You Can’t Be Any Poorer
Than Dead

By Flannery O’ Connor

1954

FRANCIS MARION TARWATER'S uncle had been dead for only half a
day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave
and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug
filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table
where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way,
with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt
on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along
about noon, and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had
never returned from the still.
  The old man had been Tarwater's great uncle, or said he was, and
they had always lived together so far as the child knew. His uncle
had said he was seventy years of age at the time he had rescued
him and undertaken to bring him up; he was eighty-four when he
died. Tarwater figured this made his own age fourteen. His uncle
had taught him figures, reading, writing, and historv beginning with
Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the
presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the
Second Coming and the Day of Judgment. Besides giving him a
good education, he had rescued him from his only other connection,
old Tarwater's nephew, a school teacher who had no child of his own
at the time and wanted this one of his dead sister's to raise according
to his own ideas. The old man was in a position to know what
his ideas were.
  He had lived for three months in the nephew's house on what he
had thought at the time was Charity but what he said he had found
out was not Charity or anything like it. All the time he had lived
there, the nephew had secretly been making a study of him. The
nephew, who had taken him in under the name of Charity, had at
the same time been creeping into his soul by the back door, asking
him questions that meant more than one thing, planting traps
around the house and watching him fall into them, and finally
coming up with a written study of him for a school teacher magazine.
The stench of his behavior had reached heaven and the Lord
Himself had rescued the old man. He had sent him a rage of vision,
had told him to fly with the orphan boy to the farthest part of the
backwoods and raise him up to justify his Redemption. The Lord
had assured him a long life and he had snatched the child from
under the school teacher's nose and taken him to live in a clearing
that he had title to for his lifetime.
  Eventually Rayber, the school teacher, had discovered where they
were and had come out to the clearing to get the boy back. He had
had to leave his car on the dirt road and walk a mile through the
woods, on a path that appeared and disappeared, before he came to
the corn patch with the gaunt two-story shack standing in the middle
of it. The old man had been fond of recalling for Tarwater the red,
sweating, bitten face of his nephew bobbing up and down through
the corn and behind it the pink, flowered hat of a welfare woman
he had brought along with him. The corn was planted up to two
feet from the porch step, and as the nephew came out of it, the old
man appeared in the door with his shotgun and said that he would
shoot any foot that touched his step, and the two stood facing each
other while the welfare woman bristled out of the corn like a peahen
upset on the nest. The old man said if it hadn't been for the welfare
woman his nephew wouldn't have taken a step, but she stood there
waiting, pushing back the wisps of dyed red hair that were plastered
on her long forehead. Both their faces were scratched and bleeding
from thorn bushes, and the old man recalled a switch of blackberry
bush hanging from the sleeve of the welfare woman's blouse. She
only had to let out her breath slowly as if she were releasing the last
patience on earth and the nephew lifted his foot and set it down on
the step and the old man shot him in the leg. The two of them had
scuttled off, making a disappearing rattle in the corn, and the woman
had screamed, "You knew he was crazy!"; but when they came out
of the corn on the other side, old Tarwater had noted from the
upstairs window where he had run that she had her arm around
him and was holding him up while he hopped into the woods; and
later he learned that he had married her though she was twice his
age and he could only possibly get one child out of her. She had
never let him come back again.
  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 shack was all kitchen, large and
dark, with a wood tove in the center of it and a board table drawn
up to the stove. Sacks of feed and mash were stacked in the corners,
and scrap metal, wood shavings, old rope, ladders, and other
tinder were wherever he or Tarwater had let them fall. They had
slept in the kitchen until a wild cat sprang in the window one night
and frightened him into carrying the bed upstairs where there were
two empty rooms. He prophesied at the time that the stairsteps
would take ten years off his life. At the moment of his death, he
had 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 had 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 gray
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 focused 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 the old man.
  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 cross-shaped face stared ahead
beyond the clearing over woods that ran in gray and purple folds
until they touched the light-blue fortress line of trees set against the
empty morning sky.
  The clearing 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. The old man had started an acre of cotton
to the left and had run it beyond the fence line 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, ready like a white hound dog to crouch under and crawl
across the yard.
