A Temple of the Holy Ghost

By Flannery O’ Connor

1954

ALL weekend the two girls were calling each other Temple One
and Temple Two, shaking with laughter and getting so red
and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had
spots on her face anyway. They came in the brown convent uniforms
they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they
opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red
skirts and loud blouses. They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes
and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always
passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs.
None of their ways were lost on the child. If only one of them had
come, that one would have played with her, but since there were
two of them, she was out of it and watched them suspiciously from
a distance.
  They were fourteen--two years older than she was--but neither
of them was bright, which was why they had been sent to the convent.
If they had gone to a regular school, they wouldn't have done
anything but think about boys; at the convent the sisters, her mother
said, would keep a grip on their necks. The child decided, after
observing them for a few hours, that they were practically morons
and she was glad to think that they were only second cousins
and she couldn't have inherited any of their stupidity. Susan called
herself Su-zan. She was very skinny but she had a pretty pointed
face and red hair. Joanne had yellow hair that was naturally curly
but she talked through her nose and when she laughed, she turned
purple in patches. Neither one of them could say an intelligent
thing and all their sentences began, "You know this boy I know
well one time he ... "
  They were to stay all weekend and her mother said she didn't
see how she would entertain them since she didn't know any boys
their age. At this, the child, struck suddenly with genius, shouted,
"There's Cheat! Get Cheat to come! Ask Miss Kirby to get Cheat
to come show them around!" and she nearly choked on the food
she had in her mouth. She doubled over laughing and hit the table
with her fist and looked at the two bewildered girls while water
started in her eyes and rolled down her fat cheeks and the braces
she had in her mouth glared like tin. She had never thought of
anything so funny before.
  Her mother laughed in a guarded way and Miss Kirby blushed
and carried her fork delicately to her mouth with one pea on it. She
was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher who boarded with them and
Mr. Cheatam was her admirer, a rich old farmer who arrived every
Saturday afternoon in a fifteen-year-old baby-blue Pontiac powdered
with red clay dust and black inside with Negroes that he charged
ten cents apiece to bring into town on Saturday afternoons. After
he dumped them he came to see Miss Kirby, always bringing a
little gift-a bag of boiled peanuts or a watermelon or a stalk of
sugar cane and once a wholesale box of Baby Ruth candy bars. He
was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust-colored hair and his
face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed
like them with ruts and gulleys. He wore a pale green shirt with
a thin black stripe in it and blue galluses and his trousers cut across
a protruding stomach that he pressed tenderly from time to time
with his big flat thumb. All his teeth were backed with gold and he
would roll his eyes at Miss Kirby in an impish way and say, "Haw
haw," sitting in their porch swing with his legs spread apart and his
hightopped shoes pointing in opposite directions on the floor.
  "I don't think Cheat is going to be in town this weekend," Miss
Kirby said, not in the least understanding that this was a joke, and
the child was convulsed afresh, threw herself backward in her chair,
fell out of it, rolled on the floor and lay there heaving. Her mother
told her if she didn't stop this foolishness she would have to leave
the table.
  Yesterday her mother had arranged with Alonzo Myers to drive
them the forty-five miles to Mayville, where the convent was, to
get the girls for the weekend and Sunday afternoon he was hired
to drive them back again. He was an eighteen-year-old boy who
weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and worked for the taxi
company and he was all you could get to drive you anywhere. He
smoked or rather chewed a short black cigar and he had a round
sweaty chest that showed through the yellow nylon shirt he wore.
When he drove all the windows of the car had to be open.
  "Well there's Alonzo!" the child roared from the Roar. "Get
Alonzo to show em around! Get Alonzo!"
  The two girls, who had seen Alonzo, began to scream their indignation.
  Her mother thought this was funny too but she said, "That'll be
about enough out of you," and changed the subject. She asked
them why they called each other Temple One and Temple Two
and this sent them off into gales of giggles. Finally they managed
to explain. Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in
Mayville, had given them a lecture on what to do if a young man
Should--here they laughed so hard they were not able to go on
without going back to the beginning--on what to do if a young
man should--they put their heads in their laps--on what to do if
--they finally managed to shout it out--if he should "behave in an
ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile."
Sister Perpetua said they were to say, "Stop sir! I am a Temple of
the Holy Ghost!" and that would put an end to it. The child sat
up off the floor with a blank face. She didn't see anything so funny
in this. What was really funny was the idea of Mr. Cheatam or
Alonzo Myers beauing them around. That killed her.
  Her mother didn't laugh at what they had said. "I think you girls
are pretty silly," she said. "After all, that's what you are--Temples
of the Holy Ghost."
  The two of them looked up at her, politely concealing their
giggles, but with astonished faces as if they were beginning to
realize that she was made of the same stuff as Sister Perpetua,
Miss Kirby preserved her set expression and the child thought,
it's all over her head anyhow. I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost,
she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her
feel as if somebody had given her a present.
  After dinner, her mother collapsed on the bed and said, "Those
girls are going to drive me crazy if I don't get some entertainment
for them. They're awful."
  "I bet I know who you could get," the child started.
  "Now listen. I don't want to hear any more about Mr. Cheatam,"
her mother said. "You embarrass Miss Kirby. He's her only friend.
Oh my Lord," and she sat up and looked mournfully out the
window, "that poor soul is so lonesome she'll even ride in that
car that smells like the last circle in hell."
  And she's a Temple of the Holy Ghost too, the child reflected.
"I wasn't thinking of him," she said. "I was thinking of those two
Wilkinses, Wendell and Cory, that visit old lady Buchcll out on
her farm. They're her grandsons. They work for her."
  "Now that's an idea," her mother murmured and gave her an
appreciative look. But then she slumped again. "They're only farm
boys. These girls would turn up their noses at them.'
  "Huh," the child said. "They wear pants. They’re sixteen and
they got a car. Somebody said they were both going to be Church
of God preachers because you don't have to know nothing to be
one. "
  "They would be perfectly safe with those boys allright," her
mother said and in a minute she got up and called their grandmother
on the telephone and after she had talked t< the old woman
a half an hour, it was arranged that Wendell and Cory would come
to supper and afterwards take the girls to the fair.
  Susan and Joanne were so pleased that they washed their hair
and rolled it up on aluminum curlers. Hah, thought, he child, sitting
cross-legged on the bed to watch them undo the curlers, wait’ll you
get a load of Wendell and Cory! "You'll like these boys." she said.
"Wendell is six feet tall and got red hair. Cory is six feet six
inches tails got black hair and wears a sport jacket and they gottem
this car with a squirrel tail on the front."
  "How does a child like you know so much; about  these men?"
Susan asked and pushed her face up close to the mirror to watch
the pupils in her eyes dilate.
  The child lay back on the bed and began to count  the narrow
boards in the ceiling until she lost her place.  I  know them all
right, she said to someone. We fought in the world  war together.
They were under me and I saved them five times from Japanese
suicide divers and Wendell said I am going to marry that kid and
the other said oh no you ain't I am and I said neither one of you
is because I will court marshall you all before you can bat an eye.
"I've seen them around is all," she said.
  When they came the girls stared at them a second and then
began to giggle and talk to each other about the convent. They
sat in the swing together and Wendell and Cory sat on the banisters
together. They sat like monkeys, their knees on a level with their
shoulders and their arms hanging down between. They were short
thin boys with red faces and high cheekbones and pale seed-like
eyes. They had brought a harmonica and a guitar. One of them
began to blow softly on the mouth organ, watching the girls over
it, and the other started strumming the guitar and then began to
sing, not watching them but keeping his head tilted upward as if
he were only interested in hearing himself. He was singing a hillbilly
song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.
The child was standing on a barrel pushed into some bushes at
the side of the house, her face on a level with the porch floor. The
sun was going down and the sky was turning a bruised violet color
that seemed to be connected with the sweet mournful sound of the
music. Wendell began to smile as he sang and to look at the girls.
He looked at Susan with a dog-like loving look and sang,

