Flannery O'Connor

THE
COMPLETE
STORIES

Contents

INTRODUCTION by Robert Giroux

The Geranium 
The Barber
Wildcat
The Crop
The Turkey
The Train
The Peeler
T he Heart of the Park 
A Stroke of Good Fortune 
Enoch and the Gorilla 
A Good Man Is Hard to Find 
A Late Encounter with the Enemy 
The Life You Save May Be Your Own 
The River 
A Circle in the Fire 
The Displaced Person 
A Temple of the Holy Ghost 
The Artificial Nigger 
Good Country People 
You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead 
Greenleaf 
A View o] the Woods 
The Enduring Chill 
The Comforts of Home 
Everything That Rises Must Converge 
The Partridge Festival 
The Lame Shall Enter First 
Why Do the Heathen Rage? 
Revelation 
Parker's Back
Judgement Day

NOTES 

***

Introduction

Flannery O'Connor's first book has never, up to now, been
published. It was entitled The Geranium: A Collection of Short
Stories and consists of the first six stories in this volume. The title
page of the original manuscript, in the library of the University of
Iowa, bears the legend, "A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, in the
Department of English, in the Graduate College of the State University
of Iowa." It is dated June 1947 and a separate page carries
a dedication to her teacher, Paul Engle.
  At their first meeting in his office, in 1946, Mr. Engle recalls,* he
was unable to understand a word of Flannery's native Georgian
tongue: "Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just
said on a pad. She wrote : 'My name is Flannery O'Connor. I am
not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer's Workshop?' ... I told
her to bring examples of her writing and we would consider her,
late as it was. Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest
sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive:
just like Flannery herself. For a few weeks we had this strange and
yet trusting relationship. Soon I understood those Georgia pronunciations.
  The stories were quietly filled with insight, shrewd
about human weakness, hard and compassionate ... She was shy
about having them read, and when it was her turn to have a story
presented in the Workshop, I would read it aloud anonymously.
Robert Penn Warren was teaching a semester while Flannery was
at the University of Iowa; there was a scene about a black and a
white man, and Warren criticized it ... It was changed. Flannery

*Letter to Robert Giroux dated July 13, 1971.

always had a flexible and objective view of her own writing, constantly
revising, and in every case improving. The will to be a writer
was adamant; nothing could resist it, not even her own sensibility
about her own work. Cut, alter, try it again ... Sitting at the back
of the room, silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant
talkers who serenade every writing-class with their loudness.
The only communicating gesture she would make was an occasional
amused and shy smile at something absurd. The dreary chair she
sat in glowed."
  The publishing career of this unknown writer of twenty-one had
already started. Flannery mailed "The Geranium" to the editors of
Accent as early as February 1946.** They accepted it at once and
printed it in their summer issue. On the basis of the stories she later
incorporated into her novel-in-progress, Wise Blood, Mr. Engle
recommended her for a prize offered by a publisher for a first novel.
In the spring of 1947 she was awarded this prizes--the sum of $750,
which was to serve as part of the advance against royalties if the
publisher ultimately accepted the novel.
  Flannery received her master's degree that summer; Sewanee
Review published "The Train" the next spring; in June 1948 she
took the important and crucial step of finding a literary agent and a
lifelong friend, Elizabeth McKee. Miss McKee placed her story "The
Capture" (entitled "The Turkey" in the thesis) with Mademoiselle
in November. It was shortly after this--I was not the publisher
involved with the prize-that I met Flannery O'Connor.

  Robert Lowell brought her into my office late in February 1949.
They had come to New York from Yaddo, the writer's colony at
Saratoga Springs, where Flannery worked on Wise Blood and
Lowell on his poems. Behind her soft-spoken speech, clear-eyed gaze
and shy manner, I sensed a tremendous strength. This was the
rarest kind of young writer, one who was prepared to work her
utmost and knew exactly what she must do with her talent. I rather
regretted, as a publisher, meeting such an interesting writer at the
start of a career in which I could play no part. She told me she was
committed elsewhere, and if I knew anything it was that she would

**We are indebted to Daniel Curley, former editor of Accent  for verifying
this date.

honor her commitment. She asked about a new writer I had recently
published--Thomas Merton; I gave her a copy of The Seven Storey
Mountain to take with her to her mother's house in Milledgeville,
Georgia. Later I heard that she would be coming north again to
live in Connecticut with my friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald and
I hoped I'd have the opportunity to know her better.
  It was not until after her death in 1964 that I learned exactly
how her publishing fate took an unexpected turn. (Our later publishing
relationship also developed surprisingly, and I'll come to that.)
The details are fully and rather comically recorded in her correspondence
with Elizabeth McKee, who gave me copies of the
letters before she added the originals to the papers that Flannery's
mother, Regina O'Connor, is collecting. The excerpts from
Flannery's letters are quoted here with the permission of her literary
executor, Robert Fitzgerald.
  In her first letter (June 19, 1948) to Miss McKee, Flannery revealed
she had been working on the novel "a year and a half and
will probably be two more years finishing it." She described her
writing habits in a letter dated July 13: "I must tell you how I work.
I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what
I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think
until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again. I am working
on the twelfth chapter now. I long ago quit numbering the pages but
I suppose I am past the 50,000 word mark. Of the twelve chapters
only a few won't have to be rewritten, and I can't exhibit such formless
stuff. It would discourage me to look at it right now and
anyway I yearn to go about my business to the end."
  At the end of the year, when she was worried about money, her
agent advised her to submit the new chapters in order to get a
definite commitment and perhaps a further advance. From Yaddo,
December 15, 1948: "Perhaps I shall get down [to New York] in
January and perhaps before that send you the chapters I am working
on ... I have decided, however, that no good comes of sending
anything off in a hurry." On January 20, 1949, Flannery wrote:
"Here are the first nine chapters which please show [the publisher]
and let us be on with financial thoughts. They are, of course, not
finished but they are finished enough for the present ... " When
there was no response by February 5: "I'll be anxious to hear the
outcome . . ."
  She heard it on February 16 and it was not to her liking. One
can sympathize with the publisher's problem at this early stage of
composition. Wise Blood was a strange book, as Flannery would
have been the first to acknowledge. What she could not accept was
the tone of the publisher's letter. He said he thought she was a
pretty straight shooter, that she had an astonishing gift, but that
some aspects of the book were obscured by her habit of rewriting
over and over again. To be honest, he added, he sensed a kind of
aloneness in the book, as if she were writing out of her own experience,
and consciously limiting this experience. He wished she would
sit down and tell him what was what. He hoped she didn't mind
his forthright letter.
  Flannery wrote at once to Miss McKee: "Please tell me what is
behind this Sears-Roebuck Straight Shooter approach. I presume ...
either that [the publisher] will not take the novel as it will be if left
to my fiendish care (it will be essentially as it is), or that [the
publisher] would like to rescue it at this point and train it into a
conventional novel ... The letter is addressed to a slightly dimwitted
Campfire Girl, and I cannot look forward with composure to
a lifetime of others like them."
  At the same time, in an effort to honor her commitment, she
answered the publisher's letter next day: "I can only hope that in
the finished novel the direction will be clearer ... I feel that whatever
virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the
limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel,
and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely
from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience
I write from ... In short, I am amenable to criticism but only
within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend
to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will
be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you now have."
  Matters had not improved much by the following April, when she
wrote Paul Engle to tell him that "other publishers who have read
the two printed chapters"-she was referring to "The Train" and
to the publication that winter of "The Heart of the Park" in
Partisan Review--"are interested." She also told him about her
meeting with the dissatisfied publisher, at which he "and I came
to the conclusion that I was 'prematurely arrogant.' I supplied
him with the phrase." She thought that "no one will understand
my need to work this novel out in my own way better than you,
although you may feel that I should work faster. I work ALL the
time, but I cannot work fast. No one can convince me I shouldn't
rewrite as much as I do." She concluded with the news that she had
been turned down for the Guggenheim fellowship for which Mr.
Engle had recommended her. (Her other sponsors were Robert
Lowell, Philip Rahv and Robert Penn Warren.)
  I met her again in May 1950, at the christening of Maria
Juliana Fitzgerald in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I noted what good
spirits Flannery was in, as we gravely performed our roles as
godparents, renouncing the devil and all his works and pomps. (It
is to be regretted that she did not live to see our godchild become
Sister Mary Julian in 1970.) She told me she was still working hard
on the novel and was still committed to her publisher, though her
literary agent soon informed me that the submission of additional
chapters had not allayed his doubts. Finally, in October, after she
had obtained a release from him, I offered and she signed a contract
for Wise Blood.

  The strength I sensed in Flannery at our first meeting now had
an incredible strain put on it. She was stricken with lupus on her
journey home for Christmas, and spent nine months, desperately ill,
in and out of Emory Hospital in Atlanta. On her release she was
unable to climb stairs, and Regina O'Connor then decided to move
to "Andalusia," their country place five miles from town, which was
to be their home and Flannery's refuge from then on. By the following
September Flannery was writing Miss McKee, "The last time I
saw Bob Giroux, he said we would push the date rof delivery of the
manuscript] up to the first of the year [1951) but that there was
nothing magic in that date. There is nothing magic in my speed or
progress at this time, but I don't know anything for it. I plan to
last until the first of the year and then see what I've got." A full year
later (September I, 1951) she wrote Miss McKee from Milledgeville:
"Bob Giroux and Caroline Gordon made some suggestions for
improving my book and I have been working on these and have
by now about come up with another draft of it."
  By the end of the year the novel was ready, and we began to
prepare for publication. Flannery had less vanity than anyone I have
ever known. When I asked her for a photograph to use on the book
jacket, I expected a picture taken before her illness. The new one
she sent was not unattractive, and she looked out at the reader with
that clear-eyed gaze of hers, but her hair had not fully grown back
nor had the puffiness induced by cortisone wholly subsided. The
photograph was widely reproduced when Wise Blood was published
in May 1952. I was disappointed by the reviews more than she was;
they all recognized her power but missed her point.
  In the five years between 1947, when a draft of the first chapter of
Wise Blood was written, and 1952, Flannery's development was
amazing. In the three years following, she wrote better and better.
Starting late in 1952 with "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a
masterpiece of a story, she turned out one beauty after another,
including "The River," "The Life You Save May Be Your Own,"
"The Displaced Person," "The Artificial Nigger" and "Good
Country People." Catherine Carver, whom we were fortunate enough
to have as an editor, and who worked with Flannery at this period,
brought each new story into my office with more or less the same
remark, "Wait till you read this one!" Early in 1955 Flannery completed
work on her second book, a collection of these stories which
she entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find. In January we sent it to
press, having set publication for June. I remember our amusement at
Evelyn Waugh's reaction to the advance proofs we sent him: "If
these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed
remarkable." At the beginning of April, before the book appeared,
I resigned from the firm and joined the house with which I have
since been associated. When Flannery sent me an inscribed copy,
soon after my departure, I felt a twinge of sadness that my editorial
association with her books had ended.
  Once again fate rearranged what seemed to be an unalterable
course. After the very successful publication of A Good Man Is

Hard to Find, Flannery was offered a new contract about which
she asked my advice, saying she wanted to stay as long as Catherine
Carver remained as her editor. In that case, I suggested, why not
ask that such a stipulation be incorporated in the contract? This was
not readily granted, but Flannery had made up her mind and in the
end she got what she wanted. Within three years, after Catherine
Carver and Denver Lindley had left, it came to pass that Flannery was
free to join the house she remained with until her death. We contracted
for her third book, "a novel in progress," on April 15, 1958,
and published The Violent Bear It Away in 1960. Then I learned that
Wise Blood was out of print, and we soon acquired this classic work.
She wrote a short and eloquent preface for the second edition, describing
the book as "a comic novel about a Christian malgre lui" and
stating that it had been written by "an author congenitally innocent
of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ
is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for
readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence."
She ended by defining her theme, free will or freedom,
as "a mystery, and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only
be asked to deepen." We reissued Wise Blood in 1962, on the tenth
anniversary of the original publication, and it lives on both in cloth
and paperback editions. Didn't some wise man define a classic as a
book that does not stay out of print?

  One of Flannery's admirers was Thomas Merton, who became
more of a fan with each new book of hers. Over the years I came to
see how much the two had in common--a highly developed sense
of comedy, deep faith, great intelligence. The aura of aloneness surrounding each of them was not an accident. It was their metier,
in which they refined and deepened their very different talents
in a short span of time. They both died at the height of their
powers.
  Finally, they were both as American as one can be. When publication
of Merton's The Sign of Jonas was forbidden by the Abbot
General in France, I was able to obtain its release only with the help
of Jacques Maritain, who wrote him in beautiful French (the Abbot
General did not read English and consequently had not read The
Sign of Jonas), explaining what the "American Trappist" was up to.
As for Flannery, whose work can only be understood in an American
setting, when a German publisher wanted to drop some of her
stories as too shocking for Germanic sensibilities, she wrote Miss
McKee, "I didn't think I was that vicious."
  On a trip south in 1959 1 stopped at the Abbey of Gethsemani in
Kentucky to see Merton, before going to see Flannery in Georgia.
He gave me a presentation copy of the beautifully designed private
edition of Prometheus: A Meditation to take to her. He was
much interested in Flannery's peacocks. From previous visits to
"Andalusia" I was able to tell him about their habits--how they
roost at dusk by gradual hops from ground to fence post to tree limb;
how their trains get caught under car wheels because they refuse to
hurry; how vain they are (they seemed to jockey for good angles
when they saw my camera); how funny it is to see peachicks
rehearsing with their immature featherduster tails; and how rare
it is to see the ultimate display, when the peacock shimmers and
shakes his feathers in a kind of ecstasy at the height of preening. 1
could not tell Merton enough about them or about Flannery and
her surroundings. What was Milledgeville like? Well, one of its
sights was the beautiful ante-bellum Cline house, where Flannery's
aunt served a formal midday dinner. He was surprised to learn that
far from being "backwoods" Milledgeville had once been the capital
of Georgia. I also showed him a letter in which Flannery wrote:
"Somebody sent me a gossip column that said Gene Kelly would
make his TV debut in Flannery O'Connor's 'backwoods love story'
[The Life You Save May Be Your Own). I certainly can't afford to
miss this metamorphosis."
  When I got to the O'Connors', Flannery was curious to hear about
Gethsemani. Was Merton allowed to talk to me ? Yes, without
restriction. I described our walks in the woods and the monastic
routine of the day: first office (Matins) at two a.m. and last office
(Compline) at sunset, followed by bed. I mentioned that in Louisville
I'd bought Edith Sitwell's recording of Facade, which Merton
played over and over, laughing so hard that tears ran down his
cheeks, and Flannery asked me to recite some of the poems. Even my
pallid approximation of Dame Edith's renderings of "Daisy and
Lily, lazy and silly," "Long Steel Grass" (pronounced "Grawss"),
"Black Mrs. Behemoth" and the rest made her face light up with
smiles.
   When Flannery died, Merton was not exaggerating his estimate
of her worth when he said he would not compare her with such good
writers as Hemingway, Porter and Sartre but rather with "someone
like Sophocles ... I write her name with honor, for all the truth and
all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor."
  Up to the very end, she worked hard. She was working on Everything
That Rises Must Converge during her final illness. "I have been
thinking about this collection of my stories and what can be done
to get it out with me sick," she wrote Miss McKee on May 7, 1964.
"I am definitely out of commission for the summer and maybe
longer with this lupus. I have to stay mostly in bed ... If I were well
there is a lot of rewriting and polishing I could do, but in my
present state of health [the stories] are essentially all right the way
they are." This is a typical O'Connor understatement; some of these
last stories, like "Revelation" and the title story, are as nearly
perfect as stories can be. In the same letter she proposed eight stories
for the book, one of which, "The Partridge Festival," she later withdrew.
All eight had appeared in magazines. Later in May she
wrote, "I forgot to tell Bob Giroux that the title Everything That
Rises Must Converge is all right with me if he thinks that is what
it ought to be." It seemed absolutely right and (though she never
said so) may have dated from a few years earlier when I sent her a
French anthology of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, one
section of which was entitled Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge. I was
unaware of the two unpublished stories she was working on.
  The first of these new stories was "Parker's Back." Caroline
Gordon later wrote of it: "Miss O'Connor's stories are all about the
operations of supernatural grace in the lives of natural men and
women. Such operations are infinitely various but so delicate that
they have eluded some of the subtlest writers. In ... 'Parker's Back,'
Miss O'Connor seems to have succeeded where the great Flaubert
failed: in the dramatization of that particular heresy which denies
Our Lord corporeal substance. We do not naturally like anything
which is unfamiliar. No wonder Miss O'Connor's writings have
baffled the reviewers, so much so they have reached for any cliche
they could lay hold of in order to have some way of apprehending
this original and disturbing work."
  The final story, " Judgement Day," was mailed to me in early July.
It is a revised and expanded version of "The Geranium," which
appears to have been a favorite of hers, for letters to Miss McKee
reveal that in 1955 she had also worked on an intermediate version
under the title "An Exile in the East." As "Judgement Day" it became
the ninth story in the collection published posthumously in
1965·
  What turned out to be my last letter to Flannel y was dated July 7,
1964. I knew of the recurrence of her illness, of course, but I did
not know that the lupus was now uncontrolled. I enclosed with
my letter an advance proof of our catalogue description of Everything
That Rises Must Converge as it was then conceived. She never
replied and in late July she was taken to the Baldwin County hospital
at Milledgeville, where she died in a coma on August 3·

  There are thirty-one stories in this volume. Nineteen are taken
from Flannery's two collections and twelve  appear for the first time
in book form. For this edition we have followed the author's
original manuscripts for "The Partridge Festival," "Why Do the
Heathen Rage?" and the first six stories. For the latter group we have
also retained the order she followed in her thesis. The order of the
other stories is chronological according to date of composition and
does not duplicate the arrangement the author worked out for the
two collections, which are of course available as she wanted them.
Nor is it implied that all the stories here are of equal merit. It simply
seems desirable to preserve as complete a collection of Flannery
O'Connor's short fiction as possible.
  Elizabeth Bishop, who with her poet's eye sees more than most of
us, wrote at the time of Flannery's death: "I am sure her few books
will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly,
but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases,
and an odd insight that contains more real poetry than a dozen books
of poems." She added a bit of testimony that Flannery herself would

have relished: "Critics who accuse her of exaggeration are quite
wrong, I think. I lived in Florida for several years next to a flourishing
'Church of God' (both white and black congregation), where
every Wednesday night Sister Mary and her husband spoke in
tongues.' After those Wednesday nights, nothing Flannery O'Connor
ever wrote could seem at all exaggerated to me."
ROBERT GIROUX

THE COMPLETE STORIES OF
Flannery O'Connor

The Geranium

By Flannery O’ Connor

1946

OLD DUDLEY folded into the chair he was gradually molding
to his own shape and looked out the window fifteen feet
away into another window framed by blackened red brick. He was
waiting for the geranium. They put it out every morning about ten
and they  took it in at five-thirty. Mrs. Carson back home had a
geranium in her window. There were plenty of geraniums at home,
better-looking geraniums. Ours are sho nuff geraniums, Old Dudley
thought, not any er this pale pink business with green, paper bows.
The geranium they would put in the window reminded him of the
Grisby boy at home who had polio and had to be wheeled out every
morning and left in the sun to blink. Lutisha could have taken that
geranium and stuck it in the ground and had something worth
looking at in a few weeks. Those people across the alley had no
business with one. They set it out and let the hot sun bake it all
day and they put it so near the ledge the wind could almost knock
it over. They had no business with it, no business with it. It
shouldn't have been there. Old Dudley felt his throat knotting up.
Lutish could root anything. Rabie too. His throat was drawn taut.
He "laid his head back and tried to clear his mind. There wasn't
much he could think of to think about that didn't do his throat that
way.
  His daughter came in. "Don't you want to go for a walk?" she
asked. She looked provoked.
  He didn't answer her.
  "Well?"
  "No." He wondered how long she was going to stand there. She
made his.eves feel like his throat. They'd get watery and she'd see.
She had seen before and had looked sorry for him. She'd looked
sorry for herself too; but she could er saved herself, Old Dudley
thought, if she'd just have let him alone-let him stay where he
was back home and not be so taken up with her damn duty.
She moved out of the room, leaving an audible sigh, to crawl over
him and remind him again of that one minute-that wasn't her
fault at all-when suddenly he had wanted to go to New York to
live with her.
  He could have got out of going. He could have been stubborn
and told her he'd spend his life where he'd always spent it, send
him or not send him the money every month, he'd get along with
his pension and odd jobs. Keep her damn money-she needed it
worse than he did. She would have been glad to have had her duty
disposed of like that. Then she could have said if he died without
his children near him, it was his own fault; if he got sick and there
wasn't anybody to take care of him, well, he'd asked for it, she
could have said. But there was that thing inside him that had wanted
to see New York. He had been to Atlanta once when he was a boy
and he had seen New York in a picture show. Big Town Rhythm
it was. Big towns were important places. The thing inside him had
sneaked up on him for just one instant. The 'place like he'd seen in
the picture show had room for him! It was an important place and
it had room for him! He'd said yes, he'd go.
  He must have been sick when he said it. He couldn't have been
well and said it. He had been sick and she had been so taken up
with her damn duty, she had wangled it- out of him. Why did she
ha ve to come down there in the first place to pester him? He had
been doing all right. There was his pension that could feed him
and odd jobs that kept him his room in the boarding house.
  The window in that room showed him the river-thick and red
as it struggled over rocks and around curves. He tried to think how
it was besides red and slow. He added green brotches for trees on
either side of it and a brown spot for trash somewhere upstream. He
and Rabie had fished it in a flat-bottom boat every Wednesday.
Rabie knew the river up and .down for twenty miles. There wasn't
another nigger in Coa County that knew it like he did. He loved
the river, but it hadn't meant any'thing to Old Dudley. The fish
were what he was after. He liked to come in at night with a long
string of them and slap them down in the sink. "Few fish I got,"
he'd say. It took a man to get those fish, the old girls at the boarding
house always said. He and Rabie would start out early Wednesday
morning and fish all day. Rabiewould find the spots and row;
Old Dudley always caught them. Rabie didn't care much about
catching them-he just loved-the river. "Ain't no use settin' yo' line
down dere, boss," he'd say. "Ain't no fish dere. Dis 01' riber ain't
hidin' none nowhere 'round hyar, nawsuh." And he would giggle
and shift the boat downstream. That was Rabie. He could steal
cleaner than a weasel but he knew where the fish were. Old Dudley
always gave him the little ones.
  Old Dudley had lived upstairs in the corner room of the boarding
house ever since his wife died in ‘22. He protected the old ladies.
He was the man in the house and he did the things a man in the
house was supposed to do. It was a dull occupation at night when
the old girls crabbed and crocheted in the parlor and the rran in
the house had to listen and judge the sparrow-like wars that rasped
and twittered intermittently. But in the daytime there was Rabie.
Rabie and Lutisha lived down in the basement. Lutish cooked and
Rabie took care of the cleaning and the vegetable garden; but he
was sharp at sneaking off with half his work done and going to
help Old Dudley with some current project-building a hen house
or painting a door. He liked to listen, he liked to hear about
Atlanta when Old Dudley had been there and about how guns
were put together on the inside and all the other things the old man
knew.
  Sometimes at night they would go 'possum hunting. They never
got a 'possum but Old Dudley liked to get away from the ladies
once in a while and hunting was a good excuse. Rabie didn't like
'possum hunting. They never got a 'possum; they never even treed
one; and besides, he was mostly a water nigger. "We ain't gonna
go huntin' no 'possum tonight, is we, boss? I got a lil' business I
wants tuh tend tuh," he'd say when Old Dudley would start
talking about hounds and guns. "Whose chickens you gonna steal
tonight?" Dudley would grin. "I reckon I be huntin' 'possum
tonight," Rabie'd sigh.
  Old Du~ley would get out his gun and take it apart and, as Rabie
cleaned the pieces, would explain the mechanism to him. Then
he'd put it together again. Rabie always marveled at the way he
could put it together again. Old Dudley would have liked to have
explained New York to Rabie. If he could have showed it to Rabie,
it wouldn't have been so big-he wouldn't have felt pressed down
every time he went out in it. "It ain't so big," he would have said.
"Don't let it get you down, Rabie. It's just like any other city and
cities ain't all that complicated."
  But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute
and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn't even live in a
house. She lived in a building-the middle in a row of buildings
all alike, all blackened-red and gray with rasp-mouthed people
hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other
people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you
could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape
measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he'd
been dazed by the building the first week. He'd wake up expecting
the halls to have changed in the night and he'd look out the door
and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same
way. He wondered where he'd be if he walked to the end of one of
them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the
building-nowhere.
  The next week he had become more conscious of the daughter
and son-in-law and their boy-no place to be out of their way. The
son-in-law was a queer one. He drove a truck and came in only
on the weekends. He said "nah" for "no" and he'd never heard of a
'possum. Old Dudley slept in the room with the boy, who was sixteen
and couldn't be talked to. But sometimes when the daughter
and Old Dudley were alone in the apartment, she would sit down
and talk to him. First she had to think of something to say. Usually
it gave out before what she considered was the proper time to get
up and do something else, so he would have to say something. He
always tried to think of something he hadn't said before. She never
listened the second time. She was seeing that her father spent his
last years with his own family and not in a decayed boarding house
full of old women whose heads jiggled. She was doing her duty.
She had brothers and sisters who were not.
  Once she took him shopping with her but he was too slow. They
went in a "subway"-a railroad underneath the ground like a big
cave. People boiled out of trains and up steps and over into the
streets. They rolled off the street and down steps and into trains black
and white and yellow all mixed up like vegetables in soup.
Everything was boiling. The trains swished in from tunnels, up
canals, and all of a sudden stopped. The people coming out pushed
through the people coming in and a noise rang and the train
swooped off again. Old Dudley and the daughter had to go in three
different ones before they got where they were going. He wondered
why people ever went out of their houses. He felt like his tongue
had slipped down in his stomach. She held him by the coat sleeve
and pulled him through the people.
  They went on an overhead train too. She called it an "El," They
had to go up on a high platform to catch it. Old Dudley looked
over the rail and could see the people rushing and the automobiles
rushing under him. He felt sick. He put one hand on the rail and
sank down on the wooden floor of the platform. The daughter
screamed and pulled him over from the edge. "Do you want to fall
off and kill yourself?" she shouted.
   Through a crack in the boards he could see the cars swimming
in the street. "I don't care," he murmured, "I don't care if I do
or not."
  "Come on," she said, "you'll feel better when we get home."
  "Home?" he repeated. The cars moved in a rhythm below him.
  "Come on," she said, "here it comes; we've just got time to make
it." They'd just had time to make all of them.
  They made that one. They came back to the building and the
apartment. The apartment was too tight. There was no place to
be where there wasn't somebody else. The kitchen opened into the
bathroom and the bathroom opened into everything else and you
were always where you started from. At home there was upstairs
and the basement and the river and downtown in front of Fraziers
. . . damn his throat.
  The geranium was late today. It was ten-thirty. They usually had
it out by ten-fifteen.
  Somewhere down the hall a woman shrilled something unintelligi8
bie out to the street; a radio was bleating the worn music to a
soap serial; and a garbage can crashed down a fire escape. The door
to the next apartment slammed and a sharp footstep clipped down
the hall. "That would be the nigger," Old Dudley muttered. "The
nigger with the shiny shoes." He had been there a week when the
nigger moved in. That Thursday he was looking out the door at
the dog-run halls when this nigger went into the next apartment.
He had on a gray, pin-stripe suit and a tan tie. His collar was stiff
and white and made a clear-cut line next to his neck. His shoes
were shiny tan-they matched his tie and his skin. Old Dudley
scratched his head. He hadn't known the kind of people that would
live thick in a building could afford servants. He chuckled. Lot of
good a nigger in a Sunday suit would do them. Maybe this nigger
would know the country around here-or maybe how to get to it.
They might could hunt. They might could find them a stream
somewhere. He shut the door and went to the daughter's room.
"Hey!" he shouted, "the folks next door got 'em a nigger. Must be
gonna clean for them. You reckon they gonna keep him every
day?"
  She looked up from making the bed. "What are you talking
about?"
  "I say they got 'em a servant next door-a nigger-all dressed up
in a Sunday suit."
  She walked to the other side of the bed. "You must be crazy,"
she said. "The next apartment is vacant and besides, nobody around
here can afford any servant."
  "I tell you I saw him," Old Dudley snickered. "Going right in
there with a tie and a white collar on-and sharp-toed shoes."
  "If he went in there, he's looking at it for himself," she muttered.
She went to the dresser and started fidgeting with things.
  Old Dudley laughed. She could be right funny when she wanted
to. "Well," he said, "I think I'll go over and see what day he gets
off. Maybe I can convince him he likes to fish," and he'd slapped his
pocket to make the two quarters jingle. Before he got out in the
hall good, she came tearing behind him and pulled him in. "Can't
you hear?" she'd yelled. "I meant what I said. He's renting that
himself if he went in there. Don't you go asking him any questions
or saying anything to him. I don't want any trouble with niggers."
  "You mean," Old Dudley murmured, "he's gonna live next door
to you?"
  She shrugged. "I suppose he is. And you tend to your own
business," she added. "Don't have anything to do with him."
  That's just the way she'd said it. Like he didn't have any sense
at all. But he'd told her off then. He'd stated his say and she knew
what he meant. "You ain't been raised that way!" he'd said thundery-
like. "You ain't been raised to live tight with niggers that
think they're just as good as you, and you think I'd go messin'
around with one er that kind! If you think I want anything to do
with them, you're crazy." He had had to slow down then because
his throat was tightening. She'd stood stiff up and said they lived
where they could afford to live and made the best of it. Preaching
to him! Then she'd walked stiff off without a word more. That was
her. Trying to be holy with her shoulders curved around and her
neck in the air. Like he was a fool. He knew Yankees let niggers
in their front doors and let them set on their sofas but he didn't
know his own daughter that was raised proper would stay next
door to them-and then think he didn't have no more sense than
to want to mix with them. Him!
  He got up and took a paper off another chair. He might as well
appear to be reading when she came through again. No use having
her standing up there staring at him, believing she had to think
up something for him to do. He looked over the paper at the
window across the alley. The geranium wasn't there yet. It had
never been this late before. The first day he'd seen it, he had been
sitting there looking out the window at the other window and he
had looked at his watch to see how long it had been since breakfast.
When he looked up, it was there. It startled him. He didn't
like flowers, but the geranium didn't look like a flower. It looked
like the sick Grisby boy at home and it was the color of the drapes
the old ladies had in the parlor and the paper bow on it looked like
the one behind Lutish's uniform she wore on Sundays. Lutish had
a fondness for sashes. Most niggers did, Old Dudley thought.
  The daughter came through again. He had meant to be looking
at the paper when she came through. "Do me a favor, will you?"
she asked as if she had just thought up a favor he could do.
  He hoped she didn't want him to go to the grocery again. He got
lost the time before. All the blooming buildings looked alike. He
nodded.
  "Go down to the third floor and ask Mrs. Schmitt to lend me the
shirt pattern she uses for Jake."
  Why couldn't she just let him sit? She didn't need the shirt
pattern. "All right," he said. "What number is it?"
  "Number 10-just like this. Right below us three floors down."
  Old Dudley was always afraid that when he went out in the
dog runs, a door would suddenly open and one of the snipe-nosed
men that hung off the window ledges in his undershirt would
growl, "What are you doing here?" The door to the nigger's apartment
was open and he could see a woman sitting in a chair by the
window. "Yankee niggers," he muttered. She had on rimless glasses
and there was a book in her lap. Niggers don't think they're dressed
up till they got on glasses, Old Dudley thought. He remembered
Lutish's glasses. She had saved up thirteen dollars to buy them.
Then she went to the doctor and asked him to look at her eyes and
tell her how thick to get the glasses. He made her look at animals'
pictures through a mirror and he stuck a light through her eyes and
looked in her head. Then he said she didn't need any glasses. She
was so mad she burned the corn bread three days in a row, but
she bought her some glasses anyway at the ten-cent store. They
didn't cost her but $1.98 and she wore them every Saddey. "That
was niggers," Old Dudley chuckled. He realized he had made a
noise, and covered his mouth with his hand. Somebody might hear
him in one of the apartments.
  He turned down the first flight of stairs. Down the second he
heard footsteps coming up. He looked over the banisters and saw
it was a woman-a fat woman with an apron on. From the top, she
looked kind er like Mrs. Benson at home. He wondered if she
would speak to him. When they were four steps from each other,
he darted a glance at her but she wasn't looking at him. When there
were no steps between them, his eyes fluttered up for an instant and
she was looking at him cold in the face. Then she was past him.
She hadn't said a word. He felt heavy in his stomach.
  He went down four flights instead of three. Then he went back
up one and found number 10. Mrs. Schmitt said O.K., wait a
minute and she'd get the pattern. She sent one of the children back
to the door with it. The child didn't say anything.
  Old Dudley started back up the stairs. He had to take it more
slowly. It tired him going up. Everything tired him, looked like.
Not like having Rabie to do his running for him. Rabie was a
light-footed nigger. He could sneak in a hen house 'thout even the
hens knowing it and get him the fattest fryer in there and not a
squawk. Fast too. Dudley had always been slow on his feet. It went
that way with fat people. He remembered one time him and Rabie
was hunting quail over near Molton. They had 'em a hound dog
that could find a covey quick ern any fancy pointer going. He
wasn't no good at bringing them back but he could find them every
time and then set like a dead stump while you aimed at the birds.
This one time the hound stopped cold-still. "Dat gonna be a big
'un," Rabie whispered, "I feels it." Old Dudley raised the gun slowly
as they walked along. He had to be careful of the pine needles.
They covered the ground and made it slick. Rabie shifted his
weight from side to side, lifting and setting his feet on the waxen
needles with unconscious care. He looked straight ahead and moved
forward swiftly. Old Dudley kept one eye ahead and one on the
ground. It would slope and he would be sliding forward dangerously,
or in pulling himself up an incline, he would slide back
down.
  "Ain't I better get dem birds dis time, boss?" Rabie suggested.
  "You ain't never easy on yo' feets on Monday. If you falls in one
dem slopes, you gonna scatter dem birds fo' you gits dat gun up."
Old Dudley wanted to get the covey. He could er knocked four
out of it easy. "I'll get 'em," he muttered. He lifted the gun to his eye
and leaned forward. Something slipped beneath him and he slid
backward on his heels. The gun went off and the covey sprayed into
the air.
  "Dem was some mighty fine birds we let get away from us,"
Rabie sighed.
  "We'll find another covey," Old Dudley said. "Now get me out
of this damn hole."
  He could er got five er those birds if he hadn't fallen. He could
er shot 'em off like cans on a fence. He drew one hand back to his
ear and extended the other forward. He could er knocked 'em out
like clay pigeons. Bang! A squeak on the staircase made him wheel
around-his arms still holding the invisible gun. The nigger was
clipping up the steps toward him, an amused smile stretching his
trimmed mustache. Old Dudley's mouth dropped open. The
nigger's lips were pulled down like he was trying to keep from
laughing. Old Dudley couldn't move. He stared at the clear-cut
line the nigger's collar made against his skin.
  "What are you hunting, old-timer?" the Negro asked in a voice
that sounded like a nigger's laugh and a white man's sneer.
  Old Dudley felt like a child with a pop-pistol. His mouth was
open and his tongue was rigid in the middle of it. Right below his
knees felt hollow. His feet slipped and he slid three steps and landed
sitting down.
  "You better be careful," the Negro said. "You could easily hurt
yourself on these steps." And he held out his hand for Old Dudley
to pull up on. It was a long narrow hand and the tips of the fingernails
were clean and cut squarely. They looked like they might
have been filed. Old Dudley's hands hung between his knees. The
nigger took him by the arm and pulled up. "Whew!" he gasped,
"you're heavy. Give a little help here." Old Dudley's knees unbended
and he staggered up. The nigger had him by the arm. "I'm going
up anyway," he said. "I'll help you." Old Dudley looked frantically
around. The steps behind him seemed to close up. He was walking
with the nigger up the stairs. The nigger was waiting for him on
each step. "So you hunt?" the nigger was saying. "Well, let's see.
I went deer hunting once. I believe we used a Dodson .38 to get
those deer. What do you use?"
  Old Dudley was staring through the shiny tan shoes. "I use a
gun," he mumbled.
  "I like to fool with guns better than hunting," the nigger was
saying. "Never was much at killing anything. Seems kind of a
shame to deplete the game reserve. I'd collect guns if I had the time
and the money, though." He was waiting on every step till Old
Dudley got on it. He was explaining guns and makes. He had on
gray socks with a black fleck in them. They finished the stairs. The
nigger walked down the hall with him, holding him by the
arm. It probably looked like he had his arm locked in the nigger's.
  They went right up to Old Dudley's door. Then the nigger
asked, "You from around here?"
  Old Dudley shook his head, looking at the door. He hadn't
looked at the nigger yet. All the way up the stairs, he hadn't
looked at the nigger. "Well," the nigger said, "it's a swell placeonce
you get used to it." He patted Old Dudley on the back and
went into his own apartment. Old Dudley went into his. The pain
in his throat was all over his face now, leaking out his eyes.
  He shuffled to the chair by the window and sank down in it.
His throat was going to pop. His throat was going to pop on
account of a nigger-a damn nigger that patted him on the back
and called him "old-timer." Him that knew such as that couldn't
be. Him that had come from a good place. A good place. A place
where such as that couldn't be. His eyes felt strange in their sockets.
They were swelling in them and in a minute there wouldn't be any
room left for them there. He was trapped in this place where
niggers could call you "old-timer." He wouldn't be trapped. He
wouldn't be. He rolled his head on the back of the chair to stretch
his neck that was too full.
  A man was looking at him. A man was in the window across the
alley looking straight at him. The man was watching him cry.
That was where the geranium was supposed to be and it was a man
in his undershirt, watching him cry, waiting to watch his throat
pop. Old Dudley looked back at the man. It was supposed to be the
geranium. The geranium belonged there, not the man. "Where is
the geranium?" he called out of his tight throat.
  "What you cryin' for?" the man asked. "I ain't never seen a
man cry like that."
  "Where is the geranium?" Old Dudley quavered. "It ought to be
there. Not you."
  "This is my window," the man said. "I got a right to set here if
I want to."
  "Where is it?" Old Dudley shrilled. There was just a little room
left in his throat.
  "It fell off if it's any of your business," the man said.
  Old Dudley got up and peered over the window ledge. Down in
the alley, way six floors down, he could see a cracked flower pot
scattered over a spray of dirt and something pink sticking out of a
green paper bow. It was down six floors. Smashed down six floors.
Old Dudley looked at the man who was chewing gum and waiting
to see the throat pop. "You shouldn't have put it so near the
ledge," he murmured. "Why don't you pick it up?"
  "Why don't you, pop?"
  Old Dudley stared at the man who was where the geranium
should have been.
  He would. He'd go down and pick it up. He'd put it in his own
window and look at it all day if he wanted to. He turned from the
window and left the room. He walked slowly down the dog run
and got to the steps. The steps dropped down like a deep wound
in the floor. They opened up through a gap like a cavern and went
down and down. And he had gone up them a little behind the
nigger. And the nigger had pulled him up on his feet and kept
his arm in his and gone up the steps with him and said he hunted
deer, "old-timer," and seen him holding a gun that wasn't there and
sitting on the steps like a child. He had shiny tan shoes and he
was trying not to laugh and the whole business was laughing.
There'd probably be niggers with black flecks in their socks on
every step, pulling down their mouths so as not to laugh. The steps
dropped down and down. He wouldn't go down and have niggers
pattin' him on the back. He went back to the room and the window
and looked down at the geranium.
  The man was sitting over where it should have been. "I ain't seen
you pickin' it up," he said.
  Old Dudley stared at the man.
  "I seen you before." the man said. "I seen you settin' in that old
chair every day, starin' out the window, looking in my apartment.
What I do in my apartment is my business, see? I don't like people
looking at what I do."
  It was at the bottom of the alley with its roots in the air.
  "I only tell people once," the man said and left the window.

