The Violent Bear It Away Read Online Free PDF Page B

pinch, of fire or anything else.
    “It was the last day he was thinking of,” Tarwater murmured.
    Well now, the stranger said, don’t you think any cross you set up in the year 1952 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 pulp? And all those sojers blasted to nothing? What about all those that there’s nothing left of to burn or bury?
    If 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 Judgment 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 this 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 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 dim-witted 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