"I've found a friend in Jesus,
He's everything to me,
He's the lily of the valley,
He's the One who's set me free!"

Then he turned the same look on Joanne and sang,

"A wall of fire about me,
I've nothing now to fear,
He's the My of the valley,
And I'll always have Him near!"

  The girls looked at each other and held their lips stiff so as
not to giggle but Susan let out one anyway and clapped her hand
on her mouth. The singer frowned and for a few seconds only
strummed the guitar. Then he began "The Old Rugged Cross"

and they listened politely but when he had finished they said, "Let
us sing one!" and before he could start another, they began to
sing with their convent-trained voices,

"Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur Cernui:
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:"

The child watched the boys' solemn faces turn with perplexed
frowning stares at each other as if they were uncertain whether they
were being made fun of.

"Praestct fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.
Genitori, Genitoque
Laus et jubilatio
Salus, honor, virtus quoque ... "

The boys' faces were dark red in the gray-purple light. They
looked fierce and startled.

"Sit et benedictio;
Procedenti ab utroque
Compar sit laudatio.
Amen."

The girls dragged out the Amen and then there was a silence.
"That must be Jew singing," Wendell said and began to tune
the guitar.

The girls giggled idiotically but the child stamped her foot on
the barrel. "You big dumb ox!" she shouted. "You big dumb Church
of God ox!" she roared and fell off the barrel and scrambled up
and shot around the corner of the house as they jumped from the
banister to see who was shouting.
  Her mother had arranged for them to have supper in the back
yard and she had a table laid out there under some Japanese
lanterns that she pulled out for garden parties. "I ain't eating with
them," the child said and snatched her plate off the table and
carried it to the kitchen and sat down with the thin blue-gummed
cook and ate her supper.