End

The Barber

IT IS trying on liberals in Dilton.
After the Democratic White Primary, Rayber changed his
barber. Three weeks before it, while he was shaving him, the barber
asked, "Who you gonna vote for?"
  "Darmon," Rayber said.
  "You a nigger-lover?"
  Rayber started in the chair. He had not expected to be approached
so brutally. "No," he said. If he had nut been taken off-balance, he
would have said, "I am neither a Negro- nor a white-lover." He had
said that before to Jacobs, the philosophy man, and-to show you
how trying it is for liberals in Dilton-Jacobs-a man of his education-
had muttered, "That's a poor way to be."
  "Why?" Rayber had asked bluntly. He knew he could argue
Jacobs down.
  Jacobs had said, "Skip it." He had a class. His classes frequently
occurred, Rayber noticed, when Rayber was about to get him in an
argument.
  "I am neither a Negro- nor a white lover," Rayber would have
said to the barber.
  The barber drew a clean path through the lather and then
pointed the razor at Rayber. ''I'm tellin' you," he said, "there ain't
but two sides now, white and black. Anybody can see that from this
campaign. You know what Hawk said?  Said a hunnert and fifty
years ago, they was runnin' each other down eatin’ each other--throwin'
jewel rocks at birds-skinnin' horses with their teeth. A
nigger come in a white barber shop in Atlanta and says, 'Gimme a
haircut.' They throwed him out but it just goes to show you. Why
listen, three black hyenas over in Mulford last month shot a white
man and took half of what was in his house and you know where
they are now? Settin' in their county jail eatin' like the President
of the United States-they might get dirty in the chain gang; or
some damn nigger-lover might come by and be heart-broke to see
'em pickin' rock. Why, lemme tell you this-ain't uothin' gonna
be good again until we get rid of them Mother Hubbards and get
us a man can put these niggers in their places. Shuh."
  "You hear that, George?" he, shouted to the colored boy wiping
up the floor around the basins.
  "Sho. do," George said.
  It was time for Rayber to say something but nothing appropriate
would come. He wanted to say something that George would
understand. He was startled that George had been brought into
the conversation. He remembered Jacobs telling about lecturing at
a Negro college for a week. They couldn't say Negro-nigger-colored-
black. Jacobs said he had come home every night and
shouted, "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER" out the back window.
Rayber wondered what George's leanings were. He was a trim-looking
boy.
  "If a nigger come in my shop with any of that haircut sass, he'd
get it cut all right." The barber made a noise between his teeth.
  "You a Mother Hubbard?" he asked.
  "I'm voting for Darmon, if that's what you mean," Rayber said.
  "You ever heard Hawkson talk?"
  "I've had that pleasure," Rayber said.
  "You heard his last one?"
  "No, I understand his remarks don't alter from speech to speech,"
Rayber said curtly.
  "Yeah?" the barber said. "Well, this last speech was a killeroo! Ol'
Hawk let them Mother Hubbards have it."
  "A good many people," Rayber said, "consider Hawkson a demagogue."
He wondered if George knew what demagogue meant.
Should have said, "lying politician."
  "Demagogue!" The. barber slapped his knee and whooped.
"That's what Hawk said!" he howled. "Ain't that a shot! 'Folks,'
he says, 'them Mother 'Hubbards says I'm a demagogue.' Then he
rears back and says sort of soft-like, 'Am I a demagogue, you people?'
Alld they yells, 'Naw, Hawk, you ain't no demagogue!' And he
comes forward shouting, 'Oh yeah I am, I'm the best damn demagogue
in this state!' And you should hear them people roar!
  Whew!"
  "Quite a show," Rayber said, "but what is it but a.... "
  "Mother Hubbard," the barber muttered. "You been taken in by
'em all right. Lemme tell you sornethin' .... " He reviewed Hawkson's
Fourth of July speech. It had been another killeroo, ending
with poetry. Who was Darmon? Hawk wanted to know. Yeah,
who was Darmon? the crowd had roared. Why, didn't they know?
Why, he was Little Boy Blue, blowin' his horn. Yeah. Babies in
the meadow and niggers in the corn. Man! Rayber should have
heard that one. No Mother Hubbard could have stood up under it.
  Rayber thought that if the barber would read a few ....
  Listen, he didn't have to read nothin.' All he had to do was think.
That was the trouble with people these days-they didn't think,
they didn't use their horse sense. Why wasn't Rayber thinkin'?
Where was his horse sense?
  Why am I straining myself? Rayber thought irritably.
  "Nossir!" the barber said. "Big words don't do nobody no good.
They don't take the place of thinkin'."
  "Thinking!" Rayber shouted. "You call yourself thinking?"
  "Listen," the barber said, "do you know what Huwk told them
people at Tilford?" At Tilford Hawk had told them that he liked
niggers fine' in their place and if they didn't stay in that place, he
had a place to put 'em. How about that?
  Rayber wanted to know what that had to do with thinking.
  The barber thought it was plain as a pig on a sofa what that had
to do with thinking. He thought a good many other things too.
which he told Rayber. He said Rayber should have heard the Hawk-
son speeches at Mullin's Oak, Bedford, and Chickerville.
  Rayber settled down in his chair again and reminded the barber
that he had come in for a shave.
  The barber started back shaving him. He said Rayber should
have heard the one at Spartasville. "There wasn't a Mother Hubbard
left standin', and all the Boy Blues got their horns broke.
Hawk said," he said, "that the time had come when you had to
sit on the lid with .... "
  "I have an appointment," Rayber said. "I'm a hurry." Why
should he stay and listen to that tripe?
  As much rot as it was, the whole asinine conversation stuck
with him the rest of the day and went through his mind in persistent
detail after he was in bed that night. To his disgust, he
found that he was going through it, putting in what he would
have said if he'd had an opportunity to prepare himself. He wondered
how Jacobs would have handled it. Jacobs had a way about
him that made people think he knew more than Rayber thought
he knew. It was not a bad trick in his profession. Rayber often
amused himself analyzing it. Jacobs would have handled the barber
calmly enough. Rayber started through the conversation again,
thinking how Jacobs would have done it. He ended doing it himself.
  The next time he went to the barber's, he had forgotten about
the argument. The barber seemed to have forgotten it too. He disposed
of the weather and stopped talking. Rayber was wondering
what was going to be for supper. Oh. It was Tuesday. On Tuesday
his wife had canned meat. Took canned meat and baked it with
cheese-slice of meat and a slice of cheese-turned out striped-why
do we have to have this stuff every Tuesday?-if you don't
like it you don't have to-
  "You still a Mother Hubbard?"
  Rayber's head jerked. "What?"
  "You still for Darmon ?"
  "Yes," Rayber said and his brain darted to its store of preparations.
  "Well, look-a-here, you teachers, you know, looks like, well. ... "
He was confused. Rayber could see that he was not so sure of himself
as he'd been the last time. He probably thought he had a new
point to stress. "Looks like you fellows would vote for Hawk on
account of you know what he said about teachers' salaries. Seems
like you would now. Why not? Don't you want more money?"
 "More money!" Rayber laughed. "Don't you know that with a
rotten governor I'd lose more money than he'd give me?" He
realized that he was finally on the barber's level. "Why, he dislikes
too many different kinds of people," he said. "He'd cost me twice
as much as Darmon."
  "So what if he would?" the barber said. "I ain't one to pinch
money when it does some good. I'll pay for quality any day."
  "That's not what I meant!" Rayber began. "That's not. ... "
  "That raise Hawk's promised don't apply to teachers like him
anyway," somebody said from the back of the room. A fat man with
an air of executive assurance came over near Rayber. "He's a college
teacher, ain't he?"
  "Yeah," the barber said, "that's right. He wouldn't get Hawk's
raise; but say, he wouldn't get one if Darmon was elected neither."
  "Ahh, he'd get something. All the schools are supporting Darmon.
They stand to get their cut-free textbooks or new desks or something.
That's the rules of the game."
  "Better schools," Rayber sputtered, "benefit everybody."
 "Seems like I been hearin' that a long time," the barber said.
"You see," the man explained, "you can't put nothing over on
the schools. That's the way they throw it off-benefits everybody."
  The barber laughed.
  "If you ever thought ... " Rayber began.
  "Maybe there'd be a new desk at the head of the room for you,"
the man chortled. "How about that, Joe?" He nudged the barber.
Rayber wanted to lift his foot under the man's chin. "You ever
heard about reasoning?" he muttered.
  "Listen," the man said, "you can talk all you want. What you
don't realize is, we've got an issue here. How'd you like a couple
of black faces looking at you from the back of your classroom?"
Rayber had a blind moment when he felt as if something that
wasn't there was bashing him to the ground. George came in and
began washing basins. "Willing to teach any person willing to learn
-black or white," Rayber said. He wondered if George had looked
up.
  "All right," the barber agreed, "but not mixed up together, huh'
How'd you like to go to a white school, George?" he shouted.
  "Wouldn't like that," George said. "We needs sommo powders.
These here the las' in this box." He dusted them out into the basin.
  "Go get some then," the barber said.
  "The time has come," the executive went on, "just like Hawkson
said, when we got to sit on the lid with both feet and a mule." He
went on to review Hawkson's Fourth of July speech.
  Rayber would like to have pushed him into the basin. The day
was hot and full enough of flies without having to spend it listening
to a fat fool. He could see the courthouse sq narc, blue-green
cool, through the tinted glass window. He wished to hell the barber
would hurry. He fixed his attention on the square outside, feeling
himself there where, he could tell from the trees, the air was moving
slightly. A group of men sauntered up the courthouse walk. Rayber
looked more closely and thought he recognized Jacobs. But Jacobs
had a late afternoon class. It was Jacobs, though. Or was it. If it
were, who was he talking to? Blakeley' Or was that Blakeley. He
squinted. Three colored boys in zoot suits strolled by on the sidewalk.
One dropped down on the pavement so that only his head
was visible to Rayber, and the other two lounged over him, leaning
against the barbershop window and making a hole in the view.
Why the hell can't they park somewhere else? Rayber thought
fiercely. "Hurry up," he said to the barber, "I have an appointment."
  "What's your hurry?" the fat man said. "You better stay and
stick up for Boy Blue."
"  You know you never told us why you're gonna vote for him,"
the barber chuckled, taking the cloth from around Rayber's neck.
  "Yeah," the fat man said, "see can you tell us without sayin',
goodgovermint."
  "I have an appointment," Rayber said. "I can't stay."
  "You just know Darmon is so sorry you won't he able to say a
good word for him," the fat man howled.
  "Listen," Rayber said, "I'll be back in here next week and I'll
give you as many reasons for voting for Darmon as you want better
reasons than you've given me fur voting for Hawkson."
  "I'd like to see you do that," the barber said. "Because I'm telling
you, it can't be done."
  "All right, we'll see," Rayber said.
  "Remember," the fat man carped, "vou ain't gonna say, goodgovermint."
  "I won't say anything you can't understand," Rayber muttered
and then felt foolish for showing his irritation. The fat man and the
barber were grinning. "I'll see you Tuesday," Rayber said and left.
He was disgusted with himself for saying he would give them
reasons. Reasons would have to be worked out-systematically. He
couldn't open his head in a second like they did. He wished to
hell he could. He wished to hell "Mother Hubbard" weren't so
accurate. He wished to hell Darmon spit tobacco juice. The reasons
would have to be worked out-time and trouble. What was the
matter with him? Why not work them out? He could make everything
in that shop squirm if he put his mind to it.
  By the time he got home, he had the beginnings of an outline
for an argument. It would be filled in with no waste words, no big
words-no easy job, he could see.
  He got right to work on it. He worked on it until suppertime and
had four sentences-all crossed out. He got up once in the middle
of the meal to go to his desk and change one. After supper he
crossed the correction out.
  "What is the matter with you?" his wife wanted to know.
  "Not a thing," Rayber said, "not a thing. I just have to work."
  "I'm not stopping you," she said.
  When she went out, he kicked the board loose on the bottom of
the desk. By eleven o'clock he had one page. The next morning
it came easier, and he finished it by noon. He thought it was blunt
enough. It began, "For two reasons, men elect other men to power,"
and it ended, "Men who use ideas without measuring them are
walking on wind." He thought the last sentence was pretty effective.
He thought the whole thing was effective enough.
  In the afternoon he took it around to Jacob's office. Blakeley was
there but he left. Rayber read the paper to Jacobs.
  "Well," Jacobs said, "so what? What do you call yourself doing?"
  He had been jotting figures down on a record sheet all the time
Rayber was reading.
  Rayber wondered if he were busy. "Defending myself against
barbers," he said. "You ever tried to argue with a barber?"
  "I never argue," Jacobs said.
  "That's because you don't know this kind of ignorance," Rayber
explained. "You've never experienced it."
  Jacobs snorted. "Oh yes I have," he said.
  "What happened?"
  "I never argue."
  "But you know you're right," Rayber persisted.
  "I never argue."
  "Well, I'm going to argue," Rayber said. "I'm going to say the
right thing as fast as they can say the wrong. It'll be a question of
speed. Understand," he went on, "this is no mission of conversion;
I'm defending myself."
  "I understand that," Jacobs said. "I hope you're able to do it."
  "I've already done it! You read the paper. There it is." Rayber
wondered if Jacobs were dense or preoccupied.
  "Okay, then ,leave it there. Don't spoil your complexion arguing
with barbers."
  "It's got to be done," Rayber said.
  Jacobs shrugged.
  Rayber had counted on discussing it with him at length. "Well,
I'll see you," he said.
  "Okay," Jacobs said.
  Rayber wondered why he had ever read the paper to him in the
first place.
  Before he left for the barber's Tuesday afternoon, Rayber was
nervous and he thought that by way of practice he'd try the paper
out on his wife. He didn't know but what she was for Hawkson
herself. Whenever he mentioned the election, she made it a point
to say, "Just because you teach doesn't mean you know everything."
Did he ever say he knew anything at all? Maybe he wouldn't call
her. But he wanted to hear how the thing was actually going to
sound said casually. It wasn't long; wouldn't take up much of her
time. She would probably dislike being called. Still, she might
possibly be affected by what he said. Possibly. He called her.
  She said all right, but he'd just have to wait until she got through
what she was doing; it looked like every time she got her hands in
something, she had to leave and go do something else.
  He said he didn't have all day to wait-it was only forty-five
minutes until the shop closed-and would she please hurry up?
  She came in wiping her hands and said all right; all right, she
was there, wasn't she? Go ahead.
  He began saying it very easily and casually, looking over her
head. The sound of his voice playing over the words was not bad.
He wondered it it were the words themselves or his tones that made
them sound the way they did. He paused in the middle of a sentence
and glanced at his wife to see if her face would give him any
clue. Her head was turned slightly toward the table by her chair
where an 'open magazine was lying. As he paused, she got up.
"That was very nice," she said and went back to the kitchen. Rayber
left for the barber's.
  He walked slowly, thinking what he was going to say in the
shop and now and then stopping to look absently at a store window.
Block's Feed Company had a display of automatic chicken-killers-
"So Timid Persons Can Kill Their Own Fowl" the sign over them
read. Rayber wondered if many timid persons used them. As he
neared the barber's, he could see obliquely through the door the
man with the executive assurance was sitting in the corner reading
a newspaper. Rayber went in and hung up his hat.
  "Howdy," the barber said. "Ain't this the hottest day in the
year, though!"
  "It's hot enough," Rayber said.
  "Hunting season soon be over," the barber commented.
  All right, Rayber wanted to say, let's get this thing going. He
thought he would work into his argument from their remarks. The
fat man hadn't noticed him.
  "You should have seen the covey this dog of mine flushed the
other day," the barber went on as Rayber got in the chair. "The
birds spread once and we got four and they spread again and we
got two. That ain't bad."
  "Never hunted quail," Rayber said hoarsely.
  "There ain't nothing like taking a nigger and a hound dog and a
gun and going after quail," the barber said. "You missed a lot out of
life if you ain't had that."
  Rayber cleared his throat and the barber went on working. The
fat man in the corner turned a page. What do they think I came in
here for? Rayber thought. They couldn't have forgotten. He waited,
hearing the noises flies make and the mumble of the men talking in
the back. The fat man turned another page. Rayber could hear
George's broom slowly stroking the floor somewhere in the shop,
then stop, then scrape, then .... "You er, still a Hawkson man?"
Rayber asked the barber.
  "Yeah!" the barber laughed. "Yeah! You know I had forgot.
  You was gonna tell us why you are voting for Darrnon. Hey,
Roy!" he yelled to the fat man, "come over here. We gonna hear
why we should vote for Boy Blue."
  Roy grunted and turned another page. "Be there when I finish
this piece," he mumbled.
  "What you got there, Joe?" one of the men in the back called,
"one of them goodgovermint boys?"
  "Yeah," the barber said. "He's gonna make a speech."
  "I've heard too many of that kind already," the man said.
  "You ain't heard one by Rayber," the barber said. "Rayber's all
right. He don't know how to vote, but he's all right."
Rayber reddened. Two of the men strolled up. "This is no
speech," Rayber said. "I only want to discuss it with you-sanely."
  "Come on over here, Roy," the barber yelled.
  "What are you trying to make of this?" Rayber muttered; then
he said suddenly, "If you're calling everybody else, why don't you
call your boy, George. You afraid to have him listen?"
  The barber looked at Rayber for a second without saying anything.
Rayber felt as if he had made himself too much at home.
  "He can hear," the barber said. "He can hear back where he is."
  "I just thought he might be interested," Rayber said.
  "He can hear," the barber repeated. "He can hear what he hears
and he can hear two times that much. He can hear what you don't
say as well as what you do."
  Roy came over folding his newspaper. "Howdy, boy," he said,
putting his hand on Rayber's head, "let's get on with this speech."
Rayber felt as if he were fighting his way out of a net. They
were over him with their red faces grinning. He heard the words
drag out-"Well, the way I see it, men elect. ... " He felt them
pull out of his mouth like freight cars, jangling, backing up on
each other, grating to a halt, sliding, clinching back, jarring, and
then suddenly stopping as roughly as they had begun. It was over.
Rayber was jarred that it was over so soon. For a second-as if they
were expecting him to go on-no one said anything.
  Then, "How many yawl gonna vote for Boy Blue!" the barber
yelled.
  Some of the men turned around and snickered. One doubled over.
  "Me," Roy said. "I'm gonna run right down there now so I'll be
first to vote for Boy Blue tomorrow morning."
  "Listen!" Rayber shouted, "I'm not trying .... "
  "George," the barber yelled, "you heard that speech?"
  "Yessir," George said.
  "Who you gonna vote for, George?"
  "I'm not trying to ... ." Rayber yelled.
  "I don't know is they gonna let me vote," George said. "Do, I
gonna vote for Mr. Hawkson."
  "Listen!" Rayber yelled, "do you think I'm trying to change your
fat minds? What do you think I am?" He jerked the barber
around by the shoulder. "Do you think I'd tamper with your damn
fool ignorance?"
  The barber shook Rayber's grip off his shoulder. "Don't get excited,"
he said, "we all thought it was a fine speech. That's what I
been saying all along-you got to think, you got to. . . ." He
lurched backward when Rayber hit him, and landed sitting on the
footrest of the next chair. "Thought it was fine," he finished, looking
steadily at Rayber's white, half-lathered face glaring down at
him. "It's what I been saying all along."
  The blood began pounding up Raybers neck  just! under his skin.
He turned and pushed quickly through the men around him to the
door. Outside, the sun was suspending everything in a pool of
heat, and before he had turned the first corner, almost running,
lather began to drip inside his collar and down the barber's bib,
dangling to his knees.

End

Wildcat

1947

OLD GABRIEL shuffled across the room waving his stick slowly
sideways in front of him.
  "Who that?" he whispered, appearing in the doorway. "I smells
fo' niggers."
  Their soft, minor-toned laughter rose above the frog's hum and
blended into voices.
  "Cain't you do no bettern that, Gabe?"
  "Is you gain' with us, Granpaw?"
  "You oughter be able to smell good enough to git our names."
Old Gabriel moved out on the porch a little way. "That Matthew
an' George an' Willie Myrick. An' who that other?"
  "This Boon Williams, Granpaw."
  Gabriel felt for the edge of the porch with his stick. "What yawl
doin'? Set down a spell."
  "We waitin' on Mose an' Luke."
"We gain' huntin' that cat."
  "What yawl huntin' him with?" old Gabriel muttered. "Yawl
ain't got nothin' fit to kill a wildcat with." He sat down on the
edge of the porch and hung his feet over the side. "I done tal' Mose
an' Luke that."
  "How many wildcats you killed, Gabrul?" Their voices, rising to
him through the darkness, were full of gentle mockery.
"When I was a boy, there was a cat once," Gabriel started. "It
come 'round here huntin' blood. Come in through the winder of a
cabin one night an' sprung in bed with a nigger an' tore that
nigger's throat open befo' he could holler good."
  "This cat in the woods, Granpaw. It jus' come out to git cows.
Jupe Williams seen it when he gone through to the sawmill."
  "What he done about it?"
  "Started runnin'." Their laughter broke over the night sounds
again. "He thought it was after him."
  "It was," old Gabriel murmured.
  "It after cows."
Gabriel sniffed. "It comin' out the woods for mo' than cows. It
gonna git itssef some folks' blood. You watch. An' yawl gain' off
huntin' it ain't gonna do no good. It guin' huntiu' itssef. I been
smellin' it."
 "How you know that it you smellin'; "
  "Ain't no mistakin' a wildcat. Ain't heen one 'round here since I
was a boy. Why don't yawl set a spell)" he added.
  "You ain't afraid to stay here by yoseL is you, GL\l1paw?"
Old Gabriel stiffened. He felt for the post to pull himself up on.
  "Ef you waitin' on Mose an' Luke," he said, "you better git goin'.
They started over to yawl's place an hour ago."

II

  "Come in here, I say! Come in here right now!"
  The blind boy sat alone on the steps, staring ahetd. "All the men
gone?" he called.
  "All gone but Ol' Hezuh. Come in."
  He hated to go in-among the women.
  "I smells it," he said.
  "You come in here, Gabriel."
  He went in and walked to where the window was. The women
were muttering at him.
  "You stay in here, boy."
  "You be 'tractin' that cat right in this room, setlin' out there."
  No air was coming through the window, and he scratched at the
shutter latch to open it.
  "Don't open that winder, boy. Us don't want no wildcat [umpin'
in here."
  "I could er gone wit 'em," he said sullenly. "I could er smelled it
out. I ain't afraid." Shut up wit these women like he one too.
  "Reba say she kin smell it herself."
  He heard the old woman groan in the corner. "They ain't gonna
do no good out huntin' it," she whined. "It here. It right around
here. Ef it jump in this room it gonna git me fust, then it gonna git
that boy, then it gonna git. ... "
  "Hush yo' mouth, Reba," he heard his mother say. "I look after
my boy."
  He could look after hissef. He warn't afraid. He could smell ithim
an' Reba could. It'd jump on them fust; fusr Reba an' then
him. It was the shape of a reg'lar cat only bigger, his mother said.
An' where you felt the sharp points on a house eat's foot, you felt
big knife claws in a wildcat's, an' knife teeth, too; an' it breathed
heat an' spit wet lime. Gabriel could feel its claws in his shoulders
and its teeth in his throat. But he wouldn't let 'em stay there. He'd
lock his arms 'round its body an' feel up for its neck an' jerk its
head back an' go down wit it on the floor until its claws dropped
away from his shoulders. Beat, beat, beat its head, beat, beat
beat....
  "Who wit Ol' Hezuh?" one of the women asked.
  "Jus' Nancy."
  "Oughter be somebody else down there," his mother said softly.
  Reba moaned. "Anybody go out gonna git sprung on befo' they
gits there. It around here, I say. It gittin' closer an' closer. It gonna
git me sho."
  He could smell it strong.
  "How it gonna git in here? Yawl jus' frettin' for nothin'."
  That was Thin Minnie. Nothin' could git her. She'd had a spell
on her since when she was small-put there by a conjer woman.
  "It come in easy ef it wanter," Reba snorted. "It tear up that cat
hole an' come through."
  "We could be down to Nancy's by then," Minnie snitfed.
  "Yawl could," the old woman muttered.
  Him an' her couldn't, he knew. But he'd stay an' fight it. You
see that blin' boy there? He the one kill the wildcat!
  Reba started groaning.
  "Hush that!" his mother ordered.
  The groaning turned into singing-low in her throat.

"Lord, Lord,
Gonna see yo' pilgrim today,
Lord, Lord,
Gonna see yo' .. "

  "Hush!" his mother hissed. "What that I hear?"
  Gabriel leaned forward in the silence; stiff, ready.
  It was a thump, thump and maybe a snarl, away, muffled, and
then a shriek, far away, then louder and louder, closer and closer,
over the edge of the hill into the yard and up on the porch. The
cabin was shaking with the weight of a body against the door.
There was the feel of a rush inside the room and the scream was
let in. Nancy!
  "It got him!" she screamed. "Got him, sprung in through the
winder, got him in the throat. Hezuh," she wailed, "Ol' Hezuh."
  Later in the night the men returned, carrying a rabbit and two
squirrels.

III

  Old Gabriel crept back through the darkness to his bed. He could
sit in the chair a while or he could lie down. He eased down in
the bed and pushed his nose into the feel and smell of the quilt.
They won't no use to do that. He could smell the other jus' the
same. He had been smellin' it, been srnellin' it ever since they started
talkin' about it. There it was one evenin'-different from all the
smells around, different from niggers' and cows' an' ground smells.
Wildcat. Tull Williams seen it jump on a bull.
  Gabriel sat up suddenly. It was nearer. He got out the bed and
pushed to the door. He had bolted that one; the other must be open.
A breeze was coming in and he walked in it until he felt the night
air full in his face. This one was open. He slammed it shut and
pushed the bolt in. What was the use to do that? Ef the cat aimed
on comin' in, it could git there. He went back to the chair and sat
down. It come in east ef it wanta. There were little drafts all around
him. By the door there was a hole the hound could git under; that
cat could gnaw it through an' be in befo' he got out. Maybe ef he
sat by the back do', he could git away quicker. He got up and
dragged his chair after him across the room. The smell was near.
Maybe he'd count. He could count to a thousand. Won't no nigger
for five miles could count that fur. He started counting.
  Mose an' Luke wouldn't be back for six hours yet. Tomorrow
night they wouldn't go; but the cat was gonna git him tonight.
Lemme go wit you boys an' smell him out for you. I the onliest one
kin smell 'round here.
  They'd lose him in the woods, they'd said. Huntin' wildcats won't
no business for him.
  I ain't afraid er no wildcat er no woods neither. Lemme go wit you
boys, lemme go.
  Ain't no reason to be 'fraid to stay here by yosef, they'd laughed.
Ain't nothin' gonna git you. We take you up the road to Mattie's ef
you scaird.
  Mattie's! Take him to Mattie's! Settiri' wit the women. What yawl
think I is? I ain't afraid er no wildcat. But it comin', boys; an' it ain't
gonna be in no woods-it gonna be here. Yawl wastin' yo' time in
the woods. Stay here an' you ketch it.
  He suppose to be countin'. Where he Ieft off at? Five hunnert an'
five, five hunnert an' six ... Mattie's! What they think he is? Five
hunnert an' two, five hunnert an' ....
  He sat stiff in the chair with his hands gripped tight to the
stick across his knees. It won't gonna git him like he was a woman.
His shirt was stuck wet to him, making him smell higher. The
men had come back later in the night with a rabbit and two squirrels.
He began to remember the other wildcat and he remembered
as if he had been in Hezuh's cabin instead of with the women. He
wondered was he Hezuh. He was Gabrul. It won't gonna git him
like Hezuh. He was gonna hit it. He was gonna pull it off. He was
gonna ... how he gonna do all that? He hadn't been able to wring
a chicken's neck for fo' years. It was gonna git him. Won't nothin'
to do but wait. The smell was near. Won't nothin' for old people
to do but wait. It was gonna git him tonight. The teeth would be
hot an' the claws cold. The claws would sink in soft, an' the teeth
would cut sharp an' scrape his bones inside.
  Gabriel felt the sweat on himself. It kin smell me good's I kin
smell it, he thought. I settin' here smellin' an' it cornin' here smellin'.
  Two hunnert an' fa'; where he lef' off at? Fa' hunnert an' five ....
  There was a sudden scratching by the chimney. He sat forward,
tense, tight-throated. "Come on," he whispered, "I here. I waitin'."
He couldn't move. He couldn't make himself move. There was another
scratching. It was the pain he didn't want. But he didn't want
the waiting either. "I here," he-there was another, just a small
noise and then a flutter. Bats. His grip on the stick loosened. He
should have known that won't it. It won't no farther than the barn
yet. What ail his nose? What ail him? Won't no nigger for hunnert
miles could smell like he could. He heard the scratching again, coming
differently, coming from the corner of the house where the cat
hole was. Pick pick ... pick. That was a bat. He knowd that
was a bat. Pick pick. "Here I is," he whispered. Won't no bat.
He braced his feet to get up. Pick. "Lord waitin' on me," he
whispered. "He don't want me with my face tore open. Why don't
you go on, Wildcat, why you want me?" He was on his feet now.
"Lord don't want me with no wildcat marks." He was moving
toward the cat hole. Across on the river bank the Lord was waiting
on him with a troupe of angels and golden vestments for him to
put on and when he came, he'd put on the vestments and stand there
with the Lord and the angels, judging life. Won't no nigger for
fifty miles fitter to judge than him. Pick. He stopped. He smelled
it right outside, nosing the hole. He had to climb onto something!
What he going toward it for? He had to get on something high!
There was a shelf nailed over the chimney and he turned wildly
and fell against a chair and shoved it up to the fireplace. He caught
hold of the shelf and pulled himself onto the chair and sprang up
and backwards and felt the narrow shelf board under him for an
instant and then felt it sag and jerked his feet up and felt it crack
somewhere from the wall. His stomach flew inside him and stopped
hard and the shelf board fell across his feet and the rung of the
chair hit against his head and then, after a second of stillness, he
heard a low, gasping animal cry wail over two hills and fade past
him; then snarls, tearing short, furious, through the pain wails.
Gabriel sat stiff on the floor.
  "Cow," he breathed finally. "Cow."
  Gradually he felt his muscles loosen. It got to her befo' him. It
would go on off now, but it would be back tomorrer night. He rose
shaking from the chair and stumbled to his bed. The cat had been
a half mile away. He won't sharp like he used to be. They shouldn't
leave old people by theyselves. He done tole 'em they won't gonna
ketch nothin' off in no woods. Tomorrer night it would come back.
Tomorrer night they would stay here an' kill it. Now he want to
sleep. He done tole 'em they couldn't get no wildcat in no woods.
He the one tole 'em where it gonna be. They'd a listened to him,
they'd done had it by now. When he die he want to be sleepin' in a
bed; didn't want to be on no floor with a wildcat stuck in his face.
Lord waitin',
  When he woke up, the darkness was full of morning things. He
heard Mose and Luke at the stove and smelled the side meat
in the skillet. He reached for his snuff and filled his lip. "What
yawl ketch?" he asked trenchantly.
  "Ain't caught nothin' las' night." Luke put the plate in his hands.
  "Here yo' side meat. How you bust that shelf?"
  "Ain't busted no shelf," old Gabriel muttered. "Wind to' it down
and waked me up in the middle of the night. It been due to fall.
You ain't never built nothin' yet stayed together."
  "We sot a trap," Mose said. "We git that cat tonight."
  "Yawl sho will, boys," Gabriel said. "It'll be right here tonight.
Ain't it done kill a cow a half a mile from here las' night?"
  "That don't mean it comin' this way," Luke said.
  "It comin' this way," Gabriel said.
  "How many wildcats you killed, Granpaw?"
  Gabriel stopped; the plate of side meat tremored in his hand.
"I knows what I knows, boy."
  "We git it soon. We sot a trap over in Ford's Woods. It been
around there. We gain' up in a tree over the trap every night an'
wait 'til we gits it."
  Their forks were scraping back and forth over their tin plates like
knife teeth against stone.
  "You wants somemo' side meat, Granpaw?"
  Gabriel put his fork down on the quilt. "No, boy," he said, "no
mo' side meat." The darkness was hollow around him and through
its depth, animal cries wailed and mingled with the beats pounding
in his throat.

