Wise Blood: Chapters 10–14

"Who is that that says it's your conscience?" he cried, looking around with a constricted face as if he could smell the particular person who thought that. "Your conscience is a trick," he said, "it don't exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because it's no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you."

He was so struck with how gaunt and thin he looked in the illusion that he stopped preaching.

He slid down from his own car and moved up closer, never taking his eyes from the bleak figure.

He had a loud consumptive cough that started somewhere deep in him and finished with a long wheeze. He expectorated a white fluid at the end of it.

Her face was sullen and apprehensive.

He was very sullen and disgruntled at having to spend his day off in such a way as this, and in bad weather, but he wanted to get rid of the new jesus so that if the police had to catch anybody for the robbery, they could catch Hazel Motes instead of him.

To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand of Providence.

The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes: an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the celluloid pair.

Haze was lying on his cot, with a washrag over his eyes; the exposed part of his face was ashen and set in a grimace, as if he were in some permanent pain.

Earlier that morning, when he had waked up for the first time, he had felt as if he were about to be caught by a complete consumption in his chest; it had seemed to be growing hollow all night and yawning underneath him, and he had kept hearing his coughs as if they came from a distance.

He had forgotten that he had a pair of glasses. He put them on and the wall that he was facing moved up closer and wavered.

The rain blew in his face and he jumped back and stood, with a cautious look, as if he were bracing himself for a blow.

All afternoon, he fidgeted and fooled in his room, biting his nails and shredding what was left of the silk off the landlady's umbrella. Finally he denuded it entirely and broke off the spokes.

If anyone had watched Enoch read this, he would have seen a certain transformation in his countenance. It still shone with the inspiration he had absorbed from the comic strips, but something else had come over it: a look of awakening.

His natural appearance was marred by a gash that ran from the corner of his lip to his collarbone and by a lump under his eye that gave him a dulled insensitive look.

Then he picked up the loose bulky object and shook it vigorously.

The man began to sidle off, out into the middle of the road.

Solace began to lope down the road, taking off his coat as he went.

The embankment dropped down for about thirty feet, sheer washed-out red clay, into a partly burnt pasture where there was one scrub cow lying near a puddle.

She recalled the phrase, "eternal death," that preachers used, but she cleared it out of her mind immediately, with no more change of expression than the cat. She was not religious or morbid, for which every day she thanked her stars.

When she found a stream of wealth, she followed it to its source and before long, it was not distinguishable from her own.

She felt justified in getting anything at all back that she could, money or anything else, as if she had once owned the earth and been dispossessed of it.

The Hawks girl had spread it over the house as soon as it happened. She had watched him do it and then she had run to every room, yelling what he had done, and all the boarders had come running.

She had the disposition of a yellow jacket and you could hear her a block away, shouting and screaming at him, and him never opening his mouth.

She thought of benefits that might accrue to his widow should he leave one.

"Mr. Motes," she said one afternoon when they were sitting on the porch, "why don't you preach any more? Being blind wouldn't be a hinderance. People would like to go see a blind preacher. It would be something different."

Every now and then she would have an intimation of something hidden near her but out of her reach.

He had a deep wheezing cough and she began to badger him about his health.

He would eat what she brought, immediately, with a wry face, and hand back the plate without thanking her, as if all his attention were directed elsewhere and this was an interruption he had to suffer.

"And you'll rue the day!" she said.