O peeler12/7/2023 The child passed the card table again and handed him a tract. “I’d like to know who the hell you think you are!” the man with the peelers was yelling. The words on the outside of it said, “Jesus Calls You.” He thrust one of the pamphlets a little to the side of Haze and Haze grabbed it. The blind man had a peculiar boiled looking red face. “I got these people together, how you think you can horn in?” “What the hell you think you doing?” the man selling peelers yelled. He handed one at Enoch Emery and then he came toward Haze, hitting the white cane at an angle from his leg. “Hey you!” he yelled at the blind man, “what you think you doing? Who you think you are, running people off from here?” When the machine-seller saw this, he leaned, glaring, over the card table. There were not many people gathered there, but the ones who were began to move off. Then Haze saw that the child was moving around too, giving out white leaflets. The blind man began to move straight forward suddenly and the peeler man got ready to hand him one of the green boxes, but he went past the card table and turned, moving at a right angle back in among the people. Ever one of you people purchasing one theseyer machines’ll never forget it.” “You’ll thank the day you ever stopped here,” the man said, “you’ll never forget it. “Who’s gonna step up first? Only a dollar and a half for a machine’d cost you three dollars in any store!” Enoch Emery began fumbling in his pockets. ![]() “I’m going to give away half a dozen peeled potatoes to the first person purchasing one theseyer machines,” the man said. ![]() “Well shaw,” the man said, with his hand cupped to the people, “he needs one theseyer just to keep him company.”Įnoch Emery thought that was so funny that he doubled over and slapped his knee, but Hazel Motes didn’t look as if he had heard it yet. “Well, you got a dear old mother, ain’t you?” “I ain’t none,” Haze muttered without drawing his attention from the blind man. “Whyn’t you take one of these home to yer wife?” the peeler man was saying. “He’s talking to you! He’s talking to you!” Haze was looking at the blind man and the child. “Hey!” Enoch Emery said, reaching across a woman and punching Haze’s arm. “You’ll never be able to get a bargain like this in any store.” “How about you, you there,” he said, pointing at Hazel Motes. The people began to look at the two of them instead of the man selling peelers. She had a long face and a short sharp nose. He had his hand on the shoulder of a big-boned child with a black knitted cap pulled down low on her forehead and a fringe of orange hair sticking out from it on either side. The laugh sounded as if it came from something tied up in a croker sack. He was a tall man with light green glasses and a black suit and a black wool hat like a preacher’s hat, and he was leaning on a white cane. Then a man standing across from Hazel Motes laughed. “Boy with a pretty name like that ought to have one of these,” the man said, rolling his eyes, trying to warm up the others. ![]() “Name Enoch Emery,” the boy said and snuffled. “What’s yer name?” the peeler man asked. He had yellow slick hair and a fox-shaped face. The boy guffawed and looked at the other people gathered around. “You ain’t gonna let one of these go by!” he said. The machine was a square tin box with a red handle, and as he turned the handle, the potato went into the box and then in a second, backed out the other side, white. “How about you?” he said, pointing at a damp-haired pimpled boy, “you ain’t gonna let one of these go by?” He stuck a brown potato in one side of the open machine. The man stood in front of this altar, pointing over it at different people. Between the two buckets there was a pyramid of green cardboard boxes and on top of the stack, one peeler was open for demonstration. There were two buckets on the card table, one empty and the other full of potatoes. He was pitching his voice under the street noises so that it reached every ear distinctly as in a private conversation. The man had on a small canvas hat and a shirt patterned with bunches of upsidedown pheasants and quail and bronze turkeys. Haze’s shadow was now behind him and now before him and now and then broken up by other people’s shadows, but when it was by itself, stretching behind him, it was a thin nervous shadow walking backwards.Īfter a while he stopped where a lean-faced man had a card table set up in front of a Lerner’s Dress Shop and was demonstrating a potato peeler. ![]() The stores in Taulkinham stayed open on Thursday nights and a lot of people were shopping. He had on a blue suit that was glare-blue in the day time, but looked purplish with the night lights on it, and his hat was a fierce black wool hat like a preacher’s hat. His neck was thrust forward as if he were trying to smell something that was always being drawn away. Hazel Motes walked along downtown, close to the store fronts but not looking at them.
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