  "I'm going to move that fence," Tarwater said. "I ain't going to
have my fence in the middle of a field." The voice was loud and
still strange and disagreeable and he finished the rest of his thought
in his head: because this place is mine now whether I own it or not
because I'm here and nobody can't get me off. If any school teacher
comes here to claim the property, I'll kill him.
  He had on a faded pair of overalls and a gray 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, there wouldn't be a soul to hinder me, he thought; no
voice will be lifted.
  "Bury him first and get it over with," the loud stranger's disagreeable
voice said, and 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 top 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 overleavened 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 ,aid. "I'll have to sit
on the lid 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.
  "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'll be doing good if I get you in the ground," Tarwater said.
  "I'll be too wore out 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," he hollered, "and I'm damned if you won't be one!"
"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 school teacher," 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 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 so that their faces were not two inches
apart. "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 insolence, 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 in the eyes that he was
shaken by this, and after a minute he had said, 'The school teacher
is my uncle. The only blood connection 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 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.
  A living man, he thought as he went to get the shovel, but he
better not come out here and try to get me off this property because
I'll kill him. Go to him and be dammed, his uncle had said. I've
saved you from him this far and if you go to him the minute I'm in
the ground, there's nothing I can do about it.
  The shovel lay against the side of the hen house. "I'll never set my
foot in the city again," Tarwater said. "I'll never go to him. Him nor
nobody else will ever get me off this place." He decided to dig the
grave under the fig tree because the old man would be good for the
figs. The ground was sandy on top and solid brick underneath and
the shovel made a clanging sound when he struck it in the sand. Two
hundred pounds of dead mountain to bury, he thought, and stood
with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, studying the white sky
through the leaves of the tree. It would take all day to get a hole big
enough out of this rock and the school teacher would burn him in a
minute.
  Tarwater had never seen the school teacher but he had seen his
child, a boy who resembled old Tarwater himself. The old man had
been so shocked by the likeness that the time he and Tarwater had
gone there, he had only stood in the door, staring at the little boy
and rolling his tongue around outside his mouth like an old idiot.
That had been the first and only time the old man had seen the boy.
"Three months there," he would say. "It shames me. Betrayed for
three months in the house of my own kin, and if when I'm dead you
want to turn me over to my betrayer and see my body burned, go
ahead. Go ahead, boy!" he had shouted, sitting up splotch-faced in
his box. "Go ahead and let him burn me but watch out for the crab
that begins to grip your neck after that!" and he had clawed his hand
in the air to show Tarwater his grip. "I been leavened by the yeast
he don't believe in," he said, "and I won't be burned. And when I'm
gone you'll be better off in these woods by yourself with just as much
light as that dwarf sun wants to let in than you would be in the city
with him!"
  The white fog had eased through the yard and disappeared into
the next bottom and now the air was clear and blank. "The dead are
poor," Tarwater said in the voice of the stranger. "You can't be any
poorer than dead. He'll have to take what he gets." Nobody to bother
me, he thought. Ever. No hand uplifted to hinder me from anything.
A sand-colored hound beat its tail on the ground nearby and a few
black chickens scratched in the raw clay he was turning up. The sun
had slipped over the blue line of trees and, circled by a haze of
yellow, was moving slowly across the sky. "Now I can do anything I
want to," he said, softening the stranger's voice so that he could
stand it. Could kill off all those chickens if I had a mind to, he
thought, watching the worthless black game bantams that his uncle
had been fond of keeping.
  "He favored a lot of foolishness," the stranger said. "The truth is
he was childish. Why, that school teacher never did him any harm.
You take, all he did was to watch him and write down what he seen
and heard and put it in a paper for school teachers to read. Now
what was wrong in that? Why nothing. Who cares what a school
teacher reads? And the old fool acted like he had been killed in his
very soul. Well, he wasn't so near dead then as he thought he was.
Lived on fifteen years and raised up a boy to bury him, suitable to
his own taste."
  As Tarwater slashed at the ground with the shovel, the stranger's
voice took on a kind of restrained fury and he kept repeating, "You
got to bury him whole and completely by hand and that school
teacher would burn him in a minute." After he had dug for an hour
or more, the grave was only a foot deep, not as deep yet as the corpse.