   "Howcome you be so ugly sometime?" the cook asked.
  "Those stupid idiots," the child said.
The lanterns gilded the leaves of the trees orange on the level
where they hung and above them was black-green and below them
were different dim muted colors that made the girls sitting at
the table look prettier than they were. From time to time, the
child turned her head and glared out the kitchen window at the
scene below.
  "God could strike you deaf dumb and blind," the cook said, "and
then you wouldn't be as smart as you is."
  "I would still be smarter than some," the child said.
  After supper they left for the fair. She wanted to go to the
fair but not with them so even if they had asked her she wouldn't
have gone. She went upstairs and paced the long bedroom with
her hands locked together behind her back and her head thrust
forward and an expression, fierce and dreamy both, on her face.
She didn't turn on the electric light but let the darkness collect and
make the room smaller and more private. At regular intervals a
light crossed the open window and threw shadows on the wall. She
stopped and stood looking out over the dark slopes, past where
the pond glinted silver, past the wall of woods to the speckled sky
where a long finger of light was revolving up and around and
away, searching the air as if it were hunting for the lost sun. It
was the beacon light from the fair.
  She could hear the distant sound of the calliope and she saw in
her head all the tents raised up in a kind of gold sawdust light
and the diamond ring of the ferris wheel going around and around
up in the air and down again and the screeking merry-go-round
going around and around on the ground. A fair lasted five or six
days and there was a special afternoon for school children and a
special night for niggers. She had gone last year on the afternoon
for school children and had seen the monkeys and the fat man and
had ridden on the ferris wheel. Certain tents were closed then because
they contained things that would be known only to grown
people but she had looked with interest at the advertising on the
closed tents, at the faded-looking pictures on the canvas of people
in tights, with stiff stretched composed faces like the faces of the
martyrs waiting to have their tongues cut out by the Roman soldier.
She had imagined that what was inside these tents concerned medicine
and she had made up her mind to be a doctor when she
grew up.
  She had since changed and decided to be an engineer but as
she looked out the window and followed the revolving searchlight
as it widened and shortened and wheeled in its are, she felt that
she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer.
She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that
included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would
never be a saint. She did not steal or murder but she was a born
liar and slothful and she sassed her mother and was deliberately
ugly to almost everybody. She was eaten up also with the sin of
Pride, the worst one. She made fun of the Baptist preacher who
came to the school at commencement to give the devotional. She
would pull down her mouth and hold her forehead as if she were
in agony and groan, "Fawther, we thank Thee," exactly the way
he did and she had been told many times not to do it. She could
never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they
killed her quick.
  She could stand to be shot but not to be burned in oil. She didn't
know if she could stand to be torn to pieces by lions or not. She
began to prepare her martyrdom, seeing herself in a pair of tights
in a great arena, lit by the early Christians hanging in cages of fire,
making a gold dusty light that fell on her and the lions. The first
lion charged forward and fell at her feet, converted. A whole series
of lions did the same. The lions liked her so much she even slept
with them and finally the Romans were obliged to burn her but
to their astonishment she would not burn down and finding she
was so hard to kill, they finally cut off her heal very quickly with
a sword and she went immediately to heaven. She rehearsed this
several times, returning each time at the entrance of Paradise to the
lions.
  Finally she got up from the window and got ready for bed and
got in without saying her prayers. There were two heavy double
beds in the room. The girls were occupying the other one and she
tried to think of something cold and clammy that she could hide
in their bed but her thought was fruitless. She didn't have anything
she could think of, like a chicken carcass or a piece of beef liver.
The sound of the calliope coming through the window kept her
awake and she remembered that she hadn't said her prayers and got
up and knelt down and began them. She took a running start and
went through to the other side of the Apostle's Creed and then
hung by her chin on the side of the bed, empty-minded. Her
prayers, when she remembered to say them, were usually perfunctory
but sometimes when she had done something wrong or heard music
or lost something, or sometimes for no reason at all, she would be
moved to fervor and would think of Christ on the long journey to
Calvary, crushed three times on the rough cross. Her mind would
