And the Lord, the old man said, had preserved the one child he had got out of her from being corrupted by such parents. He had preserved him in the only possible way: the child was dimwitted. The old man would pause here and let the weight of this mystery sink in on Tarwater. He had made, since he learned of that child’s existence, several trips into town to try to kidnap him so that he could baptize him, but each time he had come back unsuccessful. The schoolteacher was on his guard and the old man was too fat and stiff now to make an agile kidnapper.
“If by the time I die,” he had said to Tarwater, “I haven’t got him baptized, it’ll be up to you. It’ll be the first mission the Lord sends you.”
The boy doubted very much that his first mission would be to baptize a dimwitted child. “Oh no it won’t be,” he said. “He don’t mean for me to finish up your leavings. He has other things in mind for me.” And he thought of Moses who struck water from a rock, of Joshua who made the sun stand still, of Daniel who stared down lions in the pit.
“It’s no part of your job to think for the Lord,” his great-uncle said. “Judgment may rack your bones.”
The morning the old man died, he came down and cooked the breakfast as usual and died before he got the first spoonful to his mouth. The downstairs of their house was all kitchen, large and dark, with a wood stove at one end of it and a board table drawn up to the stove. Sacks of feed and mash were stacked in the corners and scrapmetal, woodshavings, old rope, ladders, and other tinder were wherever he or Tarwater had let them fall. They had slept in the kitchen until a bobcat sprang in the window one night and frightened his uncle into carrying the bed upstairs where there were two empty rooms. The old man prophesied at the time that the stairsteps would take ten years off his life. At the moment of his death, he sat down to his breakfast and lifted his knife in one square red hand halfway to his mouth, and then with a look of complete astonishment, he lowered it until the hand rested on the edge of the plate and tilted it up off the table.
He was a bull-like old man with a short head set directly into his shoulders and silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining to get out of a net of red threads. He had on a putty-colored hat with the brim turned up all around and over his undershirt a grey coat that had once been black. Tarwater, sitting across the table from him, saw red ropes appear in his face and a tremor pass over him. It was like the tremor of a quake that had begun at his heart and run outward and was just reaching the surface. His mouth twisted down sharply on one side and he remained exactly as he was, perfectly balanced, his back a good six inches from the chair back and his stomach caught just under the edge of the table. His eyes, dead silver, were focussed on the boy across from him.
Tarwater felt the tremor transfer itself and run lightly over him. He knew the old man was dead without touching him and he continued to sit across the table from the corpse, finishing his breakfast in a kind of sullen embarrassment as if he were in the presence of a new personality and couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally he said in a querulous tone, “Just hold your horses. I already told you I would do it right.” The voice sounded like a stranger’s voice, as if the death had changed him instead of his great-uncle.
He got up and took his plate out the back door and set it down on the bottom step and two long-legged black game roosters tore across the yard and finished what was on it. He sat down on a long pine box on the back porch and his hands began absently to unravel a length of rope while his long face stared ahead beyond the clearing over the woods that ran in grey and purple folds until they touched the light blue fortress line of trees set against the empty morning sky.
Powderhead was not simply off the dirt road but off the wagon track and footpath, and the nearest neighbors, colored not white, still had to walk through the woods, pushing plum branches out of their way to get to it. Once there had been two houses; now there was only the one house with the dead owner inside and the living owner outside on the porch, waiting to bury him. The boy knew he would have to bury the old man before anything would begin. It was as if there would have to be dirt over him before he would be thoroughly dead. The thought seemed to give him respite from something that pressed on him.
A few weeks before, the old man had started an acre of corn to the left and had run it beyond the fenceline almost up to the house on one side. The two strands of barbed-wire ran through the middle of the patch. A line of fog, hump-shaped, was creeping toward it like a white hound dog ready to crouch under and crawl across the yard.
“I’m going to move that fence,” Tarwater said. “I ain’t going to have any fence I own in the middle of a patch.” The voice was loud and strange and disagreeable. Inside his head it continued: you ain’t the owner. The schoolteacher owns it.
I own it, Tarwater said, because I’m here and can’t nobody get me off. If any schoolteacher comes to claim the property, I’ll kill him.
The Lord may send you off, he thought. There was a complete stillness over everything and the boy felt his heart begin to swell. He held his breath as if he were about to hear a voice from on high. After a few moments he heard a hen scratching beneath him under the porch. He ran his arm fiercely under his nose and gradually his face paled again.
He had on a faded pair of overalls and a grey hat pulled down over his ears like a cap. He followed his uncle’s custom of never taking off his hat except in bed. He had always followed his uncle’s customs up to this date but: if I want to move that fence before I bury him, it wouldn’t be a soul to hinder me, he thought; no voice will be uplifted.
Bury him first and get it over with, the loud stranger’s disagreeable voice said. He got up and went to look for the shovel.
The pine box he had been sitting on was his uncle’s coffin but he didn’t intend to use it. The old man was too heavy for a thin boy to hoist over the side of a box and though old Tarwater had built it himself a few years before, he had said that if it wasn’t feasible to get him into it when the time came, then just to put him in the hole as he was, only to be sure the hole was deep. He wanted it ten foot, he said, not just eight. He had worked on the box a long time and when he finished it, he had scratched on the lid, MASON TARWATER, WITH GOD, and had climbed into it where it stood on the back porch, and had lain there for some time, nothing showing but his stomach which rose over the top like over-leavened bread.
The boy had stood at the side of the box, studying him. “This is the end of us all,” the old man said with satisfaction, his gravel voice hearty in the coffin.
“It’s too much of you for the box,” Tarwater said. “I’ll have to sit on the lid to press you down or wait until you rot a little.”
“Don’t wait,” old Tarwater had said. “Listen. If it ain’t feasible to use the box when the time comes, if you can’t lift it or whatever, just get me in the hole but I want it deep. I want it ten foot, not just eight, ten. You can roll me to it if nothing else. I’ll roll. Get two boards and set them down the steps and start me rolling and dig where I stop and don’t let me roll over into it until it’s deep enough. Prop me with some bricks so I won’t roll into it and don’t let the dogs nudge me over the edge before it’s finished. You better pen up the dogs,” he said.