End

The Crop

1946

MISS WILLERTON always crumbed the table. It was her particular
household accomplishment and she did it with great
thoroughness. Lucia and Bertha did the dishes and Garner went
into the parlor and did the Morning Press crossword puzzle. That
left Miss Willerton in the dining room by herself and that was all
right with Miss Willerton. Whew! Breakfast in that house was
always an ordeal. Lucia insisted that they have a regular hour for
breakfast just like they did for other meals. Lucia said a regular
breakfast made for other regular habits, and with Garner's tendency
to upsets, it was imperative that they establish some system in their
eating. This way she could also see that he put the Agar-Agar on
his Cream of Wheat. As if, Miss Willerton thought, after having
done it for fifty years, he'd be capable of doing anything else. The
breakfast dispute always started with Garner's Cream of Wheat
and ended with her three spoonfuls of pineapple crush. "You
know your acid, Willie," Miss Lucia would always say, "you know
your acid"; and then Garner would roll his eyes and make some
sickening remark and Bertha would jump and Lucia would look
distressed and Miss Willerton would taste the pineapple crush she
had already swallowed.
  It was a relief to crumb the table. Crumbing the table gave one
time to think, and if Miss Willerton were going to write a story,
she had to think about it first. She could usually think best sitting
in front of her typewriter, but this would do for the time being.
First, she had to think of a subject to write a story about. There were
so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never
could think of one. That was always the hardest part of writing a
story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something
to write about than she did writing. Sometimes she discarded subject
after subject and it usually took her a week or two to decide
finally on something. Miss Willerton got out the silver crumber
and the crumb-catcher and started stroking the table. I wonder, she
mused, if a baker would make a good subject? Foreign bakers were
very picturesque, she thought. Aunt Myrtile Filmer had left her
four color-tints of French bakers in mushroom-looking hats. They
were great tall fellows-blond and ....
  "Willie!" Miss Lucia screamed, entering the dining room with
the saltcellars. "For heaven's sake, hold the catcher under the
crumber or you'll have those crumbs on the rug. I've Bisseled it four
times in the last week and I am not going to do it again."
  "You have not Bisseled it on account of any crumbs I have spilled,"
Miss Willerton said tersely. "I always pick up the crumbs I drop,"
and she added, "I drop relatively few."
  "And wash the crumber before you put it up this time," Miss
Lucia returned.
  Miss Willerton drained the crumbs into her hand and threw them
out the window. She took the catcher and crumber to the kitchen
and ran them under the cold-water faucet. She dried them and
stuck them back in the drawer. That was over. Now she could get
to the typewriter. She could stay there until dinnertime.
Miss Willerton sat down at her typewriter and let out her breath.
Now! What had she been thinking about? Oh. Bakers. Hmmm.
Bakers. No, bakers wouldn't do. Hardly colorful enough. No social
tension connected with bakers. Miss Willerton sat staring through
her typewriter. A S D F G-her eyes wandered over the keys.
Hmmm. Teachers? Miss Willerton wondered. No. Heavens no.
Teachers always made Miss Willerton feel peculiar. Her teachers at
Willowpool Seminary had been all right but they were women.
Willowpool Female Seminary, Miss Willerton remembered. She
didn't like the phrase, Willowpool Female Seminary-it sounded
biological. She always just said she was a graduate of Willowpool.
Men teachers made Miss Willerton feel as if she were going to
mispronounce something. Teachers weren't timely anyhow. They
weren't even a social problem.
  Social problem. Social problem. Hmmm. Sharecroppers! Miss
Willerton had never been intimately connected with sharecroppers
but, she reflected, they would make as arty a subject as any, and
they would give her that air of social concern which was so valuable
to have in the circles she was hoping to travel! "I can always
capitalize," she muttered, "on the hookworm." It was coming to her
now! Certainly! Her fingers plinked excitedly over the keys, never
touching them. Then suddenly she began typing at great speed.
  "Lot Motun," the typewriter registered, "called his dog." "Dog"
was followed by an abrupt pause. Miss Willerton always did her
best work on the first sentence. "First sentences," she always said,
"came to her-like a flash! Just like a flash!" she would say and snap
her fingers, "like a flash!" And she built her story up from them.
"Lot Motun called his dog" had been automatic with Miss Willerton,
and reading the sentence over, she decided that not only was "Lot
Motun" a good name for a sharecropper, but also that having him
call his dog was an excellent thing to have a sharecropper do. "The
dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to Lot." Miss Willerton had
the sentence down before she realized her error-two "Lots" in one
paragraph. That was displeasing to the ear. The typewriter grated
back and Miss Willerton applied three x's to "Lot." Over it she wrote
in pencil, "him." Now she was ready to go again. "Lot Motun
called his dog. The dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him."
Two dogs, too, Miss Willerton thought. Ummm. But that didn't
affect the ears like two "Lots," she decided.
  Miss Willerton was a great believer in what she called "phonetic
art." She maintained that the ear was as much a reader as the eye.
She liked to express it that way. "The eye forms a picture," she had
told a group at the United Daughters of the Colonies, "that can be
painted in the abstract, and the success of a literary venture" (Miss
Willerton liked the phrase, 'literary venture') "depends on the
abstract created in the mind and the tonal quality" (Miss Willerton
also liked 'tonal quality') "registered in the ear." There was something
biting and sharp about "Lot Motun called his dog"; followed
by "the dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him," it gave the
paragraph just the send-off it needed.
  "He pulled the animal's short, scraggy ears and rolled over with
it in the mud." Perhaps, Miss Willerton mused, that would be over
doing it. But a sharecropper, she knew, might reasonably be expected
to roll over in the mud. Once she had read a novel dealing with that
kind of people in which they had done just as bad and, throughout
three-fourths of the narrative, much worse. Lucia found it in cleaning
out one of Miss Willertori's bureau drawers  and after glancing at a
few random pages took it between thumb and index finger to the
furnace and threw it in. "When I was cleaning  your bureau out
this morning, Willie, I found a book that Garner must have put
there for a joke," Miss Lucia told her later. "It was awful, but you
know how Garner is. I burned it" And then, tittering, she added,
"I was sure it couldn't be yours." Miss Willerton was sure it could
be none other's than hers but she hesitated in claiming the distinction.
She had ordered it from the publisher because she didn't want
to ask for it at the library. It had cost her $3.75 with the postage and
she had not finished the last four chapters. At least, she had got
enough from it, though, to be able to say that Lot Motun might
reasonably roll over in the mud with his dog. Having him do that
would give more point to the hookworm, too, she decided. "Lot
Motun called his dog. The dog pricked lip its ears and slunk over
to him. He pulled the animal's short. scraggy ears and rolled over
with it in the mud."
  Miss Willerton settled back. That was a good beginning. Now she
would plan her action. There had to be a woman, of course. Perhaps
Lot could kill her. That type of woman always started trouble.
She might even goad him on to kill her because of her wantonness
and then he would be pursued by his conscience maybe.
  He would have to have principles if that were going to be the case,
but it would be fairly easy to give him those. Now how was she
going to work that in with all the love interest there'd have to be,
she wondered. There would have to be some quite violent, naturalistic
scenes, the sadistic sort of thing one read of in connection with that
class. It was a problem. However, Miss Willerton enjoyed such
problems. She liked to plan passionate scenes best of all, but when
she came to write them, she always began to feel peculiar and to
wonder what the family would say when they read them. Garner
would snap his fingers and wink at her at every opportunity; Bertha
would think she was terrible; and Lucia would say in that silly
voice of hers, "What have you been keeping from us, Willie?
What have you been keeping from us," and titter like she always
did. But Miss Willerton couldn't think about that now; she had to
plan her characters.
  Lot would be tall, stooped, and shaggy but with sad eyes that
made him look like a gentleman in spite of his red neck and big
fumbling hands. He'd have straight teeth and, to indicate that he
had some spirit, red hair. His clothes would hang on him but he'd
wear them nonchalantly like they were part of his skin; maybe,
she mused, he'd better not roll over with the dog after all. The
woman would be more or less pretty-yellow hair, fat ankles,
muddy-colored eyes.
  She would get supper for him in the cabin and he'd sit there eating
the lumpy grits she hadn't bothered to put salt in and thinking about
something big, something way off-another cow, a painted house, a
clean well, a farm of his own even. The woman would yowl at him
for not cutting enough wood for her stove and would whine about
the pain in her back. She'd sit and stare at him eating the sour
grits and say he didn't have nerve enough to steal food. "You're
just a damn beggar!" she'd sneer. Then he'd tell her to keep quiet.
"Shut your mouth!" he'd shout. "I've taken all I'm gonna." She'd
roll her eyes, mocking him, and laugh-"I ain't afraid er nothin'
that looks like you." Then he'd push his chair behind him and head
toward her. She'd snatch a knife off the table-Miss Willerton
wondered what kind of a fool the woman was-and back away holding
it in front of her. He'd lunge forward but she'd dart from him
like a wild horse. Then they'd face each other again-their eyes
brimming with hate-and sway back and forth. Miss Willerton
could hear the seconds dropping on the tin roof outside. He'd
dart at her again but she'd have the knife ready and would plunge
it into him in an instant-Miss Willerton could stand it no longer.
She struck the woman a terrific blow on the head from behind. The
knife dropped out of her hands and a mist swept her from the
room. Miss Willerton turned to Lot. "Let me get you some hot
grits," she said. She went over to the stove and got a clean plate
of smooth white grits and a piece of butter.
  "Gee, thanks," Lot said and smiled at her with his nice teeth.
"You always fix 'em just right. You know," he said, "I been
thinkin'-we could get out of this tenant farm. We could have a
decent place. If we made anything this year over, we could put it
in a cowan' start buildin' things up. Think what it would mean,
Willie, just think."
  She sat down beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. "We'll
do it," she said. "We'll make better than we've made any year and
by spring we should have us that cow."
  "You always know how I feel, Willie," he said. "You always
have known."
  They sat there for a long time thinking of how well they understood
each other. "Finish your food," she said finally.
  After he had eaten, he helped her take the ashes out the stove
and then, in the hot July evening, they walked down the pasture
toward the creek and talked about the place they were going to have
some day.
 When late March came and the rainy season was almost there,
they had accomplished almost more than was believable. For the
past month, Lot had been up every morning at five, and Willy an
hour earlier to get in all the work they could while the weather was
clear. Next week, Lot said, the rain would probably start and if
they didn't get the crop in by then, they would lose it-and all they
had gained in the past months. They knew what that meantanother
year of getting along with no more than they'd had the
last. Then too, there'd be a baby next year instead of a cow. Lot had
wanted the cow anyway. "Children don't cost all that much to
feed," he'd argued, "an' the cow would help feed him," but Willie
had been firm-the cow could come later-the child must have a
good start. "Maybe," Lot had said finally, "we'll have enough for
both," and he had gone out to look at the new-plowed ground as if
he could count the harvest from the furrows.
  Even with as little as they'd had, it had been a good year. Willie
had cleaned the shack, and Lot had fixed the chimney. There was a
profusion of petunias by the doorstep and a colony of snapdragons
under the window. It had been a peaceful year. But now they were
becoming anxious over the crop. They must gather it before the rain.
"We need another week," Lot muttered when he came in that night.
"One more week an' we can do it. Do you feel like gatherin'? It
isn't right that you should have to," he sighed, "but I can't hire any
help."
  "I'm all right," she said, hiding her trembling hands behind her.
"I'll gather."
  "It's cloudy tonight," Lot said darkly.
  The next day they worked until nightfall-worked until they
could work no longer and then stumbled back to the cabin and fell
into bed.
  Willie woke in the night conscious of a pain. It was a soft, green
pain with purple lights running through it. She wondered if she
were awake. Her head rolled from side to side and there were
droning shapes grinding boulders in it.
  Lot sat up. "Are you bad off?" he asked, trembling.
  She raised herself on her elbow and then sank down again. "Get
Anna up by the creek," she gasped.
  The droning became louder and the shapes grayer. The pain
intermingled with them for seconds first, then interminably. It came
again and again. The sound of the droning grew more distinct
and toward morning she realized that it was rain. Later she asked
hoarsely, "How long has it been raining?"
  "Most two days, now," Lot answered.
  "Then we lost." Willie looked listlessly out at the dripping trees.
  "It's over."
  "It isn't over," he said softly. "We got a daughter."
  "You wanted a son."
  "No, I got what I wanted-two Willies instead of one-that's
better than a cow, even," he grinned. "What can I do to deserve all
I got, Willie?" He bent over and kissed her forehead.
  "What can I?" she asked slowly. "And what can I do to help you
more?"
  "How about your going to the grocery, Willie?"
  Miss Willerton shoved Lot away from her. "What did you
say, Lucia?" she stuttered.
  "I said how about your going to the grocery this time? I've been
every morning this week and I'm busy now."
  Miss Willerton pushed back from the typewriter. "Very well,"
she said sharply. "What do you want there?"
  "A dozen eggs and two pounds of tomatoes-ripe tomatoes--
and you'd better start doctoring that cold right now. Your eyes are
already watering and you're hoarse. There's Empirin in the bathroom.
Write a check on the house for the groceries. And wear your
coat. It's cold."
  Miss Willerton rolled her eyes upward. "I am forty-four years
old," she announced, "and able to take care of myself."
  "And get ripe tomatoes," Miss Lucia returned.
  Miss Willerton, her coat buttoned unevenly, tramped up Broad
Street and into the supermarket. "What was it now?" she muttered.
"Two dozen eggs and a pound of tomatoes, yes." She passed the
lines of canned vegetables and the crackers and headed for the box
where the eggs were kept. But there were no eggs. "Where are the
eggs?" she asked a boy weighing snapbeans.
  "We ain't got nothin' but pullet eggs," he said, fishing up another
handful of beans.
  "Well, where are they and what is the difference?" Miss Willerton
demanded.
  He threw several beans back into the bin, slouched over to the
egg box and handed her a carton. "There ain't no difference really,"
he said, pushing his gum over his front teeth. "A teen-age chicken
or somethin', I don't know. You want 'em?"
  "Yes, and two pounds of tomatoes. Ripe tomatoes," Miss Willerton
added. She did not like to do the shopping. There was no reason
those clerks should be so condescending. That boy wouldn't have
dawdled with Lucia. She paid for the eggs and tomatoes and left
hurriedly. The place depressed her somehow.
  Silly that a grocery should depress one-nothing in it but trifling
domestic doings-women buying beans-riding children in those
grocery go-carts-higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less
of squash-what did they get out of it? Miss Willerton wondered.
Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art?
All around her it was the same-sidewalks full of people scurrying
about with their hands full of little packages and their minds full
of little packages-that woman there with the child on the leash,
pulling him, jerking him, dragging him away from a window with
a jack-o'-lantern in it; she would probably be pulling and jerking him
the rest of her life. And there was another, dropping a shopping
bag all over the street, and another wiping a child's nose, and up
the street an old woman was coming with three grandchildren
jumping all over her, and behind them was a couple walking too
close for refinement.
  Miss WiIIerton looked at the couple sharply as they came nearer
and passed. The woman was plump with yellow hair and fat ankles
and muddy-colored eyes. She had on high-heel pumps and blue
anklets, a too-short cotton dress, and a plaid jacket. Her skin was
mottled and her neck thrust forward as if she were sticking it out to
smell something that was always being drawn away. Her face
was set in an inane grin. The man was long and wasted and shaggy.
His shoulders were stooped and there were yellow knots along
the side of his large, red neck. His hands fumbled stupidly with the
girl's as they slumped along, and once or twice he smiled sickly at
her and Miss Willerton could see that he had straight teeth and
sad eyes and a rash over his forehead.
  "Ugh," she shuddered.
  Miss Willerton laid the groceries all the kitchen table and went
back to her typewriter. She looked at the paper in it. "Lot Motun
called his dog," it read. "The dog pricked up its ears and slunk
over to him. He pulled the animal's short, scraggy ears and rolled
over with it in the mud."
  "That sounds awful!" Miss Willerton muttered. "It's not a good
subject anyway," she decided. She needed something more colorful
--more arty. Miss Willerton looked at her typewriter for a long time.
Then of a sudden her fist hit the desk in several ecstatic little bounces.
"The Irish!" she squealed. "The Irish!" Miss Willerton had always
admired the Irish. Their brogue, she thought, was full of music; and
their history-splendid! And the people, she mused, the Irish people!
They were full of spirit-red-haired, with broad shoulders and great,
drooping mustaches.

End

The Turkey

1947

HIS guns glinted sun steel in the ribs of the tree and, half aloud
through a crack in his mouth, he growled, "All right, Mason,
this is as far as you go. The jig's up." The six-shooters in Mason's
belt stuck out like waiting rattlers but he flipped them into the
air and, when they fell at his feet, kicked them behind him like
so many dried steer skulls. "You varmit," he muttered, drawing his
rope tight around the captured man's ankles, "this is the last
rustlin' you'll do." He took three steps backward and leveled one gun
to his eye. "Okay," he said with cold, slow precision, "this is.... "
And then he saw it, just moving slightly through the bushes farther
over, a touch of bronze and a rustle and then, through another gap
in the leaves, the eye, set in red folds that covered the head and
hung down along the neck, trembling slightly. He stood perfectly
still and the turkey took another step, then stopped, with one foot
lifted, and listened.
  If he only had a gun, if he only had a gun! He could level aim
and shoot it right where it was. In a second, it would slide through
the bushes and be up in a tree before he could tell which direction
it had gone in. Without moving his head, he strained his eyes to
the ground to see if there were a stone near, but the ground looked
as if it might just have been swept. The turkey moved again. The
foot that had been poised half way up went down and the wing
dropped over it, spreading so that Ruller could see the long single
feathers, pointed at the end. He wondered if he dived into the
bush on top of it .... It moved again and the wing came up
again and it went down.
  It's limping, he thought quickly. He moved a little nearer, trying
to make his motion imperceptible. Suddenly its head pierced out of
the bush-he was about ten feet from it-and drew back and then
abruptly back into the bush. He began edging nearer with his arms
rigid and his fingers ready to clutch. It was lame, he could tell. It
might not be able to fly. It shot its head out once more and saw
him and shuttled back into the bushes and out again on the other
side. Its motion was half lopsided and the left wing was dragging.
He was going to get it. He was going to get it if he had to chase
it out of the county. He crawled through the brush and saw it about
twenty feet away, watching him warily, moving its neck up and
down. It stooped and tried to spread its wings and stooped again
and went a little way to the side and stooped again, trying to
make itself go up; but, he could tell, it couldn't fly. He was going
to have it. He was going to have it if he had to run it out of the
state. He saw himself going in the front door with it slung over
his shoulder, and them all screaming, "Look at Ruller with that
wild turkey! Ruller! where did you get that wild turkey?"
  Oh, he had caught it in the woods; he had thought they might
like to have him catch them one.
  "You crazy bird," he muttered, "you can't fly. I've already got you."
He was walking in a wide circle, trying to get behind it. For a
second, he almost thought he could go pick it up. It had dropped
down and one foot was sprawled, but when he got near enough to
pounce, it shot off in a heavy speed that made him start. He tore
after it, straight out in the open for a half acre of dead cotton; then
it went under a fence and into some woods again and he had
to get on his hands and knees to get under the fence but still keep
his eye on the turkey but not tear his shirt; and then dash after it
again with his head a little dizzy, but faster to catch up with it.
If he lost it in the woods, it would be lost for good; it was going for
the bushes on the other side. It would go on out in the road. He
was going to have it. He saw it dart through a thicket and he headed
for the thicket and when he got there it darted out again and in a
second disappeared under a hedge. He went through the hedge fast
and heard his shirt rip and felt cool streaks on his arms where they
were getting scratched. He stopped a second and looked down at
his torn shirt sleeves but the turkey was only a little ahead of him
and he could see it go over the edge of the hill and down again into
an open space and he darted on. If he came in with the turkey, they
wouldn't pay any attention to his shirt. Hane hadn't ever got a
turkey. Hane hadn't ever caught anything. He guessed they'd be
knocked out when they saw him; he guessed they'd talk about it in
bed. That's what they did about him and Hane. Hane didn't know;
he never woke up. Ruller woke up every night exactly at the time
they started talking. He and Hane slept in one room and their
mother and father in the next and the door was left open between
and every night Ruller listened. His father would say finally, "How
are the boys doing?" and their mother would say, Lord, they were
wearing her to a frazzle, Lord, she guessed she shouldn't worry but
how could she help worrying about Hane, the way he was now?
Hane had always been an unusual boy, she said. She said he would
grow up to be an unusual man too; and their father said yes, if he
didn't get put in the penitentiary first, and their mother said how
could he talk that way? and they argued just like Ruller and Hane
and sometimes Ruller couldn't get back to sleep for thinking. He
always felt tired when he got through listening but he woke up every
night and listened just the same, and whenever they started talking
about him, he sat up in bed so he could hear better. Once his father
asked why Ruller played by himself so much and his mother said
how was she to know? if he wanted to play by himself, she didn't
see any reason he shouldn't; and his father said that worried him
and she said well, if that was all he had to worry about, he'd do
well to stop; someone told her, she said, that they had seen Hane
at the Ever-Ready; hadn't they told him he couldn't go there?
His father asked Ruller the next day what he had been doing
lately and Ruller said, "playing by himself," and walked off sort of
like he had a limp. He guessed his father had looked pretty worried.
He guessed he'd think it was something when he came home with
the turkey slung over his shoulder. The turkey was heading out into
a road and for a gutter along the side of it. It ran along the gutter
and Ruller was gaining on it all the time until he fell over a root
sticking up and spilled the things out of his pockets and had to
snatch them up. When he got up, it was out of sight.
  "Bill, you take a posse and go down South Canyon; Joe, you cut
around by the gorge and head him off," he shouted to his men.
  "I'll follow him this way." And he dashed off again along the ditch.
  The turkey was in the ditch, not thirty feet from him, lying almost
on its neck panting, and he was nearly a yard from it before
it darted off again. He chased it straight until the ditch ended and
then it went out in the road and slid under a hedge on the other
side. He had to stop at the hedge and catch his breath and he could
see the turkey on the other side through the leaves, lying on its neck,
its whole body moving up and down with the panting. He could see
the tip of its tongue going up and down in its opened bill. If he could
stick his arm through, he might could get it while it was still too
tired to move. He pushed up closer to the hedge and eased his hand
through and then gripped it quickly around the turkey's tail. There
was no movement from the other side. Maybe the turkey had
dropped dead. He put his face close to the leaves to look through.
He pushed the twigs aside with one hand but they would not stay.
He let go the turkey and pulled his other hand through to hold
them. Through the hole he had made, he saw the bird wobbling off
drunkenly. He ran back to where the hedge began and got on the
other side. He'd get it yet. It needn't think it was so smart, he
muttered.
  It zigged across the middle of the field and toward the woods
again. It couldn't go into the woods! He'd never get it! He dashed
behind it, keeping his eyes sharp on it until suddenly something hit
his chest and knocked the breath black out of him. He fell back on
the ground and forgot the turkey for the cutting in his chest. He
lay there for a while with things rocking on either side of him.
Finally he sat up. He was facing the tree he had run into. He
rubbed his hands over his face and arms and the long scratches
began to sting. He would have taken it in slung over his shoulder
and they would have jumped up and yelled, "Good Lord look at
Ruller! Ruller! Where did you get that wild turkey?" and his
father would have said, "Man! That's a bird if I ever saw one!" He
kicked a stone away from his foot. He'd never see the turkey now.
He wondered why he had seen it in the first place if he wasn't
going to be able to get it.
  It was like somebody had played a dirty trick on him.
  All that running for nothing. He sat there looking sullenly at
his white ankles sticking out of his trouser legs and into his shoes.
"Nuts," he muttered. He turned over on his stomach and let his
cheek rest right on the ground, dirty or not. He had torn his
shirt and scratched his arms and got a knot on his forehead-he
could feel it rising just a little, it was going to be a big one all
right-all for nothing. The ground was cool to his face, but the
grit bruised it and he had to turn over. Oh hell, he thought.
  "Oh hell," he said cautiously.
  Then in a minute he said just, "Hell."
  Then he said it like Hane said it, pulling the e-ull out and trying
to get the look in his eye that Hane got. Once Hane said, "God!"
and his mother stomped after him and said, "I don't want to hear
you say that again. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, Thy
God, in vain. Do you hear me?" and he guessed that shut Hane up.
Hal He guessed she dressed him off that time.
  "God," he said.
  He looked studiedly at the ground, making circles in the dust
with his finger. "God!" he repeated.
  "God dammit," he said softly. He could feel his face getting hot
and his chest thumping all of a sudden inside. "God dammit to
hell," he said almost inaudibly. He looked over his shoulder but no
one was there.
  "God dammit to hell, good Lord from Jerusalem," he said. His
uncle said "Good Lord from Jerusalem."
  "Good Father, good God, sweep the chickens out the yard," he
said and began to giggle. His face was very red. He sat up and
looked at his white ankles sticking out of his pants legs into his
shoes. They looked like they didn't belong to him. He gripped a
hand around each ankle and bent his knees up and rested his chin
on a knee. "Our Father Who art in heaven, shoot 'em six and roll
'em seven," he said, giggling again. Boy, she'd smack his head in if
she could hear him. God dammit, she'd smack his goddam head in.
He rolled over in a fit of laughter. God dammit, she'd dress him off
and wring his goddam neck like a goddam chicken. The laughing
cut his side and he tried to hold it in, but every time he thought of
his goddam neck, he shook again. He lay back on the ground, red
and weak with laughter, not able not to think of her smacking his
goddam head in. He said the words over and over to himself and
after a while he stopped laughing. He said them again but the
laughing had gone out. He said them again but it wouldn't start
back up. All that chasing for nothing, he thought again. He might
as well go home. What did he want to be sitting around here for?
He felt suddenly like he would if people had been laughing at him.
Aw, go to hell, he told them. He got up and kicked his foot sharply
into somebody's leg and said, "Take that, sucker," and turned into
the woods to take the short trail home.
  And as soon as he got in the door, they would holler, "How did
you tear your clothes and where did you get that knot on your
forehead?" He was going to say he fell in a hole. What difference
would it make? Yeah, God, what difference would it make?
  He almost stopped. He had never heard himself think that tone
before. He wondered should he take the thought back. He guessed
it was pretty bad; but heck, it was the way he felt. He couldn't help
feeling that way. Heck ... hell, it was the way he felt. He guessed he
couldn't help that. He walked on a little way, thinking, thinking
about it. He wondered suddenly if he were going "bad." That's
what Hane had done. Hane played pool and smoked cigarettes and
sneaked in at twelve-thirty and boy he thought he was something.
"There's nothing you can do about," their grandmother had told
their father, "he's at that age." What age? Ruller wondered. I'm
eleven, he thought. That's pretty young. Hane hadn't started until
he was fifteen. I guess it's worse in me, he thought. He wondered
would he fight it. Their grandmother had talked to Hane and told
him the only way to conquer the devil was to fight him-if he didn't,
he couldn't be her boy any more-Ruller sat down on a stump-and
she said she'd give him one more chance, did he want it? and he
yelled at her, no! and would she leave him alone? and she told him,
well, she loved him even if he didn't love her and he was her boy
anyway and so was Ruller. Oh no, I ain't, Ruller thought quickly.
Oh no. She's not pinning any of that stuff on me.
  Boy, he could shock the pants off her. He could make her teeth
fall in her soup. He started giggling. The next time she asked him
if he wanted to playa game of parcheesi, he'd say, hell no, goddammit,
didn't she know any good games? Get out her goddam
cards and he'd show her a few. He rolled over on the ground,
choking with laughter. "Let's have some booze, kid," he'd say. "Let's
get stinky." Boy, he'd knock her out of her socks! He sat on the
ground, red and grinning to himself, bursting every now and then
into a fresh spasm of giggles. He remembered the minister had
said young men were going to the devil by the dozens this day and
age; forsaking gentle ways; walking in the tracks of Satan. They
would rue the day, he said. There would be weeping and gnashing
of teeth. "Weeping," Ruller muttered. Men didn't weep.
  How do you gnash your teeth? he wondered. He grated his jaws
together and made an ugly face. He did it several times.
  He bet he could steal.
  He thought about chasing the turkey for nothing. It was a dirty
trick. He bet he could be a jewel thief. They were smart. He bet
he could have all Scotland Yard on his tail. Hell.
  He got up. God could go around sticking things in your face and
making you chase them all afternoon for nothing.
  You shouldn't think that way about God, though.
  But that was the way he felt. If that was the way he felt, could
he help it? He looked around quickly as if someone might be
hiding in the bushes; then suddenly he started.
  It was rolled over at the edge of a thicket-a pile of ruffled bronze
with a red head lying limp along the ground. Ruller stared at it, unable
to think; then he leaned forward suspiciously. He wasn't going
to touch it. Why was it there now for him to take? He wasn't going
to touch it. It could just lie there. The picture of himself walking
in the room with it slung over his shoulder came back to him. Look
at Ruller with that turkey! Lord, look at Ruller! He squatted down
beside it and looked without touching it. He wondered what had
been wrong with its wing. He lifted it up by the tip and looked
under. The feathers were blood-soaked. It had been shot. It must
weigh ten pounds, he figured.
  Lord, Ruller! It's a huge turkey! He wondered how it would feel
slung over his shoulder. Maybe, he considered, he was supposed to
take it.
  Ruller gets our turkeys for us. Ruller got it in the woods, chased it
dead. Yes, he's a very unusual child.
  Ruller wondered suddenly if he were an unusual child.
  It came down on him in an instant: he was ... an ... unusual
... child.
  He reckoned he was more unusual than Hane,
  He had to worry more than Hane because he knew more how
things were.
  Sometimes when he was listening at night, he heard them arguing
like they were going to kill each other; and the next day his father
would go out early and his mother would have the blue veins out
on her forehead and look like she was expecting a snake to jump
from the ceiling any minute. He guessed he was one of the most unusual
children ever. Maybe that was why the turkey was there. He
rubbed his hand along the neck. Maybe it was to keep him from
going bad. Maybe God wanted to keep him from that.
  Maybe God had knocked it out right there where he'd see it when
he got up.
  Maybe God was in the bush now, waiting for him to make up his
mind. Ruller blushed. He wondered if God could think he was a
very unusual child. He must. He found himself suddenly blushing
and grinning and he rubbed his hand over his face quick to make
himself stop. If You want me to take it, he said, I'll be glad to.
Maybe finding the turkey was a sign. Maybe God wanted him to be
a preacher. He thought of Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy. He
might found a place for boys to stay who were going bad. He lifted
the turkey up-it was heavy all right-and fitted it over his shoulder.
He wished he could see how he looked with it slung over like that.
It occurred to him that he might as well go home the long way through
town. He had plenty of time. He started off slowly, shifting
the turkey until it fit comfortably over his shoulder. He remembered
the things he had thought before he found the turkey.
  They were pretty bad, he guessed.
  He guessed God had stopped him before it was too late. He
should be very thankful. Thank You, he said.
  Come on, boys, he said, we will take this turkey back for our
dinner. We certainly are much obliged to You, he said to God.
This turkey weighs ten pounds. You were mighty generous.
  That's okay, God said. And listen, we ought to have a talk about
these boys. They're entirely in your hands, see? I'm leaving the job
strictly up to you. I have confidence in you, McFarney.
  You can trust me, Ruller said. I'll come through with the goods.
He went into town with the turkey over his shoulder. He
wanted to do something for God but he didn't know what he could
do. If anybody was playing the accordion on the street today, he'd
give them his dime. He only had one dime, but he'd give it to them.
Maybe he could think of something better, though. He had been
going to keep the dime for something. He might could get another
one from his grandmother. How about a goddam dime, kid? He
pulled his mouth piously out of the grin. He wasn't going to think
that way any more. He couldn't get a dime from her anyway. His
mother was going to whip him if he asked his grandmother for
money again. Maybe something would turn up that he could do. If
God wanted him to do something, He'd turn something up.
  He was getting into the business block and through the corner of
his eye he noticed people looking at him. There were eight thousand
people in Mulrose County and on Saturday everyone of them was in
Tilford on the business block. They turned as Ruller passed and
looked at him. He glanced at himself reflected in a store window,
shifted the turkey slightly, and walked quickly ahead. He heard
someone call, but he walked on, pretending he was deaf. It was
his mother's friend, Alice Gilhard, and if she wanted him, let
her catch up with him.
  "Ruller!" she cried. "My goodness, where did you get that turkey?"
  She came up behind him fast and put her hand on his shoulder.
"That's some bird," she said. "You must be a good shot."
  "I didn't shoot it," Ruller said coldly. "I captured it. I chased it
dead."
  "Heavens," she said. "You wouldn't capture me one sometime,
would you?"
  "I might if I ever have time," Ruller said. She thought she was
so cute.
  Two men came over and whistled at the turkey. They yelled at
some other men on the corner to look. Another of his mother's
friends stopped and some country boys who had been sitting on the
curb got up and tried to see the turkey without showing they were
interested. A man with a hunting suit and gun stopped and looked
at Ruller and walked around behind him and looked at the turkey.
  "How much do you think it weighs?" a lady asked.
  "At least ten pounds," Ruller said.
  "How long did you chase it?"
  "About an hour," Ruller said.
  "The goddam imp," the man in the hunting suit muttered.
  "That's really amazing," a lady commented.
  "About that long," Ruller said.
  "You must be very tired."
  "No," Ruller said. "I have to go. I'm in a hurry." He worked his
face to look as if he were thinking something out and hurried down
the street until he was out of their view. He felt warm all over and
nice as if something very fine were going to be or had been. He
looked back once and saw that the country boys were following
him. He hoped they would come up and ask to look at the turkey.
God must be wonderful, he felt suddenly. He wanted to do something
for God. He hadn't seen anyone playing the accordion, though,
or selling pencils and he was past the business block. He might see
one before he really got to the streets where people lived at. If he
did, he'd give away the dime-even while he knew he couldn't get
another one any time soon. He began to wish he would see somebody
begging.
  Those country kids were still trailing along behind him. He
thought he might stop and ask them did they want to see the
turkey; but they might just stare at him. They were tenants'
children and sometimes tenants' children just stared at you. He
might found a home for tenants' children. He thought about going
back through town to see if he had passed a beggar without seeing
him, but he decided people might think he was showing off with
the turkey.
  Lord, send me a beggar, he prayed suddenly. Send me one before
I get home. He had never thought before of praying on his own,
but it was a good idea. God had put the turkey there. He'd send
him a beggar. He knew for a fact God would send him one. He
was on Hill Street now and there were nothing but houses on Hill
Street. It would be strange to find a beggar here. The sidewalks
were empty except for a few children and some tricycles. Ruller
looked back; the country boys were still following him. He decided
to slow down. It might make them catch up with him and it might
give a beggar more time to get to him. If one were coming. He
wondered if one were coming. If one came, it would mean God
had gone out of His way to get one. It would mean God was
really interested. He had a sudden fear one wouldn't come; it was a
whole fear quick.
  One will come, he told himself. God was interested in him because
he was a very unusual child. He went on. The streets were deserted
now. He guessed one wouldn't come. Maybe God didn't have confidence
in-no, God did. Lord, please send me a beggar! he implored.
He squinched his face rigid and strained his muscles in a
knot and said, "Please! one right now"; and the minute he said it -the
minute-Hetty Gilman turned around the corner before him,
heading straight to where he was.
   He felt almost like he had when he ran into the tree.
  She was walking down the street right toward him. It was just
like the turkey lying there. It was just as if she had been hiding
behind a house until he came by. She was an old woman whom
everybody said had more money than anybody in town because she
had been begging for twenty years. She sneaked into people's houses
and sat until they gave her something. If they didn't, she cursed
them. Nevertheless, she was a beggar. Ruller walked faster. He took
the dime out of his pocket so it would be ready. His heart was
stomping up and down in his chest. He made a noise to see if he
could talk. As they neared each other, he stuck out his hand.
  "Here!" he shouted. "Here!"
  She was a tall, long-faced old woman in an antique black cloak.
Her face was the color of a dead chicken's skin. When she saw
him, she looked as if she suddenly smelled something bad. He
darted at her and thrust the dime into her hand and dashed on
without looking back.
  Slowly his heart calmed and he began to feel full of a new
feeling-like being happy and embarrassed at the same time. Maybe,
he thought, blushing, he would give all his money to her. He felt
as if the ground did not need to be under him any longer. He
noticed suddenly that the country boys' feet were shuffling just behind
him, and almost without thinking, he turned and asked
graciously, "You all wanta see this turkey?"
  They stopped where they were and stared at him. One in front
spit. Ruller looked down at it quickly. There was real tobacco juice
in it! "Wheered you git that turkey?" the spitter asked,
   "I found it in the woods," Ruller said. "I chased it dead. See,
it's been shot under the wing." He took the turkey off his shoulder
and held it down where they could see. "I think it was shot twice,"
he went on excitedly, pulling the wing up.
  "Lemme see it here," the spitter said.
  Ruller handed him the turkey. "You see down there where the
bullet hole is?" he asked. "Well, I think it was shot twice in the
same hole, I think it was .... " The turkey's head flew in his face
as the spitter slung it up in the air and over his own shoulder and
turned. The others turned with him and together they sauntered off
in the direction they had come, the turkey sticking stiff out on the
spitter's back and its head swinging slowly in a circle as he walked
away.
  They were in the next block before Ruller moved. Finally, he
realized that he could not even see them any longer, they were
so far away. He turned toward home, almost creeping. He walked
four blocks and then suddenly, noticing that it was dark, he began
to run. He ran faster and faster, and as he turned up the road
to his house, his heart was running as fast as his legs and he was
certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him with its arms
rigid and its fingers ready to clutch.

