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By Root 2431 0

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 upsidedown 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 I 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