He sat down on the edge of it for a while. The sun was like a furious
white blister in the sky. "The dead are a heap more trouble than the
living," the stranger said. "That school teacher wouldn't consider for
a minute that on the last day all the bodies marked by crosses will be
gathered. In the rest of the world they do things different than what
you been taught."
  "I been there oncet," Tarwater muttered. "Nobody has to tell me."
His uncle two or three years before had gone there to call on the
lawyers to try and get the property unentailed so that it would skip
the school teacher and go to Tarwater. Tarwater had sat at the
lawyer's twelfth-story window and looked down into the pit of the
city street while his uncle transacted the business. On the way from
the railroad station he had walked tall in the mass of moving metal
and concrete speckled with the very small eyes of people. The glitter
of his own eyes was shaded under the stiff rootlike brim of a new
gray hat balanced perfectly straight on his buttressing ears. Before
coming he had read facts in the almanac and he knew that there
were 60,000 people here who were seeing him for the first time. He
wanted to stop and shake hands with each of them and say his name
was Francis M. Tarwater and that he was here only for the day to
accompany his uncle on business at a lawyer's. His head jerked backwards after each passing figure until they began to pass too thickly
and he observed that their eyes didn't grab at you like the eyes of
country people. Several of them bumped into him and this contact
that should have made an acquaintance for life made nothing because
the hulks shoved on with ducked heads and muttered apologies
that he would have accepted if they had waited. At the lawyer's window,
he had knelt down and let his face hang out upside-down over
the floating speckled street moving like a river of tin below and had
watched the glints on it from the sun which drifted pale in a pale
sky. You have to do something particular here to make them look
at you, he thought. They ain't going to look at you just because God
made you. When I come for good, he said to himself, I'll do something
to make every eye stick on me for what I clone; and leaning
forward, he saw his hat drop down gently, lost and casual, dallied
slightly by the breeze on its way to be smashed in the traffic below.
He clutched at his bare head and fell back inside the room.
His uncle was in argument with the lawyer, hath hitting the desk
that separated them, bending their knees and hitting their fists at
the same time. The lawyer, a tall dome-headed man with an eagle's
nose, kept repeating in a restrained shriek, "But] didn't make the
will. I didn't make the law," and his uncle's voice grated, "I can't
help it. My daddy wouldn't have wanted it this way. It has to skip
him. My daddy wouldn't have seen a fool inherit his property.
That's not how he intended it."
  "My hat is gone," Tarwater said.
  The lawyer threw himself backwards into his chair and screaked
it toward Tarwater and saw him without interest from pale-blue
eyes and screaked it forward again and said to his uncle, "There's
nothing I can do. You're wasting your time and mine. You might
as well resign yourself to this will."
  "Listen," old Tarwater said, "at one time I thought I was finished,
old and sick and about to die and no money, nothing, and I accepted
his hospitality because he was my closest blood connection and
you could have called it his duty to take me, only I thought it was
Charity, I thought ... "
  "I can't help what you thought or did or what your connection
thought or did," the lawyer said and closed his eyes.
  "My hat fell," Tarwater said.
  "I'm only a lawyer," the lawyer said, letting his glance rove over
the lines of clay-colored books of law that fortressed his office.
  "A car is liable to have run over it by now."
  "Listen," his uncle said, "all the time he was studying me for a
paper he was writing. Only had me there to study me for this paper.
Taking secret tests on me, his own kin, looking into my soul like a
Peeping Tom, and then says to me, 'Uncle, you're a type that's almost
extinct!' Almost extinct!" the old man piped, barely able to force a
thread of sound from his throat. "You see how extinct I am!"
The lawyer shut his eyes and smiled into one cheek.
