a supply store and bought a tin bucket and a sack of quicklime and then he went on to where he lived, carrying these. When he reached the house, he stopped outside on the sidewalk and opened the sack of lime and poured the bucket half full of it. Then he went to a water spigot by the front steps and filled up the rest of the bucket with water and started up the steps. His landlady was sitting on the porch, rocking a cat. “What you going to do with that, Mr. Motes?” she asked.

“Blind myself,” he said and went on in the house.

The landlady sat there for a while longer. She was not a woman who felt more violence in one word than in another; she took every word at its face value but all the faces were the same. Still, instead of blinding herself, if she had felt that bad, she would have killed herself and she wondered why anybody wouldn’t do that. She would simply have put her head in an oven or maybe have given herself too many painless sleeping pills and that would have been that. Perhaps Mr. Motes was only being ugly, for what possible reason could a person have for wanting to destroy their sight? A woman like her, who was so clear-sighted, could never stand to be blind. If she had to be blind she would rather be dead. It occurred to her suddenly that when she was dead she would be blind too. She stared in front of her intensely, facing this for the first time. She recalled the phrase, “eternal death/* that preachers used, but she cleared it out of her mind immediately, with no more change of expression than the cat. She was not religious or morbid, for which every day she thanked her stars. She would credit a person who had that streak with anything, though, and Mr. Motes had it or he wouldn’t be a preacher. He might put lime in his eyes and she wouldn’t doubt it a bit, because they were all, if the truth was only known, a little bit off in their heads. What possible reason could a sane person have for wanting to not enjoy himself any more?

She certainly couldn’t say.

CHAPTER 14

But she kept it in mind because after he had done it, he continued to live in her house and every day the sight of him presented her with the question. She first told him he couldn’t stay because he wouldn’t wear dark glasses and she didn’t like to look at the mess he had made in his eye sockets. At least she didn’t think she did. If she didn’t keep her mind going on something else when he was near her, she would find herself leaning forward, staring into his face as if she expected to see something she hadn’t seen before. This irritated her with him and gave her the sense that he was cheating her in some secret way. He sat on her porch a good part of every afternoon, but sitting out there with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn’t talk except when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer it in the afternoon, or he might never. He offered to pay her extra to let him keep his room because he knew his way in and out, and she decided to let him stay, at least until she found out how she was being cheated.

He got money from the government every month for something the war had done to his insides and so he was not obliged to work. The landlady had always been impressed with the ability to pay. When she found a stream of wealth, she followed it to its source and before long, it was not distinguishable from her own. She felt that the money she paid out in taxes returned to all the worthless pockets in the world, that the government not only sent it to foreign niggers and a-rabs, but wasted it at home on blind fools and on every idiot who could sign his name on a card. She felt justified in getting any of it back that she could. She felt justified in getting anything at all back that she could, money or anything else, as if she had once owned the earth and been dispossessed of it. She couldn’t look at anything steadily without wanting it, and what provoked her most was the thought that there might be something valuable hidden near her, something she couldn’t see.

To her, the blind man had the look of seeing something. His face had a peculiar pushing look, as if it were going forward after something it could just distinguish in the distance. Even when he was sitting motionless in a chair, his face had the look of straining toward something. But she knew he was totally blind. She had satisfied herself of that as soon as he took off the rag he used for a while as a bandage. She had got one long good look and it had been enough to tell her he had done what he’d said he was going to do. The other boarders, after he had taken off the rag, would pass him slowly in the hall, tiptoeing, and looking as long as they could, but now they didn’t pay any attention to him; some of the new ones didn’t know he had done it himself. The Hawks girl had spread it over the house as soon as it happened. She had watched him do it and then she had run to every room, yelling what he had done, and all the boarders had come running. That girl was a harpy if one ever lived, the landlady felt. She had hung around pestering him for a few days and then she had gone on off; she said she hadn’t counted on no honest-to-Jesus blind man and she was homesick for her papa; he had deserted her, gone off on a banana boat. The landlady hoped he was at the bottom of the salt sea; he had been a month behind in his rent. In two weeks, of course, she was back, ready to start pestering him again. She had the disposition of a yellow jacket and you could hear her a block away, shouting and screaming at him, and him never opening his mouth.

The landlady conducted an orderly house and she told him so. She told him that when the girl lived with him, he would have to pay double; she said there were things she didn’t mind and things she did. She left him to draw his own conclusions about what she meant by that, but she waited, with her arms folded, until he had drawn them. He didn’t say anything, he only counted out three more dollars and handed them to her. “That girl, Mr. Motes,” she said, “is only after your money.”

“If that was what she wanted she could have it,” he said. “I’d pay her to stay away.”

The thought that her tax money would go to support such trash was more than the landlady could bear. “Don’t do that,” she said quickly. “She’s got no right to it.” The next day she called the Welfare people and made arrangements to have the girl sent to a detention home; she was eligible.

She was curious to know how much he got every month from the government and with that set of eyes removed, she felt at liberty to find out. She steamed open the government envelope as soon as she found it in the mailbox the next time; in a few days she felt obliged to raise his rent. He had made arrangements with her to give him his meals and as the price of food went up, she was obliged to raise his board also; but she didn’t get rid of the feeling that she was being cheated. Why had he destroyed his eyes and saved himself unless he had some plan, unless he saw something that he couldn’t get without being blind to everything else? She meant to find out everything she could about him.

“Where were your people from, Mr. Motes?” she asked him one afternoon when they were sitting on the porch. “I don’t suppose they’re alive?”

She supposed she might suppose what she pleased; he didn’t disturb his doing nothing to answer her. “None of my people’s alive either,” she said. “All Mr. Flood’s people’s alive but him.” She was a Mrs. Flood. “They all come here when they want a hand-out,” she said, “but Mr. Flood had money. He died in the crack-up of an airplane.”

