The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel

by Flannery O'Connor

  On the highway again, he drove gripping the wheel, his face tense, his mind turned on the problem of Tarwater as if his own and not only the boy’s salvation depended on his solving it. He had ruined his plan by going to Powderhead too soon. He knew he could not go there again, that he would have to find another way. He went over the afternoon’s experience in the boat. There, he thought, he had been on the right track. He had simply not gone far enough. He decided that he would put the whole thing verbally before the boy. He would not argue with him but only tell him, tell him in so many plain words that he had a compulsion and what it was. Whether he answered, whether he cooperated, he would have to listen. He could not escape knowing that there was someone who knew exactly what went on inside him and who understood it for the good reason that it was understandable. He would go the whole way this time and tell him everything. The boy should at least know that he had no secrets. Casually while they ate their supper, he would lift the compulsion from his mind, expose it to the light, and let him have a good look at it. What he did about it would be his own affair. All at once this seemed to him extremely simple, the way he should have proceeded in the first place. Only time simplifies, he thought.

  He stopped for gas at a pink stucco filling station where pottery and whirligigs were sold. While the car was being filled, he got out and looked for something to take as a peace offering, for he wanted the encounter to be pleasant if possible. His eye roved over a shelf of false hands, imitation buck teeth, boxes of simulated dog dung to put on the rug, wooden plaques with cynical mottos burnt on them. Finally he saw a combination corkscrew-bottleopener that fit in the palm of the hand. He bought it and left.

  When they returned to the room, the boy was still lying on the cot, his face set in a deadly calm as if his eyes had not moved since they left. Again Rayber had a vision of the face his wife must have seen and he experienced a moment’s revulsion for the boy that made him tremble. Bishop climbed onto the bottom of the cot and Tarwater returned the child’s gaze steadily. He seemed unaware that Rayber was in the room.

  “I could eat a horse,” the schoolteacher said. “Let’s go down.”

  The boy turned his head and regarded him evenly, with no interest but with no hostility. “It’s what you’ll get,” he said, “if you eat here.”

  Rayber, unamused, pulled out the corkscrew-bottleopener and dropped it negligently on his chest. “That might come in handy sometime,” he said and turned and began to wash his hands at the basin.

  In the mirror, he saw him pick it up gingerly and look at it. He pushed the corkscrew out of the circle and then meditatively pushed it back. He studied it back and front and held it in the palm of his hand where it fit like a halfdollar. Presently he said in a grudging voice, “I don’t have no use for it but I thank you,” and put it in his pocket.

  He returned his attention to Bishop as if this were its natural place. He lifted himself on one elbow and fixed the child with a narrow look. “Git up, you,” he said slowly. He might have been commanding a small animal he was successfully training. His voice was steady but experimental. The hostility in it seemed contained and directed toward some planned goal. The little boy was watching with complete fascination.

  “Git up now, like I tol’ you to,” Tarwater repeated slowly.

  The child obediantly climbed down off the bed.

  Rayber felt a twinge of ridiculous jealousy. He stood by, his brows working irritably as the boy moved out of the door without a word and Bishop followed him. After a moment he slung his towel into the basin and walked after them.

  The lodge was shaking with the stamping of four couples dancing at the other end of the lobby where the woman who ran the place had a nickelodeon. The three of them sat down at the red tin table and Rayber turned off his hearing aid until the racket should stop. He sat glaring around him, disgruntled at this intrusion.

  The dancers were about Tarwater’s age but they might have belonged to a different species entirely. The girls could be distinguished from the boys only by their tight skirts and bare legs; their faces and heads were alike. They danced with a furious stern concentration. Bishop was entranced. He stood up in his chair, watching them, his head hanging forward as if any moment it might drop off. Tarwater, his eyes dark and distant, stared through them. They might have been insects buzzing across the surface of his vision.