End

The Train

1948

THINKING about the porter, he had almost forgotten the berth.
He had an upper one. The man in the station had said he
could give him a lower and Haze had asked didn't he have no upper
ones; the man said sure if that was what he wanted, and gave him
an upper one. Leaning back on the seat, Haze had seen how the
ceiling was rounded over him. It was in there. They pulled the
ceiling down and it was in there, and you climbed up to it on a
ladder. He hadn't seen any ladders around; he reckoned they kept
them in the closet. The closet was up where you came in. When he
first got on the train, he had seen the porter standing in front of
the closet, putting on his porter's jacket. Haze had stopped right
then-right where he was.
  The turn of his head was like and the back of his neck was like
and the short reach of his arm. He turned away from the closet
and looked at Haze and Haze saw his eyes and they were like;
they were the same-same as old Cash's for the first instant, and
then different. They turned different while he was looking at them;
hardened flat. "Whu ... what time do you pull down the beds?"
Haze mumbled.
  "Long time yet," the porter said, reaching into the closet again.
Haze didn't know what else to say to him. He went on to his
section.
  Now the train was greyflying past instants of trees and quick
spaces of field and a motionless sky that sped darkening away in
the opposite direction. Haze leaned his head back on the seat and
looked out the window, the yellow light of the train lukewarm on
him. The porter had passed twice, twice back and twice forward,
and the second time forward he had looked sharply at Haze for an
instant and passed on without saying anything; Haze had turned
and stared after him as he had done the time before. Even his
walk was like. All them gulch niggers resembled. They looked
like their own kind of nigger-heavy and bald, rock all through.
Old Cash in his day had been two hundred pounds heavy-no fat
on him-and five feet high with not more than two inches over.
Haze wanted to talk to the porter. What would the porter say when
he told him: I'm from Eastrod? What would he say?
  The train had come to Evansville. A lady got on and sat opposite
Haze. That meant she would have the berth under him. She said
she thought it was going to snow. She said her husband had driven
her down to the station and he said if it didn't snow before he got
home, he'd be surprised. He had ten miles to go; they lived in the
suburbs. She was going to Florida to visit her daughter. She had
never had time to take a trip that far off. The way things happened,
one thing right after another, it seemed like time went by so fast
you couldn't tell if you were old or young. She looked as if it had
been cheating her, going double quick when she was asleep and
couldn't watch it. Haze was glad to have someone there talking.
  He remembered when he was a little boy, him and his mother
and the other children would go into Chattanooga on the Tennessee
Railroad. His mother had always started up a conversation with the
other people on the train. She was like an old bird dog just unpenned
that raced, sniffing up every rock and stick and sucking in the air
around everything she stopped at. There wasn't a person she hadn't
spoken to by the time they were ready to get off. She remembered
them too. Long years after, she would say she wondered where the
lady was who was going to Fort West, or she wondered if the man
who was selling Bibles had ever got his wife out the hospital. She
had a hankering for people-as if what happened to the ones she
talked to happened to her then. She was a Jackson. Annie Lou
Jackson.
  My mother was a Jackson, Haze said to himself. He had stopped
listening to the lady although he was still looking at her and she
thought he was listening. My name is Hazel Wickers, he said. I'm
nineteen. My mother was a Jackson. I was raised in Eastrod, Eastrod,
Tennessee; he thought about the porter again. He was going
to ask the porter. It struck him suddenly that the porter might even
be Cash's son. Cash had a son run away. It happened before Haze's
time. Even so, the porter would know Eastrod.
  Haze glanced out the window at the shapes black-spinning past
him. He could shut his eyes and make Eastrod at night out of any
of them-he could find the two houses with the road between and
the store and the nigger houses and the one barn and the piece of
fence that started out into the pasture, gray-white when the moon
was on it. He could put the mule face, solid, over the fence and let
it hang there, feeling how the night was. He felt it himself. He felt
it light-touching around him. He seen his rna coming up the path,
wiping her hands on an apron she had taken off, looking like the
night change was on her, and then standing in the doorway:
Haaazzzzeeeee, Ha.rzzzeee, come in here. The train said it for him.
He wanted to get up and go find the porter.
  "Are you going home?" Mrs. Hosen asked him. Her name was
Mrs. Wallace Ben Hasen; she had been a Miss Hitchcock before
she married.
  "Oh!'' Haze said, startled-"I get off at, I get off at Taulkinham."
Mrs. Hasen knew some people in Evansville who had a cousin
in Taulkinham-a Mr. Henrys, she thought. Being from Taulkinham,
Haze might know him. Had he ever heard the ....
  "Taulkinham ain't where I'm from," Haze muttered. "I don't
know nothin ' about Taulkinham." He didn't look at Mrs. Hasen.
He knew what she was going to ask next and he felt it coming
and it came, "Well, where do you live?"
lie wanted to get away from her. "It was there," he mumbled,
squirming in the seat. Then he said, "I don't rightly know, I was
there but ... this is just the third time I been at Taulkinham," he
said quickly-her face had crawled out and was staring at him-
  "I ain't been since I went when I was six. I don't know nothin'
about it. Once I seen a circus there but not .... " He heard a
clanking at the end of the car and looked to see where it was
Lcnl1ing from. The porter was pulling the walls of the sections
farther alit. "I got to see the porter a minute," he said and escaped
down the aisle-. He didn't know what he'd say to the porter. He got
to him and he still didn't know what he'd say. "I reckon you're
fixing to make. them up now," he said.
  "That's right," the porter said.
  "How long does it take you to make one up?" Haze asked.
  "Seven minutes," the porter said.
  ''I'm from Eastrod," Haze said. "I'm from Eastrod, Tennessee."
  "That isn't on this line," the porter said. "You on the wrong train
if you counting on going to any such place as that."
  ''I'm going to Taulkinharn," Haze saidl. "I was raised in Eastrod."
  "You want your berth made up now;" the porter asked.
  "Huh?" Haze said. "Eastrod, Tennessee ; ain't you ever heard Eastrod?"
The porter wrenched one side of the scat flat. "I'm from Chicago,"
he said. He jerked the shades down on either window and wrenched
the other seat down. Even the back of his neck was like. When bent over, it came out in three bulges. He was from Chicago. "You
standing in the middle of the aisle. Somebody gonna want to get
past you," he said, suddenly turning on Hazw.
  "I reckon I'll go sit down some," Haze said, blushing.
  He knew people were staring at him as he went back to his
section. Mrs. Hosen was looking out the window. She turned and
eyed him suspiciously; then she said it hadn't snowed yet, had it?
and relaxed into a stream of talk. She guessed her husband was
getting his own supper tonight. She was paying a girl to come
cook his dinner but he was having to get his own supper. She
didn't think that hurt a man once in a while. She thought it did
him good. Wallace wasn't lazy but he didn't think what it took keep going with housework all day. She didn’t know how it would
feel to be in Florida with somebody waiting on her.
  He was from Chicago.
  This was her first vacation in five years. Five years ago she had
gone to visit her sister in Grand Rapids. Time flies. Her sister had
left Grand Rapids and moved to Waterloo. She didn't suppose she'd
recognize her sister's children if she saw them now. Her sister
wrote they were as big as their father. Things changed fast, she
said. Her sister's husband had worked with the city water supply
in Grand Rapids-he had a good place-but in Waterloo, he ....
  "I went back there last time," Haze said. "I wouldn't be getting
off at Taulkinham if it was there; it went, apart like, you know.
it .... "
  Mrs. Hosen frowned. "You must be thinking of another Grand
Rapids," she said. "The Grand Rapids I'm talking about is a large
city and it's always where it's always been." She stared at him for a
moment and then went on: when they were in Grand Rapids they
got along fine, but in Waterloo he suddenly took to liquor. Her
sister had to support the house and educate the children. It beat
Mrs. Hosen how he could sit there year after year.
  Haze's mother had never talked much on the train; she mostly
listened. She was a Jackson.
  After a while Mrs. Hosen said she was hungry and asked him if
he wanted to go into the diner. He did.
  The dining car was full and people were waiting to get in it.
Haze and Mrs. Hosen stood in line for a half hour, rocking in the
narrow passageway and every few minutes flattening themselves
against the side to let a trickle of people through. Mrs. Hosen began
talking to the lady on the side of her. Haze stared stupidly at the
wall. He would never have had the courage to come to the diner
by himself; it was fine he had met Mrs. Hosen. If she hadn't been
talking, he would have told her intelligently that he had gone there
the last time and that the porter was not from there but that he
looked near enough like a gulch nigger to be one, near enough
like old Cash to be his child. He'd tell her while they were eating.
He couldn't see inside the diner from where he was; he wondered
what it would be like in there. Like a restaurant, he reckoned. He
thought of the berth. By the time they got through eating, the berth
would probably be made up and he could get in it. What would
his ma say if she seen him having a berth in a train! He bet she
never reckoned that would happen. As they got nearer the entrance
to the diner he could see in. It was like a city restaurant! He bet
she never reckoned it was like that.
  The head man was beckoning to the people at the first of the
line every time someone left-sometimes for one person, sometimes
for more. He motioned for two people and the line moved up so
that Haze and Mrs. Hosen and the lady she was talking to were
standing at the end of the diner, looking in. In a minute, two
more people left. The man beckoned and Mrs. Hosen and the lady
walked in, and Haze followed them. The man stopped Haze and
said, "Only two," and pushed him back to the doorway. Haze's
face went an ugly red. He tried to get behind the next person and
then he tried to get through the line to go back to the car
he had come from, but there were too many people bunched in the
opening. He had to stand there while everyone around looked at
him. No one left for a while and he had to stand there. Mrs. Hosen
did not look at him again. Finally a lady up at the far end got up
and the head man jerked his hand and Haze hesitated and saw the
hand jerk again and then lurched up the aisle, falling against two
tables on the way and getting his hand wet with somebody's coffee.
He didn't look at the people he sat down with. He ordered the
first thing on the menu and, when it came, ate it without thinking
what it might be. The people he was sitting with had finished and,
he could tell, were waiting, watching him eat.
  When he got out the diner he was weak and his hands were
making small jittery movements by themselves. It seemed a year
ago that he had seen the head man beckon to him to sit down. He
stopped between two cars and breathed in the cold air to clear his
head. It helped. When he got back to his car all the berths were
made up and the aisles were dark and sinister, hung in heavy green.
He realized again that he had a berth, an upper one, and that he
could get in it now. He could lie down and raise the shade just
enough to look out from and watch-what he had planned to do and
see how everything went by a train at night. He could look
right into the night, moving.
  He got his sack and went to the men's room and put on his night
clothes. A sign said to get the porter to let you into the upper
berths. The porter might be a cousin of some of them gulch niggers,
he thought suddenly; he might ask him if he had any cousins
around Eastrod, or maybe just in Tennessee. He went down the
aisle, looking for him. They might have a little conversation before
he got in the berth. The porter was not at that end of the car and
he went back to look at the other encl. Going around the corner,
he ran into something heavily pink; it gasped and muttered,
"Clumsy!" It was Mrs. Hosen in a pink wrapper with her hair in
knots around her head. He had forgotten about her. She was
terrifying with her hair slicked back and the knobs like dark toad
stools framing her face. She tried to get past him and he tried to let
her but they were both moving the same way each time. Her face
became purplish except for little white marks over it that didn't
heat up. She drew herself stiff and stopped still and said, "What
IS the matter with you?" He slipped past her and dashed down
the aisle and ran suddenly into the porter so that the porter slipped
and he fell on top of him and the porter's face was right under his
and it was old Cash Simmons. For a minute he couldn't move off
the porter for thinking it was Cash and he breathed, "Cash," and
the porter pushed him off and got up and went down the aisle quick
and Haze scrambled off the floor and went after him saying he
wanted to get in the berth and thinking, this is Cash's kin, and then
suddenly, like something thrown at him when he wasn't looking:
this is Cash's son run away; and then: he knows about Eastrod and
doesn't want it, he doesn't want to talk about it, he doesn't want to
talk about Cash.
  He stood staring while the porter put the ladder up to the berth
and then he started up it, still looking at the porter, seeing Cash
there, only different, not in the eyes, and halfway up the ladder he
said, still looking at the porter, "Cash is dead. He got the cholera
from a pig." The porter's mouth perked down and he muttered,
looking at Haze with his eyes thin, "I'm from Chicago. My father
was a railroad man." And Haze stared at him and then laughed:
a nigger being a railroad "man": and laughed again, and the porter
jerked the ladder off suddenly with a wrench of his arm that sent
Haze clutching at the blanket into the berth.
  He lay on his stomach in the berth, trembling from the way he
had got in. Cash's son. From Eastrod. But not wanting Eastrod;
hating it. He lay there for a while on his stomach, not moving. It
seemed a year since he had fallen over the porter in the aisle.
  After a while he remembered that he was actually in the berth
and he turned and found the light and looked around him. There
was no window.
  The side wall did not have a window in it. It didn't push up to
be a window. There was no window concealed in it. There was a
fish-net thing stretched across the side wall; but no windows. For
a second it flashed through his mind that the porter had done this
given him this berth that there were no windows to and had just
a fish net strung the length of-because he hated him. But they
must all be like this.
  The top of the berth was low and curved over. He lay down. The
curved top looked like it was not quite closed; it looked like it was
closing. He lay there for a while not moving. There was something
in his throat like a sponge with an egg taste. He had eggs for
supper. They were in the sponge in his throat. They were right in
his throat. He didn't want to turn over for fear they would move;
he wanted the light off; he wanted it dark. He reached up without
turning and felt for the button and snapped it and the darkness
sank down on him and then faded a little with light from the
aisle that came in through the foot of space not closed. He wanted
it all dark, he didn't want it diluted. He heard the porter's footsteps
coming down the aisle, soft into the rug, coming steadily down,
brushing against the green curtains and fading up the other way
out of hearing. He was from Eastrod. From Eastrod but he hated
it. Cash wouldn't have put any claim on him. He wouldn't have
wanted him. He wouldn't have wanted anything that wore a
monkey white coat and toted a whisk broom in his pocket. Cash's
clothes had looked like they'd set a while under a rock; and they
smelled like nigger. He thought how Cash smelled, but he smelled
the train. No more gulch niggers in Easirod. In Eastrod. Turning in
the road, he saw in the dark, half dark, the store boarded and the
barn open with the dark free in it, and the smaller house half carted
away, the porch gone and no floor in the hall. He had been supposed
to go to his sister's in Taulkinham all his last furlough when he
came up from the camp in Georgia but he didn't want to go to
Taulkinham and he had gone back to Eastrod even though he
knew how it was: the two families scattered in towns and even
the niggers from up and down the road gone into Memphis and
Murfreesboro and other places. He had gone back and slept in the
house on the floor in the kitchen and a board had fallen on his head
out of the roof and cut his face. He jumped, feeling the board, and
the train jolted and unjolted and went again. He went looking
through the house to see they hadn't left nothing in it ought to been
taken.
  His ma always slept in the kitchen and had her walnut shiffer-robe
in there. Wasn't another shiffer-robe nowhere around. She was
a Jackson. She had paid thirty dollars for it and hadn't bought
herself nothing else big again. And they had left it. He reckoned
they hadn't had room on the truck for it. He opened all the drawers.
There were two lengths of wrapping cord in the top one and
nothing in the others. He was surprised nobody had come and
stolen a shifler-robe like that. He took the wrapping cord and tied
the legs through the floorboards and left a piece of paper in each
of the drawers: THIS IS SHIFFER-ROBE BELONGS TO HAZEL WICKERS. DO NOT STEAL IT OR YOU WILL BE HUNTED DOWN AND KILLED.
  She could rest easier knowing it was guarded some. If she come
looking any time at night, she would see. He wondered if she
walked at night and came there ever-came with that look on her
face, unrested and looking, going up the path and through the
barn open all around and stopping in the shadow by the store
boarded up, coming on unrested with that look on her face like he
had seen through the crack going down. He seen her face through
the crack when they were shutting the top on her, seen the shadow
that came down over her face and pulled her mouth down like
she wasn't satisfied with resting, like she was going to spring up
and shove the lid back and fly out like a spirit going to be satisfied:
but they shut it on down. She might have been going to fly out of
there, she might have been going to spring-he saw her terrible like
a huge bat darting from the closing-fly out of there but it was
falling dark on top of her, closing down all the time, closing down;
from inside he saw it closing, coming closer, closer down and cutting
off the light and the room and the trees seen through the window
through the crack faster and darker closing down. He opened his
eyes and saw it closing down and he sprang up between the crack
and wedged his body through it and hung there moving, dizzy,
with the dim light of the train slowly showing the rug below,
moving, dizzy. He hung there wet and cold and saw the porter at
the other end of the car, a white shape in the darkness, standing
there, watching him and not moving. The tracks curved and he fell
back sick into the rushing stillness of the train.

END

The Peeler

1949

HAZEL MOTES walked along downtown, close to the store
fronts but not looking at them. His neck was thrust forward
as if he were trying to smell something that was always being drawn
away. 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, The stores in Taulkinham
stayed open on Thursday nights and a lot of people were shopping.
Haze's shadow was now behind him and now before him and now
arid 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.
  After 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 man had on a small canvas hat and a
shirt patterned with bunches of upside down pheasants and quail
and bronze turkeys. He was pitching his voice under the street
noises so that it reached every ear distinctly as in a private conversation.
A few people gathered around. There were two buckets on
the card table, one empty and the other full of potatoes. Between
the two buckets there was a pyramid of green cardboard boxes and
on top of the stack, one peeler was open for demonstration. The
man stood in front of this altar, pointing over it at different people.
"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 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. "You ain't gonna let one of these go by!" he said.
The boy guffawed and looked at the other people gathered
around. He had yellow slick hair and a fox-shaped face.
  "What's yer name?" the peeler man asked.
  "Name Enoch Emery," the boy said and snuffled.
  "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. Nobody
laughed but the boy. Then a man standing across from Hazel Motes
laughed. 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. The laugh sounded as if it came from something tied
up in a croker sack. It was evident he was a blind man. 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. She had a long face and a short sharp
nose. The people began to look at the two of them instead of the
man selling peelers. This irritated the man selling peelers. "How
about you, you there," he said, pointing at Hazel Motes. "You'll
never be able to get a bargain like this in any store."
  "Hey!" Enoch Emery said, reaching across a woman and punching
Haze's arm. "He's talking to you! He's talking to you!" Haze
was looking at the blind man and the child. Enoch Emery had to
punch him again.
  "Whyn't you take one of these home to yer wife?" the peeler
man was saying.
  "I ain't none," Haze muttered without drawing his attention
from the blind man.
  "Well, you got a dear old mother, ain't you?"
  "No."
  "Well shaw," the man said, with his hand cupped to the people,
"he needs one theseyer just to keep him company."
  Enoch Emery thought that was so funny that he leaned over
and slapped his knee, but Hazel Motes didn't look as if he had heard
it yet. "I'm going to give away half a dozen peeled potatoes to the
first person purchasing one theseyer machines," the man said.
"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. "You'll thank the day you ever stopped here," the
man said, "you'll never forget it. Ever one of you people purchasing
one theseyer machines'll never forget it."
  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. He was handing something out. Then Haze
saw that the child was moving around too, giving out white leaflets.
There were not many people gathered there, but the ones who were
began to move off. When the machine-seller saw this, he leaned,
glaring, over the card table. "Hey you!" he yelled at the blind man,
"what you think you doing? Who you think you are, running
people off from here?"
  The blind man didn't pay him any mind. He kept on handing
out the pamphlets. He handed one at Enoch Emery and then he
came toward Haze, hitting the white cane at an angle from his leg.
  "What the hell you think you doing:" the man selling peelers
yelled. "I got these people together, how you think you can horn
in?"
  The blind man had a peculiar boiled looking red face. He thrust
one of the pamphlets a little to the side of Haze and Haze grabbed
it. It was a tract. The words on the outside of it said, "Jesus Calls
You."
  "I'd like to know who the hell you think you are!" the man
with the peelers was yelling. The child p"ssed the card table again
and handed him a tract. He looked at it fur an instant with his lip
curled, and then he charged around the card table, upsetting the
bucket of potatoes. "These damn Jesus fanatics," he yelled, glaring
around, trying to find the blind man. More people had gathered,
hoping to see a disturbance, and the blind man had disappeared
among them. "These goddam Communist Jesus Foreigners!" the
peeler man screamed. "I got this crowd together!" He stopped,
realizing there was a crowd.
  "Listen folks," he said, "one at a time, there's plenty to go
around, just don't push, a half dozen peeled potatoes to the first person
stepping up to buy." He got back behind the card table quietly
and started holding up the peeler boxes. "Step on up, plenty to go
around," he said, "no need to crowd."
  Hazel Motes didn't open his tract. He looked at the outside of
it and then he tore it across. He put the two pieces together and tore
them across again. He kept restacking the pieces and tearing them
again until he had a little handful of confetti. He turned his hand
over and let the shredded leaflet sprinkle to the ground. Then he
looked up and saw the blind man's child not three feet away, watching
him. Her mouth was open and her eyes glittered on him like two
chips of green bottle glass. She had on a black dress and there was a
white gunny sack hung over her shoulder. Haze scowled and began
rubbing his sticky hands on his pants.
  "I seen you," she said. Then she moved quickly over to where the
blind man was standing now, beside the card table. Most of the
people had moved off.
  The peeler man leaned over the card table and said, "Hey!" to
the blind man. "I reckon that showed you. Trying to horn in." But
the blind man stood there with his chin tilted back slightly as if
he saw something over their heads.
  "Lookerhere," Enoch Emery said, "I ain't got but a dollar sixteen
cent but I. ... "
  "Yah," the man said, as if he were going to make the blind man
see him, "I reckon that'll show you you can't muscle in on me. Sold
eight peelers, sold .... "
  "Give me one of them," the child said, pointing to the peelers.
  "Hanh?" he said.
  She reached in her pocket and drew out a long coin purse and
opened it. "Give me one of them," she said, holding out two fifty
cent pieces.
  The man eyed the money with his mouth hiked on one side. "A
buck fifty, sister," he said.
  She pulled her hand in quickly and all at once glared around
at Hazel Motes as if he had made a noise at her. The blind man was
moving off. She stood a second glaring red-faced at Haze and then
she turned and followed the blind man. Haze started suddenly.
  "Listen," Enoch Emery said, "I ain't got but a dollar sixteen
cent and I want me one of them .... "
  "You can keep it," the man said, taking the bucket off the card
table. "This ain't no cut-rate joint."
  Hazel Motes stood staring after the blind man, jerking his hands
in and out of his pockets. He looked as if he were trying to move
forward and backward at the same time. Then suddenly he thrust
two bills at the man selling peelers and snatched a box off the card
table and started down the street. In just a second Enoch Emery was
panting at his elbow.
  "My, I reckon you got a heap of money," Enoch Emery said.
Haze turned the corner and saw them about a block ahead of him.
Then he slowed down some and saw Enoch Emery there. Enoch
had on a yellowish white suit with a pinkish white shirt and his tie
was a greenpeaish color. He was grinning. He looked like a
friendly hound dog with light mange. "How long you been here?"
he inquired.
  "Two days," Haze muttered.
  "I been here two months," Enoch said. "I work for the city.
  Where you work?"
  "Not working," Haze said.
  "That's too bad," Enoch said. "I work for the city." He skipped
a step to get in line with Haze, then he said, "I'm eighteen year
old and I ain't been here but two months and I already work for
the city."
  "That's fine," Haze said. He pulled his hat down farther on the
side Enoch Emery was on and walked faster.
  "I didn't ketch your name good," Enoch said.
  Haze said his name.
  "You look like you might be follering them hicks," Enoch remarked. "You go in for a lot of Jesus?"
  "No," Haze said.
  "No, me neither, not much," Enoch agreed. "I went to thisyer
Rodemill Boys' Bible Academy for four weeks. Thisyer woman
that traded me from my daddy she sent me; she was a Welfare
woman. Jesus, four weeks and I thought I was gonna be sanctified
crazy."
  Haze walked to the end of the block and Enoch stayed all the
time at his elbow, panting and talking. When Haze started across
the street, Enoch yelled, "Don't you see theter light! That means
you got to wait!" A cop blew a whistle and a car blasted its horn
and stopped short. Haze went on across, keeping his eyes on the
blind man in the middle of the block, The policeman kept blowing
the whistle. He crossed the street over to where Haze was and
stopped him. He had a thin face and oval-shaped yellow eyes.
  "You know what that little thing hanging up there is for?" he
asked, pointing to the traffic light over the intersection.
  "I didn't see it," Haze said.
  The policeman looked at him without saying anything. A few
people stopped. He rolled his eyes at them. "Maybe you thought
the red ones was for white folks and the green ones for colored,"
he said.
  "Yeah, I thought that," Haze said. "Take your hand off me."
The policeman took his hand off and put it on his hip. He backed
one step away and said, "You tell all your friends about these
lights. Red is to stop, green is to go-men and women, white folks
and niggers, all go on the same light. You tell all your friends so
when they come to town, they'll know." The people laughed.
  "I'll look after him," Enoch Emery said, pushing in by the policeman.
"He ain't been here but only two days. I'll look after him."
  "How long you been here?" the cop asked.
 "I was born and raised here," Enoch said. "This is my ole home
town. I'll take care of him for you. Hey wait!" he yelled at Haze.
"Wait on me!" He pushed out the crowd and caught up with him.
"I reckon I saved you that time," he said.
  "I'm obliged," Haze said.
  "It wasn't nothing," Enoch said. "Why don't we go in Walgreen's
and get us a soda? Ain't no nightclubs open this early."
  "I don't like no drugstores," Haze said. "Goodby."
  "That's all right," Enoch said. "I reckon I'll go along and keep
you company for a while." He looked up ahead at the couple and
said, "I sho wouldn't want to get messed up with no hicks this
time of night, particularly the Jesus kind. I done had enough of
them myself. Thisyer woman that traded me from my daddy didn't
do nothing but pray. Me and daddy, we moved around with a
sawmill where we worked and it set up outside Boonville one
summer and here come thisyer woman." He caught hold of Haze's
coat. "Only objection I got to Taulkinham is there's too many
people on the street," he said confidentially, "look like they ain't
satisfied until they knock you down-well, here she come and I
reckon she took a fancy to me. I was twelve year old and I could
sing some hymns good I learnt off a nigger. So here she comes taking
a fancy to me and traded me off my daddy and took me to Boonville
to live with her. She had a brick house but it was Jesus all day
lang." While he was talking he was looking up at Haze, studying
his face. All of a sudden he bumped into a little man lost in a
pair of faded overalls. "Whyn't you look where you going?" he
growled.
  The little man stopped short and raised his arm in a vicious
gesture and a mean dog look came on his face. "Who you tellin
what?" he snarled.
  "You see," Enoch said, jumping to catch up with Haze, "all they
want to do is knock you down. I ain't never been to such a unfriendly
place before. Even with that woman. I stayed with her for
two months in that house of hers," he went on, "and then come fall
she sent me to the Rodemill Boys' Bible Academy and I thought
that sho was gonna be some relief. This woman was hard to get
along with-she wasn't old, I reckon she was forty year old-but she
sho was ugly. She had the seyer brown glasses and her hair was so
thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull. I thought it
was gonna be some certain relief to get to that Ac.idemv. I had run
away oncet on her and she got me back and come to find out she had
papers on me and she could send me to the penitentiary if I didn't
stay with her so I sho was glad to get to theter Academy. You ever
been to a academy?"
  Haze didn't seem to hear the question. He still h;ld his eye on the
blind man in the next block.
  "Well, it won't no relief," Enoch said. "Good Jesus, it won't no
relief. I run away from there after four weeks and durn if she
didn't get me back and brought me to that house of hers again. I
got out though." He waited a minute. "You want to know how?"
After a second he said, "I scared hell out of that woman, that's
how. I studied on it and studied on it. I even prayed. I said,
'Jesus, show me the way to get out of here without killing
thisyer woman and getting sent to the penitentiary.' And durn if
He didn't. I got up one morning at just daylight and I went in her
room without my pants on and pulled the sheet off her and giver a
heart attackt. Then I went back to my daddy and we ain't seen
hide of her since.
  "Your jaw just crawls," he observed, watching the side of
Haze's face. "You don't never laugh. I wouldn't be surprised if you
wasn't a real wealthy man."
  Haze turned down a side street. The blind man and the girl were
Oil the corner a block ahead.
  "Well, I reckon we gonna ketch up with em after all," Enoch
said. "Ain't that girl ugly, though? You seen them shoes she has
on? Men's shoes, looks like. You know many people here?"
  "No," Haze said.
  "You ain't gonna know none neither. This is one more hard
place to make friends in. I been here two months and I don't know
nobody, look like all they want to do is knock you down. I reckon
you got a right heap of money," he said. "I ain't got none. Had, I'd
sho know what to do with it." The man and the girl stopped on
the corner and turned up the left side of the street. "We catching
up," he said. "I bet we'll be at some meeting singing hymns with
her and her daddy if we don't watch out."
  Up in the next block there was a large building with columns and
a dome. The blind man and the child were going toward it. There
was a car parked in every space around the building and on the
other side the street and up and down the streets near it. "That ain't
no picture show," Enoch said. The blind man and the girl turned
up the steps to the building. The steps went all the way across
the front, and on either side there were stone lions sitting on
pedestals. "Ain't no church," Enoch said. Haze stopped at the steps.
He looked as if he were trying to settle his face into an expression.
He pulled the black hat forward at a nasty angle and started toward
the two, who had sat down in the corner by one of the lions.
As they came nearer the blind man leaned forward as if he were
listening to the footsteps, then he stood up, holding a tract out in
his hand.
  "Sit down," the child said in a loud voice. "It ain't nobody but
them two boys."
  "Nobody but us," Enoch Emery said. "Me and him been follerin
you all about a mile."
  "I knew somebody was following me," the blind man said. "Sit
down."
  "They ain't here for nothing but to make fun," the child said.
She looked as if she smelled something bad. The blind man was
feeling out to touch them. Haze stood just out of reach of his hands,
squinting at him as if he were trying to see the empty eye sockets
under the green glasses.
  "It ain't me, it's him," Enoch said. "He's been running after yawl
ever since back yonder by them potato peelers. We bought one of
em. "
  "I knew somebody was following me!" the blind man said. "I
felt it all the way back yonder."
  "I ain't followed you," Haze said. He felt the peeler box in his
hand and looked at the girl. The black knitted cap came down
almost to her eyes. She looked as if she might be thirteen or fourteen
years old. "I ain't followed you nowhere," he said sourly. "I followed
her." He stuck the peeler box out at her.
  She jumped back and looked as if she were going to swallow
her face. "I don't want that thing," she said. "What you think I
want with that thing? Take it. It ain't mine. I don't want it!"
  "I take it with thanks for her," the blind man said. "Put it in
your sack," he said to her.
  Haze thrust the peeler at her again, but he was still looking
at the blind man.
  "I won't have it," she muttered.
  "Take it like I told you," the blind man said shortly.
  After a second she took it and shoved it in the sack where the
tracts were. "It ain't mine," she said. "I don't want none of it. I
got it but it ain't mine."
  "She thanks you for it," the blind man said. "I knew somebody
was following me."
  "I ain't followed you nowhere," Haze said. "I followed her to
say I ain't beholden for none of her fast eye like she gave me back
yonder." He didn't look at her, he looked at the blind man.
"What do you mean?" she shouted. "I never gave you no fast
eye. I only watch you tearing up that tract. He tore it up in little
pieces," she said, pushing the blind man's shoulder. "He tore it up
and sprinkled it over the ground like salt and wiped his hands on
his pants."
  "He followed me," the blind man said. "Wouldn't anybody follow
you. I can hear the urge for Jesus in his voice."
  "Jesus," Haze muttered, "my Jesus." He sat down by the girl's
leg. His head was at her knee and he set his hand on the step next
to her foot. She had on men's shoes and black cotton stockings.
The shoes were laced up tight and tied in precise bows. She moved
herself away roughly and sat down behind the blind man.
  "Listen at his cursing," she said in a low tone. "He never followed
you."
  "Listen," the blind man said, "you can't run away from Jesus.
Jesus is a fact. If who you're looking for is Jesus, the sound of it
will be in your voice."
  "I don't hear nothing in his voice," Enoch Emery said. "I know
a whole heap about Jesus because I attended thisyer Rodemill Boys'
Bible Academy that a woman sent me to. If it was anything about
Jesus in his voice I could certainly hear it." He had got up onto the
lion's back and he was sitting there sideways cross-legged.
  The blind man reached out again and his hands suddenly covered
Haze's face. For a second Haze didn't move or make any
sound. Then he knocked the hands off. "Quit it," he said in a faint
voice. "You don't know nothing about me."
  "You got a secret need," the blind man said. "Them that know
Jesus once can't escape Him in the end."
  "I ain't never known Him," Haze said.
  "You got a least knowledge," the blind man said. "That's enough.
You know His name and you're marked. If Jesus has marked
you there ain't nothing you can do about it. Them that have
knowledge can't swap it for ignorance." He was leaning forward
but in the wrong direction so that he appeared to be talking to the
step below Haze's foot. Haze sat leaning backward with the black
hat tilted forward over his face.
  "My daddy looks just like Jesus," Enoch said from the lion's
back. "His hair hangs to his shoulders. Only difference is he's got
a scar acrost his chin. I ain't never seen who my mother is."
  "You're marked with knowledge," the blind man said. "You
know what sin is and only them that know what it is can commit
it. I knew all the time we were walking here somebody was following
me," he said. "You couldn't have followed her. Wouldn't
anybody follow her. I could feel there was somebody near with
an urge for Jesus."
  "There ain't nothing for your pain but Jesus," the girl said suddenly.
She leaned forward and stuck her arm out with her finger
pointed at Haze's shoulder, but he spat down the steps and didn't
look at her. "Listen," she said in a louder voice, "this here man
and woman killed this little baby. It was her own child but it was
ugly and she never give it any love. This child had Jesus and this
woman didn't have nothing but good looks and a man she was
living in Sin with. She sent the child away and it come back and
she sent it away again and it come back again and ever time she
sent it away it come back to where her and this man was living in
Sin. They strangled it with a silk stock ng and hung it up in the
chimney. It didn't give her any peace after that, though. Everything
she looked at was that child. Jesus made it beautiful to haunt
her. She couldn't lie with that man without she saw it, staring
through the chimney at her, shining through the brick in the
middle of the night." She moved her feet around so that just the
tips of them stuck out from her skirt which she had pulled tight
around her legs. "She didn't have nothing but good looks," she
said in a loud fast voice. "That ain't enough. No sirree."
  "My Jesus," Haze said.
  "It ain't enough," she repeated.
  "I hear them scraping their feet inside there," the blind man said.
"Get out the tracts, they're fixing to come out."
  "What we gonna do?" Enoch asked. "What's inside theter building?”
  "A program letting out," the blind m.ui said. The child took the
tracts out the gunny sack and gave him two bunches of them, tied
with a string. "You and Enoch Emery go over on that side and give
out," he said to her. "Me and this boy'll stay over here."
  "He don't have no business touching them," she said. "He don't
want to do nothing but shred them up."
  "Go like I told you," the blind man said.
  She stood there a second, scowling. Then she said, "You come on
if you're coming," to Enoch Emery and Enoch jumped off the
lion and followed her over to the other side.
  The blind man was reaching forward. Haze ducked to the side
but the blind man was next to him on the step with his hand
clamped around his arm. He leaned forward so that he was facing
Haze's knee and he said in a fast whisper, "You followed me
here because you're in Sin but you can be a testament to the Lord.
Repent! Go to the head of the stairs and renounce your sins and
distribute these tracts to the people," and he thrust the stack of
pamphlets into Haze's hand.
  Haze jerked his arm away but he only pulled the blind man
nearer. "Listen," he said, ''I'm as clean as you are."
  "Fornication," the blind man said.
  "That ain't nothing but a word," Haze said. "If I was in Sin I
was in it before I ever committed any. Ain't no change come in
me." He was trying to pry the fingers off from around his arm
but the blind man kept wrapping them tighter. "I don't believe
in Sin," he said. "Take your hand off me."
  "You do," the blind man said, "you're marked."
  "I ain't marked," Haze said, "I'm free."
  "You're marked free," the blind man said. "Jesus loves you and
you can't escape his mark. Go to the head of the stairs and .... "
Haze jerked his arm free and jumped up. "I'll take them up
there and throw them over into the bushes," he said. "You be
looking! See can you see."
  "I can see more than you!" the blind man shouted. "You got eyes
and see not, ears and hear not, but Jesus'll make you see!"
  "You be watching if you can see!" Haze said, and started running
up the steps. People were already coming out the auditorium
doors and some were halfway down the steps. He pushed through
them with his elbows out like sharp wings and when he got to the
top, a new surge of them pushed him back almost to where he had
started up. He fought through them again until somebody hollered,
"Make room for this idiot!" and people got out of his way.
He rushed to the top and pushed his way over to the side and
stood there, glaring and panting.
  "I never followed him," he said aloud. "I wouldn't follow a blind
fool like that. My Jesus." He stood against the building, holding
the stack of leaflets by the string. A fat man stopped near him to
light a cigar, and Haze pushed his shoulder. "Look down yonder,"
he said. "See that blind man down there, he's giving out tracts.
Jesus. You ought to see him and he's got this here ugly child dressed
up in woman's clothes, giving them out too. My Jesus."
  "There's always fanatics," the fat man said, moving on.
  "My Jesus," Haze said. He leaned forward near an old woman
with orange hair and a collar of red wooden beads. "You better
get on the other side, lady," he said. "There's a fool down there
giving out tracts." The crowd behind the old woman pushed her on,
but she looked at him for an instant with two bright flea eyes. He
started toward her through the people but she was already too far
away, and he pushed back to where he had been standing against
the wall. "Sweet Jesus Christ crucified," he said, and felt something
turn in his chest. The crowd was moving fast. It was like a
big spread ravelling and the separate threads disappeared down the
dark streets until there was nothing left of it and he was standing
on the porch of the auditorium by himself. The tracts were speckled
all over the steps and on the sidewalk and out into the street.
The blind man was standing down on the first step, bent over,
feeling for the crumpled pamphlets scattered around him. Enoch
Emery was over on the other side, standing on the lion's head and
trying to balance himself, and the child was picking up the pamphlets
that were not too crushed to use again and putting them back in
the gunny sack.
  I don't need no Jesus, Haze said. I don't need no Jesus. I got
Leora Watts.
  He ran down the steps to where the blind man was, and stopped.
He stood there for a second just out of reach of his hands which
had begun to grope forward, hunting the sound of his step, and
then he started across the street. He was on the other side before
the voice pierced after him. He turned and saw the blind man
standing in the middle of the street, shouting, "Shrike! Shrike!
My name is Asa Shrike when you want me!" A car had to swerve
to the side to keep from hitting him.
  Haze drew his head down nearer his hunched shoulders and
went on quickly. He didn't look back until he heard the footsteps
coming behind him.
  "Now that we got shut of them," Enoch Emery panted, "whyn't
we go sommer and have us some fun?"
  "Listen," Haze said roughly, "I got business of my own. I seen
all of you I want." He began walking very fast.
  Enoch kept skipping steps to keep up. "I been here two months,"
he said, "and I don't know nobody. People ain't friendly here. I
got me a room and there ain't never nobody in it but me. My
daddy said I had to come. I wouldn't never have come but he made
me. I think I seen you sommers before. You ain't from Stockwell,
are you?"
  "No."
  "Melsy?"
  "No."
  "Sawmill set up there oncet," Enoch said. "Look like you had a
kind of familer face."
  They walked on without saying anything until they got on the
main street again. It was almost deserted. "Goodby," Haze said
and quickened his walk again.
  "I'm going thisaway too," Enoch said in a sullen voice. On the
left there was a movie house where the electric bill was being
changed. "We hadn't got tied up with them hicks, we could have
gone to a show," he muttered. He strode along at Haze's elbow,
talking in a half mumble, half whine. Once he caught at his
sleeve to slow him down and Haze jerked it away. "He made me
come," he said in a cracked voice. Haze looked at him and saw
he was crying, his face seamed and wet and a purple-pink color.
"I ain't but eighteen year," he cried, "and he made me come and I
don't know nobody, nobody here'll have nothing to do with nobody
else. They ain't friendly. He done gone off with a woman and made
me come but she ain't gonna stay for long, he's gonna beat hell
out of her before she gets herself stuck to a chair. You the first
familer face I seen in two months, I seen you sommers before. I
know I seen you sommers before."
  Haze looked straight ahead with his face set hard, and Enoch
kept up the half mumble, half blubber. They passed a church and a
hotel and an antique shop and turned up a street full of brick
houses, each alike in the darkness.
  "If you want you a woman you don't have to be follerin nothing
looked like her," Enoch said. "I heard about where there's a house
full of two-dollar ones. Whyn't we go have us some fun? I could
pay you back next week."
  "Look," Haze said, "I'm going where I stay-two doors from
here. I got a woman. I got a woman, you understand? I don't
need to go with you."
  "I could pay you back next week," Enoch said. "I work at the
city zoo. I guard a gate and I get paid ever week."
  "Get away from me," Haze said.
  "People ain't friendly here. You ain't from here and you ain't
friendly neither."
  Haze didn't answer him. He went on with his neck drawn close
to his shoulder blades as if he were cold.
  "You don't know nobody neither," Enoch said. "You ain't got no
woman or nothing to do. I knew when I first seen you you didn't
have nobody or nothing. I seen you and I knew it."
  "This is where I live," Haze said, and he turned up the walk of
the house without looking back at Enoch.
  Enoch stopped. "Yeah," he cried, "oh yeah," and he ran his
sleeve under his nose to stop the snivel. "Yeah," he cried. "Go on
where you gain but looker here." He slapped at his pocket and ran
up and caught Haze's sleeve and rattled the peeler box at him. "She
give me this. She give it to me and there ain't nothing you can do
about it. She invited me to come to see them and not you and it was
you follerin them." His eyes glinted through his tears and his
face stretched in an evil crooked grin.
  Haze's mouth jerked but he didn't say anything. He stood there
for an instant, small in the middle of the steps, and then he raised
his arm and hurled the stack of tracts he had been carrying. It
hit Enoch in the chest and knocked his mouth open. He stood
looking, with his mouth hanging open, at where it had hit his front,
and then he turned and tore off down the street; and Haze went
into the house.
  The night before was the first time he had slept with Leora
Watts or any woman, and he had not been very successful with
her. When he finished, he was like something washed ashore on
her, and she had made obscene comments about him, which he
remembered gradually during the day. He was uneasy in the
thought of going to her again. He didn't know what she would say
when she opened the door and saw him there.
  When she opened the door and saw him there, she said, "Ha ha."
She was a big blonde woman with a green nightgown on. "What
do YOU want?" she said.
  He put his face into what he thought was an all-knowing expression
but it was only stretched a little on one side. The black
wool hat sat on his head squarely. Leora left the door open and went
back to the bed. He came in with his hat on and when it knocked
the sacked electric lightbulb, he took it off. Leora rested her face on
her hand and watched him. He began to move around the room
examining this and that. His throat got dryer and his heart began to
grip him like a little ape clutching the bars of its cage. He sat
down on the edge of her bed, with his hat in his hand.
  Leora's eyes had narrowed some and her mouth had widened
and got thin as a knife blade. "That Jesus-seeing hat!" she said.
She sat up and pulled her nightgown from under her and took
it off. She reached for his hat and put it on her head and sat with
her hands on her hips, watching him. Haze stared blank-faced for
a minute, then he made three quick noises that were laughs. He
jumped for the electric light cord and undressed in the dark.
  Once when he was small, his father took him and his sister,
Ruby, to a carnival that stopped in Melsy. There was one tent
that cost more money, a little off to the side. A dried-up man with
a horn voice was barking it. He never said what was inside. He
said it was so SINsational that it would cost any man wanted to
see it thirty-five cents, and it was so EXclusive, only fifteen could
get in at a time. His father sent him and Ruby to a tent where two
monkeys danced, and then he made for it, moving shuttle-faced
and close to the walls of things, like he moved. Haze left the
monkeys and followed him, but he didn't have thirty-five cents.
He asked the barker what was inside.
  "Beat it," the man said, "there ain't no pop and there ain't no
monkeys."
  "I already seen them," he said.
  "That's fine," the man said, "beat it."
  "I got fifteen cents," he said. "Whyn't you lemme in and I
could see half of it." It's something about a privy, he was thinking.
It's some men in a privy. Then he thought, maybe it's a man and
a woman in a privy. She wouldn't want me in there. "I got fifteen
cents," he said.
  "It's more than half over," the man said, fanning with his straw
hat. "You run along."
  "That'll be fifteen cents worth then," Haze said.
  "Scram," the man said.
  "Is it a nigger?" Haze asked. "Are they doing something to a
nigger ?"
  The man leaned off his platform and his dried-LIp face drew into
a glare. "Where'd you get that idear?" he said.
  "I don't know," Haze said.
  "How old are you?" the man asked.
  "Twelve," Haze said. He was ten.
  "Gimme that fifteen cents," the man said, "and get in there."
  He slid the money on the platform and scrambled to get in
before it was over. He went through the flap of the tent and inside
there was another tent and he went through that. His face was hot
through to the back of his head. All he could see were the backs of
the men. He climbed up on a bench and looked over their heads.
They were looking down into a lowered place where something
white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth.
For a second he thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it
was a woman. She was fat and she had a face like an ordinary
woman except there was a mole on the corner of her lip, that
moved when she grinned, and one on her side, that was moving
too. Haze's head became so heavy he couldn't turn it away from
her.
   "Had one of themther built in ever casket," his father, up toward
the front, said, "be a heap ready to go sooner."
  He recognized the voice without looking. He fell down off the
bench and scrambled out the tent. He crawled out under the side
of the outside one because he didn't want to pass the barker. He
got in the back of a truck and sat down in the far corner of it.
The carnival was making a tin roar outside.
  His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at
him, when he got home. She wore black all the time and her dresses
were longer than other women's. She was standing there straight,
looking at him. He slid behind a tree and got out of her view, but
in a few minutes he could feel her watching him through the
tree. He saw the lowered place and the casket again and a thin
woman in the casket who was too long for it. Her head stuck up at
one end and her knees were raised to make her fit. She had a
cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head, and she was
twisting and trying to cover herself while the men looked down.
He stood flat against the tree, dry-throated. She left the wash pot
and come toward him with a stick. She said, "What you seen?"
  "What you seen?" she said.
  "What you seen?" she said, using the same tone of voice all the
time. She hit him across the legs with the stick, but he was like
part of the tree. "Jesus died to redeem you," she said.
  "I never ast Him," he muttered.
  She didn't hit him again but she stood looking at him, shutmouthed,
and he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced
guilt that was in him. In a minute she threw the stick
away from her and went back to the wash pot, shut-mouthed.
  The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods. He
never wore them except for revivals and in winter. He took them
out of the box and filled the bottoms of them with stones and small
rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight and
walked in them through the woods what he knew to be a mile,
until he came to a creek, and then he sat down and took them off
and eased his feet in the wet sand. He thought, that ought to
satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had fallen he would
have taken it for a sign. After a while he drew his feet out the
sand and let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again with
the rocks still in them and he walked a half mile back before
he took them off.

