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By Root 2481 0

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