  When the music whined to a stop, they clambered back to their table and sprawled in their chairs. Rayber turned his hearing aid on and winced as Bishop’s bellow blared into his head. The child was jumping up and down in his chair, roaring his disappointment. As soon as the dancers saw him, he stopped making the noise and stood still, devouring them with his gape. An angry silence fell over them. Their look was shocked and affronted as if they had been betrayed by a fault in creation, something that should have been corrected before they were allowed to see it. With pleasure Rayber could have dashed across the room and swung his lifted chair in their faces. They got up and pushed each other out sullenly, packed themselves in a topless automobile and roared off, sending an indignant spray of gravel against the side of the lodge. Rayber let out his breath as if it were sharp and might cut him. Then his eyes fell on Tarwater.

  The boy was looking directly at him with an omniscient smile, faint but decided. It was a smile that Rayber had seen on his face before. It seemed to mock him from an ever-deepening inner knowledge that grew in indifference as it came nearer and nearer to a secret truth about him. Without warning its meaning pierced Rayber and he felt such a fury that for the moment all his strength left him. Go, he wanted to shout. Get your damn impudent face out of my sight! Go to hell! Go baptize the whole world!

  The woman had been standing for some time at his side, waiting to take their order but she could have been invisible for all the notice he paid her. She began tapping the menu on a glass, then she slid it in front of his face. Without reading it, he said, “Three hamburger plates,” and thrust it aside.

  When she was gone, he said in a dry voice, “I want to lay some cards on the table.” He sought the boy’s eyes and steadied himself by the hated glint in them.

  Tarwater looked at the table as if waiting for the cards to be laid on it.

  “That means I want to talk straight to you,” Rayber said, rigidly keeping the exasperation out of his voice. He strove to make his gaze, his tone, as indifferent as his listener’s “I have some things to say to you that you’ll have to listen to. What you do about what I have to say is your own business. I have no further interest in telling you what to do. I only intend to put the facts before you.” His voice was thin and brittle-sounding. He might have been reading from a paper. “I notice that you’ve begun to be able to look Bishop in the eye. That’s good. It means you’re making progress but you needn’t think that because you can look him in the eye now, you’ve saved yourself from what’s preying on you. You haven’t. The old man still has you in his grip. Don’t think he hasn’t.”

  The boy continued to give him the same omniscient look. “It’s you the seed fell in,” he said. “It ain’t a thing you can do about it. It fell on bad ground but it fell in deep. With me,” he said proudly, “it fell on rock and the wind carried it away.”

  The schoolteacher grasped the table as if he were going to push it forward into the boy’s chest. “Goddam you!” he said in a breathless harsh voice. “It fell in us both alike. The difference is that I know it’s in me and I keep it under control. I weed it out but you’re too blind to know it’s in you. You don’t even know what makes you do the things you do.”

  The boy looked at him angrily but he said nothing.

  At least, Rayber thought, I’ve shocked that look off his face. He did not say anything for a few moments while he thought how to continue.

  The woman returned with the three plates. She set them down slowly, giving herself time for observation. The man’s face had a sweaty harassed look and so did the boy’s. He threw her an ugly glance. The man began to eat at once as if he
wanted to get it over with. The little boy took his bun apart and began to lick the mustard off it. The other boy looked at his as if it were probably bad meat and did not touch it. She left and watched indignantly for a few seconds from the kitchen door. The boy finally picked his hamburger up. He raised it half-way to his mouth and then put it down again. He picked it up and put it down twice without biting into it. Then he pulled his hat down and sat there, his arms folded. She had had enough and closed the door.

  The schoolteacher leaned forward across the table, his eyes pin-pointed and very bright. “You can’t eat,” he said, “because something is eating you. And I intend to tell you what it is.”

  “Worms,” the boy hissed as if his disgust could not be contained an instant longer.

  “It takes guts to listen,” Rayber said.

  Tarwater leaned toward him with a kind of blaring attention. “You ain’t got nothing to say to me that I don’t have the guts to listen to,” he said.

