“He wasn’t always as good as he is now,” she said. “She never answered my second letter.”
“You mean in his youth he didn’t believe but he came to?” he asked. “Is that what you mean or ain’t it?” and he kicked her foot roughly away from his.
“That’s right,” she said. Then she drew herself up a little. “Quit that feeling my leg with yours,” she said.
The blinding white cloud was a little ahead of them, moving to the left. “Why don’t you turn down that dirt road?” she asked. The highway forked off onto a clay road and he turned onto it. It was hilly and shady and the country showed to advantage on either side. One side was dense honeysuckle and the other was open and slanted down to a telescoped view of the city. The white cloud was directly in front of them.
“How did he come to believe?” Haze asked. “What changed him into a preacher for Jesus?”
“I do like a dirt road,” she said, “particularly when it’s hilly like this one here. Why don’t we get out and sit under a tree where we could get better acquainted?”
After a few hundred feet Haze stopped the car and they got out. “Was he a very evil-seeming man before he came to believe,” he asked, “or just part way evil-seeming?”
“All the way evil,” she said, going under the barbed wire fence on the side of the road. Once under it she sat down and began to take off her shoes and stockings. “How I like to walk in a field is barefooted,” she said with gusto.
“Listenhere,” Haze muttered, “I got to be going back to town. I don’t have time to walk in any field,” but he went under the fence and on the other side he said, “I suppose before he came to believe he didn’t believe at all.”
“Let’s us go over that hill yonder and sit under the trees/’ she said.
They climbed the hill and went down the other side of it, she a little ahead of Haze. He saw that sitting under a tree with her might help him to seduce her, but he was in no hurry to get on with it, considering her innocence. He felt it was too hard a job to be done in an afternoon. She sat down under a large pine and patted the ground close beside her for him to sit on, but he sat about five feet away from her on a rock. He rested his chin on his knees and looked straight ahead.
“I can save you,” she said. “I got a church in my heart where Jesus is King.”
He leaned in her direction, glaring. “I believe in a new kind of jesus,” he said, “one that can’t waste his blood redeeming people with it, because he’s all man and ain’t got any God in him. My church is the Church Without Christ!”
She moved up closer to him. “Can a bastard be saved in it?” she asked.
“There’s no such thing as a bastard in the Church Without Christ/* he said. “Everything is all one. A bastard wouldn’t be any different from anybody else.”
“That’s good,” she said.
He looked at her irritably, for something in his mind was already contradicting him and saying that a bastard couldn’t, that there was only one truth—that Jesus was a liar—and that her case was hopeless. She pulled open her collar and lay down on the ground full length. “Ain’t my feet white, though?” she asked raising them slightly.
Haze didn’t look at her feet. The thing in his mind said that the truth didn’t contradict itself and that a bastard couldn’t be saved in the Church Without Christ. He decided he would forget it, that it was not important.
“There was this child once,” she said, turning over on her stomach, “that nobody cared if it lived or died. Its kin sent it around from one to another of them and finally to its grandmother who was a very evil woman and she couldn’t stand to have it around because the least good thing made her break out in these welps. She would get all itching and swoll. Even her eyes would itch her and swell up and there wasn’t nothing she could do but run up and down the road, shaking her hands and cursing and it was twicet as bad when this child was there so she kept the child locked up in a chicken crate. It seen its granny in hell-fire, swoll and burning, and it told her everything it seen and she got so swoll until finally she went to the well and wrapped the well rope around her neck and let down the bucket and broke her neck.
“Would you guess me to be fifteen years old?” she asked.
“There wouldn’t be any sense to the word, bastard, in the Church Without Christ,” Haze said.
“Why don’t you lie down and rest yourself?” she inquired.
Haze moved a few feet away and lay down. He put his hat over his face and folded his arms across his chest. She lifted herself up on her hands and knees and crawled over to him and gazed at the top of his hat. Then she lifted it off like a lid and peered into his eyes. They stared straight upward. “It don’t make any difference to me,” she said softly, “how much you like me.”
He trained his eyes into her neck. Gradually she lowered her head until the tips of their noses almost touched but still he didn’t look at her. “I see you,” she said in a playful voice.
“Git away!” he said, jumping violently.
She scrambled up and ran around behind the tree. Haze put his hat back on and stood up, shaken. He wanted to get back in the Essex. He realized suddenly that it was parked on a country road, unlocked, and that the first person passing would drive off in it.
“I see you,” a voice said from behind the tree.
He walked off quickly in the opposite direction toward the car. The jubilant expression on the face that looked from around the tree, flattened.
He got in his car and went through the motions of starting it but it only made a noise like water lost somewhere in the pipes. A panic took him and he began to pound the starter. There were two instruments on the dashboard with needles that pointed dizzily in first one direction and then another, but they worked on a private system, independent of the whole car. He couldn’t tell if it was out of gas or not. Sabbath Hawks came running up to the fence. She got down on the ground and rolled under the barbed wire and then stood at the window of the car, looking in at him. He turned his head at her fiercely and said, “What did you do to my car?” Then he got out and started walking down the road, without waiting for her to answer. After a second, she followed him, keeping her distance.
Where the highway had forked off onto the dirt road, there had been a store with a gas pump in front of it. It was about a half-mile back; Haze kept up a steady fast pace until he reached it. It had a deserted look, but after a few minutes a man appeared from out of the woods behind it, and Haze told him what he wanted. While the man got out his pick-up truck to drive them back to the Essex, Sabbath Hawks arrived and went over to a cage about six feet high that was at the side of the shack. Haze had not noticed it until she came up. He saw that there was something alive in it, and went near enough to read a sign that said, Two DEADLY ENEMIES. HAVE A LOOK FREE.
There was a black bear about four feet long and very thin, resting on the floor of the cage; his back was spotted with bird lime that had been shot down on him by a small chicken hawk that was sitting on a perch in the upper part of the same apartment. Most of the hawk’s tail was gone; the bear had only one eye.
“Come on here if you don’t want to get left,” Haze said roughly, grabbing her by the arm. The man had his truck ready and the three of them drove back in it to the Essex. On the way Haze told him about the Church Without Christ; he explained its principles and said there was no such thing as a bastard in it. The man didn’t comment. When they got out at the Essex, he put a can of gas in the tank and Haze got in and tried to start it but nothing happened. The man opened up the hood and studied the inside for a while. He was a one-armed man with two sandy-colored teeth and eyes that were slate-blue and thoughtful. He had not spoken more than two words yet. He looked for a long time under the hood while Haze stood by, but he didn’t touch anything. After a while he shut it and blew his nose.