stay on this a while and then get empty and when something roused
her, she would find that she was thinking of a different thing entirely,
of some dog or some girl or something she was going to do
some day. Tonight, remembering Wendell and Cory, she was filled
with thanksgiving and almost weeping with delight, she said, "Lord,
Lord, thank You that I'm not in the Church of God, thank You
Lord, thank You!" and got back in bed and kept repeating it until
she went to sleep.
  The girls came in at a quarter to twelve and waked her up with
their giggling. They turned on the small blue-shaded lamp to see
to get undressed by and their skinny shadows climbed up the wall
and broke and continued moving about softly on the ceiling. The
child sat up to hear what all they had seen at the fair. Susan had a
plastic pistol full of cheap candy and Joanne a pasteboard cat with
red polka dots on it. "Did you see the monkeys dance?" the child
asked. "Did you see that fat man and those midgets?"
  "All kinds of freaks," Joanne said. And then she said to Susan,
  "I enjoyed it all but the you--know-what," and her face assumed a
peculiar expression as if she had bit into something that she didn't
know if she liked or not.
  The other stood still and shook her head once and nodded slightly
at the child. "Little pitchers," she said in a low voice but the child
heard it and her heart began to beat very fast.
  She got out of her bed and climbed onto the footboard of theirs.
They turned off the light and got in but she didn't move. She sat
there, looking hard at them until their faces were well defined the dark. "I'm not as old as you all," she said, "but I'm about million times smarter."
  "There are some things," Susan said, "that a child of your age
doesn't know," and they both began to giggle.
  "Go back to your own bed," Joanne said.
  The child didn't move. "One time," she said, her voice hollow sounding
in the dark, "I saw this rabbit have rabbits."
  There was a silence. Then Susan said, "How?" in an indifferent
tone and she knew that she had them. She said she wouldn't tell
until they told about the you-know-what. Actually she had never
seen a rabbit have rabbits but she forgot this as they began to tell
what they had seen in the tent.
  It had been a freak with a particular name but they couldn't remember
the name. The tent where it was had been divided into
two parts by a black curtain, one side for men and one for women.
The freak went from one side to the other, talking first to the men
and then to the women, but everyone could hear. The stage ran
all the way across the front. The girls heard the freak say to the
men, "I'm going to show you this and if you laugh, God may
strike you the same way." The freak had a country voice, slow and
nasal and neither high nor low, just flat. "God made me thisaway
and if you laugh He may strike you the same way. This is the
way He wanted me to be and I ain't disputing HIS way. I'm
showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to
act like ladies and gentlemen. I never done it to myself nor had a
thing to do with it but I'm making the best of it. I don't dispute
hit." Then there was a long silence on the other side of the tent and
finally the freak left the men and came over onto the women's side
and said the same thing.
  The child felt every muscle strained as if she were hearing the
answer to a riddle that was more puzzling than the riddle itself.
  "You mean it had two heads?" she said.
  "No," Susan said, "it was a man and woman both. It pulled up
its dress and showed us. It had on a blue dress."
  The child wanted to ask how it could be a man and woman both
without two heads but she did not. She wanted to get back into her
own bed and think it out and she began to climb down off the
footboard.
  "What about the rabbit?" Joanne asked.
The child stopped and only her be: appeared, over the footboard,
abstracted, absent. "It spit them out of its mouth." she said, "six of
them."
  She lay in bed trying to picture the tent with the freak walking
from side to side but she was too sleepy to figure it out. She was
better able to see the faces of the country people watching, the
men more solemn than they were in church, and the women stern
and polite, with painted-looking eyes, standing as if they were
waiting for the first note of the piano to begin the hymn. She could
hear the freak saying, "God made me thisaway and I don't dispute
hit," and the people saying, "Amen. Amen."
  "God done this to me and I praise Him."
  "Amen. Amen."
  "He could strike you thisaway."
  "Amen. Amen."
  "But he has not,"
  "Amen."
  "Raise yourself up. A temple of tile Holy Ghost. You! You are
God's temple, don't you know? Don't you know? God's Spirit has
a dwelling in you, don't you know?"
  "Amen. Amen."
  "If anybody desecrates the temple Of God, God will bring him to
ruin and if you laugh, He may strike you thisaway.  A temple of
God is a holy thing. Amen. Amen "
  "I am a temple of the Holy Ghost.'
  "Amen."
  The people began to slap their hands without making a loud
noise and with a regular beat between the Amens, more and more
softly, as if they knew there was a child near, half asleep.