  The schoolteacher sat back. “All right,” he said, “then listen.” He folded his arms and looked at him for an instant before he began. Then he started coldly. “The old man told you to baptize Bishop. You have that order lodged in your head like a boulder blocking your path.”

  The blood drained from the boy’s face but his eyes did not swerve. They looked at Rayber furiously, the glint in them gone.

  The schoolteacher spoke slowly, picking his words as if he were looking for the steadiest stones to step on across a rushing stream. “Until you get rid of this compulsion to baptize Bishop, you’ll never make any progress toward being a normal person. I said in the boat you were going to be a freak. I shouldn’t have said that. I only meant you had the choice. I want you to see the choice. I want you to make the choice and not simply be driven by a compulsion you don’t understand. What we understand, we can control,” he said. “You have to understand what it is that blocks you. I wonder if you’re smart enough to take this in. It’s not simple.”

  The boy’s face seemed dry and old as if he had taken it in long ago, and now it was part of him like the current of death in his blood. The schoolteacher was touched by this muteness before the facts. His anger left him. The room was silent. A pink cast had fallen from the windows over the table. Tarwater looked away from his uncle at Bishop. The little boy’s hair was pink and lighter than his face. He was sucking his spoon; his eyes were drowned in silence.

  “I want to put two solutions before you,” Rayber said. “What you do is up to you.”

  Tarwater looked at him again, with no mockery, no glint in his eye, but with no anticipation either, as if his course were irrevocably set.

  “Baptism is only an empty act,” the schoolteacher said. “If there’s any way to be born again, it’s a way that you accomplish yourself, an understanding about yourself that you reach after a long time, perhaps a long effort. It’s nothing you get from above by spilling a little water and a few words. What you want to do is meaningless, so the easiest solution would be simply to do it. Right here now, with this glass of water. I would permit it in order to get it out of your mind. As far as I’m concerned, you may baptize him at once.” He pushed his own glass of water across the table. His look was patient and ironical.

  The boy’s glance touched the top of the glass and then bounded off. His hand lying by the side of his plate twitched. He jammed it into his pocket and looked the other way, out the window. His whole aspect seemed shaken as if his integrity had been dangerously challenged.

  The schoolteacher pulled back the glass of water. “I knew that would be too cheap for you,” he said. “I knew you would refuse to do anything so unworthy of the courage you’ve already shown.” He raised the glass and drank the rest of the water. Then he set it down on the table. He looked tired enough to collapse; his aspect was so weary that he might just have attained the top of a mountain he had been climbing for days.

  After an interval he said, “The other way is not so simple. It’s the way I’ve chosen for myself. It’s the way you take as a result of being born again the natural way—through your own efforts. Your intelligence.” His words had a disconnected sound. “The other way is simply to face it and fight it, to cut down the weed every time you see it appear. Do I have to tell you this? An intelligent boy like you?”

  “You don’t have to tell me nothing,” Tarwater murmured.

  “I don’t have a compulsion to baptize him,” Rayber said. “My own is more complicated, but the principle is the same. The way we have to fight it is the same.”

  “It ain’t the same,” Tarwater said. He turned toward his uncle. The glint had reappeared. “I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all. I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.” He was looking at his uncle now with a completely fresh contempt. “It’s nothing about me like you,” he said.

  “There are certain laws that determine every man’s conduct,” the schoolteacher said. “You are no exception.” He saw with perfect clarity that the only feeling he had for this boy was hate. He loathed the very sight of him.

  “Wait and see,” Tarwater said as if it needed only a short time to be proved.

  “Experience is a terrible teacher,” Rayber said.

  The boy shrugged and got up. He walked off, across the room to the screen door where he stood looking out. At once Bishop climbed down off his chair and started after him, putting on his hat as he went. Tarwater stiffened when the child approached but he did not move and Rayber watched as the two of them stood there side by side, looking out the door—the two figures, hatted and somehow ancient, bound together by some necessity of nerve that excluded him. He was startled to see the boy put his hand on Bishop’s neck just under his hat, open the door and guide him out of it. It occurred to him that what he meant by “doing something” was to make a slave of the child. Bishop would be at his command like a faithful dog. Instead of avoiding him, he planned to control him, to show who was master.

