“What if you die in bed?” the boy asked. “How’m I going to get you down the stairs?”
“I ain’t going to die in bed,” the old man said. “As soon as I hear the summons, I’m going to run downstairs. I’ll get as close to the door as I can. If I should get stuck up there, you’ll have to roll me down the stairs, that’s all.”
“My Lord,” the child said.
The old man sat up in the box and brought his fist down on the edge of it. “Listen,” he said. “I never asked much of you. I taken you and raised you and saved you from that ass in town and now all I’m asking in return is when I die to get me in the ground where the dead belong and set up a cross over me to show I’m there. That’s all in the world I’m asking you to do. I ain’t even asking you to go for the niggers and try to get me in the plot with my daddy. I could ask you that but I ain’t. I’m doing everything to make it easy for you. All I’m asking you is to get me in the ground and set up a cross.”
“I’ll be doing good if I get you in the ground,” Tarwater said. “I’ll be too wore out to set up any cross. I ain’t bothering with trifles.”
“Trifles!” his uncle hissed. “You’ll learn what a trifle is on the day those crosses are gathered! Burying the dead right may be the only honor you ever do yourself. I brought you out here to raise you a Christian, and more than a Christian, a prophet!” he hollered, “and the burden of it will be on you!”
“If I don’t have the strength to do it,” the child said, watching him with a careful detachment, “I’ll notify my uncle in town and he can come out and take care of you. The schoolteacher,” he drawled, observing that the pockmarks in his uncle’s face had already turned pale against the purple. “He’ll tend to you.”
The threads that restrained the old man’s eyes thickened. He gripped both sides of the coffin and pushed forward as if he were going to drive it off the porch. “He’d burn me,” he said hoarsely. “He’d have me cremated in an oven and scatter my ashes. ‘Uncle,’ he said to me, ‘you’re a type that’s almost extinct!’ He’d be willing to pay the undertaker to burn me to be able to scatter my ashes,” he said. “He don’t believe in the Resurrection. He don’t believe in the Last Day. He don’t believe in the bread of life… “
“The dead don’t bother with particulars,” the boy interrupted.
The old man grabbed the front of his overalls and pulled him up against the side of the box and glared into his pale face. “The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are,” he said, and then as if he had conceived the answer for all the insolence in the world, he said, “There’s a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive,” and he released him with a laugh.
The boy had shown only by a slight quiver that he was shaken by this, and after a minute he had said, “The schoolteacher is my uncle. The only blood connection with good sense I’ll have and a living man and if I wanted to go to him, I’d go; now.”
The old man looked at him silently for what seemed a full minute. Then he slammed his hands flat on the sides of the box and roared, “Whom the plague beckons, to the plague! Whom the sword to the sword! Whom fire to fire!” And the child trembled visibly.
“I saved you to be free, your own self!” he had shouted, “and not a piece of information inside his head! If you were living with him, you’d be information right now, you’d be inside his head, and what’s furthermore,” he said, “you’d be going to school.”
The boy grimaced. The old man had always impressed on him his good fortune in not being sent to school. The Lord had seen fit to guarantee the purity of his upbringing, to preserve him from contamination, to preserve him as His elect servant, trained by a prophet for prophesy. While other children his age were herded together in a room to cut out paper pumpkins under the direction of a woman, he was left free for the pursuit of wisdom, the companions of his spirit Abel and Enoch and Noah and Job, Abraham and Moses, King David and Solomon, and all the prophets, from Elijah who escaped death, to John whose severed head struck terror from a dish. The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.
The truant officer had come only once. The Lord had told the old man to expect it and what to do and old Tarwater had instructed the boy in his part against the day when, as the devil’s emissary, the officer would appear. When the time came and they saw him cutting across the field, they were ready. The child got behind the house and the old man sat on the steps and waited. When the officer, a thin bald-headed man with red galluses, stepped out of the field onto the packed dirt of the yard, he greeted old Tarwater warily and commenced his business as if he had not come for it. He sat down on the steps and spoke of poor weather and poor health. Finally, gazing out over the field, he said, “You got a boy, don’t you, that ought to be in school?”
“A fine boy,” the old man said, “and I wouldn’t stand in his way if anybody thought they could teach him. You boy!” he called. The boy didn’t come at once. “Oh you boy!” the old man shouted.
In a few minutes Tarwater appeared from around the side of the house. His eyes were open but not well-focused. His head rolled uncontrollably on his slack shoulders and his tongue lolled in his open mouth.
“He ain’t bright,” the old man said, “but he’s a mighty good boy. He knows to come when you call him.”
“Yes,” the truant officer said, “well yes, but it might be best to leave him in peace.”
“I don’t know, he might take to schooling,” the old man said. “He ain’t had a fit for going on two months.”
“I speck he better stay at home,” the officer said. “I wouldn’t want to put a strain on him,” and he commenced to speak of other things. Shortly he took his leave and the two of them watched with satisfaction as the diminishing figure moved back across the field and the red galluses were finally lost to view.
If the schoolteacher had got hold of him, right now he would have been in school, one among many, indistinguishable from the herd, and in the schoolteacher’s head, he would be laid out in parts and numbers. “That’s where he wanted me,” the old man said, “and he thought once he had me in that schoolteacher magazine, I would be as good as in his head.” The schoolteacher’s house had had little in it but books and papers. The old man had not known when he went there to live that every living thing that passed through the nephew’s eyes into his head was turned by his brain into a book or a paper or a chart. The schoolteacher had appeared to have a great interest in his being a prophet, chosen by the Lord, and had asked numerous questions, the answers to which he had sometimes scratched down on a pad, his little eyes lighting every now and then as if in some discovery.
The old man had fancied he was making progress in convincing the nephew again of his Redemption, for he at least listened though he did not say he believed. He seemed to delight to talk about the things that interested his uncle. He questioned him at length about his early life, which old Tarwater had practically forgotten. The old man had thought this interest in his forebears would bear fruit, but what it bore, what it bore, stench and shame, were dead words. What it bore was a dry and seedless fruit, incapable even of rotting, dead from the beginning. From time to time, the old man would spit out of his mouth, like gobbets of poison, some of the idiotic sentences from the schoolteacher’s piece. Wrath had burned them on his memory, word for word. “His fixation of being called by the Lord had its origin in insecurity. He needed the assurance of a call, and so he called himself.”
“Called myself!” the old man would hiss, “called myself!” This so enraged him that half the time he could do nothing but repeat it. “Called myself. I called myself. I, Mason Tarwater, called myself! Called myself to be beaten and tied up. Called myself to be spit on and snickered at. Called myself to be struck down in my pride. Called myself to be torn by the Lord’s eye. Listen boy,” he would say and grab the child by the straps of his overalls and shake him slowly, “even the mercy of the Lord burns,” He would let go the straps and allow the boy to fall back into the thorn bed of that thought, while he continued to hiss and groan.