  "Other lawyers," the old man growled, and they had left and
visited three more without stopping, and Tarwater had counted
eleven men who might have had on his hat or might not. Finally
when they came out of the fourth lawyer's office, they sat down on
the window ledge of a bank building and his uncle felt in his pocket
for some biscuits he had brought and handed one to Tarwater. The
old man unbuttoned his coat and allowed his stomach to ease forward
and rest on his lap while he ate. His face worked wrathfully;
the skin between the pockmarks grew pink and then purple and
then white and the pockmarks appeared to jump from one spot to
another. Tarwater was very pale and his eyes glittered with a peculiar
hollow depth. He had an old work handkerchief tied around his
head, knotted at the four corners. He didn't observe the passing
people who observed him now. "Thank God, we're finished here and
can go home," he muttered.
  "We ain't finished here," the old man said and got up abruptly and
started down the street.
  "My Jesus," the boy hissed, jumping to catch up with him. "Can't
we sit down for one minute? Ain't you got any sense? They all tell
you the same thing. It's only one law and it's nothing you can do
about it. I got sense enough to get that; why ain't you? What's the
matter with you?"
  The old man strode on with his head thrust forward as if he were
smelling out an enemy.
  "Where we going?" Tarwater asked after they had walked out of
the business streets and were passing between rows of gray bulbous
houses with sooty porches that overhung the sidewalks. "Listen," he
said, hitting his uncle's hip, "I never ast to come."
  "You would have asked to come soon enough," the old man muttered.
  "Get your fill now."
  "I never ast for no fill. I never ast to come at all. I'm here before
  I knew this here was here."
  "Just remember," the old man said, "just remember that I told
you to remember when you ast to come that you never liked it when
you were here," and they kept on going, crossing one length of sidewalk
after another, row after row of overhanging houses with halfopen
doors that let a little dried light fall on the stained passageways
inside. Finally they came out into another section where the houses
were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass
in front of it like a dog gripping a stolen steak. After a few blocks,
Tarwater dropped down on the sidewalk and said, "I ain't going a
step further."
  "I don't even know where I'm going and I ain't going no further!"
he shouted at his uncle's heavy figure which didn't stop or look back.
In a second he jumped up and followed him again, thinking: If
anything happened to him, I would be lost here.
  The old man kept straining forward as if his blood scent were
leading him closer and closer to the place where his enemy was
hiding. He suddenly turned up the short walk of a pale-yellow
house and moved rigidly to the white door, his heavy shoulders
hunched as if he were going to crash through like a bulldozer. He
struck the wood with his fist, ignoring a polished brass knocker. By
the time Tarwater came up behind him, the door had opened and a
small pink-faced fat boy stood in it. He was a white-haired child
and wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had pale-silver eyes like the
old man's. The two stood staring at each other, old Tarwater with
his fist raised and his mouth open and his tongue lolling idiotically
from side to side. For a second the little fat boy seemed shocked still
with astonishment. Then he guffawed. He raised his fist and opened
his mouth and let his tongue roll out as far as it would go. The old
man's eyes seemed about to strain out of their sockets.
  "Tell your father," he roared, "that I'm not extinct!"
  The little boy shook as if a blast had hit him and pushed the door
almost shut, hiding himself all but one spectacled eye. The old man
grabbed Tarwater by the shoulder and swung him around and
pushed him down the path away from the place.
  He had never been back there again, never seen his cousin again,
never seen the school teacher at all, and he hoped to God, he told
the stranger digging the grave along with him now, that he would
never see him, though he had nothing against him and he would
dislike to kill him, but if he came out here, messing with what was
none of his business except by law, then he would be obliged to.
  "Listen," the stranger said, "what would he want to come out
here for--where there's nothing?"
  Tarwater began to dig again and didn't answer. He didn't search
out the stranger's face, but he knew by now it was sharp and friendly
and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed hat. He had lost
his dislike for the sound of the voice. Only, every now and then it
sounded like a stranger's voice to him. He began to feel that he was
only just now meeting himself, as if, as long as his uncle had lived,
he had been deprived of his own acquaintance.
  "I ain't denying the old man was a good one," his new friend said,
"but like you said: you can't be an y poorer than dead. They have to
take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his
body is not going to feel the pinch of fire or anything else."
  "It was the last day he was thinking of," Tarwater said.