  And I will not permit that, he said. If anyone controlled Bishop, it would be himself. He put his money on the table under the salt-shaker and went out after them.

  The sky was a bright pink, casting such a weird light that every color was intensified. Each weed that grew out of the gravel looked like a live green nerve. The world might have been shedding its skin. The two were in front of him half way down the dock, walking slowly, Tarwater’s hand still resting just under Bishop’s hat; but it seemed to Rayber that it was Bishop who was doing the leading, that the child had made the capture. He thought with a grim pleasure that sooner or later the boy’s confidence in his own judgment would be brought low.

  When they arrived at the end of the dock, they stood looking down into the water. Then to Rayber’s chagrin, the boy lifted the child like a sack under the arms and lowered him over the edge of the dock into the boat that was tied there.

  “I haven’t given you permission to take Bishop out in the boat,” Rayber said.

  Tarwater may have heard or he may not; he did not answer. He sat down on the edge of the dock and for a few moments looked across the water at the opposite bank. Part of a red globe hung almost motionless in the far side of the lake as if it were the other end of the elongated sun cut through the middle by a swath of forest. Pink and salmon-colored clouds floated in the water at different depths. Suddenly Rayber wanted nothing so much as a half hour to himself, without sight of either of them. “But you may take him,” he said, “if you’ll be careful.”

  The boy didn’t move. He was leaning forward, his thin shoulders hunched, his hands gripped on the edge of the dock. He seemed poised there waiting to make a momentous move.

  He dropped down into the boat with Bishop.

  “You’ll look after him?” Rayber asked.

  Tarwater’s face was like a very old mask, colorless and dry. “I’ll tend to him,” he said.

  “Thanks,” his uncle said. He experienced a short feeling of warmt
h for the boy. He strolled back down the dock to the lodge and when he reached the door, he turned and watched the boat move out into view on the lake. He raised his arm and waved but Tarwater showed no sign of seeing him and Bishop’s back was turned. The small black-hatted figure sat like a passenger being borne by the surly oarsman across the lake to some mysterious destination.

  * * *

  Back in his room, Rayber lay on the cot trying to feel the release he had felt when he started out in the car in the afternoon. More than anything else, what he experienced in the boy’s presence was the feeling of pressure and when it was taken off for a while, he realized how intolerable it was. He lay there thinking with distaste of the moment when the silent mutinous face would appear again in the door. He imagined the rest of the summer spent coping with the boy’s cold intractability. He began to consider the possibility of his leaving of his own accord and after a moment he knew that this was actually what he wanted him to do. He no longer felt any challenge to rehabilitate him. All he wanted now was to get rid of him. He thought with horror of being stuck with him for good and began to consider ways that he might hasten his departure. He knew he would never leave as long as Bishop was around. The thought flew through his mind that he might put Bishop in an institution for a few weeks. He was shaken and turned his mind to other things. For a while he dozed and dreamed that he and Bishop were speeding away in the car, escaping safely from a lowering tornado-like cloud. He awoke to find the room growing dim.

  He got up and went to the window. The boat with the two of them in it was near the middle of the lake, almost still. They were sitting there facing each other in the isolation of the water, Bishop small and squat, and Tarwater gaunt, lean, bent slightly forward, his whole attention concentrated on the opposite figure. They seemed to be held still in some magnetic field of attraction. The sky was an intense purple as if it were about to explode into darkness.

  Rayber left the window and threw himself on the cot again but he was no longer sleepy. He had a peculiar sense of waiting, of marking time. He lay with his eyes closed as if listening to something he could hear only when his hearing aid was off. He had had this sense of waiting, kin in degree but not in kind, when he was a child and expected any moment that the city would blossom into an eternal Powderhead. Now he sensed that he waited for a cataclysm. He waited for all the world to be turned into a burnt spot between two chimneys.