End

The Heart of the Park

1949

ENOCH EMERY knew when he woke up that today the person
he could show it to was going to come. He knew by his
blood. He had wise blood like his daddy.
  At two o'clock that afternoon, he greeted the second-shift gate
guard. "You ain't but only fifteen minutes late," he said irritably.
"But I stayed. I could of went on but I stayed." He wore a green
uniform with yellow piping on the neck and sleeves and a yellow
stripe down the outside of each leg. The second-shift guard, a boy
with a jutting shale-textured face and a toothpick in his mouth, wore
the same. The gate they were standing by was made of iron bars and
the concrete arch that held it was fashioned to look like two trees;
branches curved to form the top of it where twisted letters said,
CITY FOREST PARK.The second-shift guard leaned against one of the
trunks and began prodding between his teeth with the pick.
  "Ever day," Enoch complained; "look like ever day I lose fifteen
good minutes standing here waiting on you."
  Every day when he got off duty, he went into the park and
every day when he went in, he did the same things. He went first to
the swimming pool. He was afraid of the water but he liked to sit
up on the bank above it if there were any women in the pool, and
watch them. There was one woman who came every Monday who
wore a bathing suit that was split on each hip. At first he thought
she didn't know it, and instead of watching openly on the bank, he
had crawled into some bushes, snickering to himself and had
watched from there. There had been no one else in the pool-the
crowds didn't come until four o'clock-to tell her about the split and
she had splashed around in the water and then lain up on the edge
of the pool asleep for almost an hour, all the time without suspect-
ing there was somebody in the bushes looking at where she came
out of the suit. Then on another day when he stopped a little later,
he saw three women, all with their suits split, the pool full of
people, and nobody paying them any mind. That was how the city
was-always surprising him. He visited a whore every time he had
two dollars to spare but he was continually being shocked by the
looseness he saw in the open. He crawled into the bushes out of a
sense of propriety. Very often the women would pull the suit straps
down off their shoulders and lie stretched out.
  The park was the heart of the city. He had come to the city-with
a knowing in his blood-he had established himself at the heart of
it. Every day he looked at the heart of it; every day; and he was
so stunned and awed and overwhelmed that just to think about
it made him sweat. There was something, in the center of the park,
that he had discovered. It was a mystery, although it was right there
in a glass case for everybody to see and there was a typewritten card
telling all about it right there. But there was something the card
couldn't say and what it couldn't say was inside him, a terrible
knowledge without any words to it, a terrible knowledge like a big
nerve growing inside him. He could not show the mystery to just
anybody; but he had to show it to somebody. Who he had to show
it to was a special person. This person could not be from the city but
he didn't know why. He knew he would know him when he saw
him and he knew that he would have to see him soon or the nerve
inside him would grow so big that he would be forced to rob a bank
or jump on a woman or drive a stolen car into the side of a building.
His blood all morning had been saying the person would come
today.
  He left the second-shift guard and approached the pool from a
discreet footpath that led behind the ladies' end of the bath house
to a small clearing where the entire pool could be seen at once. There
was nobody in it-the water was bottle-green and motionless-but
he saw, coming up the other side and heading for the bath house,
the woman with the two little boys. She came every other day or so
and brought the two children. She would go in the water with them
and swim down the pool and then she would lie up on the side in
the sun. She had a stained white bathing suit that fit her like a sack,
and Enoch had watched her with pleasure on several occasions. He
moved from the clearing up a slope to some abelia bushes. There
was a nice tunnel under them and he crawled into it until he came
to a slightly wider place where he was accustomed to sit. He settled
himself and adjusted the abelia so that he could see through it
properly. His face was always very red in the bushes. Anyone who
parted the abelia sprigs at just that place would think he saw a
devil and would fall down the slope and into the poo!. The woman
and the two little boys entered the bath house.
  Enoch never wept immediately to the dark secret center of the
park. That was the peak of the afternoon. The other things he did
built up to it and they had become very formal and necessary. When
he left the bushes, he would go to the FROSTY BOTTLE, a hot-dog
stand in the shape of an Orange Crush with frost painted in blue
around the top of it. Here he would have a chocolate malted milkshake
and would make a few suggestive remarks to the waitress
whom he believed to be secretly in love with him. After that he
would go to see the animals. They were in a long set of steel cages
like Alcatraz Penitentiary in the movies. The cages were electrically
heated in the winter and air-conditioned in the summer and there
were six men hired to wait on the animals and feed them T-bone
steaks. The animals didn't do anything but lie around. Enoch
watched them every day, full of awe and hate. Then he went there.
  The two little boys ran out the bath house and dove into the
water, and simultaneously a grating noise issued from the driveway
on the other side of the pool. Enoch's head pierced out the
bushes. He saw a high rat-colored car passing, which sounded as if
its motor were dragging out the back. The car passed and he could
hear it rattle around the turn in the drive and 011 away. He listened
carefully, trying to hear if it would stop. The noise receded and then
gradually grew louder. The car passed again. Enoch saw this time
that there was only one person in it, a man. The sound of it died
away again and then grew louder. The car carne around a third
time and stopped almost directly opposite Enoch across the pool.
The man in the car looked out the window and down the grass
slope to the water where the two little boys were splashing and
screaming. Enoch's head was as far out the bushes as it could
come and he was squinting. The door by the man was tied on with
a rope. The man got out the other door and walked in front of the
car and came halfway down the slope to the pool. He stood there
a minute as if he were looking for somebody and then he sat down
stiffly on the grass. He had on a suit that looked as if it had glare
in it. He sat with his knees drawn up. "Well, I'll be dog," Enoch
said. "Well, I'll be dog."
  He began crawling out of the bushes immediately, his heart
moving so fast it was like one of those motorcycles at fairs that the
fellow drives around the walls of a pit. He even remembered the
man's name-Mr. Hazel Weaver. In a second he appeared on all
fours at the end of the abelia and looked across the pool. The blue
figure was still sitting there in the same position. He had the look
of being held there, like by an invisible hand, like if the hand lifted
up, the figure would spring across the pool in one leap without the
expression on his face changing once.
  The woman came out the bath house and went straight to the
diving board. She spread her arms out and began to bounce, making
a big heavy flapping sound with the board. Then suddenly she
swirled backwards and disappeared below the water. Mr. Hazel
Weaver's head turned very slowly, following her down the pool.
  Enoch got up and went down the path behind the bath house.
He came stealthily out on the other side and started walking toward
Haze. He stayed on the top of the slope, moving softly in the grass
just off the sidewalk, and making no noise. When he was directly
behind him, he sat down on the edge of the sidewalk. If his arms
had been ten feet long, he could have put his hands on Haze's
shoulders. He studied him quietly.
  The woman was climbing out the pool, chinning herself up on
the side. First her face appeared, long and cadaverous, with a bandage-
like bathing cap coming down almost to her eyes, and sharp
teeth protruding from her mouth. Then she rose on her hands until
a large foot and leg came up from behind her and another on the
other side and she was out, squatting there, panting. She stood up
loosely and shook herself, and stamped in the water dripping off her.
She was facing them and she grinned. Enoch could see a part of
Hazel Weaver's face watching the woman. It didn't grin in return
but it kept on watching her as she padded over to a spot of sun
almost directly under where they were sitting. Enoch had to move
a little to see.
  The woman sat down in the spot of sun and took off her bathing
cap. Her hair was short and matted and all sorts of colors, from deep
rust to a polluted lemon yellow. She shook her head and then she
looked up at Hazel Weaver again, grinning through her pointed
teeth. She stretched herself out in the spot of sun, raising her knees
and settling her backbone down against the concrete. The two little
boys, at the other end of the water, were knocking each other's heads
against the side of the pool. She settled herself until she was flat
against the concrete and then she reached up and pulled the bathing
suit straps off her shoulders.
  "King Jesus!" Enoch whispered and before he could get his eyes
off the woman, Haze Weaver had sprung up and was almost to
his car. The woman was sitting straight up with the suit half off
her in front, and Enoch was looking both ways at once. He wrenched
his attention loose from the woman and darted after Hazel Weaver.
  "Wait on me!" he shouted and waved his arms in front of the
car which was already rattling and starting to go. Hazel Weaver
cut off the motor. His face behind the windshield was sour and froglike;
it looked like it had a shout closed up in it, it looked like one
of those closet doors in gangster pictures where there is somebody
tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth.
  "Well," Enoch said, "I declare if it ain't Hazel Weaver. How
are you, Hazel?"
  "The guard said I'd find you at the swimming pool," Hazel
Weaver said. "He said you hid in the bushes and watched the swimming."
Enoch blushed. "I allus have admired swimming," he said. Then
he stuck his head farther through the winelow. "You were looking
for me?" he exclaimed.
  "Those people," Haze said, "those people named Moats-did she
tell you where they lived?"
  Enoch didn't seem to hear. "You came out here special to see me?"
he said.
  "Asa and Sabbath Moats-she gave you the peeler. Did she tell
you where they lived?"
  Enoch eased his head out the car. He opened the door and

climbed in beside Haze. For a minute he only looked at him, wetting
his lips. Then he whispered, "I got to show you something."
  "I'm looking for those people," Haze said. "I got to see that man.
Did she tell you where they live?"
  "I got to show you this thing," Enoch said. "I got to show it to
you, here, this afternoon. I got to." He gripped Hazel Weaver's
arm and Hazel Weaver shook him off.
  "Did she tell you where they live?" he said again.
Enoch kept wetting his lips. They were pale except for his fever
blister, which was purple. "Sho," he said. "Ain't she invited me to
come see her and bring my harp? I got to show you this thing," he
said, "then I'll tell you."
  "What thing?" Haze muttered.
  "This thing I got to show you," Enoch said. "Drive straight on
ahead and I'll tell you where to stop."
  "I don't want to see anything of yours," Hazel Weaver said. "I
got to have that address."
  "I won't be able to remember it unless you come," Enoch said.
He didn't look at Hazel Weaver. He looked out the window. In a
minute the car started. Enoch's blood was beating fast. He knew he
had to go to the FROSTY BOTTLE and the zoo before there, and he
foresaw a terrible struggle with Hazel Weaver. He would have
to get him there, even if he had to hit him over the head with a
rock, and carry him on his back right up to it.
Enoch's brain was divided into two parts. The part in communication
with his blood did the figuring but it never said anything in
words. The other part was stocked up with all kinds of words and
phrases. While the first part was figuring how to get Hazel Weaver
through the FROSTY BOTTLE and the zoo, the second inquired,
"Where'd you git thisyer fine car? You ought to paint you some
signs on the outside it, like 'step-in, baby'-I seen one with that on
it, then I seen another with .... "
  Hazel Weaver's face might have been cut out the side of a rock.
  "My daddy once owned a yeller Ford automobile he won on
a ticket," Enoch murmured. "It had a roll-up top and two arials and
a squirril tail all come with it. He swapped it off. Stop here! Stop
here!" he yelled-they were passing the FROSTY BOTTLE.
  "Where is it?" Hazel Weaver said as soon as they were inside.
They were in a dark room with a counter across the back of it and
brown stools like toadstools in front of the counter. On the wall
facing the door there was a large advertisement for ice cream, showing
a cow dressed like a housewife.
  "It ain't here," Enoch said. "We have to stop here on the way
and get something to eat. What you want?"
  "Nothing," Haze muttered. He stood stiffly in the middle of the
room with his hands in his pockets and his neck drawn down inside
his collar.
  "Well, sit down," Enoch said. "I have to have a little drink."
  Something stirred behind the counter and a woman with bobbed
hair like a man's got up from a chair where she had been reading
the newspaper, and came forward. She looked sourly at Enoch.
She had on a once-white uniform clotted with brown stains. "What
you want?" she said in a loud voice, leaning close to his ear as if
he were deaf. She had a man's face and big muscled arms.
  "I want a chocolate malted milkshake, baby girl," Enoch said
softly. "I want a lot of ice cream in it."
  She turned fiercely from him and glared at Haze.
  "He says he don't want nothing but to sit down and look at you
for a while," Enoch said. "He ain't hungry but for just to see you."
Haze looked woodenly at the woman and she turned her back
on him and began mixing the milkshake. He sat down on the last
stool in the row and started cracking his knuckles.
  Enoch watched him carefully. "I reckon you done changed
some," he murmured after a few minutes.
  Haze's neck jerked around and he started forward. "Give me
those people's address. Right now," he said.
  It came to Enoch in an instant. The police. His face was suddenly
suffused with secret knowledge. "I reckon you ain't as uppity
as you used to be," he said. "I reckon maybe," he said, "you ain't
got so much cause now as you had then." Stole theter automobile,
he thought.
  Hazel Weaver sat back down. There was no expression on his
face but inside his sour wet eyes, something moved. He turned away
from Enoch.
  "How come you jumped up so fast down yonder at the pool?"
Enoch asked. The woman turned around to him with the malted
milk in her hand. "Of course," he said evilly, "1 wouldn't have had
no truck with a ugly dish like that neither."
  The woman thumped the malted milk on the counter in front
of him. "Fifteen cents," she roared.
  "You're worth more than that, baby girl," Enoch said. He
snickered and began gassing his malted milk through the straw.
  The woman strode over to where Haze was. "What do you come
in here with a son of a bitch like that for?" she shouted. "A nice
quiet boy like you to come in here with a son of a bitch. You ought
to mind the company you keep." Her name was Maude and she
drank whiskey all day from a fruit jar under the counter. "Jesus,"
she said, wiping her hand under her nose. She sat down in a straight
chair in front of Haze but facing Enoch, and folded her arms across
her chest. "Ever day," she said to Haze, looking at Enoch, "ever day
that son of a bitch comes in here."
  Enoch was thinking about the animals. They had to go next
to the animals. He hated them; just thinking about them made his
face turn a chocolate purple color as if the malted milk were rising
in his head.
  "You're a nice boy," she said, "I can see you got a clean nose,
well keep it clean, don't go messin with a son of a bitch like that
yonder. I always know a clean boy when I see one." She was shouting
at Enoch, but Enoch watched Hazel Weaver. It was like something
inside Hazel Weaver was winding up, although he didn't
move on the outside, not even his hands. He just looked pressed
down in that blue suit, like inside it, the thing winding was getting
tighter and tighter. Enoch's blood told him to hurry He raced the
milkshake up the straw.
  "Yes sir," she said, "there ain't anything sweeter than a clean
boy. God for my witness. And I know a clean one when 1 see him
and I know a son a bitch when I see him and there's a lot of difference
and that pus-marked bastard zlurping through that straw is
a goddammed son a bitch and you a clean boy had better mind
how you keep him company. I know a clean boy when I see one."
  Enoch screeched in the bottom of his glass. He fished fifteen cents
from his pocket and laid it on the counter and got up. But Hazel
Weaver was already up; he was leaning over the counter toward
the woman. She didn't see him right away because she was looking
at Enoch. He leaned on his hands over the counter until his face
was just a foot from hers. She turned around and stared at him.
  "Come on," Enoch started, "we don't have no time to be sassing
around with her. I got to show you this right away, I got. ... "
  "I ain't clean," Haze said.
  It was not until he said it again that Enoch heard the words.
  "I ain't clean," he said again, without any expression on his face
or in his voice, just looking at the woman as if he were looking
at a piece of wood.
  She stared at him, startled and then outraged. "What do you
think I care!" she screamed. "Why should I give a goddamm what
you are?"
  "Come on," Enoch whined, "come on or I won't tell you where
them people live." He caught Haze's arm and pulled him back from
the counter and toward the door.
  "You bastard!" the woman screamed, "what do you  think I care
about any of you filthy boys?"
  Hazel Weaver pushed the door open quickly and went out. He
got back in his car, and Enoch jumped in behind him. "Okay,"
Enoch said, "drive straight on ahead down this road."
  "What do you want for telling me?" Haze said. "I'm not staying
here. I have to go. I can't stay here any longer."
  Enoch shuddered. He began wetting his lips. "I got to show it to
you," he said hoarsely. "I can't show it to nobody but you. 1 had
a sign it was you when I seen you drive up at the pool. I knew all
morning somebody was gonna come and then when I saw you at
the pool, I had thisyer sign."
  "I don't care about your signs," Haze said.
  "I go to see it ever day," Enoch said. "I go ever day but 1 ain't
ever been able to take nobody else with me. I had to wait on the sign.
I'll tell you them people's address just as soon as you see it. You got
to see it," he said. "When you see it, something's going to happen."
  "Nothing's going to happen," Haze said.
  He started the car again and Enoch sat forward on the seat.
  "Them animals," he muttered. "We got to walk by them first. It
won't take long for that. It won't take a minute." He saw the animals
waiting evil-eyed for him, ready to throw him off time. He
thought what if the police were screaming out here now with sirens
and squad cars and they got to Hazel Weaver just before he showed
it to him.
  "I got to see those people," Haze said.
  "Stop here! Stop here!" Enoch cried.
  There was a long shining row of steel cages over to the left and
behind the bars, black figures were sitting or pacing. "Get out,"
Enoch said. "This won't take one second."
  Haze got out. Then he stopped. "I got to see those people," he
said.
  "Okay, okay, come on," Enoch whined.
  "I don't believe you know the address."
  "I do! I do!" Enoch cried. "It begins with a two, now come
on!" He pulled Haze toward the cages. There were two black bears
in the first one. They were sitting facing each other like two matrons
having tea, their faces polite and self-absorbed. "They don't do
nothing but sit there all day and stink," Enoch said. "A man comes
and washes theseyer cages out ever morning with a hose and it stinks
just as much as if he'd left it." Every animal there had a personal
haughty hatred for him like society people have for climbers. He
went on past two more cages of bears, not even looking at them, and
then he stopped at the next cage where there were two yellow-eyed
wolves nosing around the edges of the concrete. "Hyenas," he said.
"I ain't got no use for hyenas." He leaned closer and spit into the
cage, hitting one of the wolves on the leg. It shuttled to one side,
giving him a slanted evil look. For a second he forgot Hazel
Weaver. Then he looked back quickly to make sure he was still
there. He was right behind him. He was not looking at the animals.
Thinking about them police, Enoch thought. He said, "Come on,
we don't have to look at all theseyer monkeys that come next."
Usually he stopped at every cage and made an obscene comment
aloud to himself, but today the animals were only a form he had
to get through. He hurried past the cages of monkeys, looking back
two or three times to make sure Hazel Weaver was behind him. At
the last of the monkey cages, he stopped as if he couldn't help
himself.
  "Look at that ape," he said, glaring. The animal had its back to
him, gray except for a small pink seat. "If I had a ass like that,"
he said prudishly, "I'd sit on it. I wouldn't be exposing it to all these
people come to this park. Come on, we don't have to look at theseyer
birds that come next." He ran past the cages of birds and then he
was at the end of the zoo. "Now we don't need the car," he said,
going on ahead, "we'll go right down that hill yonder through them
trees." He stopped and saw that Hazel Weaver instead of being
behind him had stopped at the last cage for birds. "Oh Jesus," he
groaned. He stood and waved his arms wildly and shouted, "Come
on!" but Haze didn't move from where he was looking into the
cage.
  Enoch ran back to him and grabbed him by tic arm but Haze
pushed him off absently and kept on looking in the cage. It was
empty. Enoch stared. "It's empty!" he shouted. "What do you have
to look in that all' empty cage for ? You come on," He stood there,
sweating and purple. "It's empty!" he shouted; and then he saw it
wasn't empty. Over in one corner on the floor of the cage, there
was an eye. The eye was in the middle of something that looked
like a piece of mop and the piece of mop was sitting on an old rag.
He squinted close to the wire and saw that the piece of mop was an
owl with one eye open. It was looking directly at Hazel Weaver.
"That ain't nothing but an all' hoot owl," he moaned. "You seen
them before."
  "I ain't clean," Haze said to the eye, He said it Just like he said
it to the woman in the FROSTY BOTTLE. The eye shut softly and the
owl turned its head to the wall.
  He's done murdered somebody, Enoch thought. "Oh sweet
Jesus come on!" he wailed. "I got to show you this right now." He
pulled him away but a few feet from the cage Haze stopped again,
looking at something in the distance. Enoch's eyesight was very
poor. He squinted and made out a figure far down the road behind
them. There were two smaller figures jumping on either side of it.
  Hazel Weaver turned back to him suddenly and said, "Where's
this thing? Let's see it right now. Come on."
  "Ain't that where I been trying to take you," Enoch murmured.
He felt the perspiration drying on him and stinging and his skin
began to get pin-pointed, even in his scalp. "We got to go on foot,"
he said.
  "Why?" Haze muttered.
  "I don't know," Enoch said. He knew something was going to
happen to him. He knew something was going to happen to him.
His blood stopped beating. All the time it had been beating like
drum noises and now it had stopped. They started down the hill.
It was a steep hill, full of trees painted white from the ground up
four feet. They looked as if they had on ankle-socks. He gripped
Hazel Weaver's arm. "It gets damp as you go down," he said, looking
around vaguely. Hazel Weaver shook him off. In a second, he
gripped his arm again and stopped him. He pointed down through
the trees. "Muvseevum," he said. The strange word made him shiver.
That was the first time he had ever said it aloud. A piece of gray
building was showing where he pointed. It grew larger as they went
down the hill, then as they came to the end of the wood and
stepped out on the gravel driveway, it seemed to shrink suddenly.
It was round and soot-colored. There were columns at the front
of it and in between each column there was an eyeless woman
holding a pot on her head. A concrete band was over the columns
and the letters M V S E V M were cut into it. Enoch was afraid to pronounce the word again.
  "We got to go up the steps and through the front door," he
whispered. There were ten steps up to the porch. The door was
wide and black. Enoch pushed it in cautiously and inserted his head
in the crack. In a minute he brought it out again and said, "All right,
go in and walk easy. I don't want to wake up theter ole guard. He
ain't very friendly with me." They went into a dark hall. It was
heavy with the odor of linoleum and creosote and another odor behind
these two. The third one was an undersmell and Enoch couldn't
name it as anything he had ever smelled before. There was nothing
in the hall but two urns and an old man asleep in a straight chair
against the wall. He had on the same kind of uniform as Enoch and
he looked like a dried up spider stuck there. Enoch looked at Hazel
Weaver to see if he was smelling the undersmell. He looked like he
was; Enoch's blood began beating again, and the sound was nearer
this time like the drums had moved up about a quarter of a mile.
He gripped Haze's arm and tip-toed through the hall to another
black door at the end of it. He cracked it a little and inserted his
head in the crack. Then in a second he drew it out and crooked his
finger in a gesture for Haze to follow him. They went into another
hall, like the last one but running crosswise. "It's in that first door
yonder," Enoch said in a small voice. They went into a dark room
full of glass cases. The glass cases covered the walls and there were
three coffin-like ones in the middle of the floor. The ones on the
walls were full of birds tilted on varnished sticks and looking down
with dried piquant expressions.
  "Come on," Enoch whispered. The drum noises in his blood
were getting closer and closer. He went past the two cases in the
middle of the floor and toward the third one. He went to the
farthest end of it and stopped. He stood looking down with his neck
thrust forward and his hands clutched together; Hazel Weaver
moved up beside him.
  The two of them stood there, Enoch rigid and Hazel Weaver bent
slightly forward. There were three bowls and a row of blunt
weapons and a man in the case. It was the man Enoch was looking
at. He was about three feet long. He was naked and a dried yellow
color and his eyes were squinched shut as if a giant block of steel
were falling down on top of him.
  "See theter notice," Enoch said in a church whisper, pointing
to a typewritten card at the man's foot, "it says he was once as tall
as us. Some A-rabs did it to him in six months." He turned his head
cautiously to see Hazel Weaver.
  All he could tell was that Hazel Weaver 's eyes were on the
shrunken man. He was bent forward so that his face was reflected
in the glass top of the case. The reflection was pale and the eyes
were like two clean bullet holes. Enoch waited, rigid. He heard
footsteps in the hall. Oh Jesus Jesus, he prayed, let him hurry up
and do whatever he's going to do! The footsteps came in the door.
He saw the woman with the two little boys. She had one by each
hand, and she was grinning. Hazel Weaver had not raised his eyes
once from the shrunken man. The woman came toward them. She
stopped on the other side of the case and looked down into it, and
the reflection of her face appeared grinning on the glass, over Hazel
Weaver's, She snickered and put two fingers in front of her teeth,
The little boys' faces were like pans set on either side to catch the
grins us that overflowed from her. Haze's neck jerked back and he
made a noise, It was a noise like Enoch hadn't ever heard before,
It might have come from the man inside the case. In a second
Enoch knew it had, "Wait!" he screamed, and tore out the room
after Hazel Weaver.
  He overtook him halfway up the hill. He caught him by the
arm and swung him around and then he stood there, suddenly weak
and light as a balloon, and stared. Hazel Weaver grabbed him by
the shoulders and shook him. "What is that address?" he shouted,
"Give me that address!"
  Even if Enoch had known the address, he couldn't have thought
of it then. He could not even stand up. As soon as Hazel Weaver
let him go, he fell backwards and landed against one of the whitesocked
trees. He rolled over and lay stretched out on the ground,
with an exalted look on his face. He thought he was floating. A long
way off he saw the blue figure spring and pick up a rock, and he
saw the wild face turn, and the rock hurtle toward him; he smiled
and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, Hazel Weaver was
gone. He put his fingers to his forehead and then held them in front
of his eyes. They were red-streaked, He turned his head and saw a
drop of blood on the ground and as he looked at it, he thought it
widened like a little spring, He sat straight up, frozen-skinned, and
put his finger in it. and very faintly he could hear his blood beating,
his secret blood, in the center of the city.

End

A Stroke of Good Fortune

1949

RUBY came in the front door of the apartment building and
lowered the paper sack with the four cans of number three
beans in it onto the hall table. She was too tired to take her arms
from around it or to straighten up and she hung there collapsed
from the hips, her head balanced like a big florid vegetable at the
top of the sack. She gazed with stony unrecognition at the face
that confronted her in the dark yellow-spotted mirror over the
table. Against her right cheek was a gritty collard leaf that had been
stuck there half the way home. She gave it a vicious swipe with her
arm and straightened up, muttering, "Collards, collards," in a voice
of sultry subdued wrath. Standing up straight, she was a short
woman, shaped nearly like a funeral urn. She had mulberry-colored
hair stacked in sausage rolls around her head but some of these had
come loose with the heat and the long walk from the grocery store
and pointed frantically in various directions. "Collard greens!" she
said, spitting the word from her mouth this time as if it were a
poisonous seed.
  She and Bill Hill hadn't eaten collard greens for five years and
she wasn't going to start cooking them now. She had bought these on
account of Rufus but she wasn't going to buy them but once. You
would have thought that after two years in the armed forces Rufus
would have come back ready to eat like somebody from somewhere;
but no. When she asked him what he would like to have special, he
had not had the gumption to think of one civilized dish-he had
said collard greens. She had expected Rufus to have turned out into
somebody with some get in him. Well, he had about as much get as
a floor mop.
  Rufus was her baby brother who had just come back from the
European Theater. He had come to live with her because Pitman
where they were raised was not there any more. All the people who
had lived in Pitman had had the good sense to leave it, either by
dying or by moving to the city. She had married Bill B. Hill, a
Florida man who sold Miracle Products, and had come to live in the
city. If Pitman had still been there, Rufus would have been in
Pitman. If one chicken had been left to walk across the road in
Pitman, Rufus would have been there too to keep him company.
She didn't like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own
brother, but there he was-good for absolutely nothing. "I seen it
after five minutes of him," she had told Bill Hill and Bill Hill, with
no expression whatsoever, had said, "It taken me three." It was mortifying to let that kind of a husband see you had that kind of a
brother.
  She supposed there was no help for it. Rufus was like the other
children. She was the only one in her family who had been different,
who had had any get. She took a stub of pencil from her pocketbook
and wrote on the side of the sack: Bill you bring this upstairs. Then
she braced herself at the bottom of the steps for the climb to the
fourth floor.
  The steps were thin black rent in the middle of the house, covered
with a mole-colored carpet that looked as if it grew from the floor.
They stuck straight up like steeple steps, it seemed to her. They
reared up. The minute she stood at the bottom of them, they reared
up and got steeper for her benefit. As she gazed up them, her mouth
widened and turned down in a look of complete disgust. She was
in no condition to go up anything. She was sick. Madam Zoleeda
had told her but not before she knew it herself.
  Madam Zoleeda was the palmist on Highway 87. She had said,
"A long illness," but she had added, whispering, with a very l-already-
know-but-l-won't-tell look, "It will bring you a stroke of good
fortune!" and then had sat back grinning, a stout woman with green
eyes that moved in their sockets as if they had been oiled. Ruby
didn't need to be told. She had already figured out the good fortune.
Moving. For two months she had had a distinct feeling that they
were going to move. Bill Hill couldn't hold off much longer. He
couldn't kill her. Where she wanted to be was in a subdivision-she
started up the steps, leaning forward and holding onto the banisters
-where you had your drugstores and grocery and a picture show
right in your own neighborhood. As it was now, living downtown,
she had to walk eight blocks to the main business streets and farther
than that to get to a supermarket. She hadn't made any complaints
for five years much but now with her health at stake as young as she
was what did he think she was going to do, kill herself? She had
her eye on a place in Meadowcrest Heights, a duplex bungalow
with yellow awnings. She stopped on the fifth step to blow. As young
as she was-thirty-four-you wouldn't think five steps would stew
her. You better take it easy, baby, she told herself, you're too young
to bust your gears.
  Thirty-four wasn't old, wasn't any age at all. She remembered her
mother at thirty-four-she had looked like a puckered-up old yellow
apple, sour, she had always looked sour, she had always looked like
she wasn't satisfied with anything. She compared herself at thirtyfour
with her mother at that age. Her mother's hair had been gray
-hers wouldn't be gray now even if she hadn't touched it up. All
those children were what did her mother in-eight of them: two
born dead, one died the first year, one crushed under a mowing
machine. Her mother had got deader with everyone of them. And
all of for what? Because she hadn't known any better. Pure ignorance.
The purest of downright ignorance!
  And there her two sisters were, both married four years with four
children apiece. She didn't see how they stood it, always going to
the doctor to be jabbed at with instruments. She remembered when
her mother had had Rufus. She was the only one of the children who
couldn't stand it and she walked all the way in to Melsy, in the hot
sun ten miles, to the picture show to get clear of the screaming, and
had sat through two westerns and a horror picture and a serial and
then had walked all the way back and found it was just beginning,
and she had had to listen all night. All that misery for Rufus! And
him turned out now to have no more charge than a dish rag. She
saw him waiting out nowhere before he was born, just waiting,
waiting to make his mother, only thirty-four, into an old woman.
She gripped the banister rail fiercely and heaved herself up another
step, shaking her head. Lord, she was disappointed in him! After
she had told all her friends her brother was back from the European
Theater, here he comes-sounding like he'd never been out of a hog
lot.
  He looked old too. He looked older than she did and he was
fourteen years younger. She was extremely young looking for her
age. Not that thirty-four is any age and anyway she was married.
She had to smile, thinking about that, because she had done so much
better than her sisters-they had married from around. "This breathlessness," she muttered, stopping again. She decided she would have to sit down.
  There were twenty-eight steps in each flight-twenty-eight.
  She sat down and jumped quickly, feeling something under her.
She caught her breath and then pulled the thing out: it was Hartley
Gilfeet's pistol. Nine inches of treacherous tin! He was a six-year old
boy who lived on the fifth floor. If he had been hers, she'd have
worn him out so hard so many times he wouldn't know how to
leave his mess on a public stair. She could have fallen down those
stairs as easy as not and ruined herself! But his stupid mother wasn't
going to do anything to him even if she told her. All she did was
scream at him and tell people how smart he was. "Little Mister Good
Fortune!" she called him. "All his poor daddy left me!" His daddy
had said on his death bed, "There's nothing but him I ever given
you," and she had said, "Rodman, you given me a fortune!" and
so she called him Little Mister Good Fortune. "I'd wear the seat of
his good fortune out!" Ruby muttered.
  The steps were going up and down like a seesaw with her in the
middle of it. She did not want to get nauseated. Not that again. Now
no. No. She was not. She sat tightly to the steps with her eyes shut
until the dizziness stopped a little and the nausea subsided. No, I'm
not going to no doctor, she said. No. No. She was not. They would
have to carry her there knocked out before she would go. She had
done all right doctoring herself all these years-no bad sick spells,
no teeth out, no children, all that by herself. She would have had
five children right now if she hadn't been careful,
  She had wondered more than once if this breathlessness could be
heart trouble. Once in a while, going up the steps, there'd be a pain
in her chest along with it. That was what she wanted it to be-heart
trouble. They couldn't very well remove your heart. They'd have to
knock her in the head before they'd get her near a hospital, they'd
have to-suppose she would die if they didn't ~
  She wouldn't.
  Suppose she would?
  She made herself stop this gory thinking. She was only thirty-four.
There was nothing permanent wrong with her. She was fat and
her color was good. She thought of herself again in comparison with
her mother at thirty-four and she pinched her arm and smiled. Seeing
that her mother or father neither had been Inuch to look at, she had
done very well. They had been the dried-up type dried up and
Pitman dried into them, them and Pitman shrunk down into something
all dried and puckered up. And she had come out of that!
A somebody as alive as her! She got up, gripping the banister rail
but smiling to herself. She was warm and tat and beautiful and
not too fat because Bill Hill liked her that way. She had gained
some weight but he hadn't noticed except that he was maybe more
happy lately and didn't know why. She felt the wholeness of herself,
a whole thing climbing the stairs. She was up the first Hight now and
she looked back, pleased. As soon as Bill Hill fell clown these steps
once, maybe they would move. But they would move before that!
Madam Zoleeda had known. She laughed aloud and, noved on down
the hall. Mr. Jerger's door grated and startled her. Oh Lord, she
thought, him. He was a second-floor resident who was peculiar.
  He peered at her coming down the hall. "Good morning!" he
said, bowing the upper part of his body out the door. . Good morning
to you!" He looked like a goat. He had little raisin eyes and a string
beard and his jacket was a green that was almost black or a black
that was almost green.
  "Morning," she said. "Hower you?"
  "Well!" he screamed. "Well indeed on this glorious, day!" He was
seventy-eight years old and his face looked as if it hal mildew on it.
In the mornings he studied and in the afternoons he walked up and
down the sidewalks, stopping children and asking them questions.
Whenever he heard anyone in the hall, he opener: his door and
looked out.
  "Yeah, it's a nice day," she said languidly.