  "Well now," the stranger said, "don't you think any cross you set
up in the year 1954 or 5 or 6 would be rotted out by the year the
Day of Judgment comes in? Rotted to as much dust as his ashes if
you reduced him to ashes? And lemme ast you this: what's God
going to do with sailors drowned at sea that the fish have et and the
fish that et them et by other fish and they et by yet others? And
what about people that get burned up naturally in house fires?
Burnt up one way or another or lost in machines until they're a
pulp? And all these sojers blasted to nothing? What about all these
naturally left without a piece to fit a piece?"
  "1f I burnt him," Tarwater said, "it wouldn't be natural, it would
be deliberate."
  "Oh, I see," the stranger said. "It ain't the Day of Judgment for
him you're worried about, it's the Day of Judgement for you."
  "That's my bidnis," Tarwater said.
  "I ain't buttin into your bidnis," the stranger said. "It don't mean a
thing to me. You're left by yourself in this empty place. Forever by
yourself in the empty place with just as much light as that dwarf
sun wants to let in. You don't mean a thing to a soul as far as I can
see."
  "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 child shut the door quickly and went
back to the grave. He was cold in spite of the sweat that stuck his
shirt to his back.
  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 from them. The least from
everybody," he added, and let out a flat sigh that was like a gust of
sand raised and dropped suddenly by the wind.
  Tarwater looked up and saw two figures cutting across the field, a
colored man and woman, each dangling an empty vinegar jug by a
finger. The woman, tall and Indian-like, had on a green sunhat. She
stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the
yard toward the grave; the man held the wire down and swung his
leg over and followed at her elbow. They kept their eyes on the
hole and stopped at the edge of it, looking down into the raw ground
with shocked satisfied expressions. The man, Buford, had a crinkled,
burnt-rag face, darker than his hat. "Old man passed," he said.
  The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail,
piercing and formal. She set her jug down on the' ground and crossed
her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again.
  "Tell her to shut up that," Tarwater said, "I'm in charge here now
and I don't want no nigger-mourning."
  "I seen his spirit for two nights," she said, "Seen him two nights
and he was unrested."
  "He ain't been dead hut since this morning,' Tarwater said. "If
you all want your jugs filled, give them to me and dig while I'm
gone."
  "He'd been perdicting his passing for many years," Buford said.
"She seen him in her dream several nights and he wasn't rested. I
known him well. I known him very well indeed."
  "Poor sweet sugar boy," the woman said to Tarwater, "what you
going to do here now by yourself in this lonesome place?"
  "Mind by bidnis," the boy growled, jerking the jug out of her
hand, and started off so quick lv that he almost fell. He stalked across
the back field toward the rim of trees that surrounded the clearmg.
  The birds had gone into the deep woods to escape the noon sun
and one thrush, hidden some distance ahead of him, called the same
four notes again and again, stopping each time after them to make a
silence. Tarwater began to waslk faster, then he began to lope, and
in a second he was running like something hunted, sliding down
slopes waxed with pine needles and grasping the limbs of trees to
pull himself, panting, up the slippery inclines. He crashed through a
wall of honeysuckle and leapt across a sandy stream bed that was
almost dry now and fell down against the high clay bank that
formed the back wall of a cove where the old man had kept his extra
liquor hidden. He hid it in a hollow of the balk, covered with a
large stone. Tarwater began to fight at the stone to pull it away,
while the stranger stood over his shoulder, panting, "He was crazy!
He was crazy! That's the long and short of it. He was crazy!" Tarwater
got the stone away and pulled out a black jug and sat down
against the bank with it. "Crazy!" the stranger hissed, collapsing by
his side. The sun appeared, edging its way secretly behind the tops of
the trees that rose over the hiding place.
  "A man, seventy years of age, to bring a baby out into the backwoods
to raise him right! Suppose he had died when you were four
years old? Could you have toted mash to the still then and supported
yourself? I never heard of no four-year-old running a still.
  "Never did I hear of that," he continued. "You weren't anything to
him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when
the time came, and now that he's dead, he's shut of you but you got
two hundred pounds of him to carry below the face of the earth.
And don't think he wouldn't heat up like a coal stove to see you
take a drop of liquor," he added. "He might say it would hurt you
but what he would mean was you might get so much you wouldn't
be in no fit condition to bury him. He said he brought you out here
to raise you according to principle and that was the principle: that
you should be fit when the time came to bury him so he would
have a cross to mark where he was at.
