Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor Read Free Book Online Page B

room, examining this and that. His throat got dryer and his heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching the bars of its cage. He sat down on the edge of her bed, with his hat in his hand.
                Mrs. Watts's grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle. It was plain that she was so well-adjusted that she didn't have to think any more. Her eyes took everything in whole, like quicksand. "That Jesus-seeing hat!" she said. She sat up and pulled her nightgown from under her and took it off. She reached for his hat and put it on her head and sat with her hands on her hips, walling her eyes in a comical way. Haze stared for a minute, then he made three quick noises that were laughs. He jumped for the electric light cord and took off his clothes in the dark.
                Once when he was small, his father took him to a carnival that stopped in Melsy. There was one tent that cost more money a little off to one side. A dried-up man with a horn voice was barking it. He didn't say what was inside. He said it was so SINsational that it would cost any man that wanted to see it thirty-five cents, and it was so Exclusive, only fifteen could get in at a time. His father sent him to a tent where two monkeys danced, and then he made for it, moving close to the walls of things like he moved. Haze left the monkeys and followed him, but he didn't have thirty-five cents. He asked the barker what was inside.
                "Beat it," the man said. "There ain't no pop and there ain't no monkeys."
                "I already seen them," he said.
                "That's fine," the man said, "beat it."
                "I got fifteen cents," he said. "Whyn't you lemme in and I could see half of it?" It's something about a privy, he was thinking. It's some men in a privy. Then he thought, maybe it's a man and a woman in a privy. She wouldn't want me in there. "I got fifteen cents," he said.
                "It's more than half over," the man said, fanning with his straw hat. "You run along."
                "That'll be fifteen cents worth then," Haze said.
                "Scram," the man said.
                "Is it a nigger?" Haze asked. "Are they doing something to a nigger?"
                The man leaned off his platform and his dried-up face drew into a glare. "Where'd you get that idear?" he said.
                "I don't know," Haze said.
                "How old are you?" the man asked.
                "Twelve," Haze said. He was ten.
                "Gimme that fifteen cents," the man said, "and get in there."
                He slid the money on the platform and scrambled to get in before it was over. He went through the flap of the tent and inside there was another tent and he went through that. All he could see were the backs of the men. He climbed up*on a bench and looked over their heads. They were looking down into a lowered place where something white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman. She was fat and she had a face like an ordinary woman except there was a mole on the corner of her lip, that moved when she grinned, and one on her side.
                "Had one of themther built into ever' casket/' his father, up toward the front, said, "be a heap ready to go sooner/*
                Haze recognized the voice without looking. He slid down off the bench and scrambled out of the tent. He crawled out under the side of the outside one because he didn't want to pass the barker. He got in the back of a truck and sat down in the far corner of it. The carnival was making a tin roar outside.
                His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at him, when he got home. She wore black all the time and her dresses were longer than other