Wise Blood: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

The next day Hazel takes the car out to drive in the country. The sky is blue, with only one cloud, a large one with “curls and a beard.” A mile from town, he discovers the young girl proudly hidden in the backseat of his car. He is angry at first, but then he remembers his plan to seduce her, and changes his tone stiffly. She slides into the front seat and introduces herself as Sabbath Lily Hawks, telling Hazel that her mother named her that and then died. Hazel tightens his jaw, his pleasure in the car gone. Sabbath reveals that she is a bastard, as her parents were unmarried. Hazel is so surprised that Asa could have a bastard that he nearly drives into the ditch.

Sabbath tells Hazel about a letter that she wrote to Mary Brittle, the advice columnist. She asked whether, since she was a bastard and so could not enter the kingdom of heaven anyway, she ought to “neck” with the boys who tended to follow her. The columnist wrote back that light necking should be fine, and that maybe she should consider adjusting her religious outlook to the modern world. Hazel is still stuck on the idea of her being a bastard. Sabbath tells him about a second letter she wrote, asking if she should “go the whole hog,” but this letter never received a response.

Hazel continues to interrogate Sabbath about Asa’s past, asking what it was that caused him to believe in Jesus. Sabbath slides her foot next to Hazel, but he kicks it away. Sabbath warns him to stop feeling her leg, and she suggests that they turn down a dirt road, where the view is consumed on one side by the city and the white cloud. Sabbath says they should get out to sit under a tree and “get better acquainted.” They go past a barbed wire fence, Hazel still asking Sabbath about Asa. Sabbath removes her shoes and stockings. Hazel protests, but follows her, still asking questions, which she ignores.

Sabbath sits on the ground and motions for Hazel to join her. He sits on a rock five feet away, aware that he should be seducing her, but not eager to begin, given her apparent innocence. Sabbath asks him if his Church Without Christ can save a bastard, and Hazel says that in his church, there is no such thing as a bastard. Something inside him immediately contradicts this, though, telling him that the only truth is that Jesus is a liar, and that a bastard can’t be saved because no one can. He keeps this to himself, however.

Sabbath tells another story, about an unwanted child whose family sent it around until it wound up with its evil grandmother, who swelled up immediately, since she had violent allergies to anything good. The child, virtuous and kind, had a vision of its grandmother in hellfire, and it told her what it saw, but her swelling – a reaction to the good in the child - only got worse, until she went mad and hung herself with the rope in the well. “Would you guess me to be fifteen years old?” Sabbath asks Hazel, and suggests that he lie down and rest. He moves a few feet away and does so, putting his hat over his face. Sabbath crawls over to him and removes it like a lid, staring into his eyes. She lowers her head until their noses are almost touching and says, “I see you.”

Hazel jumps away violently, and Sabbath runs behind the tree and says “I see you” again. Hazel heads back up the road to the unlocked car, but begins to panic when it won’t start. Sabbath comes to the window, and he asks her what she did to his car. Then he gets out and walks down the road to a gas station. When Sabbath arrives after him, she goes to a cage containing “two deadly enemies,” a wounded bear dusted with bird lime and a chicken hawk, glaring at one another. A man at the station drives Hazel and Sabbath back to the car, ignoring Hazel’s account of the Church Without Christ and its stance on bastards.

The man puts a gallon of gas in the car, but it still doesn’t start. He silently examines the engine, not answering when Hazel asks him what’s wrong. The man has one arm and slate blue eyes. He slides under the car, and lies there contemplating its underbelly. Hazel continues to insist that it’s a good car, but the man doesn’t respond. He pushes their car with his truck, and it finally starts. Hazel asks him, triumphantly, what he owes him, but the man says that he wants nothing at all.

Hazel drives on, telling Sabbath he doesn’t need any favors. She says that the car is grand and drives smooth as honey. Hazel says that this is because it wasn’t built by foreigners or one-armed men, but by people with their eyes open. The truck pulls up alongside them, and Hazel brags about his car, saying that it can take him anywhere. “Some things,” says the man, will “get some folks somewheres.” The “bearded” cloud has turned into a bird with long thin wings.