After a while he said, “My people are all dead.”

“Mr. Flood,” she said, “died in the crack-up of an airplane.”

She began to enjoy sitting on the porch with him, but she could never tell if he knew she was there or not. Even when he answered her, she couldn’t tell if he knew it was she. She herself. Mrs. Flood, the landlady. Not just anybody. They would sit, he only sit, and she sit rocking, for half an afternoon and not two words seemed to pass between them, though she might talk at length. If she didn’t talk and keep her mind going, she would find herself sitting forward in her chair, looking at him with her mouth not closed. Anyone who saw her from the sidewalk would think she was being courted by a corpse.

She observed his habits carefully. He didn’t eat much or seem to mind anything she gave him. If she had been blind, she would have sat by the radio all day, eating cake and ice cream, and soaking her feet. He ate anything and never knew the difference. He kept getting thinner and his cough deepened and he developed a limp. During the first cold months, he took the virus, but he walked out every day in spite of that. He walked about half of each day. He got up early in the morning and walked in his room—she could hear him below in hers, up and down, up and down—and then he went out and walked before breakfast and after breakfast, he went out again and walked until midday. He knew the four or five blocks around the house and he didn’t go any farther than those. He could have kept on one for all she saw. He could have stayed in his room, in one spot, moving his feet up and down. He could have been dead and get all he got out of life but the exercise. He might as well be one of them monks, she thought, he might as well be in a monkery. She didn’t understand it. She didn’t like the thought that something was being put over her head. She liked the clear light of day. She liked to see things.

She could not make up her mind what would be inside his head and what out. She thought of her own head as a switchbox where she controlled from; but with him, she could only imagine the outside in, the whole black world in his head and his head bigger than the world, his head big enough to include the sky and planets and whatever was or had been or would be. How would he know if time was going backwards or forwards or if he was going with it? She imagined it was like you were walking in a tunnel and all you could see was a pin point of light. She had to imagine the pin point of light; she couldn’t think of it at all without that. She saw it as some kind of a star, like the star on Christmas cards. She saw him going backwards to Bethlehem and she had to laugh.

She thought it would be a good thing if he had something to do with his hands, something to bring him out of himself and get him in connection with the real world again. She was certain he was out of connection with it; she was not certain at times that he even knew she existed. She suggested he get himself a guitar and learn to strum it; she had a picture of them sitting on the porch in the evening and him strumming it. She had bought two rubber plants to make where they sat more private from the street, and she thought that the sound of him strumming it from behind the rubber plant would take away the dead look he had. She suggested it but he never answered the suggestion.

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 preached 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.

Two days later, two young policemen cruising in a squad car found him lying in a drainage ditch near an abandoned construction project. The driver drew the squad car up to the edge of the ditch and looked into it for some time. “Ain’t we been looking for a blind one?” he asked.

The other consulted a pad. “Blind and got on a blue suit and ain’t paid his rent,” he said.

“Yonder he is,” the first one said, and pointed into the ditch. The other moved up closer and looked out of the window too.

“His suit ain’t blue,” he said.

“Yes it is blue,” the first one said. “Quit pushing up so close to me. Get out and I’ll show you it’s blue.” They got out and walked around the car and squatted down on the edge of the ditch. They both had on tall new boots and new policemen’s clothes; they both had yellow hair with sideburns, and they were both fat, but one was much fatter than the other.

“It might have uster been blue,” the fatter one admitted.

“You reckon he’s daid?” the first one asked.

“Ast him,” the other said.

“No, he ain’t daid. He’s moving.”

“Maybe he’s just unconscious,” the fatter one said, taking out his new billy. They watched him for a few seconds. His hand was moving along the edge of the ditch as if it were hunting something to grip. He asked them in a hoarse whisper where he was and if it was day or night.

“It’s day,” the thinner one said, looking at the sky. “We got to take you back to pay your rent.”

“I want to go on where I’m going,” the blind man said.

“You got to pay your rent first,” the policeman said. “Ever1 bit of it!”

The other, perceiving that he was conscious, hit him over the head with his new billy. “We don’t want to have no trouble with him,” he said. “You take his feet.”

He died in the squad car but they didn’t notice and took him on to the landlady’s. She had them put him on her bed and when she had pushed them out the door, she locked it behind them and drew up a straight chair and sat down close to his face where she could talk to him. “Well, Mr. Motes,” she said, “I see you’ve come home!”

His face was stern and tranquil. “I knew you’d come back,” she said. “And I’ve been waiting for you. And you needn’t to pay any more rent but have it free here, any way you like, upstairs or down. Just however you want it and with me to wait on you, or if you want to go on somewhere, well both go.”

She had never observed his face more composed and she grabbed his hand and held it to her heart. It was resistless and dry. The outline of a skull was plain under his skin and the deep burned eye sockets seemed to lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared. She leaned closer and closer to his face, looking deep into them, trying to see how she had been cheated or what had cheated her, but she couldn’t see anything. She shut her eyes and saw the pin point of light but so far away that she could not hold it steady in her mind. She felt as if she were blocked at the entrance of something. She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn’t begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.

The End

I was more impressed by Wise Blood than any noi of the world is literally terrifying. Kafka is almost the only one of our contemporaries who has achieved such effects. I have tremendous admiration for the work of this young writer.

—CAROLINE GORDON

Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Uly Sabbath. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel Motes founds The Church of Christ Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with “wise blood,” who leads him to a mummified holy child, and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel’s existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most consuming characters in modern fiction.

No other major American writer of our century has constructed a fictional world so energetically and forthrightly charged by religious investigation. —brad leithauser, the new yorker Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.