Wise Blood Read Free Page A

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     he would have shot his foot except that he trusted himself to get back in a few months,
     uncorrupted. He had a strong confidence in his power to resist evil; it was something
     he had inherited, like his face, from his grandfather. He thought that if the government
     wasn’t through with him in four months, he would leave anyway. He had thought, then
     when he was eighteen years old, that he would give them exactly four months of his
     time. He was gone four years; he didn’t get back, even for a visit.
    The only things from Eastrod he took into the army with him were a black Bible and
     a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles that had belonged to his mother. He had gone to
     a country school where he had learned to read and write but that it was wiser not
     to; the Bible was the only book he read. He didn’t read it often but when he did he
     wore his mother’s glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always
     obliged to stop. He meant to tell anyone in the army who invited him to sin that he
     was from Eastrod, Tennessee, and that he meant to get back there and stay back there,
     that he was going to be a preacher of the gospel and that he wasn’t going to have
     his soul damned by the government or by any foreign place it sent him to.
    After a few weeks in the camp, when he had some friends—they were not actually friends
     but he had to live with them—he was offered the chance he had been waiting for; the
     invitation. He took his mother’s glasses out of his pocket and put them on. Then he
     told them he wouldn’t go with them for a million dollars and a feather bed to lie
     on; he said he was from Eastrod, Tennessee, and that he was not going to have his
     soul damned by the government or any foreign place they … but his voice cracked and
     he didn’t finish. He only stared at them, trying to steel his face. His friends told
     him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he
     managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with
     his soul. They told him he didn’t have any soul and left for their brothel.
    He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted
     was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw the opportunity
     here to get rid of it without corruption, to be converted to nothing instead of to
     evil. The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him. He was wounded and
     they remembered him long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest—they said they
     took it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there, rusted,
     and poisoning him—and then they sent him to another desert and forgot him again. He
     had all the time he could want to study his soul in and assure himself that it was
     not there. When he was thoroughly convinced, he saw that this was something that he
     had always known. The misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with
     Jesus. When the army finally let him go, he was pleased to think that he was still
     uncorrupted. All he wanted was to get back to Eastrod, Tennessee. The black Bible
     and his mother’s glasses were still in the bottom of his duffel bag. He didn’t read
     any book now but he kept the Bible because it had come from home. He kept the glasses
     in case his vision should ever become dim.
    When the army had released him two days before in a city about three hundred miles
     north of where he wanted to be, he had gone immediately to the railroad station there
     and bought a ticket to Melsy, the nearest railroad stop to Eastrod. Then since he
     had to wait four hours for the train, he went into a dark dry-goods store near the
     station. It was a thin cardboard-smelling store that got darker as it got deeper.
     He went deep into it and was sold a blue suit and a dark hat. He had his army suit
     put in a paper sack and he stuffed it into a trashbox on the corner. Once