Wise Blood Read Free Page B

outside
     in the light, the new suit turned glare-blue and the lines of the hat seemed to stiffen
     fiercely.
    He was in Melsy at five o’clock in the afternoon and he caught a ride on a cotton-seed
     truck that took him more than half the distance to Eastrod. He walked the rest of
     the way and got there at nine o’clock at night, when it had just got dark. The house
     was as dark as the night and open to it and though he saw that the fence around it
     had partly fallen and that weeds were growing through the porch floor, he didn’t realize
     all at once that it was only a shell, that there was nothing here but the skeleton
     of a house. He twisted an envelope and struck a match to it and went through all the
     empty rooms, upstairs and down. When the envelope burnt out, he lit another one and
     went through them all again. That night he slept on the floor in the kitchen, and
     a board fell on his head out of the roof and cut his face.
    There was nothing left in the house but the chifforobe in the kitchen. His mother
     had always slept in the kitchen and had her walnut chifforobe in there. She had given
     thirty dollars for it and hadn’t bought herself anything else big again. Whoever had
     got everything else, had left that. He opened all the drawers. There were two lengths
     of wrapping cord in the top one and nothing in the others. He was surprised nobody
     had come and stolen a chifforobe like that. He took the wrapping cord and tied it
     around the legs and through the floor boards and left a piece of paper in each of
     the drawers: T HIS SHIFFER-ROBE BELONGS TO H AZEL M OTES. D O NOT STEAL IT OR YOU WILL BE HUNTED DOWN AND KILLED.
    He thought about the chifforobe in his half-sleep and decided his mother would rest
     easier in her grave, knowing it was guarded. If she came looking any time at night,
     she would see. He wondered if she walked at night and came there ever. She would come
     with that look on her face, unrested and looking; the same look he had seen through
     the crack of her coffin. He had seen her face through the crack when they were shutting
     the top on her. He was sixteen then. He had seen the shadow that came down over her
     face and pulled her mouth down as if she wasn’t any more satisfied dead than alive,
     as if she were going to spring up and shove the lid back and fly out and satisfy herself:
     but they shut it. She might have been going to fly out of there, she might have been
     going to spring. He saw her in his sleep, terrible, like a huge bat, dart from the
     closing, fly out of there, but it was falling dark on top of her, closing down all
     the time. From inside he saw it closing, coming closer closer down and cutting off
     the light and the room. He opened his eyes and saw it closing and he sprang up between
     the crack and wedged his head and shoulders through it and hung there, dizzy, with
     the dim light of the train slowly showing the rug below. He hung there over the top
     of the berth curtain and saw the porter at the other end of the car, a white shape
     in the darkness, standing there watching him and not moving.
    “I’m sick!” he called. “I can’t be closed up in this thing. Get me out!”
    The porter stood watching him and didn’t move.
    “Jesus,” Haze said, “Jesus.”
    The porter didn’t move. “Jesus been a long time gone,” he said in a sour triumphant
     voice.

CHAPTER 2
     
     
    He didn’t get to the city until six the next evening. That morning he had got off
     the train at a junction stop to get some air and while he had been looking the other
     way, the train had slid off. He had run after it but his hat had blown away and he
     had had to run in the other direction to save the hat. Fortunately, he had carried
     his duffel bag out with him lest someone should steal something out of it. He had
     to wait six hours at the junction stop until the right train came.
    When he got to Taulkinham, as soon as he stepped off the train, he began to see signs