Wise Blood

by Flannery O'Connor

it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn’t tell if you were young or old.

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

Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.

“It ain’t anybody perfect on this green earth of God’s, preachers nor nobody else. And you can tell people better how terrible sin is if you know from your own personal experience.”

“That’s the trouble with you preachers,” he said. “You’ve all got too good to believe in anything,”

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. No one was paying any attention to the sky.

“you can’t run away from Jesus. Jesus is a fact.”

Everything she looked at was that child. Jesus made it beautiful to haunt her.

His eyes glinted through his tears and his face stretched in an evil crooked grin. “You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,” he said, “but you ain’t! I’m the one has it. Not you. Me.”

“There’s no person a whoremonger, who wasn’t something worse first,” Haze said. “That’s not the sin, nor blasphemy. The sin came before them.”

“I don’t have to run from anything because I don’t believe in anything,” Haze said.

There was something, in the center of the park, that he had discovered. It was a mystery, although it was right there in a glass case for everybody to see and there was a typewritten card over it telling all about it. But there was something the card couldn’t say and what it couldn’t say was inside him, a terrible knowledge without any words to it, a terrible knowledge like a big nerve growing inside him. He could not show the mystery to just anybody; but he had to show it to somebody. Who he had to show it to was a special person. This person could not be from the city but he didn’t know why. He knew he would know him when he saw him and he knew that he would have to see him soon or the nerve inside him would grow so big that he would be forced to steal a car or rob a bank or jump out of a dark alley onto a woman.

Enoch’s brain was divided into two parts. The part in communication with his blood did the figuring but it never said anything in words. The other part was stocked up with all kinds of words and phrases.

“I AM clean,” he said again, without any expression on his face or in his voice, just looking at the woman as if he were looking at a wall. “If Jesus existed, I wouldn’t be clean,” he said.

He said he was a preacher. The woman looked at him thoroughly and then she looked behind him at his car. “What church?” she asked. He said the Church Without Christ. “Protestant?” she asked suspiciously, “or something foreign?” He said no mam, it was Protestant.

“I like his eyes,” she observed. “They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking.”

“There’s no such thing as a bastard in the Church Without Christ,” he said. “Everything is all one.

“It was built by people with their eyes open that knew where they were at.”

“I told you this car would get me anywhere I wanted to go,” Haze said sourly. “Some things,” the man said, “’Il get some folks somewheres,” and he turned the truck up the highway.

The Church Without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that’s all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don’t look like any other man so you’ll look at him.

If Haze had believed in praying, he would have prayed for a disciple, but as it was all he could do was worry about it a lot.

“not to have a friend in the world is just about the most miserable and lonesome thing that can happen to a man or woman! And that’s the way it was with me. I was ready to hang myself or to despair completely. Not even my own dear old mother loved me, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t sweet inside, it was because I never known how to make the natural sweetness inside me show.

As that little child gets bigger, its sweetness don’t show so much, cares and troubles come to perplext it, and all its sweetness is driven inside it. Then it gets miserable and lonesome and sick,

He had a winning smile and it was evident that he didn’t think he was any better than anybody else even though he was.

Haze leaned forward. “Blasphemy is the way to the truth,” he said, “and there’s no other way whether you understand it or not!”

“That’s the trouble with you innerleckchuls,” Onnie Jay muttered, “you don’t never have nothing to show for what you’re saying.”

he dreamed he was not dead but only buried. He was not waiting on the Judgment because there was no Judgment, he was waiting on nothing.

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he called. “No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you that would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?”

“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.”

That innocent look don’t hide a thing, he’s just pure filthy right down to the guts, like me. The only difference is I like being that way and he don’t. Yes sir!” she said.

He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now.

Enoch had an urgent need to insult somebody immediately; it was the only thing that could give his feelings even a temporary relief.

She had never known anyone who looked like him before, but there was something in him of everyone she had ever known,

The entire possibility of this came from the advantage of having a car—of having something that moved fast, in privacy, to the place you wanted to be.

She was not religious or morbid, for which every day she thanked her stars. She would credit a person who had that streak with anything, though, and Mr. Motes had it or he wouldn’t be a preacher.

What possible reason could a sane person have for wanting to not enjoy himself any more?

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.

Why had he destroyed his eyes and saved himself unless he had some plan, unless he saw something that he couldn’t get without being blind to everything else?

He might as well be one of them monks, she thought, he might as well be in a monkery. She didn’t understand it. She didn’t like the thought that something was being put over her head. She liked the clear light of day. She liked to see things.

She could not make up her mind what would be inside his head and what out. She thought of her own head as a switchbox where she controlled from; but with him, she could only imagine the outside in, the whole black world in his head and his head bigger than the world, his head big enough to include the sky and planets and whatever was or had been or would be. How would he know if time was going backwards or forwards or if he was going with it?

“Mr. Motes,” she said that day, when he was in her kitchen eating his dinner, “what do you walk on rocks for?” “To pay,” he said in a harsh voice. “Pay for what?” “It don’t make any difference for what,” he said. “I’m paying.”

“Do you think, Mr. Motes,” she said hoarsely, “that when you’re dead, you’re blind?” “I hope so,” he said after a minute. “Why?” she asked, staring at him. After a while he said, “If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.”

“It’s easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes,”

If she was going to be blind when she was dead, who better to guide her than a blind man? Who better to lead the blind than the blind,

the deep burned eye sockets seemed to lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared.