Wise Blood Read Free

front of a mowing machine when he was seven. His box was about half
     the size of an ordinary one, and when they shut it, Haze ran and opened it up again.
     They said it was because he was heartbroken to part with his brother, but it was not;
     it was because he had thought, what if he had been in it and they had shut it on him.
    He was asleep now and he dreamed he was at his father’s burying again. He saw him
     humped over on his hands and knees in his coffin, being carried that way to the graveyard.
     “If I keep my can in the air,” he heard the old man say, “nobody can shut nothing
     on me,” but when they got his box to the hole, they let it drop down with a thud and
     his father flattened out like anybody else. The train jolted and stirred him half
     awake again and he thought, there must have been twenty-five people in Eastrod then,
     three Motes. Now there were no more Motes, no more Ashfields, no more Blasengames,
     Feys, Jacksons … or Parrums—even niggers wouldn’t have it. Turning in the road, he
     saw in the dark the store boarded and the barn leaning and the smaller house half
     carted away, the porch gone and no floor in the hall.
    It had not been that way when he was eighteen years old and had left it. Then there
     had been ten people there and he had not noticed that it had got smaller from his
     father’s time. He had left it when he was eighteen years old because the army had
     called him. He had thought at first he would shoot his foot and not go. He was going
     to be a preacher like his grandfather and a preacher can always do without a foot.
     A preacher’s power is in his neck and tongue and arm. His grandfather had traveled
     three counties in a Ford automobile. Every fourth Saturday he had driven into Eastrod
     as if he were just in time to save them all from Hell, and he was shouting before
     he had the car door open. People gathered around his Ford because he seemed to dare
     them to. He would climb up on the nose of it and preach from there and sometimes he
     would climb onto the top of it and shout down at them. They were like stones! he would
     shout. But Jesus had died to redeem them! Jesus was so soul-hungry that He had died,
     one death for all, but He would have died every soul’s death for one! Did they understand
     that? Did they understand that for each stone soul, He would have died ten million
     deaths, had His arms and legs stretched on the cross and nailed ten million times
     for one of them? (The old man would point to his grandson, Haze. He had a particular
     disrespect for him because his own face was repeated almost exactly in the child’s
     and seemed to mock him.) Did they know that even for that boy there, for that mean
     sinful unthinking boy standing there with his dirty hands clenching and unclenching
     at his sides, Jesus would die ten million deaths before He would let him lose his
     soul? He would chase him over the waters of sin! Did they doubt Jesus could walk on
     the waters of sin? That boy had been redeemed and Jesus wasn’t going to leave him
     ever. Jesus would never let him forget he was redeemed. What did the sinner think
     there was to be gained? Jesus would have him in the end!
    The boy didn’t need to hear it. There was already a deep black wordless conviction
     in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. He knew by the time he was twelve
     years old that he was going to be a preacher. Later he saw Jesus move from tree to
     tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and
     come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking
     on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. Where he wanted
     to stay was in Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling the familiar
     thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose. When he was eighteen
     and the army called him, he saw the war as a trick to lead him into temptation,