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

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 women’s. She was
     standing there straight, looking at him. He moved behind a tree and got out of her
     view, but in a few minutes, he could feel her watching him through the tree. He saw
     the lowered place and the casket again and a thin woman in the casket who was too
     long for it. Her head stuck up at one end and her knees were raised to make her fit.
     She had a cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head. He stood flat against
     the tree, waiting. She left the wash-pot and came toward him with a stick. She said,
     “What you seen?
    “What you seen?” she said.
    “What you seen,” she said, using the same tone of voice all the time. She hit him
     across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the tree. “Jesus died to redeem
     you,” she said.
    “I never ast him,” he muttered.
    She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed, and he forgot
     the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him. In a minute
     she threw the stick away from her and went back to the wash-pot, still shut-mouthed.
    The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods. He didn’t wear them except
     for revivals and in the winter. He took them out of the box and filled the bottoms
     of them with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight
     and walked in them through the woods for what he knew to be a mile, until he came
     to a creek, and then he sat down and took them off and eased his feet in the wet sand.
     He thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had fallen he
     would have taken it as a sign. After a while he drew his feet out of the sand and
     let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again with the rocks still in them and
     he walked a half-mile back before he took them off.

CHAPTER 4
     
     
    He got out of Mrs. Watts’s bed early in the morning before any light came in the room.
     When he woke up, her arm was flung across him. He leaned up and lifted it off and
     eased it down by her side, but he didn’t look at her. There was only one thought in
     his mind: he was going to buy a car. The thought was full grown in his head when he
     woke up, and he didn’t think of anything else. He had never thought before of buying
     a car; he had never even wanted one before. He had driven one only a little in his
     life and he didn’t have any license. He had only fifty dollars but he thought he could
     buy a car for that. He got stealthily out the bed, without disturbing Mrs. Watts,
     and put his clothes on silently. By six-thirty, he was down town, looking for used-car
     lots.
    Used-car lots were scattered among the blocks of old buildings that separated the
     business section from the railroad yards. He wandered around in a few of them before
     they were open. He could tell from the outside of the lot if it would have a fifty-dollar
     car in it. When they began to be open for business, he went through them quickly,
     paying no attention to anyone who tried to show him the stock. His black hat sat on
     his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it
     might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.
    It was a wet glary day. The sky was like a piece of thin polished silver with a dark
     sour-looking sun in one corner of it. By ten o’clock he had canvassed all the better
     lots and was nearing the railroad yards. Even here, the lots were full of cars that
     cost more than