  "Well," he said in a softer tone, when the boy had taken a long
swallow from the black jug, "a little won't interfere. Moderation
never hurt no one."
  A burning arm slid down Tarwater's throat as if the devil were
already reaching inside him to finger his soul. He squinted at the
angry sun creeping behind the topmost fringe of the trees.
  "Take it easy," his friend said. "Do you remember them nigger
gospel singers you saw one time, all drunk, all singing, all dancing
around that black Ford automobile? Jesus, they wouldn't have been
near so glad they were redeemed if they hadn't had that liquor in
them. I wouldn't pay too much attention to my Redemption if I was
you," he said. "Some people take everything too hard."
  Tarwater drank more slowly. He had been drunk only one time
before and that time his uncle had beat him with a board for it,
saying liquor would dissolve a child's gut; another of his lies because
his gut had not dissolved.
  "It should be clear to you," his kind friend said, "how all your
life you been tricked by that old man. You could have been a city
slicker for the last ten years. Instead, you been deprived of any company
but his, you been living in a two-story barn in the middle of
this earth's bald patch, following behind a mule and plow since you
were seven. And how do you know the education he give you is
true to the fact? Maybe he taught you a system of figures nobody
else uses? How do you know that two added to two makes four?
Four added to four makes eight? Maybe other people don't use that
system. How do you know if there was an Adam or if Jesus eased
your situation any when He redeemed you? Or how you know if
He actually done it? Nothing but that old man's word and it ought
to be obvious to you by now that he was crazy. And as for Judgment
Day," the stranger said, "every day is Judgment Day.
  "Ain't you old enough to have learnt that yet for yourself? Don't
everything you do, everything you have ever done, work itself out
right or wrong before your eye and usually before the sun has set?
Have you ever got by with anything) No you ain't nor ever thought
you would," he said. "You might as well drink all that liquor since
you've already drunk so much. Once you pass the moderation mark
you've passed it, and that gyration you feel working down from the
top of your brain," he said, "that's the Hand of God laying a blessing
on you. He has given you your release. That old man was the stone
before your door and the Lord has rolled it away. He ain't rolled
it quite far enough yet, of course. You got to finish up yourself but
He's done the main part. Praise Him."
  Tarwater had ceased to have any feeling in his legs. He dozed
for a while, his head hanging to the side and his mouth open and the
liquor trickling slowly down the side of his overalls where the jug
had overturned in his lap. Eventually there was just a drip at the
neck of the bottle, forming and filling and dropping, silent and
measured and sun-colored. The bright, even sky began to fade,
coarsening with clouds until every shadow had gone in. He woke
with a wrench forward, his eyes focusing and unfocusing on something
that looked like burnt rag hanging close to his face.
  Buford said, "This ain't no way for you to act. Old man don't
deserve this. There's no rest until the dead is buried." He was
squatting on his heels, one hand gripped around Tarwater's arm. "I
gone yonder to the door and seen him sitting there at the table, not
even laid out on a cooling board. He ought to be laid out and have
some salt on his bosom if you mean to keep him overnight."
The boy's lids pinched together to hold the image steady and in
a second he made out the two small red blistered eyes. "He deserves
to lie in a grave that fits him," Buford said. "He was deep in this
life, he was deep in Jesus' misery."
  "Nigger," the child said, working his strange swollen tongue,
"take your hand off me."
  Buford lifted his hand. "He needs to be rested," he said.
"He'll be rested all right when I get through with him," Tarwater
said vaguely. "Go on and lea' me to my bidnis."
  "Nobody going to bother you," Buford said, standing up. He
waited a minute, bent, looking down at the limp figure sprawled
against the bank. The boy's head was tilted backwards over a root
that jutted out of the clay wall. His mouth hung open, and his hat,
turned up in front, cut a straight line across his forehead, just over
his half-open eyes. His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like
the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them held an ancient look
as if the child's skeleton beneath were as old as the world. "Nobody
going to bother you," the Negro muttered, pushing through the
wall of honeysuckle without looking back. "That going to be your
trouble."
