Where Hazel Motes Is

Hazel Motes is dead. I thought he might have gone away to a lot of places, maybe even out of Taukinham, but I never thought he would be dead.

Today Enoch said he’d take me to see Hazel, but I thought he was lying when he took us by the monkeys again and stopped there and made us watch them for a while. I stayed five minutes and then I said I was going back to the apartment but then all of a sudden Enoch left the monkeys behind and took me to a hot dog stand and said we had to eat something first. It reminded me a lot of Miss O’Conner’s book, because he’d some the same things when he first shown my baby to Hazel. It didn’t make him any less crazy, but it did make me think, maybe he really was going to take me to see Hazel. He was so hung up after Hazel in the book, and so maybe Hazel had gotten to be so important to him now that he had to go through this crazy routine just so we could see him. I told him all this while he sat in the hot dog stand and drank his chocolate malt.

Enoch said he read the book once and never did like it and never saw the movie either. He said the book made him feel all crawly inside, like it was saying things his blood didn’t want him to hear yet, and so he had to put the book away and wait for his blood to tell him it was the right time to read it. And besides, he never liked how Miss O’Conner wrote him. He said she made him into a crazy person in the book and that she made it look like he didn’t think straight. Well she did write him like that, but she never made up a thing about it, you only had to be with him a second to see it was all true. Enoch said, though, that even though he didn’t like the book he liked the title because he was the one who gave the book that title and it made him feel proud. He said that because he gave the title he was the most important character in the book. I tried to tell him that he wasn’t and when Jhon Huston made the movie he weren’t nothing but a clown in a gorilla suit, but before I could he finished with his malt and he made me get up and follow him. We passed a big old grey building that was falling apart on the edges with a sign in front that said MVSEVM. I didn’t know what a mvsevm was except I knew it was where my baby had come from. I thought we were going to go inside but we didn’t, Enoch just stood there staring at the place for five minutes and when I said if we didn’t get Hazel soon I was going to leave, he turned again and kept walking down the path. We walked a good long way through the park and then he turned us into the cemetery at the end of it. It was an old place, with a big iron fence around it that had turned rusty with age and brittle like it would all fall apart as soon as you touched it. He took me all the way to a grave in the back and the headstone just said, “Hazel Motes.” It didn’t have anything else, just a name and some dates. He had died over two years ago.

I stared at the grave for a long time, with my mouth open gaping like a fish in the air. Then I looked over at Enoch and he had that Jesus-seeing bright-eyed look on his face again and it made me squirm to see. I told him I didn’t know he had died, and Enoch said, “Well you should have. You said you read the book, and he died at the end of it.”

I said no, I never did read that far past when he went and blinded himself. And Enoch didn’t say anything back and neither did I and we were there staring at Hazel’s grave for a long time before we went back home, and all the time we never said nothing.

As soon as I got back I read the last bit of Miss O’Conner’s Wise Blood. I found out what he done with the barbed wire and the rocks in his shoes and how he went out into the cold rain and let himself to die there, and when I was done with it all all I could do was sit there and wonder to myself why. Why did he do all those things to himself and then let himself out to die alone in the streets? I thought but it didn’t make no more sense that him throwing babies against the wall and preaching churches without Jesus and blinding himself with lime. The things Hazel did never made no sense, not even to me, not even after I read Miss O’Conner’s book and saw Jhon Huston’s movie. They made sense to that detention school lady, and she told me how meaningful and symbolic they all were, but I never could see it. But now I’ve seen his grave it just struck something in me for some reason and now I think I seen what the school lady was getting out. I still can’t see what it all means but I know it’s there and I’m going to see if maybe I can find it.

Now that Hazel’s dead I don’t know where I’ll go. Enoch says I can stay at his house longer so long as I sleep on the floor and don’t get in the way of anything and don’t look in his slop-jar cabinet. I reckon I could stay with Enoch for a long time, he said he’d like it if I could, that he’d like to have a friend around, and I guess I wouldn’t mind if I had to sleep with him, but I don’t want to if I can avoid  it. The man is still a nuisance and the biggest idiot on this Earth, and I want to be rid of him as soon as I can. I reckon maybe I can go over and live with Mrs. Watts instead for a while, just until I found myself a job. She was a nice enough lady, even if she was ugly, and maybe if I asked she’d let me stay if I helped her out with her work. I’d pay the rent there with the money I got from the men she was too busy to serve herself. Besides, she’s already got one thing I like, and that’s that she knew Hazel Motes. She don’t t seem to remember him, but maybe I can show her the book and then maybe she will when she reads it. And I’d like to talk about him to someone who doesn’t make long speeches about how his wise blood led him to Hazel and that’s how come he is what he is now every time I try to talk about him.

So that’s my plan for now. Since my old plan is gone I really don’t know much of what to do with myself. For now, I just sort of what to think about things for a while before I figure out a real new plan.