  "Do you know what great birthday this is?" he asked.
  "Uh-uh," Ruby said. He always had a question like that. A history
question that nobody knew; he would ask it and then make a speech
on it. He used to teach in a high school.
  "Guess," he urged her.
  "Abraham Lincoln," she muttered.
  "Hah! You are not trying," he said. "Try."
  "George Washington," she said, starting up the stairs.
  "Shame on you!" he cried. "And your husband from there! Florida!
Florida! Florida's birthday," he shouted. "Come in here." He disappeared
into his room, beckoning a long finger at her.
  She came down the two steps and said, "I gotta be going," and
stuck her head inside the door. The room was the size of a large
closet and the walls were completely covered with picture postcards
of local buildings; this gave an illusion of space. A single transparent
bulb hung down on Mr. Jerger and a small table.
  "Now examine this," he said. He was bending over a book, running
his finger under the lines: "'On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1516,
he arrived on the tip of this continent.' Do you know who this
he was?" he demanded.
  "Yeah, Christopher Columbus." Ruby said.
  "Ponce de Leon!" he screamed. "Ponce de Leon' You should know
something about Florida," he said. "Your husband is from Florida."
  "Yeah, he was born in Miami," Ruby said. "He's not from Tennessee."
  "Florida is not a noble state," Mr. Jerger said, "but it is an important
one."
  "It's important alrighto," Ruby said.
  "Do you know who Ponce de Leon was?"
  "He was the founder of Florida," Ruby said brightly.
  "He was a Spaniard," Mr. Jerger said. "Do you know what he was
looking for?"
  "Florida," Ruby said.
  "Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth," Mr.
Jerger said, closing his eyes.
  "Oh," Ruby muttered.
  "A certain spring," Mr. Jerger went on, "whose water gave 
perpetual youth to those who drank it. In other words," he said, "he
was trying to be young always."
  "Did he find it?" Ruby asked.
  Mr. Jerger paused with his eyes still closed. After a minute he said,
"Do you think he found it? Do you think he found it? Do you think
nobody else would have got to it if he had found it? Do you think
there would be one person living on this earth who hadn't drunk it?"
  "I hadn't thought," Ruby said.
  "Nobody thinks any more," Mr. Jerger complained.
  "I got to be going."
  "Yes, it's been found," Mr. Jerger said.
  "Where at?" Ruby asked.
  "I have drunk of it."
  "Where'd you have to go to?" she asked. She leaned a little closer
and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a
buzzard's wing.
  "Into my heart," he said, placing his hand over it.
  "Oh." Ruby moved back. "I gotta be going. I think my brother's
home." She got over the door sill.
  "Ask your husband if he knows what great birthday this is," Mr.
Jerger said, looking at her coyly.
  "Yeah, I will." She turned and waited until she heard his door
click. She looked back to see that it was shut and then she blew out
her breath and stood facing the dark remaining steep of steps. "God
Almighty," she commented. They got darker and steeper as you
went up.
  By the time she had climbed five steps her breath was gone. She
continued up a few more, blowing. Then she stopped. There was a
pain in her stomach. It was a pain like a piece of something pushing
something else. She had felt it before, a few days ago. It was the one
that frightened her most. She had thought the word cancer once and
dropped it instantly because no horror like that was coming to her
because it couldn't. The word came back to her immediately with the
pain but she slashed it in two with Madam Zoleeda. It will end in
good fortune. She slashed it twice through and then again until
there were only pieces of it that couldn't be recognized. She was
going to stop on the next floor-God, if she ever got up there-and
talk to Laverne Watts. Laverne Watts was a third-floor resident, the
secretary to a chiropodist, and an especial friend of hers.
  She got up there, gasping and feeling as if her knees were full
of fizz, and knocked on Laverne's door with the butt of Hartley
Gilfeet's gun. She leaned on the door frame to rest and suddenly the
floor around her dropped on both sides. The wall, turned black
and she felt herself reeling, without breath, in the nnldle of the air,
terrified at the drop that was coming. She saw the door open a
great distance away and Laverne, about four inches high, standing
in it.
  Laverne, a tall straw-haired girl, let out a great guffaw and slapped
her side as if she had just opened the door on the most comical
sight she had yet seen. "That gun!" she yelled. "That gun! That
look!" She staggered back to the sofa and fell on it, her legs rising
higher than her hips and falling down again helplessly with a thud.
The floor came up to where Ruby could see it and remained,
dipping a little. With a terrible stare of concentration, she stepped
down to get on it. She scrutinized a chair across the room and then
headed for it, putting her feet carefully one before the other.
  "You should be in a wild-west show!" Laverne Watts said.
  "You're a howl!"
  Ruby reached the chair and then edged herself onto it. "Shut
up," she said hoarsely.
  Laverne sat forward, pointing at her, and then fell back on the
sofa, shaking again.
  "Quit that!" Ruby yelled. "Quit that! I'm sick."
  Laverne got up and took two or three long strides across the room.
She leaned down in front of Ruby and looked into her face with
one eye shut as if she were squinting through a keyhole. "You are
sort of purple," she said.
  "I'm damn sick," Ruby glowered.
  Laverne stood looking at her and after a second she folded her
arms and very pointedly stuck her stomach out and began to sway
back and forth. "Well, what'd you come inhere wi th that gun for?
Where'd you get it?" she asked.
  "Sat on it," Ruby muttered.
  Laverne stood there, swaying with her stomach stuck out, and a
very wise expression growing on her face. Ruby sat sprawled in the
chair, looking at her feet. The room was getting still. She sat up
and glared at her ankles. They were swollen! I'm not going to no
doctor, she started, I'm not going to one. I'm not going. "Not going,"
she began to mumble, "to no doctor, not ... "
  "How long you think you can hold off?" Laverne murmured and
began to giggle.
  "Are my ankles swollen?" Ruby asked.
  "They look like they've always looked to me," Laverne said,
throwing herself down on the sofa again. "Kind of fat." She lifted
her own ankles up on the end pillow and turned them slightly.
"How do you like these shoes?" she asked. They were a grasshopper
green with very high thin heels.
  "I think they're swollen," Ruby said. "When I was coming up
that last flight of stairs I had the awfulest feeling, all over me like ... "
    "You ought to go on to the doctor."
"I don't need to go to no doctor," Ruby muttered. "I can take
care of myself. I haven't done bad at it all this time."
  "Is Rufus at home?"
  "I don't know. I kept myself away from doctors all my life. I kept
-why?"
  "Why what?"
  "Why, is Rufus at home?"
  "Rufus is cute," Laverne said. "I thought I'd ask him how he
liked my shoes."
  Ruby sat up with a fierce look, very pink and purple. "Why
Rufus?" she growled. "He ain't but a baby." Laverne was thirty
years old. "He don't care about women's shoes."
  Laverne sat up and took off one of the shoes and peered inside it.
"Nine B," she said. "I bet he'd like what's in it."
  "That Rufus ain't but an enfant!" Ruby said. "He don't have time
to be looking at your feet. He ain't got that kind of time."
  "Oh, he's got plenty of time," Laverne said.
  "Yeah," Ruby muttered and saw him again, waiting, with plenty
of time, out nowhere before he was born, just waiting to make his
mother that much deader.
  "I believe your ankles are swollen," Laverne said.
  "Yeah," Ruby said, twisting them. "Yeah. They feel tight sort of.
I had the awfulest feeling when I got up those steps, like sort of out
of breath all over, sort of tight all over, sort of-awful."
  "You ought to go on to the doctor."
  "No."
  "You ever been to one?"
  "They carried me once when I was ten," Ruby said, "but I got
away. Three of them holding me didn't do any good."
  "What was it that time?"
  "What you looking at me that way for?" Ruby muttered.
  "What way?"
  "That way," Ruby said, "-swagging out that stomach of yours
that way."
  "I just asked you what it was that time?"
  "It was a boil. A nigger woman up the road told me what to do
and I did it and it went away." She sat slumped on the edge of the
chair, staring in front of her as if she were remembering an easier
time.
  Laverne began to do a kind of comic dance up and down the
room. She took two or three slow steps in one direction with her
knees bent and then she came back and kicked her leg slowly and
painfully in the other. She began to sing in a loud guttural voice,
rolling her eyes, "Put them all together, they spell MOTHER!
MOTHER!" and stretching out her arms as if she were on the
stage.
  Ruby's mouth opened wordlessly and her fierce expression vanished.
For a half-second she was motionless; then she sprang from the
chair. "Not me!" she shouted. "Not me!"
  Laverne stopped and only watched her with the wise look.
  "Not me!" Ruby shouted. "Oh no not me! Bill Hill takes care of
that. Bill Hill takes care of that! Bill Hill's been taking care of that
for five years! That ain't going to happen to me!"
  "Well old Bill Hill just slipped up about four or five months ago,
my friend," Laverne said. "Just slipped up ... "
  "I don't reckon you know anything about it, you ain't even married,
you ain't even ... "
  "I bet it's not one, I bet it's two," Laverne said. "You better go
on to the doctor and find out how many it is."
  "It is not!" Ruby shrilled. She thought she was so smart! She
didn't know a sick woman when she saw one, all she could do was
look at her feet and shoe em to Rufus, shoe em to Rufus and he was
an enfant and she was thirty-four years old. "Rufus is an enfant!"
she wailed.
  "That will make two!" Laverne said.
  "You shut up talking like that!" Ruby shouted. "You shut up this
minute. I ain't going to have any baby!"
  "Ha ha," Laverne said.
  "I don't know how you think you know so much," Ruby said,
"single as you are. If I was so single I wouldn't go around telling
married people what their business is."
  "Not just your ankles," Laverne said, "you're swollen all over."
  "I ain't going to stay here and be insulted," Ruby said and walked
carefully to the door, keeping herself erect and not looking down at
her stomach the way she wanted to.
  "Well I hope all of you feel better tomorrow," Laverne said.
"I think my heart will be better tomorrow," Ruby said. "But I
hope we will be moving soon. I can't climb these steps with this
heart trouble and," she added with a dignified glare, "Rufus don't
care nothing about your big feet."
  "You better put that gun up," Laverne said, "before you shoot
somebody."
  Ruby slammed the door shut and looked down at herself quickly.
She was big there but she had always had a kind of big stomach. She
did not stick out there different from the way she did any place
else. It was natural when you took on some weight to take it on in
the middle and Bill Hill didn't mind her being fat, he was just more
happy and didn't know why. She saw Bill Hill's long happy face,
grinning at her from the eyes downward in a way he had as if his
look got happier as it neared his teeth. He would never slip up.
She rubbed her hand across her skirt and felt the tightness of it
but hadn't she felt that before? She had. It was the skirt-she had on
the tight one that she didn't wear often, she had ... she didn't have
on the tight skirt. She had on the loose one. But it wasn't very loose.
But that didn't make any difference, she was just fat.
  She put her fingers on her stomach and pushed down and took
them off quickly. She began walking toward the stairs, slowly, as
if the floor were going to move under her. She began the steps. The
pain came back at once. It came back with the first step. "No,"
she whimpered, "no." It was just a little feeling, just a little feeling
like a piece of her inside rolling over but it made her breath tighten
in her throat. Nothing in her was supposed to roll over. "Just one
step," she whispered, "Just one step and it did it." It couldn't be
cancer. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in good fortune. She began
crying and saying, "Just one step and it did it," and going on up
them absently as if she thought she were standing still. On the sixth
one, she sat down suddenly, her hand slipping weakly down the
banister spoke onto the floor.
  "Noooo," she said and leaned her round red face between the
two nearest poles. She looked down into the stairwell and gave a
long hollow wail that widened and echoed as it went down. The
stair cavern was dark green and mole-colored and the wail sounded
at the very bottom like a voice answering her. She gasped and shut
her eyes. No. No. It couldn't be any baby. She was not going to
have something waiting in her to make her deader, she was not.
Bill Hill couldn't have slipped up. He said it was guaranteed and it
had worked all this time and it could not be that, it could not. She
shuddered and held her hand tightly over her mouth. She felt her
face drawn puckered: two born dead one died the first year and one
run under like a dried yellow apple no she was only thirty-four
years old, she was old. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in no
drying up. Madam Zoleeda said oh but it will end in a stroke of
good fortune! Moving. She had said it would end in a stroke of
good moving.
  She felt herself getting calmer. She felt herself, after a minute,
getting almost calm and thought she got upset too easy; heck, it was
gas. Madam Zoleeda hadn't been wrong about anything yet, she
knew more than ...
  She jumped: there was a bang at the bottom of the stairwell and
a rumble rattling up the steps, shaking them even up where she was.
She looked through the banister poles and saw Hartley Gilfeet, with
two pistols leveled, galloping up the stairs and heard a voice pierce
down from the floor over her, "You Hartley, shut up that racket!
You're shaking the house!" But he came on, thundering louder as
he rounded the bend on the first floor and streaked up the hall. She
saw Mr. Jerger's door fly open and him spring with clawed fingers
and grasp a flying piece of shirt that whirled and shot off again with
a high-pitched, "Leggo, you old goat teacher!" and came on nearer
until the stairs rumbled directly under her and a charging chipmunk
face crashed into her and rocketed through her head, smaller
and smaller into a whirl of dark.
  She sat on the step, clutching the banister spoke while the breath
came back into her a thimbleful at a time and the stairs stopped seesawing. She opened her eyes and gazed down into the dark hold,
down to the very bottom where she had started up so long ago.
"Good Fortune," she said in a hollow voice that echoed along all the
levels of the cavern, "Baby."
  "Good Fortune, Baby," the three echoes leered.
  Then she recognized the feeling again, a little roll. It was as if it
were not in her stomach. It was as if it were out nowhere in nothing,
out nowhere, resting and waiting, with plenty of time.

End

Enoch and the Gorilla

1952

ENOCH EMERY had borrowed his landlady's umbrella and he discovered
as he stood in the entrance of the drugstore, trying to
open it, that it was at least as old as she was, When he finally got
it hoisted, he pushed his dark glasses back on his eyes and re-entered
the downpour.
  The umbrella was one his landlady had stopped using fifteen years
before (which was the only reason she had lent it to him) and as
soon as the rain touched the top of it, it came down with a shriek
and stabbed him in the back of the neck. He ran a few feet with it
over his head and then backed into another store entrance and removed
it. Then to get it up again, he had to place the tip of it on
the ground and ram it open with his foot. He ran out again, holding
his hand up near the spokes to keep them open and this allowed the
handle, which was carved to represent the head of a fox terrier, to
jab him every few seconds in the stomach. He proceeded for another
quarter of a block this way before the back half half the silk stood
up off the spokes and allowed the storm to sweep down his collar.
Then he ducked under the marquee of a movie house. It was
Saturday and there were a lot of children standing more or less in
a line in front of the ticket box.
  Enoch was not very fond of children, but children always seemed
to like to look at him. The line turned and twenty or thirty eyes
began to observe him with a steady interest. The umbrella had assumed
an ugly position, half up and half down, and the half that
was up was about to come down and spill more water under his
collar. When this happened the children laughed and jumped up
and down. Enoch glared at them and turned his back and lowered
his dark glasses. He found himself facing a life-size four-color picture
of a gorilla. Over the gorilla's head, written in red letters was
"GANGA! Giant Jungle Monarch and a Great Star! HERE IN
PERSON!!!" At the level of the gorilla's knee, there was more
that said, "Gonga will appear in person in front of this theater at
12 A.M. TODAY! A free pass to the first ten brave enough to step
up and shake his hand!"
  Enoch was usually thinking of something else at the moment
that Fate began drawing back her leg to kick him. When he was
four years old, his father had brought him home a tin box from the
penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle
on the outside of it and green letters that said, "A NUTTY SURPRISE!"
When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had
sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth.
His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem
he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger. He stood
there and read the poster twice through carefully. To his mind, an
opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand of Providence.
  He turned around and asked the nearest child what time it was.
The child said it was twelve-ten and that Gonga was already ten
minutes late. Another child said that maybe the rain had delayed
him. Another said, no not the rain, his director was taking a plane
from Hollywood. Enoch gritted his teeth. The first child said that
if he wanted to shake the star's hand, he would have to get in line
like the rest of them and wait his turn. Enoch got in line. A child
asked him how old he was. Another observed that he had funnylooking
teeth. He ignored all this as best he could and began to
straighten out the umbrella.
  In a few minutes a black truck turned around the corner and
came slowly up the street in the heavy rain. Enoch pushed the
umbrella under his arm and began to squint through his dark
glasses. As the truck approached, a phonograph inside it began to
play "Tarara Boom Di Aye," but the music was almost drowned
out by the rain. There was a large illustration of a blonde on the
outside of the truck, advertising some picture other than the gorilla's.
  The children held their line carefully as the truck stopped in
front of the movie house. The back door of it was constructed like
a paddy wagon, with a grate, but the ape was not at it. Two men in
raincoats got out of the cab part, cursing, and ran around to the
back and opened the door. One of them stuck his head in and
said, "Okay, make it snappy, willya?" The other jerked his thumb
at the children and said, "Get back willya, willya get back?"
  A voice on the record inside the truck said, "Here's Gonga, folks,
Roaring Gonga and a Great Star! Give Gonga a big hand, folks!"
The voice was barely a mumble in the rain.
  The man who was waiting by the door of the truck stuck his head
in again. "Okay willya get out?" he said.
  There was a faint thump somewhere inside the van. After a
second a dark furry arm emerged just enough for the rain to touch
it and then drew back inside.
  "Goddamn," the man who was under the marquee said; he took
off his raincoat and threw it to the man by the door, who threw
it into the wagon. After two or three minutes more, the gorilla
appeared at the door, with the raincoat buttoned up to his chin and
the collar turned up. There was an iron chain hanging from around
his neck; the man grabbed it and pulled him down and the two
of them bounded under the marquee together. A motherly-looking
woman was in the glass ticket box, getting the passes ready for the
first ten children brave enough to step up and shake hands.
  The gorilla ignored the children entirely and followed the man
over to the other side of the entrance where there was a small platform
raised about a foot off the ground. He stepped up on it and
turned facing the children and began to growl. His growls were not
so much loud as poisonous; they appeared to issue from a black
heart. Enoch was terrified and if he had not been surrounded by the
children, he would have run away.
  "Who'll step up first?" the man said. "Come on come on, who'll
step up first? A free pass to the first kid stepping up."
  There was no movement from the group of children. The man
glared at them. "What's the matter with you kids?" he barked.
"You yellow? He won't hurt you as long as I got him by this chain."
He tightened his grip on the chain and jangled it at them to show
he was holding it securely.
   After a minute a little girl separated herself from the group. She
had long wood-shaving curls and a fierce triangular face. She moved
up to within four feet of the star.
  "Okay okay," the man said, rattling the chain, "make it snappy."
  The ape reached out and gave her hand a quick shake. By this
time there was another little girl ready and then two boys. The
line re-formed and began to move up.
  The gorilla kept his hand extended and turned his head away
with a bored look at the rain. Enoch had got over his fear and was
trying frantically to think of an obscene remark that would be
suitable to insult him with. Usually he didn't have any trouble with
this kind of composition but nothing came to him now. His brain,
both parts, was completely empty. He couldn't think even of the
insulting phrases he used every day.
  There were only two children in front of him by now. The first
one shook hands and stepped aside. Enoch's heart was beating
violently. The child in front of him finished and stepped aside and
left him facing the ape, who took his hand with an automatic
motion.
  It was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he
had come to the city. It was warm and soft.
  For a second he only stood there, clasping it. Then he began to
stammer. "My name is Enoch Emery," he mumbled. "I attended
the Rodemill Boys' Bible Academy. I work at the city zoo. I seen
two of your pictures. I'm only eighteen years old but I already
work for the city. My daddy made me come ... " and his voice
cracked.
  The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes:
an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch
from behind the celluloid pair. "You go to hell," a surly voice inside
the ape-suit said, low but distinctly, and the hand was jerked away.
  Enoch's humiliation was so sharp and painful that he turned
around three times before he realized which direction he wanted to
go in. Then he ran off into the rain as fast as he could.

  In spite of himself, Enoch couldn't get over the expectation that
something was going to happen to him. The virtue of hope, in
Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust. It
operated on him all the rest of the day. He had only a vague idea
what he wanted, but he was not a boy without ambition: he wanted
to become something. He wanted to better his condition. He wanted,
some day, to see a line of people waiting to shake his hand.
  All afternoon he fidgeted and fooled in his room, biting his nails
and shredding what was left of the silk off the landlady's umbrella.
Finally he denuded it entirely and broke off the spokes. What was
left was a black stick with a sharp steel point at one end and a dog's
head at the other. It might have been an instrument for some
specialized kind of torture that had gone out of fashion. Enoch
walked up and down his room with it under his arm and realized
that it would distinguish him on the sidewalk.
  About seven o'clock in the evening he put on his coat and took
the stick and headed for a little restaurant two blocks away. He had
the sense that he was setting off to get some honor, but he was very
nervous, as if he were afraid he might have to snatch it instead of
receive it.
  He never set out for anything without eating first. The restaurant
was called the Paris Diner; it was a tunnel about six feet wide,
located between a shoeshine parlor and a dry-cleaning establishment.
Enoch slid in and climbed up on the far stool at the counter and said
he would have a bowl of split-pea soup and a chocolate malted milkshake.
  The waitress was a tall woman with a big yellow dental plate
and the same color hair done up in a black hairnet, One hand never
left her hip; she filled orders with the other one. Although Enoch
came in every night, she had never learned to like him.
  Instead of filling his order, she began to fry bacon; there was
only one other customer in the place and he had finished his meal
and was reading a newspaper; there was no one to eat the bacon
but her. Enoch reached over the counter and prodded her hip with
the stick. "Listenhere," he said, "I got to go. I'm in a hurry."
  "Go then," she said. Her jaw began to work and she stared into
the skillet with a fixed attention.
  "Lemme just have a piece of theter cake yonder," he said, pointing
to a half of pink and yellow cake on a round glass stand. "I think
I got something to do. I got to be going. Set it up there next to him,"
he said, indicating the customer reading the newspaper. He slid
over the stools and began reading the outside sheet of the man's
paper.
  The man lowered the paper and looked at him. Enoch smiled.
The man raised the paper again. "Could I borrow some part of your
paper that you ain't studying?" Enoch asked. The man lowered it
again and stared at him; he had muddy unflinching eyes. He leafed
deliberately through the paper and shook out the sheet with the
comic strips and handed it to Enoch. It was Enoch's favorite part.
He read it every evening like an office. While he ate the cake that the
waitress had torpedoed down the counter at him, he read and felt
himself surge with kindness and courage and strength.
  When he finished one side, he turned the sheet over and began to
scan the advertisements for movies that filled the other side. His
eye went over three columns without stopping; then it came to a
box that advertised Gonga, Giant Jungle Monarch, and listed the
theaters he would visit on his tour and the hours he would be at
each one. In thirty minutes he would arrive at the Victory on 57th
Street and that would be his last appearance in the city.
  If anyone had watched Enoch read this, he would have seen a
certain transformation in his countenance. It still shone with the
inspiration he had absorbed from the comic strips, but something
else had come over it: a look of awakening.
  The waitress happened to turn around to see if he hadn't gone.
"What's the matter with you?" she said. "Did you swallow a seed?"
  "I know what I want," Enoch murmured.
  "I know what I want too," she said with a dark look.
  Enoch felt for his stick and laid his change on the counter. "I got
to be going."
  "Don't let me keep you," she said.
  "You may not see me again," he said, "-the way I am.
  "Any way I don't see you will be all right with me," she said.
  Enoch left. It was a pleasant damp evening. The puddles on the
sidewalk shone and the store windows were steamy and bright
with junk. He disappeared down a side street and made his way
rapidly along the darker passages of the city, pausing only once or
twice at the end of an alley to dart a glance in each direction before
he ran on. The Victory was a small theater, suited to the needs of the
family, in one of the closer subdivisions; he passed through a succession
of lighted areas and then on through more alleys and back
streets until he came to the business section that surrounded it. Then
he slowed up. He saw it about a block away, glittering in its darker
setting. He didn't cross the street to the side it was on but kept
on the far side, moving forward with his squint fixed on the glary
spot. He stopped when he was directly across from it and hid himself
in a narrow stair cavity that divided a building.
  The truck that carried Gonga was parked across the street and
the star was standing under the marquee, shaking hands with an
elderly woman. She moved aside and a gentleman in a polo shirt
stepped up and shook hands vigorously, like a sportsman. He was
followed by a boy of about three who wore a tall Western hat that
nearly covered his face; he had to be pushed ahead by the line.
Enoch watched for some time, his face working with envy. The
small boy was followed by a lady in shorts, she by an old man who
tried to draw extra attention to himself by dancing up instead of
walking in a dignified way. Enoch suddenly darted across the street
and slipped noiselessly into the open back door of the truck.
  The handshaking went on until the feature picture was ready to
begin. Then the star got back in the van and the people filed into
the theater. The driver and the man who was master of ceremonies
climbed in the cab part and the truck rumbled off. It crossed the
city rapidly and continued on the highway, going very fast.
  There came from the van certain thumping noises, not those of the
normal gorilla, but they were drowned out by the drone of the
motor and the steady sound of wheels against the road. The night
was pale and quiet, with nothing to stir it but an occasional complaint
from a hoot owl and the distant muted jarring of a freight
train. The truck sped on until it slowed for a crossing, and as the
van rattled over the tracks, a figure slipped from the door and almost
fell, and then limped hurriedly off toward the woods.
  Once in the darkness of a pine thicket, he laid down a pointed
stick he had been clutching and something bulky and loose that he
had been carrying under his arm, and began to undress. He folded
each garment neatly after he had taken it off and then stacked it
on top of the last thing he had removed. When all his clothes were
in the pile, he took up the stick and began making a hole in the
ground with it.
  The darkness of the pine grove was broken by paler moonlit
spots that moved over him now and again and showed him to be
Enoch. His natural appearance was marred by a gash that ran from
the corner of his lip to his collarbone and by a lump under his eye
that gave him a dulled insensitive look. Nothing could have been
more deceptive for he was burning with the intensest kind of
happiness.
  He dug rapidly until he had made a trench about a foot long and
a foot deep. Then he placed the stack of clothes in it and stood aside
to rest a second. Burying his clothes was not a symbol to him of
burying his former self; he only knew he wouldn't need them any
more. As soon as he got his breath, he pushed the displaced dirt over
the hole and stamped it down with his foot. He discovered while
he did this that he still had his shoes on, and when he finished, he
removed them and threw them from him. Then he picked up the
loose bulky object and shook it vigorously.
  In the uncertain light, one of his lean white legs could be seen to
disappear and then the other, one arm and then the other: a black
heavier shaggier figure replaced his. For an instant, it had two heads,
one light and one dark, but after a second, it pulled the dark back
head over the other and corrected this. It busied itself with certain
hidden fastenings and what appeared to be minor adjustments of its
hide.
  For a time after this, it stood very still and didn't do anything.
Then it began to growl and beat its chest; it jumped up and down
and flung its arms and thrust its head forward. The growls were
thin and uncertain at first but they grew louder after a second. They
became low and poisonous, louder again, low and poisonous again;
they stopped altogether. The figure extended its hand, clutched
nothing, and shook its arm vigorously; it withdrew the arm, extended
it again, clutched nothing, and shook. It repeated this four
or five times. Then it picked up the pointed stick and placed it at a
cocky angle under its arm and left the woods for the highway. No
gorilla anywhere, Africa or California or New York, was happier
than he.
  A man and woman sitting close together on a rock just off the
highway were looking across an open stretch of valley at a view of
the city in the distance and they didn't see the shaggy figure approaching. The smokestacks and square tops of buildings made a
black uneven wall against the lighter sky and here and there a
steeple cut a sharp wedge out of a cloud. The young man turned
his neck just in time to see the gorilla standing a few feet away,
hideous and black, with its hand extended. He eased his arm from
around the woman and disappeared silently into the woods. She,
as soon as she turned her eyes, fled screaming down the highway. The
gorilla stood as though surprised and presently its arm fell to its
side. It sat down on the rock where they had been sitting and
stared over the valley at the uneven skyline of the city.

End

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

1952

THE GRANDMOTHER didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted
to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she
was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was
the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of
his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the
Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this,"
and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling
the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself
The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward
Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just
you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a
criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience
if I did."
  Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around
then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks,
whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied
around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top
like a rabbit's ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his
apricots out of a jar. "The children have been to Florida before,"
the old lady said. "You all ought to take them somewhere else for
a change so they would see different parts of the world and be
broad. They never have been to east Tennessee."
  The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year old
boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, "If you
don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" He and
the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said
without raising her yellow head.
  "Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught
you?" the grandmother asked.
  ''I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.
  "She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star
said. "Afraid she'd miss something. She has to go everywhere we
go."
  "All right, Miss," the grandmother said. "Just remember that
the next time you want me to curl your hair."
  June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
  The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the
car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the
head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was
hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend
for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he
would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against
one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son,
Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.
  She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and
June Star on either side of her. Bailey and the children's mother
and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five
with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this
down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many
miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty
minutes to reach the outskirts of the citv.
  The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white
cotton gloves and putting them up with her purse on the shelf in
front of the back window. The children's mother still had on slacks
and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother
had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white
violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot
in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed
with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of
cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone
seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a
lady.
  She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving,
neither too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned  Bailey that the
speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid
themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped
out after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed
out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue
granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway;
the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the
various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground.
The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of
them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and
their mother had gone back to sleep.
  "Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it
much," John Wesley said.
  "If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk
about my native state that way. Tennessee has the mountains and
Georgia has the hills."
  "Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said,
"and Georgia is a lousy state too."
  "You said it," June Star said.
  "In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined
fingers, "children were more respectful of their native states and
their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look
at the cute little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child
standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture,
now?" she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro
out of the back window. He waved.
  "He didn't have any britches on," June Star said.
  "He probably didn't have any," the grandmother explained.
  "Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do. If I
could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said.
  The children exchanged comic books.
  The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's
mother passed him over the front seat to her. She set him on her
knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were
passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck
her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he
gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cotton field with
five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island.
"Look at the graveyard!" the grandmother said, pointing it out.
  "That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the
plantation."
  "Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.
  "Gone With the Wind," said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."
  When the children finished all the comic books they had brought,
they opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut
butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw
the box and the paper napkins out the window. When there was
nothing else to do they played a game by choosing a cloud and
making the other two guess what shape it suggested. John Wesley
took one the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow and John
Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June Star said he didn't play
fair, and they began to slap each other over the grandmother.
The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would
keep quiet. When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved
her head and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a
maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden
from Jasper, Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking
man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every
Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one
Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the watermelon and
there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and
returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon,
she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials,
E. A. T.! This story tickled John Wesley's funny bone and he
giggled and giggled but June Star didn't think it was any good. She
said she wouldn't marry a man that just brought her a watermelon
on Saturday. The grandmother said she would have done well to
marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought
Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died
only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.
  They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sandwiches. The
Tower was a part stucco and part wood filling station and dance
hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red
Sammy Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here and there on
the building and for miles up and down the highway saying, TRY
RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS
RED SAMMY'S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH
THE HAPPY LAUGH! A VETERAN! RED SAMMY'S YOUR
MAN!
  Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower
with his head under a truck while a gray monkey about a foot
high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The
monkey sprang back into the tree and got on the highest limb as
soon as he saw the children jump out of the car and run toward
him.
  Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one
end and tables at the other and dancing space in the middle. They
all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red
Sam's wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter
than her skin, came and took their order. The children's mother
put a dime in the machine and played "The Tennessee Waltz," and
the grandmother said that tune always made her want to dance. She
asked Bailey if he would like to dance but he only glared at her.
He didn't have a naturally sunny disposition like she did and trips
made him nervous. The grandmother's brown eyes were very
bright. She swayed her head from side to side and pretended she
was dancing in her chair. June Star said play something she could
tap to so the children's mother put in another dime and played a
fast number and June Star stepped out onto the dance floor and did
her tap routine.
  "Ain't she cute?" Red Sam's wife said, leaning over the counter.
  "Would you like to come be my little girl?"
  "No I certainly wouldn't," June Star said. "I wouldn't live in
a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!" and she ran
back to the table.
  "Ain't she cute?" the woman repeated, stretching her mouth
politely.
  "Aren't you ashamed?" hissed the grandmother.
  Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the
counter and hurry up with these people's order. His khaki trousers
reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like
a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat

down at a table nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel.
"You can't win," he said. "You can't win," and he wiped hi~ sweating
red face off with a gray handkerchief. "These days you don't
know who to trust," he said. "Ain't that the truth?"
  "People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the
grandmother.
  "Two fellers come in here last week," Red Sammy said, "driving
a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these
boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you
know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why
did I do that?"
  "Because you're a good man!" the grandmother said at once.
  "Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as if he were struck with
this answer.
  His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once
without a tray, two in each hand and one balanced on her arm.
"It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust," she
said. "And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody," she
repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
  "Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that's escaped?"
asked the grandmother.
  "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he didn't attact this place right
here," said the woman. "If he hears about it being here, I wouldn't
be none surprised to see him. If he hears it's two cent in the cash
register, I wouldn't be a tall surprised if he ... "
  "That'll do," Red Sam said. "Go bring these people their Co'.
Colas," and the woman went off to get the rest of the order.
  "A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is
getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave
your screen door unlatched. Not no more."
  He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady
said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the
way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would
think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking
about it, she was exactly right. The children ran outside into
the white sunlight and looked at the monkey in the lacy chinaberry
tree. He was busy catching fleas on himself and biting each
one carefully between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.
  They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother
took cat naps and woke up every few minutes with her own snoring.
Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation
that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was
a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the
front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and
two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you
sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled
exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey
would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but
the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once
again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing.
"There was a secret panel in this house," she said craftily, not telling
the truth but wishing that she were, "and the story went that all
the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but
it was never found ... "
  "Hey!" John Wesley said. "Let's go sec it! We'll find it! We'll
poke all the woodwork and find it! Who lives there? Where do
you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off there?"
  "We never have seen a house with a secret panel!" June Star
shrieked. "Let's go to the house with the secret panel! Hey Pop,
can't we go see the house with the secret panel!”
  "It's not far from here, I know," the grandmother said. "It
wouldn't take over twenty minutes."
  Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a
horseshoe. "No," he said.
  The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the
house with the secret panel. John Wesley kicked the back of the
front seat and June Star hung over her mother's shoulder and
whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even
on their vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to
do. The baby began to scream and John Weslev kicked the back of
the seat so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.
  "All right!" he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side or
the road. "Will you all shut up? Will  you all just shut up for one
second? If you don't shut up, we won't go anywhere."
  "It would be very educational for them," the grandmother murmured.
  "All right," Bailey said, "but get this: this is the only time we're
going to stop for anything like this. This is the one and only time."
  "The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back,"
the grandmother directed. "I marked it when we passed."
  "A dirt road," Bailey groaned.
  After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt
road, the grandmother recalled other points about the house, the
beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in the
hall. John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.
  "You can't go inside this house," Bailey said. "You don't know
who lives there."
  "While you all talk to the people in front, I'll run around behind
and get in a window," John Wesley suggested.
  "We'll all stay in the car," his mother said.
  They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in
a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when
there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day's journey.
The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and
sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All at once they would
be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles
around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression
with the dust-coated trees looking down on them.
  "This place had better turn up in a minute," Bailey said, "or
I'm going to turn around."
  The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months.
  "It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said
it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing
that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet
jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise
moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose
with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder.
  The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching
the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady
was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and
landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey
remained in the driver's seat with the cat-gray-striped with a broad
white face and an orange nose-clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.
  As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs,
they scrambled out of the car, shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!"
The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard,
hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come
down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before
the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was
not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
  Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and
flung it out the window against the side of a pine tree. Then he got
out of the car and started looking for the children's mother. She
was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the
screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken
shoulder. "We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed in
a frenzy of delight.
  "But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment as
the grandmother limped out of the car, her hat still pinned to her
head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and
the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch,
except the children, to recover from the shock. They were all shakmg.
  "Maybe a car will come along," said the children's mother
hoarsely.
  "I believe I have injured an organ," said the grandmother, pressing
her side, but no one answered her. Bailey's teeth were clattering.
He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed
in it and his face was as yellow as the shirt. The grandmother decided
that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the
tops of the trees on the other side of it. Behind the ditch they were
sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a
few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill,
coming slowly as if the occupants were watching them. The grandmother
stood up and waved both arms dramatically to attract their
attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared
around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on
top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearselike
automobile. There were three men in it.
  It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver
looked down with a steady expressionless gaze to where they were
sitting, and didn't speak. Then he turned his head and muttered
something to the other two and they got alit. One was a fat
boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion
embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right side
of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of
loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and a blue striped coat
and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face. He
came around slowly on the left side. Neither spoke.
  The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking
down at them. He was an older man than the other two. His
hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles
that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and
didn't have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans
that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun.
The two boys also had guns.
  "We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled
man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if
she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he was.
He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment,
placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn't slip. He
had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red
and thin. "Good afternoon," he said. "I see you all had you a little
spill."
  "We turned over twice!" said the grandmother.
  "Oncet," he corrected. "We seen it happen. Try their car and
see will it run, Hiram," he said quietly to the boy with the gray hat.
"What you got that gun for?" John Wesley: asked. "Whatcha
gonna do with that gun?"
  "Lady," the man said to the children's mother, "would you
mind calling them children to sit down by you? Children make
me nervous. I want all you all to sit down quiet together there
where you're at."
 
  "What are you telling US what to do for?" June Star asked.
Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.
  "Come here," said their mother.
  "Look here now," Bailey began suddenly, "we're in a predicament!
We're in ... "
  The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood
staring. "You're The Misfit!" she said. "I recognized you at once!"
  "Yes'm," the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in
spite of himself to be known, "but it would have been better for
all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me."
  Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother
that shocked even the children. The old lady began to cry and The
Misfit reddened.
  "Lady," he said, "don't you get upset. Sometimes a man says
things he don't mean. 1 don't reckon he meant to talk to you
thataway."
  "You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said
and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap
at her eyes with it.
  The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made
a little hole and then covered it up again. "I would hate to have
to," he said.
  "Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good
man. You don't look a bit like you have common blood. I know
you must come from nice people!"
  "Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world." When he
smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth. "God never made a
finer woman than my mother and my daddy's heart was pure gold,"
he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had come around behind
them and was standing with his gun at his hip. The Misfit squatted
down on the ground. "Watch them children, Bobby Lee," he said.
"You know they make me nervous." He looked at the six of them
huddled together in front of him and he seemed to be embarrassed
as if he couldn't think of anything to say. "Ain't a cloud in the sky,"
he remarked, looking up at it. "Don't see no sun but don't see no
cloud neither."
  "Yes, it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen," she
said, "you shouldn't call yourself The Misfit because I know you're
a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell."
  "Hush!" Bailey yelled. "Hush! Everybody shut up and let me
handle this!" He was squatting in the position of a runner about
to sprint forward but he didn't move.
  "I pre-chate that, lady," The Misfit said and drew a little circle
in the ground with the butt of his gun.
  "It'll take a half a hour to fix this here car," Hiram called, looking
over the raised hood of it.
  "Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to
step over yonder with you," The Misfit said, pointing to Bailey
and John Wesley. "The boys want to ast you something," he said
to Bailey. "Would you mind stepping back in them woods there
with them?"
  "Listen," Bailey began, "we're in a terrible predicament! Nobody
realizes what this is," and his voice cracked. His eyes were as blue
and intense as the parrots in his shirt and he remained perfectly
still.
  The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were
going to the woods with him but it came off in her hand. She stood
staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground. Hiram
pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man.
John Wesley caught hold of his father's hand and Bobby Lee
followed. They went off toward the woods and just as they reached
the dark edge, Bailey turned and supporting himself against a
gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, "I'll be back in a minute, Mamma,
wait on me!"
  "Come back this instant!" his mother shrilled but they all disappeared
into the woods.
  "Bailey Boy!" the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she
found she was looking at The Misfit squatting on the ground in
front of her. "I just know you're a good man," she said desperately.
  "You're not a bit common!"
  "Nome, I ain't a good man," The Misfit said after a second as
if he had considered her statement carefully, "but I ain't the worst
in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of
dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's
some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and
it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters.
He's going to be into everything!'" He put on his black hat and
looked up suddenly and then away deep into the woods as if he
were embarrassed again. ''I'm sorry I don't have on a shirt before
you ladies," he said, hunching his shoulders slightly. "We buried
our clothes that we had on when we escaped and we're just making
do until we can get better. We borrowed these from some folks
we met," he explained.
  "That's perfectly all right," the grandmother said. "Maybe Bailey
has an extra shirt in his suitcase."
  "I'll look and see terrectly," The Misfit said.
 "Where are they taking him?" the children's mother screamed.
  "Daddy was a card himself," The Misfit said. "You couldn't
put anything over on him. He never got in trouble with the
Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them."
  "You could be honest too if you'd only try," said the grandmother.
"Think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable
life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all
the time."
  The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his
gun as if he were thinking about it. "Yes'm, somebody is always
after you," he murmured.
  The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just
behind his hat because she was standing up looking down on him.
  "Do you ever pray?" she asked.
  He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between
his shoulder blades. "Nome," he said.
  There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by
another. Then silence. The old lady's head jerked around. She
could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied
insuck of breath. "Bailey Boy!" she called.
  "I was a gospel singer for a while," The Misfit said. "I been most
everything. Been in the arm service, both land and sea, at home and
abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with the
railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man
burnt alive oncet," and looked up at the children's mother and
the little girl who were sitting close together, their faces white
and their eyes glassy; "I even seen a woman flogged," he said.
  "Pray, pray," the grandmother began, "pray, pray ... "
  "I never was a bad boy that I remember of," The Misfit said in
an almost dreamy voice, "but somewheres along the line I done
something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried
alive," and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady
stare.
  "That's when you should have started to pray," she said. "What
did you do to get sent to the penitentiary that first time?"
  "Turn to the right, it was a wall," The Misfit said, looking up
again at the cloudless sky. "Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look
up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done,
lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I
done and I ain't recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would
think it was coming to me, but it never come."
  "Maybe they put you in by mistake," the old lady said vaguely.
  "Nome," he said. "It wasn't no mistake. They had the papers on
me."
  "You must have stolen something," she said.
  The Misfit sneered slightly. "Nobody had nothing I wanted," he
said. "It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done
was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in
nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing
to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist
churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself."
  "If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you."
  "That's right," The Misfit said.
  "Well then, why don't you pray?" she asked trembling with delight
suddenly.
  "I don't want no hep," he said. ''I'm doing all right by myself."
  Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby
Lee was dragging a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it.
  "Thaw me that shirt, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. The shirt
came flying at him and landed on his shoulder and he put it on. The
grandmother couldn't name what the shirt reminded her of. "No,
lady," The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, "I found out
the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do an
another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later
you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished
for it."
  The children's mother had begun to make heaving noises as if
she couldn't get her breath. "Lady," he asked, "would you and that
little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and
join your husband?"
  "Yes, thank you," the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled
helplessly and she was holding the baby, who had gone to sleep,
in the other. "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The Misfit said as she
struggled to climb out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee, you hold
onto that little girl's hand."
  "I don't want to hold hands with him," June Star said. "He
reminds me of a pig."
  The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm
and pulled her off into the woods after Hiram and her mother.
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had
lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the skv nor any sun.
There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him
that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times
before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, "Jesus,
Jesus," meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it,
it sounded as if she might be cursing.
  "Yes'm," The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus thown everything
off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He
hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed
one because they had the papers on me. Of course" he said, "they
never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said
long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and
keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold
up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the
end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right.
I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I
done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
  There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely
by a pistol report. "Does it seem right to you, bdy, that one is
punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?'
  "Jesus!" the old lady cried. "You've got good bluod! I know you
wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray!
Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money
I've god"
  "Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods,
"there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip."
  There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised
her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called,
  "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would break.
  "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead." The Misfit
continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything
off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to
do but throwaway everything and follow Him, and if He didn't,
then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got
left the best way you can-by killing somebody or burning down his
house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but
meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
"Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled, not
knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank
down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.
  "I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I
wisht I had of been there," he said, hitting the ground with his
fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I
would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of
been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." His
voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for
an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if
he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you're one of
my babies. You're one of my own children!" She reached out and
touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake
had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then
he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began
to clean them.
  Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over
the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half
lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a
child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
  Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes were red rimmed and pale
and defenseless-looking. "Take her off and throw her where you
thrown the others," he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing
itself against his leg.
  "She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the
ditch with a yodel.
  "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had
been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
  "Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.
  "Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in
life."

