Wise Blood: Chapters 1–4

Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones.

He got up and went toward the end of the car where the porter had begun making up a berth.

"Yeah, I bet you are," Haze said with a leer.

His grandfather had been a circuit preacher, a waspish old man who had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger.

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?

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

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.

"You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.

The door to the left was cracked and let out a narrow shaft of light.

There was nothing much in the room but the bed and a bureau and a rocking chair full of dirty clothes.

He drew a long draught of air through one side of his nose and began to run his hand carefully along the sheet.

Mrs. Watts's mouth became more round, as if she were perplexed at this waste of words.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.

The man had on a small canvas hat and a shirt patterned with bunches of upside-down pheasants and quail and bronze turkeys.

He was a tall cadaverous man with a black suit and a black hat on.

The blind man was moving forward slowly, saying in a kind of garbled mutter, "Help a blind preacher. If you won't repent, give up a nickel. I can use it as good as you. Help a blind unemployed preacher. Wouldn't you rather have me beg than preach? Come on and give a nickel if you won't repent."

Haze didn't open his tract. He looked at the outside of it and then he tore it across. He put the two pieces together and tore them across again. He kept re-stacking the pieces and tearing them again until he had a little handful of confetti.

He looked like a friendly hound dog with light mange.

"I went to thisyer Rodemill Boys' Bible Academy for four weeks. Thisyer woman that traded me from my daddy she sent me. She was a Welfare woman. Jesus, four weeks and I thought I was going to be sanctified crazy."

A little man lost in a pair of faded overalls jostled him.

"I followed her to say I ain't beholden for none of her fast eye like she gave me back there," Haze said, looking at the blind man.

He said in a fast whisper, "Repent! Go to the head of the stairs and renounce your sins and distribute these tracts to the people!" and he thrust a stack of pamphlets into Haze's hand.

"Fornication and blasphemy and what else?" the blind man said.

"Repent!" He shouted and laughed and ran forward a little way, pretending he was going to come after Haze and grab him.

"I'm going thisaway too," Enoch said in a sullen voice.

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.

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.

By ten o'clock he had canvassed all the better lots and was nearing the railroad yards.

"What you want to see him for?" the boy asked in a testy voice.

He was sitting huddled up as if he were freezing but his face had a sour composed look.

It was like a hacking cough.

"I don't never know what ails him," the man said and shrugged.

Finally he went over a viaduct and found the highway.

The fields stretched sodden on either side until they hit the scrub pines.