  The next afternoon the girls put on their brown convent uniforms
again and the child and her mot her took ::hem back to Mount
St. Scholastica. "Oh glory, oh Pete!" they said. "Back to the salt
mines." Alonzo Myers drove them and the child sat in front with

him and her mother sat in back between the two girls, telling them
such things as how pleased she was to have had them and how they
must come back again and then about the good times she and
their mothers had had when they were girls at the convent. The
child didn't listen to any of this twaddle but kept as close to the
locked door as she could get and held her head out the window.
They had thought Alonzo would smell better on Sunday but he
did not. With her hair blowing over her face she could look directly
into the ivory sun which was framed in the middle of the blue
afternoon but when she pulled it away from her eyes she had to
squint.
  Mount St. Scholastica was a red brick house set back in a garden
in the center of town. There was a filling station on one side of and a firehouse on the other. It had a high black grillework fence
around it and narrow bricked walks between old trees and japonica
bushes that were heavy with blooms. A big moon-faced nun came
bustling to the door to let them in and embraced her mother and
would have done the same to her but that she stuck out her hand
and preserved a frigid frown, looking just past the sister's shoes at
the wainscoting. They had a tendency to kiss even homely children,
but the nun shook her hand vigorously and even cracked her
knuckles a little and said she must come to the chapel, that benediction
was just beginning. You put your foot in their door and they
got you praying, the child thought as they hurried down the polished
corridor.
  You'd think she had to catch a train, she continued in the same
ugly vein as they entered the chapel when the sisters were kneeling
on one side and the girls, all in brown uniforms, on the other. The
chapel smelled of incense. It was light green and gold, a series of
springing arches that ended with the one over the altar where the
priest was kneeling in front of the monstrance, bowed low. A small
boy in a surplice was standing behind him, swinging the censer. The
child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were
well into the "T'antum Ergo" before her ugly thoughts stopped and
she began to realize that she was in the presence of God. Help me
not to be so mean, she began mechanically. Help me not to give
her so much sass. Help me not to talk like I do. Her mind began
to get quiet and then empty but when the priest raised the monstrance
with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it,
she was thinking of the tent at the fair that had the freak in it.
The freak was saying, "I don't dispute hit. This is the way He
wanted me to be."
  As they were leaving the convent door, the big nun swooped down
on her mischievously and nearly smothered her in the black habit,
mashing the side of her face into the crucifix hitched onto her belt
and then holding her off and looking at her with little periwinkle
eyes.
  On the way home she and her mother sat in the back and Alonzo
drove by himself in the front. The child observed three folds of fat
in the back of his neck and noted that his ears were pointed almost
like a pig's. Her mother, making conversation, asked him if he
had gone to the fair.
  "Gone," he said, "and never missed a thing and it was good I
gone when I did because they ain't going to have it next week like
they said they was."
  "Why?" asked her mother.
  "They shut it on down," he said. "Some of the preachers from
town gone out and inspected it and got the police to shut it on
down."
  Her mother let the conversation drop and the child's round face
was lost in thought. She turned it toward the window and looked
out over a stretch of pasture land that rose and fell with a gathering
greenness until it touched the dark woods. The sun was a huge red
ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out
of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over
the trees.

End