End

A Late Encounter with the Enemy

1953

GENERAL SASH was a hundred and four years old. He lived with
his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was sixty-two years
old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live
until her graduation from college. The General didn't give two
slaps for her graduation but he never doubted he would live for
it. Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn't
conceive of any other condition. A graduation exercise was not
exactly his idea of a good time, even if, as she said, he would be
expected to sit on the stage in his uniform. She said there would be
a long procession of teachers and students in their robes but that
there wouldn't be anything to equal him in his uniform. He knew
this well enough without her telling him, and as for the damn
procession, it could march to hell and back and not cause him
a quiver. He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and
Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He
didn't have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers as about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. However, he was willing to sit on the stage in his uniform so
that they could see him.
  Sally Poker was not as sure as he was that he would live until
her graduation. There had not been any perceptible change in
him for the last five years, but she had the sense that she might be
cheated out of her triumph because she so often was. She had been
going to summer school every year for the past twenty because
when she started teaching, there were no such things as degrees. In
those times, she said, everything was normal but nothing had been
normal since she was sixteen, and for the past twenty summers,
when she should have been resting, she had had to take a trunk
in the burning heat to the state teacher's college; and though when
she returned in the fall, she always taught in the exact way she
had been taught not to teach, this was a mild revenge that didn't
satisfy her sense of justice. She wanted the General at her graduation
because she wanted to show what she stood for, or, as she
said, "what all was behind her," and was not behind them. This
them was not anybody in particular. It was just all the upstarts who
had turned the world on its head and unsettled the ways of decent
living.
  She meant to stand on that platform in August with the General
sitting in his wheel chair on the stage behind her and she meant
to hold her head very high as if she were saying, "See him! See
him! My kin, all you upstarts! Glorious upright old man standing
for the old traditions! Dignity! Honor! Courage! See him!" One
night in her sleep she screamed, "See him! See him!" and turned
her head and found him sitting in his wheel chair behind her with a
terrible expression on his face and with all his clothes off except the
general's hat and she had waked up and had not dared to go back
to sleep again that night.
  For his part, the General would not have consented even to
attend her graduation if she had not promised to see to it that he sit
on the stage. He liked to sit on any stage. He considered that he
was still a very handsome man. When he had been able to stand
up, he had measured five feet four inches of pure game cock. He
had white hair that reached to his shoulders behind and he would
not wear teeth because he thought his profile was more striking
without them. When he put on his full-dress general's uniform, he
knew well enough that there was nothing to match him anywhere.
  This was not the same uniform he had worn in the War between
the States. He had not actually been a general in that war. He
had probably been a foot soldier; he didn't remember what he
had been; in fact, he didn't remember that war at all. It was like
his feet, which hung down now shriveled at the very end of him,
without feeling, covered with a blue-gray afghan that Sally Poker
had crocheted when she was a little girl. He didn't remember the
Spanish-American War in which he had lost a son; he didn't even
remember the son. He didn't have any use for history because he
never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected
with processions and life with parades and he liked parades.
People were always asking him if he remembered this or thata
dreary black procession of questions about the past. There was
only one event in the past that had any significance for him and that
he cared to talk about: that was twelve years ago when he had
received the general's uniform and had been in the premiere.
  "I was in that preemy they had in Atlanta," he would tell visitors
sitting on his front porch. "Surrounded by beautiful guls. It wasn't
a thing local about it. It was nothing local about it. Listen here. It
was a nashnul event and they had me in it-up onto the stage. There
was no bob-tails at it. Every person at it had paid ten dollars to get
in and had to wear his tuxseeder. I was in this uniform. A beautiful
gul presented me with it that afternoon in a hotel room."
   "It was in a suite in the hotel and I was in it too, Papa," Sally
Poker would say, winking at the visitors. "You weren't alone with
any young lady in a hotel room."
  "Was, I'd a known what to do," the old General would say
with a sharp look and the visitors would scream with laughter.
  "This was a Hollywood, California, gul," he'd continue. "She was
from Hollywood, California, and didn't have any part in the pitcher.
Out there they have so many beautiful guls that they don't need
that they call them a extra and they don't use them for nothing
but presenting people with things and having their pitchers taken.
They took my pitcher with her. No, it was two of them. One on
either side and me in the middle with my arms around each of
them's waist and their waist ain't any bigger than a half a dollar."
Sally Poker would interrupt again. "It was Mr. Govisky that
gave you the uniform, Papa, and he gave me the most exquisite
corsage. Really, I wish you could have seen it. It was made with
gladiola petals taken off and painted gold and put back together
to look like a rose. It was exquisite. I wish you could have seen it,
it was ... "
  "It was as big as her head," the General would snarl. "I was
tellin it. They gimme this uniform and they gimme this seward
and they say, 'Now General, we don't want you to start a war on us.
All we want you to do is march right up on that stage when you're
innerduced tonight and answer a few questions. Think you can
do that?' 'Think I can do it!' I say. 'Listen here. I was doing
things before you were born,' and they hollered."
  "He was the hit of the show," Sally Poker would say, but she
didn't much like to remember the premiere on account of what
had happened to her feet at it. She had bought a new dress for the
occasion-a long black crepe dinner dress with a rhinestone buckle
and a bolero-and a pair of silver slippers to wear with it, because
she was supposed to go up on the stage with him to keep him
from falling. Everything was arranged for them. A real limousine
came at ten minutes to eight and took them to the theater. It drew
up under the marquee at exactly the right time, after the big stars
and the director and the author and the governor and the mayor
and some less important stars. The police kept traffic from jamming
and there were ropes to keep the people off who couldn't go. All
the people who couldn't go watched them step out of the limousine
into the lights. Then they walked down the red and gold foyer
and an usherette in a Confederate cap and little short skirt conducted
them to their special seats. The audience was already there
and a group of UDC members began to clap when they saw the
General in his uniform and that started everybody to clap. A few
more celebrities came after them and then the doors closed and the
lights went down.
  A young man with blond wavy hair who said he represented the
motion-picture industry came out and began to introduce everybody
and each one who was introduced walked up on the stage and said
how really happy he was to be here for this great event. The General
and his granddaughter were introduced sixteenth on the program.
He was introduced as General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy,though Sally Poker had told Mr. Govisky that his name
was George Poker Sash and that he had only been a major. She
helped him up from his seat but her heart was beating so fast she
didn't know whether she'd make it herself.
  The old man walked up the aisle slowly with his fierce white head
high and his hat held over his heart. The orchestra began to play
the Confederate Battle Hymn very softly and the UOC members
rose as a group and did not sit down again until the General was
on the stage. When he reached the center of the stage with Sally
Poker just behind him guiding his elbow, the orchestra burst
out in a loud rendition of the Battle Hymn and the old man, with
real stage presence, gave a vigorous trembling salute and stood at
attention until the last blast had died away. Two of the usherettes
in Confederate caps and short skirts held a Confederate and a
Union flag crossed behind them.
  The General stood in the exact center of the spotlight and it
caught a weird moon-shaped slice of Sally Poker-the corsage, the
rhinestone buckle and one hand clenched around a white glove
and handkerchief. The young man with the blond wavy hair
inserted himself into the circle of light and said he was really
happy to have here tonight for this great event, one, he said, who had
fought and bled in the battles they would soon see daringly reacted
on the screen, and "Tell me, General," he asked, "how old are
you?"
   "Niiiiiinnttty-two!" the General screamed.
  The young man looked as if this were just about the most impressive
thing that had been said all evening. "Ladies and gentlemen,"
he said, "let's give the General the biggest hand we've got!"
and there was applause immediately and the young man indicated to
Sally Poker with a motion of his thumb that she could take the
old man back to his seat now so that the next person could be
introduced; but the General had not finished. He stood immovable
in the exact center of the spotlight, his neck thrust forward, his
mouth slightly open, and his voracious gray eyes drinking in the
glare and the applause. He elbowed his granddaughter roughly
away. "How I  keep so young," he screeched, "I kiss all the pretty
guls!"
  This was met with a great din of spontaneous applause and it
was at just that instant that Sally Poker looked down at her feet
and discovered that in the excitement of getting ready she had forgotten
to change her shoes: two brown Girl Scout oxfords protruded
from the bottom of her dress. She gave the General a yank and
almost ran with him off the stage. He was very angry that he had
not got to say how glad he was to be here for this event and on the
way back to his seat, he kept saying as loud as he could, "I'm glad
to be here at this preemy with all these beautiful guls!" but there
was another celebrity going up the other aisle and nobody paid
any attention to him. He slept through the picture, muttering
fiercely every now and then in his sleep.
  Since then, his life had not been very interesting. His feet were
completely dead now, his knees worked like old hinges, his kidneys
functioned when they would, but his heart persisted doggedly
to beat. The past and the future were the same thing to him, one
forgotten and the other not remembered; he had no more notion
of dying than a cat. Every year on Confederate Memorial Day,
he was bundled up and lent to the Capitol City Museum where he
was displayed from one to four in a musty room full of old photographs,
old uniforms, old artillery, and historic documents. All
these were carefully preserved in glass cases so that children would
not put their hands on them. He wore his general's uniform from
the premiere and sat, with a fixed scowl, inside a small roped
area. There was nothing about him to indicate that he was alive
except an occasional movement in his milky gray eyes, but once
when a bold child touched his sword, his arm shot forward and
slapped the hand off in an instant. In the spring when the old
homes were opened for pilgrimages, he was invited to wear his uniform
and sit in some conspicuous spot and lend atmosphere to the
scene. Some of these times he only snarled at the visitors but sometimes
he told about the premiere and the beautiful girls.
  If he had died before Sally Poker's graduation, she thought she
would have died herself. At the beginning of the summer term,
even before she knew if she would pass, she told the Dean that her
grandfather, General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy,
would attend her graduation and that he was a hundred and four
years old and that his mind was still clear as a bell. Distinguished
visitors were always welcome and could sit on the stage and be
introduced. She made arrangements with her nephew, John Wesley
Poker Sash, a Boy Scout, to come wheel the General's chair.
She thought how sweet it would be to see the old man in his courageous
gray and the young boy in his clean khaki-the old and the
new, she thought appropriately-they would be behind her on the
stage when she received her degree.
  Everything went almost exactly as she had planned. In the summer
while she was away at school, the General stayed with other
relatives and they brought him and John Wesley, the Boy Scout,
down to the graduation. A reporter came to the hotel where they
stayed and took the General's picture with Sally Poker on one side
of him and John Wesley on the other. The General, who had had
his picture taken with beautiful girls, didn't think much of this.
He had forgotten precisely what kind of event this was he was
going to attend but he remembered that he was to wear his
uniform and carry the sword.
  On the morning of the graduation, Sally Poker had to line up in
the academic procession with the B.S.'s in Elementary Education and
she couldn't see to getting him on the stage herself-e-but John
Wesley, a fat blond boy of ten with an executive expression,
guaranteed to take care of everything. She came in her academic
gown to the hotel and dressed the old man in his uniform. He was
as frail as a dried spider. "Aren't you just thrilled, Papa?" she
asked. "I'm just thrilled to death!"
  "Put the soward acrost my lap, damm you," the old man said,
"where it'll shine."
  She put it there and then stood back looking at him. "You look
just grand," she said.
  "God damm it," the old man said in a slow monotonous certain
tone as if he were saying it to the beating ot his heart. "God damm
every god dam thing to hell."
  "Now, now," she said and left happily to join the procession.
  The graduates were lined up behind the Science building and
she found her place just as the line started to move. She had not
slept much the night before and when she had, she had dreamed of
the exercises, murmuring, "See him, see him?" in her sleep but
waking up every time just before she turned her head to look at
him behind her. The graduates had to walk three blocks in the hot
sun in their black wool robes and as she plodded stolidly along she
thought that if anyone considered this academic procession something
impressive to behold, they need only wait until they saw that
old General in his courageous gray and that clean young Boy Scout
stoutly wheeling his chair across the stage with the sunlight catch-
ing the sword. She imagined that John Wesley had the old man
ready now behind the stage.
  The black procession wound its way up the two blocks and
started on the main walk leading to the auditorium. The visitors
stood on the grass, picking out their graduates. Men were pushing
back their hats and wiping their foreheads and women were lifting
their dresses slightly from the shoulders to keep them from sticking
to their backs. The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last
beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them. The sun
blazed off the fenders of automobiles and beat from the columns of
the buildings and pulled the eye from one spot of glare to another.
It pulled Sally Poker's toward the big red Coca-Cola machine that
had been set up by the side of the auditorium. Here she saw the
General parked, scowling and hatless in his chair in the blazing sun
while John Wesley, his blouse loose behind, his hip and cheek
pressed to the red machine, was drinking a Coca-Cola. She broke
from the line and galloped to them and snatched the bottle away.
She shook the boy and thrust in his blouse and put the hat on the
old man's head. "Now get him in there!" she said, pointing one
rigid finger to the side door of the building.
  For his part the General felt as if there were a little hole beginning
to widen in the top of his head. The boy wheeled him rapidly down
a walk and up a ramp and into a building and bumped him over the
stage entrance and into position where he had been told and the
General glared in front of him at heads that all seemed to flow
together and eyes that moved from one face to another. Several
figures in black robes came and picked up his hand and shook it. A
black procession was flowing up each aisle and forming to stately
music in a pool in front of him. The music seemed to be entering
his head through the little hole and he thought for a second that the
procession would try to enter it too.
  He didn't know what procession this was but there was something
familiar about it. It must be familiar to him since it had come to
meet him, but he didn't like a black procession. Any procession
that came to meet him, he thought irritably, ought to have floats
with beautiful guls on them like the floats before the preemy. It
must be something connected with history like they were always
having. He had no use for any of it. What happened then wasn't
anything to a man living now and he was living now.
  When all the procession had flowed into the black pool, a black
figure began orating in front of it. The figure was telling something
about history and the General made up his mind he wouldn't listen,
but the words kept seeping in through the little hole in his head.
He heard his own name mentioned and his chair was shuttled forward
roughly and the Boy Scout took a big bow. They called his
name and the fat brat bowed. Goddam you, the old man tried to
say, get out of my way, I can stand up--but he was jerked back
again before he could get up and take the bow. He supposed the
noise they made was for him. If he was over, he didn't intend to
listen to any more of it. If it hadn't been for the little hole in the
top of his head, none of the words would have got to him. He
thought of putting his finger up there into the hole to block them
but the hole was a little wider than his finger and it felt as if it
were getting deeper.
  Another black robe had taken the place of the first one and was
talking now and he heard his name mentioned again but they were
not talking about him, they were still talking about history. "If
we forget our past," the speaker was saying, "we won't remember
our future and it will be as well for we wont have one." The
General heard some of these words gradually. He had forgotten
history and he didn't intend to remember it again. He had forgotten
the name and face of his wife and the names and faces of his
children or even if he had a wife and children, and he had forgotten
the names of places and the places themselves and what had happened
at them.
  He was considerably irked by the hole in his head. He had not
expected to have a hole in his head at this event. It was the slow
black music that had put it there and though most of the music
had stopped outside, there was still a little of it in the hole, going
deeper and moving around in his thoughts, letting the words he
heard into the dark places of his brain. He heard the words,
Chickamauga, Shiloh, Johnston, Lee, and he knew he was inspiring
all these words that meant nothing to him. He wondered if he had
been a general at Chickamauga or at Lee. Then he tried to see
himself and the horse mounted in the middle of a float full of
beautiful girls, being driven slowly through downtown Atlanta.
Instead, the old words began to stir in his head as if they were
trying to wrench themselves out of place and come to life.
  The speaker was through with that war and had gone on to the
next one and now he was approaching another and all his words,
like the black procession, were vaguely familiar and irritating.
There was a long finger of music in the General's head, probing
various Spots that were words, letting in a little light on the words
and helping them to live. The words began to come toward him
and he said, Dammit! I ain't going to have it! and he started edging
backwards to get out of the way. Then he saw the figure in the
black robe sit down and there was a noise and the black pool in
front of him began to rumble and to How toward him from either
side to the black slow music, and he said, Stop darmmit! I can't do
but one thing at a time! He couldn't protect himself from the words
and attend to the procession too and the words were coming at
him fast. He felt that he was running backwards and the words
were coming at him like musket fire, just escaping him but getting
nearer and nearer. He turned around and began to run as fast
as he could but he found himself running toward the words. He
was running into a regular volley of them and meeting them with
quick curses. As the music swelled toward him, the entire past
opened up on him out of nowhere and he felt his body riddled in
a hundred places with sharp stabs of pain and he fell down, returning
a curse for every hit. He saw his wife's narrow face looking
at him critically through her round gold-rimmed glasses; he saw
one of his squinting bald-headed sons; and his mother ran toward
him with an anxious look; then a succession of places--Chicka_
mauga, Shiloh, Marthasville--rushed at him as if the past were the
only future now and he had to endure it. Then suddenly he saw
that the black procession was almost on him. He recognized it, for it
had been dogging all his days. He made such a desperate effort to
see over it and find out what comes after the past that his hand
clenched the sword until the blade touched bone.
  The graduates were crossing the stage in a long file to receive
their scrolls and shake the president's hand. As Sally Poker, who
was near the end, crossed, she glanced at the General and saw
him sitting fixed and fierce, his eyes wide open, and she turned her
head forward again and held it a perceptible degree higher and
received her scroll. Once it was all over and she was out of the
auditorium in the sun again, she located her kin and they waited
together on a bench in the shade for John Wesley to wheel the old
man out. That crafty scout had bumped him out the back way and
rolled him at high speed down a flagstone path and was waiting
now, with the corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine.

END

The Life You Save
May Be Your Own

1953

THE old woman and her daughter were sitting on their porch
when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for the first time. The
old woman slid to the edge of her chair and leaned forward,
shading her eyes from the piercing sunset with her hand. The
daughter could not see far in front of her and continued to play
with her fingers. Although the old woman lived in this desolate
spot with only her daughter and she had never seen Mr. Shiftlet before,
she could tell, even from a distance, that he was a tramp and
no one to be afraid of. His left coat sleeve was folded up to show
there was only half an arm in it and his gaunt figure listed slightly
to the side as if the breeze were pushing him. He had on a black
town suit and a brown felt hat that was turned up ill the front and
down in the back and he carried a till tool box by a handle. He
came on, at an amble, up her road, his bee turned toward the
sun which appeared to be balancing itself on the peak of a small
mountain.
  The old woman didn't change her position until he was almost
into her yard; then she rose with one hand fisted on her hip. The
daughter, a large girl in a short blue organdy dress, saw him all at
once and jumped up and began to stamp and point and make excited
speechless sounds.
  Mr. Shiftlet stopped just inside the yard and set his box on the
ground and tipped his hat at her as if she were not in the least
afflicted; then he turned toward the old woman and swung the
hat all the way off. He had long black slick hair that hung flat from
a part in the middle to beyond the tips of his ears on either side.
His face descended in forehead for more than half its length and
ended suddenly with his features just balanced over a jutting steeltrap
jaw. He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed
dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.
  "Good evening," the old woman said. She was about the size
of a cedar fence post and she had a man's gray hat pulled down
low over her head.
  The tramp stood looking at her and didn't answer. He turned
his back and faced the sunset. He swung both his whole and his
short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and
his figure formed a crooked cross. The old woman watched him
with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of
the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and
her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists. She had long pink-gold
hair and eyes as blue as a peacock's neck.
  He held the pose for almost fifty seconds and then he picked
up his box and came on to the porch and dropped down on the
bottom step. "Lady," he said in a firm nasal voice, "I'd give a fortune
to live where I could see me a sun do that every evening."
  "Does it every evening," the old woman said and sat back down.
The daughter sat down too and watched him with a cautious sly
look as if he were a bird that had come up very close. He leaned to
one side, rooting in his pants pocket, and in a second he brought out
a package of chewing gum and offered her a piece. She took it and
un peeled it and began to chew without taking her eyes off him.
He offered the old woman a piece but she only raised her upper
lip to indicate she had no teeth.
  Mr. Shiftlet's pale sharp glance had already passed over everything
in the yard-the pump near the corner of the house and the
big fig tree that three or four chickens were preparing to roost in
-and had moved to a shed where he saw the square rusted back
of an automobile. "You ladies drive?" he asked.
  "That car ain't run in fifteen year," the old woman said. "The day
my husband died, it quit running."
  "Nothing is like it used to be, lady," he said. "The world is almost
rotten."
  "That's right," the old woman said. "You from around here?"
  "Name Tom T. Shiftlet," he murmured, looking at the tires.
  "I'm pleased to meet you," the old woman said. "Name Lucynell
Crater and daughter Lucynell Crater. What you doing around here,
Mr. Shiftlet?"
  He judged the car to be about a 1928 or '29 Ford. "Lady," he said,
and turned and gave her his full attention, "lemme tell you something.
There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife
and cut the human heart-the human heart," he repeated, leaning
forward, "out of a man's chest and held it in his hand," and he held
his hand out, palm up, as if it were slightly weighted with the human
heart, "and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady,"
he said, allowing a long significant pause in which his head slid forward
and his clay-colored eyes brightened, "he don't know no more
about it than you or me."
  "That's right," the old woman said.
  "Why, if he was to take that knife and cut into every corner of it,
he still wouldn't know no more than you or me. What you want
to bet?"
  "Nothing," the old woman said wisely. "Where you come from,
Mr. ShiftIet ?"
  He didn't answer. He reached into his pocket and brought out a
sack of tobacco and a package of cigarette papers and rolled himself
a cigarette, expertly with one hand, and attached it in a hanging position
to his upper lip. Then he took a box of wooden matches from
his pocket and struck one on his shoe. He held the burning match
as if he were studying the mystery of flame while it traveled
dangerously toward his skin. The daughter began to make loud
noises and to point to his hand and shake her finger at him, but
when the flame was just before touching him, he leaned down with
his hand cupped over it as if he were going to set fire to his nose
and lit the cigarette.
  He flipped away the dead match and blew a stream of gray into
the evening. A sly look came over his face. "Lady," he said, "nowadays,
people'll do anything anyways. I can tell you my name is Tom
T. ShiftIet and I come from Tarwater, Tennessee, but you never
have seen me before: how you know I ain't lying? How you know
my name ain't Aaron Sparks, lady, and I come from Singleberry,
Georgia, or how you know it's not George Speeds and I come from
Lucy, Alabama, or how you know I ain't Thompson Bright from
Toolafalls, Mississippi?"
  "I don't know nothing about you," the old woman muttered,
irked.
  "Lady," he said, "people don't care how they lie. Maybe the best
I can tell you is, I'm a man; but listen lady," he said and paused
and made his tone more ominous still, "what is a man?"
  The old woman began to gum a seed. "What you carry in that tin
box, Mr. ShiftIet?" she asked.
  "Tools," he said, put back. ''I'm a carpenter."
  "Well, if you come out here to work, I'll be able to feed you and
give you a place to sleep but I can't pay. I'll tell you that before
you begin," she said.
  There was no answer at once and no particular expression on
his face. He leaned back against the two-by-four that helped support
the porch roof. "Lady," he said slowly, "there's some men that some
things mean more to them than money." The old woman rocked
without comment and the daughter watched the trigger that moved
up and down in his neck. He told the old woman then that all most
people were interested in was money, but he asked what a man was
made for. He asked her if a man was made for money, or what. He
asked her what she thought she was made for but she didn't answer,
she only sat rocking and wondered if a one-armed man could put a
new roof on her garden house. He asked a lot of questions that
she didn't answer. He told her that he was twenty-eight years old
and had lived a varied life. He had been a gospel singer, a foreman
on the railroad, an assistant in an undertaking parlor, and he come
over the radio for three months with Uncle Roy and his Red Creek
Wranglers. He said he had fought and bled in the Arm Service of his
country and visited every foreign land and that everywhere he had
seen people that didn't care if they did a thing one way or another.
He said he hadn't been raised thataway.
  A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if
it were going to roost there with the chickens. He said that a man
had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he
wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the
sun go down every evening like God made it to do.
  "Are you married or are you single?" the old woman asked.
There was a long silence. "Lady," he asked finally, "where would
you find you an innocent woman today? I wouldn't have any of
this trash I could just pick up."
  The daughter was leaning very far down, hanging her head almost
between her knees watching him through a triangular door
she had made in her overturned hair; and she suddenly fell in a
heap on the floor and began to whimper. Mr. Shiftlet straightened
her out and helped her get back in the chair.
  "Is she your baby girl?" he asked.
  "My only," the old woman said "and she's the sweetest girl in the
world. I would give her up for nothing on earth. She's smart too.
She can sweep the floor, cook, wash, feed the chickens, and hoe. I
wouldn't give her up for a casket of jewels."
  "No," he said kindly, "don't ever let any man take her away from
you."
  "Any man come after her," the old woman said, "'ll have to
stay around the place."
  Mr. Shiftlet's eye in the darkness was focused on a part of the
automobile bumper that glittered in the distance. "Lady," he said,
jerking his short arm up as if he could point with it to her house and
yard and pump, "there ain't a broken thing on this plantation that I
couldn't fix for you, one-arm jackleg or not. I'm a man," he said with
a sullen dignity, "even if I ain't a whole one. I got," he said, tapping
his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he
was going to say, "a moral intelligence!" and his face pierced out
of the darkness into a shaft of doorlight and he stared at her as if
he were astonished himself at this impossible truth.
  The old woman was not impressed with the phrase. "I told you
you could hang around and work for food," she said, "if you don't
mind sleeping in that car yonder."
  "Why listen, lady," he said with a grin of delight, "the monks
of old slept in their coffins!"
  "They wasn't as advanced as we are," the old woman said.

  The next morning he began on the roof of the garden house
while Lucynell, the daughter, sat on a rock and watched him work.
He had not been around a week before the change he had made in
the place was apparent. He had patched the front and back steps,
built a new hog pen, restored a fence, and taught Lucynell, who was
completely deaf and had never said a word in her life, to say the
word "bird." The big rosy-faced girl followed him everywhere, saying
"Burrttddt ddbirrrttdt," and clapping her hands. The old
woman watched from a distance, secretly pleased. She was ravenous
for a son-in-law.
  Mr. Shiftlet slept on the hard narrow back seat of the car with his
feet out the side window. He had his razor and a can of water on a
crate that served him as a bedside table and he put up a piece of
mirror against the back glass and kept his coat neatly on a hanger
that he hung over one of the windows.
  In the evenings he sat on the steps and talked while the old
woman and Lucynell rocked violently in their chairs on either side
of him. The old woman's three mountains were black against the
dark blue sky and were visited off and on by various planets and
by the moon after it had left the chickens. Mr. Shiftlet pointed out
that the reason he had improved this plantation was because he had
taken a personal interest in it. He said he was even going to make the
automobile run.
  He had raised the hood and studied the mechanism and he said
he could tell that the car had been built in the days when cars were
really built. You take now, he said, one man puts in one bolt and
another man puts in another bolt and another man puts in another
bolt so that it's a man for a bolt. That's why you have to pay so
much for a car: you're paying all those men. Now if you didn't have
to pay but one man, you could get you a cheaper car and one that
had had a personal interest taken in it, and it would be a better car.
The old woman agreed with him that this was so.
  Mr. Shiftlet said that the trouble with the world was that nobody
cared, or stopped and took any trouble. He said he never would
have been able to teach Lucynell to say a word if he hadn't cared
and stopped long enough.
  "Teach her to say something else," the old woman said.
  "What you want her to say next?" Mr. Shiftlet asked.
The old woman's smile was broad and toothless and suggestive.
"Teach her to say 'sugarpie,'" she said.
  Mr. Shiftlet already knew what was on her mind.
  The next day he began to tinker with the automobile and that
evening he told her that if she would buy a fan belt, he would be
able to make the car run.
  The old woman said she would give him the money. "You see
that girl yonder?" she asked, pointing to Lucynell who was sitting
on the floor a foot away, watching him, her eyes blue even in the
dark. "If it was ever a man wanted to take her away, I would say,
'No man on earth is going to take that sweet girl of mine away
from me!' but if he was to say, 'Lady, I don't want to take her
away, I want her right here,' I would say. 'Mister, I don't blame
you none. I wouldn't pass up a chance to live in a permanent place
and get the sweetest girl in the world myself. You ain't no fool,'
I would say."
  "How old is she?" Mr. Shiftlet asked casually.
  "Fifteen, sixteen," the old woman said. The girl was nearly thirty
but because of her innocence it was impossible to guess.
  "It would be a good idea to paint it too," Mr. Shiftlet remarked.
  "You don't want it to rust out."
  "We'll see about that later," the old woman said.
The next day he walked into town and returned with the parts
he needed and a can of gasoline. Late in the afternoon, terrible
noises issued from the shed and the old woman rushed out of the
house, thinking Lucynell was somewhere having a fit. Lucynell was
sitting on a chicken crate, stamping her feet and screaming,
"Burrddttt! bddurrddtttt!" but her fuss was drowned out by the car.
With a volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce
and stately way. Mr. Shiftlet was in the driver's seat, sitting very
erect. He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he
had just raised the dead.
  That night, rocking on the porch, the old woman began her
business, at once. "You want you an innocent woman, don't you?"
she asked sympathetically. "You don't want none of this trash."
"No'm, I don't," Mr. Shiftlet said.
   "One that can't talk," she continued, "can't sass you back or use
foul language. That's the kind for you to have. Right there," and
she pointed to Lucynell sitting cross-legged in her chair, holding
both feet in her hands.
  "That's right," he admitted. "She wouldn't give me any trouble."
  "Saturday," the old woman said, "you and her and me can drive
into town and get married."
  Mr. Shiftlet eased his position on the steps.
  "I can't get married right now," he said. "Everything you want
to do takes money and I ain't got any."
  "What you need with money?" she asked.
  "It takes money," he said. "Some people'Il do anything anyhow
these days, but the way I think, I wouldn't marry no woman that
I couldn't take on a trip like she was somebody. I mean take her to a
hotel and treat her. I wouldn't marry the Duchesser Windsor," he
said firmly, "unless I could take her to a hotel and giver something
good to eat.
 "I was raised thataway and there ain't a thing I can do about it.
My old mother taught me how to do."
"Lucynell don't even know what a hotel is," the old woman
muttered. "Listen here, Mr. Shiftlet," she said, sliding forward in
her chair, "you'd be getting a permanent house and a deep well
and the most innocent girl in the world. You don't need no money.
Lemme tell you something: there ain't any place in the world for
a poor disabled friendless drifting man."
  The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet's head like a group of
buzzards in the top of a tree. He didn't answer at once. He rolled
himself a cigarette and lit it and then he said in an even voice,
"Lady, a man is divided into two parts, body and spirit."
   The old woman clamped her gums together.
  "A body and a spirit," he repeated. "The body, lady, is like a
house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile:
always on the move, always ... "
  "Listen, Mr. Shiftlet," she said, "my well never goes dry and my
house is always warm in the winter and there's no mortgage on a
thing about this place. You can go to the courthouse and see for
yourself. And yonder under that shed is a fine automobile." She
laid the bait carefully. "You can have it painted by Saturday. I'll
pay for the paint."
  In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet's smile stretched like a weary snake
waking up by a fire. After a second he recalled himself and said,
  "I'm only saying a man's spirit means more to him than anything
else. I would have to take my wife off for the weekend without
no regards at all for cost. I got to follow where my spirit says to go."
  "I'll give you fifteen dollars for a weekend trip," the old woman
said in a crabbed voice. "That's the best I can do."
  "That wouldn't hardly pay for more than the gas and the hotel,"
he said. "It wouldn't feed her."
  "Seventeen-fifty," the old woman said. "That's all I got so it isn't
any use you trying to milk me. You can take a lunch."
  Mr. ShiftIet was deeply hurt by the word "milk." He didn't
doubt that she had more money sewed up in her mattress but he
had already told her he was not interested in her money. "I'll make
that do," he said and rose and walked off without treating with her
further.
  On Saturday the three of them drove into town in the car that the
paint had barely dried on and Mr. ShiftIet and Lucynell were married
in the Ordinary's office while the old woman witnessed. As they
came out of the courthouse, Mr. ShiftIet began twisting his neck in
his collar. He looked morose and bitter as if he had been insulted
while someone held him. "That didn't satisfy me none," he said.
"That was just something a woman in an office did, nothing but
paper work and blood tests. What do they know about my blood?
If they was to take my heart and cut it out," he said, "they wouldn't
know a thing about me. It didn't satisfy me at all."
  "It satisfied the law," the old woman said sharply.
  "The law," Mr. ShiftIet said and spit. "It's the law that don't satisfy
me."
  He had painted the car dark green with a yellow band around it
just under the windows. The three of them climbed in the front
seat and the old woman said, "Don't Lucynell look pretty? Looks
like a baby doll." Lucynell was dressed lip in a white dress that her
mother had uprooted from a trunk and there was a Panama hat
on her head with a bunch of red wooden cherries on the brim. Every
now and then her placid expression was changed by a sly isolated
little thought like a shoot of green in the desert. "You got a prize!"
the old woman said.
  Mr. ShiftIet didn't even look at her.
  They drove back to the house to let the old woman off and pick
up the lunch. When they were ready to leave, she stood staring in the
window of the car, with her fingers clenched around the glass. Tears
began to seep sideways out of her eyes and run along the dirty
creases in her face. "I ain't ever been parted with her for two days
before," she said.
  Mr. Shiftlet started the motor.
  "And I wouldn't let no man have her but you because I seen you
would do right. Good-by, Sugarbaby," she said, clutching at the
sleeve of the white dress. Lucynell looked straight at her and didn't
seem to see her there at all. Mr. ShiftIet eased the car forward so
that she had to move her hands.
  The early afternoon was clear and open and surrounded by pale
blue sky. Although the car would go only thirty miles an hour, Mr.
Shiftlet imagined a terrific climb and dip and swerve that went
entirely to his head so that he forgot his morning bitterness. He had
always wanted an automobile but he had never been able to afford
one before. He drove very fast because he wanted to make Mobile
by nightfall.
  Occasionally he stopped his thoughts long enough to look at
Lucynell in the seat beside him. She had eaten the lunch as soon
as they were out of the yard and now she was pulling the cherries
off the hat one by one and throwing them out the window. He
became depressed in spite of the car. He had driven about a hundred
miles when he decided that she must be hungry again and at
the next small town they came to, he stopped in front of an
aluminum-painted eating place called The Hot Spot and took her in
and ordered her a plate of ham and grits. The ride had made her
sleepy and as soon as she got up on the stool, she rested her head
on the counter and shut her eyes. There W;lS no one in The Hot
Spot but Mr. Shiftlet and the boy behind the counter, a pale youth
with a greasy rag hung over his shoulder. Before he could dish up
the food, she was snoring gently.
  "Give it to her when she wakes up," Mr. ShiftIet said. "I'll pay for
it now."
  The boy bent over her and stared at the long pink-gold hair and
the half-shut sleeping eyes. Then he looked up and stared at Mr.
Shiftlet. "She looks like an angel of Cawd," he murmured.
  "Hitchhiker," Mr. Shiflet explained. "I can't wait. I got to make
Tuscaloosa."
  The boy bent over again and very carefully touched his finger to
a strand of the golden hair and Mr. Shiftlet left.
  He was more depressed than ever as he drove on by himself. The
late afternoon had grown hot and sultry and the country had flattened
out. Deep in the sky a storm was preparing very slowly and
without thunder as if it meant to drain every drop of air from the
earth before it broke. There were times when Mr. Shiftiet preferred
not to be alone. He felt too that a man with a car had a responsibility
to others and he kept his eye out for a hitchhiker. Occasionally he
saw a sign that warned: "Drive carefully. The life you save may be
your own."
  The narrow road dropped off on either side into dry fields and
here and there a shack or a filling station stood in a clearing. The
sun began to set directly in front of the automobile. It was a reddening
ball that through his windshield was slightly flat on the bottom
and top. He saw a boy in overalls and a gray hat standing on the
edge of the road and he slowed the car down and stopped in front
of him. The boy didn't have his hand raised to thumb the ride, he
was only standing there, but he had a small cardboard suitcase and
his hat was set on his head in a way to indicate that he had left
somewhere for good. "Son," Mr. Shiftlet said, "I see you want a ride."
The boy didn't say he did or he didn't but he opened the door
of the car and got in, and Mr. Shiftlet started driving again. The
child held the suitcase on his lap and folded his arms on top of it. He
turned his head and looked out the window away from Mr. Shiftlet.
Mr. Shiftlet felt oppressed. "Son," he said after a minute, "I got the
best old mother in the world so I reckon you only got the second
best."
  The boy gave him a quick dark glance and then turned his face
back out the window.
  "It's nothing so sweet," Mr. Shiftlet continued, "as a boy's mother.
She taught him his first prayers at her knee, she give him love when
no other would, she told him what was right and what wasn't, and
she seen that he done the right thing. Son," he said, "I never rued a
day in my life like the one I rued when I left that ole' mother of
mine."
  The boy shifted in his seat but he didn't look at Mr. Shiftlet. He
unfolded his arms and put one hand on the door handle.
  "My mother was a angel of Gawd," Mr. Shiftlet said in a very
strained voice. "He took her from heaven and giver to me and I
left her." His eyes were instantly clouded over with a mist of tears.
The car was barely moving.
  The boy turned angrily in the seat. "You go to the devil!" he
cried. "My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking pole
cat!" and with that he flung the door open and jumped out with
his suitcase into the ditch.
  Mr. Shiftlet was so shocked that for about a hundred feet he
drove along slowly with the door still open. A cloud, the exact color
of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the
sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet
felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him. He
raised his arm and let it fall again to his breast. "Oh Lord!" he
prayed. "Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!"
  The turnip continued slowly to descend. After a few minutes
there was a guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic
raindrops, like tin-can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet's
car. Very quickly he stepped on the gas and with his stump sticking
out the window he raced the galloping shower into Mobile.