  Tarwater closed his eyes again.
  Some night bird complaining close by woke him up. It was not
a screeching noise, only an intermittent hump-hump as if the bird
had to recall his grievance each time before he repeated it. Clouds
were moving convulsively across a black sky and there was a pink
unsteady moon that appeared to be jerked up a foot or so and then
dropped and jerked up again. This was because as he observed in
an instant, the sky was lowering, coming down fast to smother him.
The bird screeched and flew off in time and Tarwater lurched into
the middle of the stream bed and crouched on h! s hands and knees.
The moon was reflected like pale fire in the few spots of water in the
sand. He sprang at the wall of honeysuckle and began to tear through
it, confusing the sweet familiar odor with the weight coming down
on him. When he stood up on the other side, the black ground swung
slowly and threw him down again. A flare of pink 1ightning lit the
woods and he saw the black shapes of trees pierce out of the ground
all around him. The night bird began to hump again from a thicket
where he had settled.
  Tarwater got up and started moving in the direction of the
clearing, feeling his way from tree to tree, the trunks very cold and
dry to his touch. There was distant thunder and a continuous flicker
of pale lightning firing one section of woods and then another.
Finally he saw the shack, standing gaunt-black and tall in the middle
of the clearing, with the pink moon trembling directly over it. His
eyes glittered like open pits of light as he moved across the sand,
dragging his crushed shadow behind him. He didn't turn his head
to that side of the yard where he had started the grave.
  He stopped at the far back corner of the house and squatted down
on the ground and looked underneath at the litter there, chicken
crates and barrels and old rags and boxes. He had four matches in
his pocket. He crawled under and began to set small fires, building
one from another and working his way out at the front porch,
leaving the fire behind him eating greedily at the dry tinder and the
floor boards of the house. He crossed the front side of the clearing
and went under the barbed-wire fence and through the rutted field
without looking back until he reached the edge of the opposite
woods. Then he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the pink
moon had dropped through the roof of the shack and was bursting
and he began to run, forced on through the woods by two bulging
silver eyes that grew in immense astonishment in the center of the
fire behind him.
  Toward midnight he came out on the highway and caught a
ride with a salesman who was a manufacturer's representative selling
copper flues throughout the Southeast and who gave the silent boy
what he said was the best advice he could give any young fellow
setting out to find himself a place in the world. While they sped
forward on the black untwisting highway watched on either side
by a dark wall of trees, the salesman said that it had been his personal
experience that you couldn't sell a copper flue to a man you didn't
love. He was a thin fellow with a narrow gorgelike face that appeared
to have been worn down to the sharpest possible depressions.
He wore a broad-brimmed stiff gray hat of the kind used by business
men who would like to look like cowboys. He said love was the
only policy that worked ninety-five per cent of the time. He said
when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's
wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that
he kept the names of his customer's families in and what was wrong
with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the
book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he
went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched
her name out and wrote dead there "And I say thank God when
they're dead," the salesman said, "that's one less to remember."
  "You don't owe the dead anything,' Tarwater said in a loud
voice, speaking for almost the first time since he had got in the car.
  "Nor they you," said the stranger. "And that's the way it ought
to be in this world--nobody owing nobody nothing."
  "Look," Tarwater said suddenly, sitting forward, his face close
to the windshield, "we're headed in the wrong direction. We're
going back where we came from. There's the fire again. There's
the fire we left." Ahead of them in the sky there was a faint glow,
steady and not made by lightning. "That's the same fire we come
from!" the boy said in a high wild voice.
  "Boy, you must be nuts," the salesman said. "That's the city
we're coming to. That's the glow from the city lights. I reckon
this is your first trip anywhere."
  You're turned around," the child said. "It's the same fire."
  The stranger twisted his rutted face sharply. "I've never been
turned around in my life," he said. "And I didn't come from any
fire. I come from Mobile. And I know where I'm going. What's the
matter with you?"
  Tarwater sat staring at the glow in front of him. "I was asleep,"
he muttered. "I'm just now waking up."
  "Well you should have been listening to me," the salesman said.
"I been telling you things you ought to know."
End