He was in Melsy at five o’clock in the afternoon and he caught a ride on a cotton-seed truck that took him more than half the distance to Eastrod. He walked the rest of the way and got there at nine o’clock at night, when it had just got dark. The house was as dark as the night and open to it and though he saw that the fence around it had partly fallen and that weeds were growing through the porch floor, he didn’t realize all at once that it was only a shell, that there was nothing here but the skeleton of a house. He twisted an envelope and struck a match to it and went through all the empty rooms, upstairs and down. When the envelope burnt out, he lit another one and went through them all again. That night he slept on the floor in the kitchen, and a board fell on his head out of the roof and cut his face.
There was nothing left in the house but the chifforobe in the kitchen. His mother had always slept in the kitchen and had her walnut chifforobe in there. She had given thirty dollars for it and hadn’t bought herself anything else big again. Whoever had got everything else, had left that. He opened all the drawers. There were two lengths of wrapping cord in the top one and nothing in the others. He was surprised nobody had come and stolen a chifforobe like that. He took the wrapping cord and tied it around the legs and through the floor boards and left a piece of paper in each of the drawers: This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.
He thought about the chifforobe in his half-sleep and decided his mother would rest easier in her grave, knowing it was guarded. If she came looking any time at night, she would see. He wondered if she walked at night and came there ever. She would come with that look on her face, un-rested and looking; the same look he had seen through the crack of her coffin. He had seen her face through the crack when they were shutting the top on her. He was sixteen then. He had seen the shadow that came down over her face and pulled her mouth down as if she wasn’t any more satisfied dead than alive, as if she were going to spring up and shove the lid back and fly out and satisfy herself: but they shut it. She might have been going to fly out of there, she might have been going to spring. He saw her in his sleep, terrible, like a huge bat, dart from the closing, fly out of there, but it was falling dark on top of her, closing down all the time. From inside he saw it closing, coming closer closer down and cutting off the light and the room. He opened his eyes and saw it closing and he sprang up between the crack and wedged his head and shoulders through it and hung there, dizzy, with the dim light of the train slowly showing the rug below. He hung there over the top of the berth curtain and saw the porter at the other end of the car, a white shape in the darkness, standing there watching him and not moving.
“I’m sickl” he called. “I can’t be closed up in this thing. Get me outl”
The porter stood watching him and didn’t move.
“Jesus,” Haze said, “Jesus.”
The porter didn’t move. “Jesus been a long time gone,” he said in a sour triumphant voice.
CHAPTER 2
He didn’t get to the city until six the next evening. That morning he had got off the train at a junction stop to get some air and while he had been looking the other way, the train had slid off. He had run after it but his hat had blown away and he had had to run in the other direction to save the hat. Fortunately, he had carried his duffel bag out with him lest someone should steal something out of it. He had to wait six hours at the junction stop until the right train came.
When he got to Taulkinham, as soon as he stepped off the train, he began to see signs and lights. Peanuts, Western Union, Ajax, Taxi, Hotel, Candy. Most of them were electric and moved up and down or blinked frantically. He walked very slowly, carrying his duffel bag by the neck. His head turned to one side and then the other, first toward one sign and then another. He walked the length of the station and then he walked back as if he might be going to get on the train again. His face was stern and determined under the heavy hat. No one observing him would have known that he had no place to go. He walked up and down the crowded waiting room two or three times, but he did not want to sit on the benches there. He wanted a private place to go to.
Finally he pushed open a door at one end of the station where a plain black and white sign said, Men’s Toilet. White. He went into a narrow room lined on one side with washbasins and on the other with a row of wooden stalls. The walls of this room had once been a bright cheerful yellow but now they were more nearly green and were decorated with handwriting and with various detailed drawings of the parts of the body of both men and women. Some of the stalls had doors on them and on one of the doors, written with what must have been a crayon, was the large word, Welcome, followed by three exclamation points and something that looked like a snake. Haze entered this one.
He had been sitting in the narrow box for some time, studying the inscriptions on the sides and door, before he noticed one that was to the left over the toilet paper. It was written in a drunken-looking hand. It said, Mrs. Leora Watts! 60 Buckley Road The friendliest bed in town! Brother.
After a while he took a pencil out of his pocket and wrote down the address on the back of an envelope.
Outside he got in a yellow taxi and told the driver where he wanted to go. The driver was a small man with a big leather cap on his head and the tip of a cigar coming out from the center of his mouth. They had driven a few blocks before Haze noticed him squinting at him through the rear-view mirror. “You ain’t no friend of hers, are you?” the driver asked.
“I never saw her before,” Haze said.
“Where’d you hear about her? She don’t usually have no preachers for company.” He did not disturb the position of the cigar when he spoke; he was able to speak on either side of it.
“I ain’t any preacher,” Haze said, frowning. “I only seen her name in the toilet.”
“You look like a preacher,” the driver said. “That hat looks like a preacher’s hat.”
“It ain’t,” Haze said, and leaned forward and gripped the back of the front seat. “It’s just a hat.”
They stopped in front of a small one-story house between a filling station and a vacant lot. Haze got out and paid his fare through the window.
“It ain’t only the hat,” the driver said. “It’s a look in your face somewheres.”
“Listen,” Haze said, tilting the hat over one eye, “I’m not a preacher.”
“I understand,” the driver said. “It ain’t anybody perfect on this green earth of God’sť preachers nor nobody else. And you can tell people better how terrible sin is if you know from your own personal experience/’
Haze put his head in at the window, knocking the hat accidentally straight again. He seemed to have knocked his face straight too for it became completely expressionless. “Listen,” he said, “get this: I don’t believe in anything.”
The driver took the stump of cigar out of his mouth. “Not in nothing at all?” he asked, leaving his mouth open after the question.
“I don’t have to say it but once to nobody,” Haze said.
The driver closed his mouth and after a second he returned the piece of cigar to it. “That’s the trouble with you preachers,” he said. “You’ve all got too good to believe in anything,” and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
Haze turned and looked at the house he was going into. It was little more than a shack but there was a warm glow in one front window. He went up on the front porch and put his eye to a convenient crack in the shade, and found himself looking directly at a large white knee. After some time he moved away from the crack and tried the front door. It was not locked and he went into a small dark hall with a door on either side of it. The door to the left was cracked and let out a narrow shaft of light. He moved into the light and looked through the crack.