Outer Dark(61)

You might of, Holme said, I don’t remember.

The blind man twisted up the ends of his cigarette and took it between his lips. Yes, he said. I’ve passed ye on these roads afore.

They’s lots of people on the roads these days, Holme said.

Yes, the blind man said. I pass em ever day. People goin up and down in the world like dogs. As if they wasn’t a home nowheres. But I knowed I’d seen ye afore.

Holme spat. I got to get on, he said.

Yes, the blind man said. Is they anything you need?

Need?

Anything you need.

I don’t need nothin.

I always like to ast.

What are ye sellin?

I ain’t sellin nothin. I’m at the Lord’s work. He don’t need your money.

It’s good he don’t need mine. I reckon you’re some kind of a preacher.

No. No preacher. What is they to preach? It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh. I don’t hold much with preachin.

Holme smiled. What have you got to give? Old blind man like you astin folks what they need.

I don’t know. Nobody’s never said.

Well how would you expect to get it.

Just pray for it.

You always get what you pray for?

Yes. I reckon. I wouldn’t pray for what wasn’t needful. Would you?

I ain’t never prayed. Why don’t ye pray back your eyes?

I believe it’d be a sin. Them old eyes can only show ye what’s done there anyways. If a blind man needed eyes he’d have eyes.

Still I believe you’d like to see your way.

What needs a man to see his way when he’s sent there anyhow?

I got to get on, Holme said.

The blind man leaned one hand on the cane where he had rested it against his leg. He sucked on the cigarette and two jets of blue smoke slid from his thin nostrils and faded in the air. I heard a preacher in a town one time, he said. A healin preacher wanted to cure everbody and they took me up there. They was a bunch of us there all cripple folks and one old man they did claim had thowed down his crutches and they told it he could make the blind see. And they was a feller leapt up and hollered out that nobody knowed what was wrong with. And they said it caused that preacher to go away. But they’s darksome ways afoot in this world and it may be he weren’t no true preacher.

I got to get on, Holme said.

I always did want to find that feller, the blind man said. And tell him. If somebody don’t tell him he never will have no rest.

I’ll see ye, Holme said.

Aye, said the blind man. It might be we’ll meet again sometime.

Holme raised a hand in inane farewell and set off down the road again. The blind man’s cane softly tapping faded behind him. He went on, soundless with his naked feet, shambling, gracelorn, down out of the peaceful mazy fields, his toed tracks soft in the dust among the cratered shapes of horse and mule hoofs and before him under the high afternoon sun his shadow be-wandered in a dark parody of his progress. The road went on through a shadeless burn and for miles there were only the charred shapes of trees in a dead land where nothing moved save windy rifts of ash that rose dolorous and died again down the blackened corridors.

Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.

Going back the way by which he came he met again the blind man tapping through the dusk. He waited very still by the side of the road, but the blind man passing turned his head and smiled upon him his blind smile. Holme watched him out of sight. He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.