“Redeemed,” Tarwater muttered. Do you smoke? the stranger asked.
Smoke if I want to and don’t if I don’t, Tarwater said. Bury if need be and don’t if don’t.
Go take a look at him and see if he’s fell off his chair, his friend suggested.
Tarwater let the shovel drop in the grave and returned to the house. He opened the front door a crack and put his face to it. His uncle glared slightly to the side of him like a judge intent upon some terrible evidence. The boy shut the door quickly and went back to the grave, cold in spite of the sweat that stuck his shirt to his back. He began digging again.
The schooolteacher was too smart for him, that’s all, the stranger said presently. You remember well enough how he said he kidnapped him when the schoolteacher was seven years of age. Gone to town and persuaded him out of his own backyard and brought him out here and baptized him. And what come of it? Nothing. The schoolteacher don’t care now if he’s baptized or if he ain’t. It don’t mean a thing to him one way or the other. Don’t care if he’s Redeemed or not neither. He only spent four days out here; you’ve spent fourteen years and now got to spend the rest of your life.
You see he was crazy all along, he continued.
Wanted to make a prophet out of that schoolteacher too, but the schoolteacher was too smart for him. He got away.
He had somebody to come for him, Tarwater said.
His daddy came and got him back. Nobody came and got me back.
The schoolteacher himself come after you, the stranger said, and got shot in the leg and the ear for his trouble.
I was not yet one year old, Tarwater said. A baby can’t walk off and leave.
You ain’t a baby now, his friend said.
The grave did not appear to get any deeper though he continued to dig. Look at the big prophet, the stranger jeered, and watched him from the shade of the speckled tree shadows. Lemme hear you prophesy something. The truth is the Lord ain’t studying about you. You ain’t entered His Head.
Tarwater turned around abruptly and worked from the other side and the voice continued from behind him. Anybody that’s a prophet has got to have somebody to prophesy to. Unless you’re just going to prophesy to yourself, he amended—or go baptize that dimwitted child, he added in a tone of high sarcasm.
The truth is, he said after a minute, the truth is that you’re just as smart, if you ain’t actually smarter, than the schoolteacher. Because he had somebody—his daddy and his mother—to tell him the old man was crazy, whereas you ain’t had anybody and yet you’ve figured it out for yourself. Of course, it’s taken you longer, but you’ve come to the right conclusion: you know he was a crazy man even when he wasn’t in the asylum, even those last years.
Or if he wasn’t actually crazy, he was the same thing in a different way: he didn’t have but one thing on his mind. He was a one-notion man. Jesus. Jesus this and Jesus that. Ain’t you in all your fourteen years of supporting his foolishness fed up and sick to the roof of your mouth with Jesus? My Lord and Saviour, the stranger sighed, I am if you ain’t.
After a pause he continued. The way I see it, he said, you can do one of two things. One of them, not both. Nobody can do both of two things without straining themselves. You can do one thing or you can do the opposite.
Jesus or the devil, the boy said.
No no no, the stranger said, there ain’t no such thing as a devil. I can tell you that from my own self-experience. I know that for a fact. It ain’t Jesus or the devil. It’s Jesus or you.
Jesus or me, Tarwater repeated. He put the shovel down for a rest and thought: he said the schoolteacher was glad to come. He said all he had to do was go out in the schoolteacher’s back yard where he was playing and say, Let’s you and me go to the country for a while—you have to be born again. The Lord Jesus Christ sent me to see to it. And the schoolteacher got up and took hold of his hand without a word and came with him and all the four days while he was out here he said the schoolteacher was hoping they wouldn’t come for him.
Well that’s all the sense a seven-year-old boy’s got, the stranger said. You can’t expect no more from a child. He learned better as soon as he got back to town; his daddy told him the old man was crazy and not to believe a word of what all he had learnt him.
That’s not the way he told it, Tarwater said. He said that when the schoolteacher was seven years old, he had good sense but later it dried up. His daddy was an ass and not fit to raise him and his mother was a whore. She ran away from here when she was eighteen years old.
It took her that long? the stranger said in an incredulous tone. My, she was kind of a ass herself.
My great uncle said he hated to admit it that his own sister was a whore but he had to say it to say the truth, the boy said.
Shaw, you know yourself that it give him great satisfaction to admit she was a whore, the stranger said. He was always admitting somebody was an ass or a whore. That’s all a prophet is good for—to admit somebody else is an ass or a whore. And anyway, he asked slyly, what do you know about whores? Where have you ever run up on one of them?
Certainly I know what one of them is, the boy said. The Bible was full of them. He knew what they were and to what they were liable to come, and just as Jezebel was discovered by dogs, an arm here and a foot there, so said his great-uncle, it had almost been with his own mother and grandmother. The two of them, along with his grandfather, had been killed in an automobile crash, leaving only the schoolteacher alive in that family, and Tarwater himself, for his mother (unmarried and shameless) had lived just long enough after the crash for him to be born. He had been born at the scene of the wreck.
The boy was very proud that he had been born in a wreck. He had always felt that it set his existence apart from the ordinary one and he had understood from it that the plans of God for him were special, even though nothing of consequence had happened to him so far. Often when he walked in the woods and came upon some bush a little removed from the rest, his breath would catch in his throat and he would stop and wait for the bush to burst into flame. It had not done it yet.
His uncle had never seemed to be aware of the importance of the way he had been born, only of how he had been born again. He would often ask him why he thought the Lord had rescued him out of the womb of a whore and let him see the light of day at all, and then why, having done it once, He had gone and done it again, allowing him to be baptized by his great-uncle into the death of Christ, and then having done it twice, gone on and done it a third time, allowing him to be rescued by his great-uncle from the schoolteacher and brought to the backwoods and given a chance to be brought up according to the truth. It was because, his uncle said, the Lord meant him to be trained for a prophet, even though he was a bastard, and to take his great-uncle’s place when he died. The old man compared their situation to that of Elijah and Elisha.
All right, the stranger said, I suppose you know what one of them is. But there’s a heap else you don’t know. You go ahead and put your feet in his shoes. Elisha after Elijah like he said. But just lemme ast you this: where is the voice of the Lord? I havent heard it. Who’s called you this morning? Or any morning? Have you been told what to do? You ain’t even heard the sound of natural thunder this morning. There ain’t a cloud in the sky. The trouble with you, I see, he concluded, is that you ain’t got but just enough sense to believe every word he told you.
The sun was directly overhead, apparently dead still, holding its breath, waiting out the noontime. The grave was about two feet deep. Ten foot now, remember, the stranger said and laughed. Old men are selfish. You got to expect the least of them. The least of everybody, he added and let out a flat sigh that was like a gust of sand raised and dropped suddenly by the wind.