End

The River

1953

THE child stood glum and limp in the middle of the dark living
room while his father pulled him into a plaid coal. His right
arm was hung in the sleeve but the father buttoned the coat anyway
and pushed him forward toward a pale spotted hand that stuck
through the half-open door.
  "He ain't fixed right," a loud voice said from the hall.
  "Well then for Christ's sake fix him," the father muttered. "It's
six o'clock in the morning." He was in his bathrobe and barefooted.
When he got the child to the door and tried to shut it, he found
her looming in it, a speckled skeleton in a long pea-green coat
and felt helmet.
  "And his and my carfare," she said. "It'll be twict we have to ride
the car."
  He went in the bedroom again to get the money and when he
came back, she and the boy were both standing in the middle of
the room. She was taking stock. "I couldn't smell those dead cigarette
butts long if I was ever to come sit with you," she said, shaking
him down in his coat.
  "Here's the change," the father said. He went to the door and
opened it wide and waited.
  After she had counted the money she slipped it somewhere
inside her coat and walked over to a watercolor hanging near the
phonograph. "I know what time it is," she said, peering closely
at the black lines crossing into broken planes of violent color.
"I ought to. My shift goes on at 10 P.M. and don't get off till 5
and it takes me one hour to ride the Vine Street car."
  "Oh, I see," he said. "Well, we'll expect him back tonight, about
eight or nine?"
  "Maybe later," she said. "We're going to the river to a healing.
  This particular preacher don't get around this way often. I wouldn't
have paid for that," she said, nodding at the painting, "I would
have drew it myself."
  "All right, Mrs. Connin, we'll see you then," he said drumming
on the door.
  A toneless voice called from the bedroom, 'Bring me an icepack."
"Too bad his mamma's sick," Mrs. Corwin said. "What's her
trouble?"
  "We don't know," he muttered.
  "We'll ask the preacher to pray for her. He's healed a lot of
folks. The Reverend Bevel Summers. Maybe she ought to see him
sometime."
  "Maybe so," he said. "We'll see you tonight," and he disappeared
into the bedroom and left them to go.
  The little boy stared at her silently, his nose and eyes running.
He was four or five. He had a long face and bulging chin and
half-shut eyes set far apart. He seemed mute and patient, like an
old sheep waiting to be let out.
  "You'll like this preacher," she said. "The Reverend Bevel Summers.
You ought to hear him sing."
  The bedroom door opened suddenly and the father stuck his
head out and said, "Good-by, old man. Have a good time."
  "Good-by," the little boy said and jumped  as if he had been shot.
Mrs. Connin gave the watercolor another look. Then they went
out into the hall and rang for the elevator. "I wouldn't have drew
it," she said.
  Outside the gray morning was blocked off on either side by the
unlit empty buildings. "It's going to fair up later," she said, "but
this is the last time we'll be able to have any preaching at the river
this year. Wipe your nose, Sugar Boy."
  He began rubbing his sleeve across it but she stopped him. "That
ain't nice," she said. "Where's your handkerchief?'
  He put his hands in his pockets and pretended to look for it while
she waited. "Some people don't care how they send one off," she
murmured to her reflection in the coffee shop window. "You pervide."
She took a red and blue flowered handkerchief out of her
pocket and stooped down and began to work on his nose. "Now
blow," she said and he blew. "You can borry it. Put it in your
pocket."
  He folded it up and put it in his pocket carefully and they walked
on to the corner and leaned against the side of a closed drugstore to
wait for the car. Mrs. Connin turned up her coat collar so that it
met her hat in the back. Her eyelids began to droop and she looked
as if she might go to sleep against the wall. The little boy put a
slight pressure on her hand.
  "What's your name?" she asked in a drowsy voice. "I don't know
but only your last name. I should have found out your first name."
His name was Harry Ashfield and he had never thought at any
time before of changing it. "Bevel," he said.
  Mrs. Connin raised herself from the wall. "Why ain't that a coincident!"
she said. "I told you that's the name of this preacher!"
  "Bevel," he repeated.
  She stood looking down at him as if he had become a marvel to
her. "I'll have to see you meet him today," she said. "He's no ordinary
preacher. He's a healer. He couldn't do nothing for Mr. Connin
though. Mr. Connin didn't have the faith but he said he would try
anything once. He had this griping in his gut."
  The trolley appeared as a yellow spot at the end of the deserted
street.
  "He's gone to the government hospital now," she said, "and they
taken one-third of his stomach. I tell him he better thank Jesus for
what he's got left but he says he ain't thanking nobody. Well I declare,"
she murmured, "Bevel!"
  They walked out to the tracks to wait. "Will he heal me?" Bevel
asked.
  "What you got?"
  "I'm hungry," he decided finally.
  "Didn't you have your breakfast?"
  "I didn't have time to be hungry yet then,” he said.
  "Well when we get home we'll both have us something," she said.
"I'm ready myself."
  They got in the car and sat down a few seats behind the driver
and Mrs. Connin took Bevel on her knees. “Now you be a good
boy," she said, "and let me get some sleep. Just don't get off my lap."
She lay her head back and as he watched, gradually her eyes closed
and her mouth fell open to show a few long scattered teeth, some
gold and some darker than her face; she began to whistle and blow
like a musical skeleton. There was no one in the car but themselves
and the driver and when he saw she was asleep, he took out the
flowered handkerchief and unfolded it and examined it carefully.
Then he folded it up again and unzipped a place in the innerlining
of his coat and hid it in there and shortly he went to sleep himself.
  Her house was a half-mile from the end of the car line, set back a
little from the road. It was tan paper brick with a porch across the
front of it and a tin top. On the porch there were three little boys
of different sizes with identical speckled faces and one tall girl who
had her hair up in so many aluminum curlers that it glared like the
roof. The three boys followed them inside and closed in on Bevel.
They looked at him silently, not smiling.
  "That's Bevel," Mrs. Connin said, taking off her coat. "It's a coincident
he's named the same as the preacher. These boys are J. C.,
Spivey, and Sinclair, and that's Sarah Mildred on the porch. Take
off that coat and hang it on the bed post, Bevel."
  The three boys watched him while he unbuttoned the coat and
took it oft. Then they watched him hang it on the bed post and then
they stood, watching the coat. They turned abruptly and went out
the door and had a conference on the porch.
  Bevel stood looking around him at the room. It was part kitchen
and part bedroom. The entire house was two rooms and two porches.
Close to his foot the tail of a light-colored dog moved up and down
between two floor boards as he scratched his back on the underside
of the house. Bevel jumped on it but the hound was experienced and
had already withdrawn when his feet hit the spot.
  The walls were filled with pictures and calendars. There were two
round photographs of an old man and woman with collapsed
mouths and another picture of a man whose eyebrows dashed out of
two bushes of hair and clashed in a heap on the bridge of his nose;
the rest of his face stuck out like a bare cliff to fall from. "That's
Mr. Connin," Mrs. Connin said, standing back from the stove for a
second to admire the face with him, "but it don't favor him any
more." Bevel turned from Mr. Connin to a colored picture over the
bed of a man wearing a white sheet. He had long hair and a gold
circle around his head and he was sawing on a board while some
children stood watching him. He was going to ask who that was
when the three boys came in again and motioned for him to follow
them. He thought of crawling under the bed and hanging onto one
of the legs but the three boys only stood there, speckled and silent,
waiting, and after a second he followed them at a little distance out
on the porch and around the corner of the house. They started off
through a field of rough yellow weeds to the hog pen, a five-foot
boarded square full of shoats, which they intended to ease him over
into. When they reached it, they turned and waited silently, leaning
against the side.
  He was coming very slowly, deliberately bumping his feet together
as if he had trouble walking. Once he had been beaten up in the
park by some strange boys when his sitter forgot him, but he hadn't
known anything was going to happen that time until it was over.
He began to smell a strong odor of garbage and to hear the noises
of a wild animal. He stopped a few feet from the pen and waited,
pale but dogged.
  The three boys didn't move. Something seemed to have happened
to them. They stared over his head as if they saw something coming
behind him but he was afraid to turn his own head and look. Their
speckles were pale and their eyes were still and gray as glass. Only
their ears twitched slightly. Nothing happened. Finally, the one in
the middle said, "She'd kill us," and turned, dejected and hacked,
and climbed up on the pen and hung over, staring ill.
  Bevel sat down on the ground, dazed with relief, and grinned up
at them.
  The one sitting on the pen glanced at him severely. "Hey you,"
he said after a second, "if you can't climb up and see these pigs you
can lift that bottom board off and look in thataway.' He appeared
to offer this as a kindness.
  Bevel had never seen a real pig but he had seen a pig in a book
and knew they were small fat pink animals with curly tails and
round grinning faces and bow ties. He leaned forward and pulled
eagerly at the board.
  "Pull harder," the littlest boy said. "It's nice and rotten. Just lift
out thet nail."
  He eased a long reddish nail out of the soft wood.
  "Now you can lift up the board and put your face to the…”
a quiet voice began.
  He had already done it and another face, gray, wet and sour, was
pushing into his, knocking him down and back as it scraped out
under the plank. Something snorted over him and charged back
again, rolling him over and pushing him up from behind and then
sending him forward, screaming through the yellow field, while it
bounded behind.
  The three Connins watched from where they were. The one
sitting on the pen held the loose board back with his gangling foot.
Their stern faces didn't brighten any but they seemed to become
less taut, as if some great need had been partly satisfied. "Maw
ain't going to like him lettin' out thet hawg," the smallest one
said.
  Mrs. Connin was on the back porch and caught Bevel up as he
reached the steps. The hog ran under the house and subsided, panting,
but the child screamed for five minutes. When she had finally
calmed him down, she gave him his breakfast and let him sit on her
lap while he ate it. The shoat climbed the two steps onto the back
porch and stood outside the screen door, looking in with his head
lowered sullenly. He was long-legged and humpbacked and part of
one of his ears had been bitten off.
  "Git away!" Mrs. Connin shouted. "That one yonder favors Mr.
Paradise that has the gas station," she said. "You'll see him today
at the healing. He's got the cancer over his ear. He always comes to
show he ain't been healed."
  The shoat stood squinting a few seconds longer and then moved
off slowly. "I don't want to see him," Bevel said.

  They walked to the river, Mrs. Connin in front with him and
the three boys strung out behind and Sarah Mildred, the tall girl,
at the end to holler if one of them ran out on the road. They looked
like the skeleton of an old boat with two pointed ends, sailing slowly
on the edge of the highway. The white Sunday sun followed at a
little distance, climbing fast through a scum of gray cloud as if it
meant to overtake them. Bevel walked Oil the out side edge, holding
Mrs. Connin's hand and looking down into the orange and purple
gulley that dropped off from the concrete.
  It occurred to him that he was lucky this time that they had
found Mrs. Connin who would take you away for the day instead
of an ordinary sitter who only sat where you lived or went to the
park. You found out more when you left where you lived. He had
found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter
named Jesus Christ. Before he had thought it had been a
doctor named Sladewall, a fat man with a yellow mustache who
gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must
have been a joke. They joked a lot where he lived. If he had thought
about it before, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like
"oh" or "damn" or "God," or maybe somebody who had cheated
them out of something sometime. When he had asked Mrs. Connin
who the man in the sheet in the picture over her heel was, she had
looked at him a while with her mouth open. Then she had said,
  "That's Jesus," and she had kept on looking at him.
In a few minutes she had got up and got a book out of the other
room. "See here," she said, turning over the cover,"this belonged
to my great grandmamma. I wouldn't part with it for nothing on
earth." She ran her finger under some brown writing on a spotted
page. "Emma Stevens Oakley, 1832," she said. "Ain’t that something
to have? And every word of it the gospel truth," She turned the
next page and read him the name: "The Life of Jesus Christ for
Readers Under Twelve." Then she read him the book.
  It was a small book, pale brown on the outside with gold edges
and a smell like old putty. It was full of pictures, one of the carpenter
driving a crowd of pigs out of a man. They were real pigs, gray
and sour-looking, and Mrs. Connin said Jesus had driven them all
out of this one man. When she finished reading, she let him sit on
the floor and look at the pictures again.
  Just before they left for the healing, he had managed to get the
book inside his innerlining without her seeing him Now it made his
coat hang down a little farther on one side than the other. His mind
was dreamy and serene as they walked along and when they turned
off the highway onto a long red clay road winding between banks of
honeysuckle, he began to make wild leaps and pull forward on her
hand as if he wanted to dash oft and snatch the sun which was rolling
away ahead of them now.
  They walked on the dirt road for a while and then they crossed a
field stippled with purple weeds and entered the shadows of a wood
where the ground was covered with thick pine needles. He had
never been in woods before and he walked carefully, looking from
side to side as if he were entering a strange country. They moved
along a bridle path that twisted downhill through crackling red
leaves, and once, catching at a branch to keep himself from slipping,
he looked into two frozen green-gold eyes enclosed in the darkness
of a tree hole. At the bottom of the hill, the woods opened suddenly
onto a pasture dotted here and there with black and white cows and
sloping down, tier after tier, to a broad orange stream where the
reflection of the sun was set like a diamond.
  There were people standing on the near bank in a group, singing.
Long tables were set up behind them and a few cars and trucks
were parked in a road that came up by the river. They crossed the
pasture, hurrying, because Mrs. Connin, using her band for a shed
over her eyes, saw the preacher already standing out in the water.
She dropped her basket on one of the tables and pushed the three
boys in front of her into the knot of people so that they wouldn't
linger by the food. She kept Bevel by the hand arid eased her way
up to the front.
  The preacher was standing about ten feet out in the stream where
the water came up to his knees. He was a tall youth in khaki trousers
that he had rolled up higher than the water. He had on a blue shirt
and a red scarf around his neck but no hat and his light-colored hair
was cut in sideburns that curved into the hollows of his cheeks. His
face was all bone and red light reflected from the river. He looked
as if he might have been nineteen years old. He was singing in a
high twangy voice, above the singing on the bank, and he kept his
hands behind him and his head tilted back.
  He ended the hymn on a high note and stood silent, looking down
at the water and shifting his feet in it. Then he looked up at the
people on the bank. They stood close together, waiting; their faces
were solemn but expectant and every eye was on him. He shifted his
feet again.
  "Maybe I know why you come," he said in the twangy voice,
"maybe I don't.
  "If you ain't come for Jesus, you ain't come for me. If you just
come to see can you leave your pain in the river, you ain't come for
Jesus. You can't leave your pain in the river," he said. "I never told
nobody that." He stopped and looked down at his knees.
  "I seen you cure a woman oncet!" a sudden high voice shouted
from the hump of people. "Seen that woman git up and walk out
straight where she had limped in!"
  The preacher lifted one foot and then the other. He seemed
almost but not quite to smile. "You might as well go home if that's
what you come for," he said.
  Then he lifted his head and arms and shouted, "Listen to what I
got to say, you people! There ain't but one river and that's the River
of Life, made out of Jesus' Blood. That's the river you have to lay
your pain in, in the River of Faith, in the River of Life, in the
River of Love, in the rich red river of Jesus' Blood, you people!"
His voice grew soft and musical. "All the rivers come from that
one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you
believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it because
that's the River that was made to carry sin. It's a River full of
pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be
washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old reel water river
round my feet.
  "Listen," he sang, "I read in Mark about an unclean man, I read
in Luke about a blind man, I read in John about a dead man! Oh
you people hear! The same blood that makes this River red, made
that leper clean, made that blind man stare, made that dead man
leap! You people with trouble," he cried, "lay it in that River of
Blood, lay it in that River of Pain, and watch it move away toward
the Kingdom of Christ."
  While he preached, Bevel's eyes followed drowsily the slow circles
of two silent birds revolving high in the air. Across the river there
was a low red and gold grove of sassafras with hills of dark blue
trees behind it and an occasional pine jutting over the skyline. Behind,
in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the
side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped
lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if
they were supporting the sky.
  "If it's this River of Life you want to lay your pain in, then come
up," the preacher said, "and lay your sorrow here. But don't be
thinking this is the last of it because this old red river don't end
here. This old red suffering stream goes on, you people, slow to the
Kingdom of Christ. This old red river is good to Baptize in, good to
lay your faith in, good to lay your pain in, but it ain't this muddy
water here that saves you. I been all up and down this river this
week," he said. "Tuesday I was in Fortune Lake, next day in Ideal,
Friday me and my wife drove to Lulawillow to see a sick man there.
Them people didn't see no healing," he said and his face burned
redder for a second. "I never said they would."
  While he was talking a fluttering figure had begun to move forward
with a kind of butterfly movement-an old woman with
flapping arms whose head wobbled as if it might fall off any second.
She managed to lower herself at the edge of the bank and let her
arms churn in the water. Then she bent farther and pushed her face
down in it and raised herself up finally, streaming wet; and still
flapping, she turned a time or two in a blind circle until someone
reached out and pulled her back into the group.
  "She's been that way for thirteen years," a rough voice shouted.
"Pass the hat and give this kid his money. That's what he's here
for." The shout, directed out to the boy in the river, came from a
huge old man who sat like a humped stone on the bumper of a
long ancient gray automobile. He had on a gray hat that was turned
down over one ear and up over the other to expose a purple bulge
on his left temple. He sat bent forward with his hands hanging between
his knees and his small eyes half closed.
  Bevel stared at him once and then moved into the folds of Mrs.
Connin's coat and hid himself.
  The boy in the river glanced at the old man quickly and raised
his fist. "Believe Jesus or the devil!" he cried. "Testify to one or the
other!"
  "I know from my own self-experience," a woman's mysterious
voice called from the knot of people, "I know from it that this
preacher can heal. My eyes have been opened! I testify to Jesus!"
The preacher lifted his arms quickly and began to repeat all that
he had said before about the River and the Kingdom of Christ and
the old man sat on the bumper, fixing him with a narrow squint.
From time to time Bevel stared at him again from around Mrs.
Connin.
  A man in overalls and a brown coat leaned forward and dipped
his hand in the water quickly and shook it and leaned back, and a
woman held a baby over the edge of the bank and splashed its feet
with water. One man moved a little distance away and sat down
on the bank and took off his shoes and waded out into the stream;
he stood there for a few minutes with his face tilted as far back as
it would go, then he waded back and put on his shoes. All this
time, the preacher sang and did not appear to watch what went on.
  As soon as he stopped singing, Mrs. Cannin lifted Bevel up and
said, "Listen here, preacher, I got a boy from town today that I'm
keeping. His mamma's sick and he wants you to pray for her. And
this is a coincident-his name is Bevel! Bevel," she said, turning to
look at the people behind her, "same as his. Ain't that a coincident,
though?"
  There were some murmurs and Bevel turned and grinned over
her shoulder at the faces looking at him. "Bevel," he said in a loud
jaunty voice.
  "Listen," Mrs. Connin said, "have you ever been Baptized, Bevel?"
He only grinned.
  "I suspect he ain't ever been Baptized," Mrs. Connin said, raising
her eyebrows at the preacher.
  "Swang him over here," the preacher said and took a stride forward
and caught him.
  He held him in the crook of his arm and looked at the grinning
face. Bevel rolled his eyes in a comical way and thrust his face forward,
close to the preacher's. "My name is Bevvvuuuuul," he said in
a loud deep voice and let the tip of his tongue slide across his mouth.
  The preacher didn't smile. His bony face was rigid and his narrow
gray eyes reflected the almost colorless sky. There was a loud
laugh from the old man sitting on the car bumper and Bevel grasped
the back of the preacher's collar and held it tightly. The grin had
already disappeared from his face. He had the sudden feeling that
this was not a joke. Where he lived everything was a joke. From
the preacher's face, he knew immediately that nothing the preacher
said or did was a joke. "My mother named me that," he said
quickly.
  "Have you ever been Baptized?" the preacher asked.
  "What's that?" he murmured.
  "If I Baptize you," the preacher said, "you'll be able to go to the
Kingdom of Christ. You'll be washed in the river of suffering, son,
and you'll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?"
  "Yes," the child said, and thought, I won't go back to the apartment
then, I'll go under the river.
  "You won't be the same again," the preacher said. "You'll count."
Then he turned his face to the people and began to preach and
Bevel looked over his shoulder at the pieces of the white sun scattered
in the river. Suddenly the preacher said, "All right, I'm going
to Baptize you now," and without more warning, he tightened his
hold and swung him upside down and plunged his head into the
water. He held him under while he said the words of Baptism and
then he jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping
child. Bevel's eyes were dark and dilated. "You count now," the
preacher said. "You didn't even count before."
  The little boy was too shocked to cry. He spit out the muddy
water and rubbed his wet sleeve into his eyes and over his face.
  "Don't forget his mamma," Mrs. Connin called. "He wants you
to pray for his mamma. She's sick."
  "Lord," the preacher said, "we pray for somebody in affiiction
who isn't here to testify. Is your mother sick in the hospital?" he
asked. "Is she in pain?"
  The child stared at him. "She hasn't got up yet," he said in a high
dazed voice. "She has a hangover." The air was so quiet he could
hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking the water.
  The preacher looked angry and startled. The red drained out of
his face and the sky appeared to darken in his eyes. There was a
loud guffaw from the bank and Mr. Paradise shouted, "Haw! Cure
the afflicted woman with the hangover!" and began to beat his knee
with his fist.

  "He's had a long day," Mrs. Connin said, standing with him in the
door of the apartment and looking sharply into the room where the
party was going on. "I reckon it's past his regular bedtime." One of
Bevel's eyes was closed and the other half closed; his nose was
running and he kept his mouth open and breathed through it. The
damp plain coat dragged down on one side.
  That would be her, Mrs. Connin decided, in the black britches--long
black satin britches and barefoot sandals and red toenails. She
was lying on half the sofa, with her knees crossed in the air and her
head propped on the arm. She didn't get up.
  "Hello Harry," she said. "Did you have a big day?" She had a
long pale face, smooth and blank, and straight sweet-patata-colored
hair, pulled back.
  The father went off to get the money. There were two other
couples. One of the men, blond with little violet-blue eyes, leaned
out of his chair and said, "Well Harry, old man, have a big day?"
  "His name ain't Harry. It's Bevel," Mrs. Connin said.
  "His name is Harry," she said from the sofa. "Whoever heard of
anybody named Bevel?"
  The little boy had seemed to be going to sleep on his feet, his
head drooping farther and farther forward; he pulled it back suddenly
and opened one eye; the other was stuck.
  "He told me this morning his name was Bevel," Mrs. Connin
said in a shocked voice. "The same as our pread1er. We been all
day at a preaching and healing at the river. He said his name was
Bevel, the same as the preacher's. That's what he told me."
  "Bevel!" his mother said. "My God! what a name."
  "This preacher is name Bevel and there's no better preacher
around," Mrs. Cannin said. "And furthermore," she added in a
defiant tone, "he Baptized this child this morning!"
His mother sat straight up. "Well the nerve!" she muttered.
  "Furthermore," Mrs. Connin said, "he's a healer and he prayed
for you to be healed."
  "Healed!" she almost shouted. "Healed of what for Christ's sake?"
  "Of your affliction," Mrs. Connin said icily.
  The father had returned with the money and was standing near
Mrs. Cannin waiting to give it to her. His eyes were lined with red
threads. "Go on, go on," he said, "I want to hear more about her
affliction. The exact nature of it has escaped ... " He waved the bill
and his voice trailed off. "Healing by prayer is mighty inexpensive,"
he murmured.
  Mrs. Connin stood a second, staring into the room, with a skeleton's
appearance of seeing everything. Then, without taking the
money, she turned and shut the door behind her. The father swung
around, smiling vaguely, and shrugged. The rest of them were looking
at Harry. The little boy began to shamble toward the bedroom.
  "Come here, Harry," his mother said. He automatically shifted
his direction toward her without opening his eyes any farther.
"Tell me what happened today," she said when he reached her. She
began to pull off his coat.
  "I don't know," he muttered.
  "Yes you do know," she said, feeling the coat heavier on one side.
She unzipped the innerlining and caught the book and a dirty handkerchief as they fell out. "Where did you get these?"
  "I don't know," he said and grabbed for them. "They're mine.
She gave them to me."
  She threw the handkerchief down and held the book too high
for him to reach and began to read it, her face after a second assuming
an exaggerated comical expression. The others moved
around and looked at it over her shoulder. "My God," somebody
said.
  One of the men peered at it sharply from behind a thick pair of
glasses. "That's valuable," he said. "That's a collector's item," and
he took it away from the rest of them and retired to another chair.
  "Don't let George go off with that," his girl said.
 "I tell you it's valuable," George said. "1832.”
  Bevel shifted his direction again toward the room where he slept.
He shut the door behind him and moved slowly in the darkness to
the bed and sat down and took off his shoes and got under the
cover. After a minute a shaft of light let in the tall silhouette of his
mother. She tiptoed lightly cross the room and sat down on the
edge of his bed. "What did that dolt of a preacher say about me?"
she whispered. "What lies have you been telling today, honey?"
  He shut his eye and heard her voice from a long way away, as if
he were under the river and she on top of it. She shook his shoulder.
"Harry," she said, leaning down and putting her mouth to his
ear, "tell me what he said." She pulled him into a sitting position
and he felt as if he had been drawn up from under the river. "Tell
me," she whispered and her bitter breath covered his face.
  He saw the pale oval close to him in the dark. "He said I'm not
the same now," he muttered. "I count."
  After a second, she lowered him by his shirt front onto the pillow.
She hung over him an instant and brushed her lips against his forehead.
Then she got up and moved away, swaying her hips lightly
through the shaft of light.

  He didn't wake up early but the apartment was still dark and
close when he did. For a while he lay there, picking his nose and
eyes. Then he sat up in bed and looked out the window. The sun
came in palely, stained gray by the glass. Across the street at the
Empire Hotel, a colored cleaning woman was looking down from an
upper window, resting her face on her folded arms. He got up and
put on his shoes and went to the bathroom and then into the front
room. He ate two crackers spread with anchovy paste, that he found
on the coffee table, and drank some ginger ale left in a bottle and
looked around for his book but it was not there.
  The apartment was silent except for the faint humming of the
refrigerator. He went into the kitchen and found some raisin bread
heels and spread a half jar of peanut butter between them and
climbed up on the tall kitchen stool and sat chewing the sandwich
slowly, wiping his nose every now and then on his shoulder. When
he finished he found some chocolate milk and drank that. He would
rather have had the ginger ale he saw but they left the bottle
openers where he couldn't reach them. He studied what was left
in the refrigerator for a while-some shriveled vegetables that she
had forgot were there and a lot of brown oranges that she bought
and didn't squeeze; there were three or four kinds of cheese and
something fishy in a paper bag; the rest was a pork bone. He left
the refrigerator door open and wandered back into the dark living
room and sat down on the sofa.
  He decided they would be out cold until one o'clock and that they
would all have to go to a restaurant for lunch. He wasn't high
enough for the table yet and the waiter would bring a highchair
and he was too big for a highchair. He sat in the middle of the
sofa, kicking it with his heels. Then he got up and wandered around
the room, looking into the ashtrays at the butts as if this might be a
habit. In his own room he had picture books and blocks but they
were for the most part torn up; he found the way to get new ones
was to tear up the ones he had. There was very little to do at any
time but eat; however, he was not a fat boy.
  He decided he would empty a few of the ashtrays on the floor.
If he only emptied a few, she would think they had fallen. He
emptied two, rubbing the ashes carefully into the rug with his
finger. Then he lay on the floor for a while, studying his feet which
he held up in the air. His shoes were still damp and he began to
think about the river.
  Very slowly, his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing
appear what he didn't know he'd been looking for. Then all of a
sudden he knew what he wanted to do.
  He got up and tiptoed into their bedroom and stood in the dim
light there, looking for her pocketbook. His glance passed her long
pale arm hanging off the edge of the bed down to the floor, and
across the white mound his father made, and past the crowded
bureau, until it rested on the pocketbook hung on the back of a chair.
He took a car-token out of it and half a package of Life Savers.
Then he left the apartment and caught the car at the corner. He
hadn't taken a suitcase because there was nothing from there he
wanted to keep.
  He got off the car at the end of the line and started down the
road he and Mrs. Connin had taken the day before. He knew there
wouldn't be anybody at her house because the three boys and the
girl went to school and Mrs. Conn in had told him she went out to
clean. He passed her yard and walked on the way they had gone
to the river. The paper brick houses were far apart and after a while
the dirt place to walk on ended and he had to walk on the edge
of the highway. The sun was pale yellow and high and hot.
  He passed a shack with an orange gas pump in front of it but
he didn't see the old man looking out at nothing in particular from
the doorway. Mr. Paradise was having an orange drink. He finished
it slowly, squinting over the bottle at the small plaid-coated figure
disappearing down the road. Then he set the empty bottle on a
bench and, still squinting, wiped his sleeve over his mouth. He
went in the shack and picked out a peppermint stick, a foot long
and two inches thick, from the candy shelf, and stuck it in his hip
pocket. Then he got in his car and drove slowly down the highway
after the boy.
  By the time Bevel came to the field speckled with purple weeds,
he was dusty and sweating and he crossed it at a trot to get into
the woods as fast as he could. Once inside, he wandered from tree
to tree, trying to find the path they had taken yesterday. Finally he
found a line Worn in the pine needles and followed it until he saw
the steep trail twisting down through the trees.
  Mr. Paradise had left his automobile back some wayan the road
and had walked to the place where he was accustomed to sit almost
every day, holding an unbaited fishline in the water while he stared
at the river passing in front of him. Anyone looking at him from
a distance would have seen an old boulder half hidden in the
bushes.
  Bevel didn't see him at all. He only saw the river, shimmering
reddish yellow, and bounded into it with his shoes and his coat on
and took a gulp. He swallowed some and spit the rest out and then
he stood there in water up to his chest and looked around him. The
sky was a clear pale blue, all in one piece-except for the hole the
sun made-and fringed around the bottom with treetops. His coat
floated to the surface and surrounded him like a strange gay lily pad
and he stood grinning in the sun. He intended not to fool with
preachers any more but to Baptize himself and to keep on going
this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He
didn't mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the
water at once and pushed forward.
  In a second he began to gasp and sputter and his head reappeared
on the surface; he started under again and the same thing happened.
The river wouldn't have him. He tried again and came up, choking.
This was the way it had been when the preacher held him under--he
had had to fight with something that pushed him back in the
face. He stopped and thought suddenly: it's another joke, it's just
another joke! He thought how far he had come for nothing and
he began to hit and splash and kick the filthy river. His feet were
already treading on nothing. He gave one low cry of pain and
indignation. Then he heard a shout and turned his head and saw
something like a giant pig bounding after him, shaking a red and
white club and shouting. He plunged under once and this time, the
waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him
swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with
surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was
getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him.
  Mr. Paradise's head appeared from time to time on the surface
of the water. Finally, far downstream, the old man rose like some
ancient water monster and stood empty-handed, staring with his
dull eyes as far down the river line as he could see.

End

A Circle in the Fire

1955

SOMETIMES the last line of trees was a solid gray-blue wall a little
darker than the sky but this afternoon it was almost black and
behind it the sky was a livid glaring white. "You know that woman
that had that baby in that iron lung?" Mrs. Pritchard said. She and
the child's mother were underneath the window the child was
looking down from. Mrs. Pritchard was leaning against the chimney,
her arms folded on a shelf of stomach, one foot crossed and the
toe pointed into the ground. She was a large woman with a small
pointed face and steady ferreting eyes. Mrs. Cope was the opposite,
very small and trim, with a large round face and black eyes that
seemed to be enlarging all the time behind her glasses as if she were
continually being astonished. She was squatting down pulling grass
out of the border beds around the house. Both women had on sunhats
that had once been identical but now Mrs. Pritchard's was
faded and out of shape while Mrs. Cope's was still stiff and bright
green.
  "I read about her," she said.
  "She was a Pritchard that married a Brookins and so's kin to me--about
my seventh or eighth cousin by marriage."
  "Well, well," Mrs. Cope muttered and threw a large clump of nut
grass behind her. She worked at the weeds and nut grass as if
they were an evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place.
"Beinst she was kin to us, we gone to see the body," Mrs. Pritchard
said. "Seen the little baby too."
  Mrs. Cope didn't say anything. She was used to these calamitous
stories; she said they wore her to a frazzle. Mrs. Pritchard would
go thirty miles for the satisfaction of seeing anybody laid away.
Mrs. Cope always changed the subject to something cheerful but
the child had observed that this only put Mrs. Pritchard in a bad
humor.
  The child thought the blank sky looked as if it were pushing
against the fortress wall, trying to break through. The trees across the
near field were a patchwork of gray and yellow greens. Mrs. Cope
was always worrying about fires in her woods. When the nights
were very windy, she would say to the child, "Oh Lord, do pray
there won't be any fires, it's so windy," and the child would grunt
from behind her book or not answer at all because she heard it so
often. In the evenings in the summer when they sat on the porch,
Mrs. Cope would say to the child who was reading fast to catch the
last light, "Get up and look at the sunset, it's gorgeous. You ought
to get up and look at it," and the child would scowl and not answer
or glare up once across the lawn and two front pastures to the
gray-blue sentinel line of trees and then begin to read again with no
change of expression, sometimes muttering for meanness, "It looks
like a fire. You better get up and smell around and see if the woods
ain't on fire."
  "She had her arm around it in the coffin," Mrs. Pritchard went
on, but her voice was drowned out by the sound of the tractor that
the Negro, Culver, was driving up the road from the barn. The
wagon was attached and another Negro was sitting in the back,
bouncing, his feet jogging about a foot from the ground. The one on
the tractor drove it past the gate that led into the field on the left.
Mrs. Cope turned her head and saw that he had not gone through
the gate because he was too lazy to get off and open it. He was
going the long way around at her expense. "Tell him to stop and
come here!" she shouted.
  Mrs. Pritchard heaved herself from the chimney and waved her
arm in a fierce circle but he pretended not to hear. She stalked to
the edge of the lawn and screamed, "Get off, 1 toljer! She wants
you!"
  He got off and started toward the chimney, pushing his head
and shoulders forward at each step to give the appearance of hurrying.
His head was thrust up to the top in a white cloth hat streaked
with different shades of sweat. The brim was down and hid all but
the lower parts of his reddish eyes.
  Mrs. Cope was on her knees, pointing the trowel into the ground.
"Why aren't you going through the gate there?" she asked and
waited, her eyes shut and her mouth stretched flat as if she were
prepared for any ridiculous answer.
  "Got to raise the blade on the mower if we do," he said and his
gaze bore just to the left of her. Her Negroes were as destructive
and impersonal as the nut grass.
  Her eyes, as she opened them, looked as if they would keep on
enlarging until they turned her wrongsideout. "Raise it," she said
and pointed across the road with the trowel.
  He moved off.
  "It's nothing to them," she said. "They don't have the responsibility.
  I thank the Lord all these things don't come at once. They'd
destroy me."
  "Yeah, they would," Mrs. Pritchard shouted against the sound of
the tractor. He opened the gate and raised the blade and drove
through and down into the field; the noise diminished as the wagon
disappeared. "I don't see myself how she had it in it," she went on
in her normal voice.
  M rs. Cope was bent over, digging fiercely at the nut grass again.
"We have a lot to be thankful for," she said. "Every day you should
say a prayer of thanksgiving. Do you do that?"
  "Yes'm," Mrs. Pritchard said. "See she was in ill four months before
she even got thataway. Look like to me if I was in one of them,
I would leave off ... how you reckun they ...?” 
  "Every day I say a prayer of thanksgiving,” Mrs. Cope said.
  "Think of all we have. Lord." she said and sighed, "we have everything,"
and she looked around at her rich pastures and hills heavy
with timber and shook her head as if it might all he a burden she was
trying to shake off her back.
  Mrs. Pritchard studied the woods. "All I got is four abscess teeth,"
she remarked.
  "Well, be thankful you don 't have five," Mrs. Cope snapped
and threw back a clump of grass. "We might all be destroyed by
a hurricane. I can always find something to be thankful for."
  Mrs. Pritchard took up a hoe resting against the side of the house
and struck lightly at a weed that had come up between two bricks
in the chimney. "I reckon you can," she said, her voice a little more
nasal than usual with contempt.
  "Why, think of all those poor Europeans," Mrs. Cope went on,
"that they put in boxcars like cattle and rode them to Siberia. Lord,"
she said, "we ought to spend half our time on our knees."
  "I know if I was in an iron lung there would be some things I
wouldn't do," Mrs. Pritchard said, scratching her bare ankle with
the end of the hoe.
  "Even that poor woman had plenty to be thankful for," Mrs.
Cope said.
  "She could be thankful she wasn't dead."
  "Certainly," Mrs. Cope said, and then she pointed the trowel up
at Mrs. Pritchard and said, "I have the best kept place in the county
and do you know why? Because I work. I've had to work to save
this place and work to keep it." She emphasized each word with
the trowel. "I don't let anything get ahead of me and I'm not always
looking for trouble. I take it as it comes."
  "If it all come at oncet sometime," Mrs. Pritchard began.
  "It doesn't all come at once," Mrs. Cope said sharply.
The child could see over to where the dirt road joined the highway.
She saw a pick-up truck stop at the gate and let off three boys
who started walking up the pink dirt road. They walked single file,
the middle one bent to the side carrying a black pig-shaped valise.
"Well, if it ever did," Mrs. Pritchard said, "it wouldn't be nothing
you could do but fling up your hands."
  Mrs. Cope didn't even answer this. Mrs. Pritchard folded her arms
and gazed down the road as if she could easily enough see all these
fine hills flattened to nothing. She saw the three boys who had
almost reached the front walk by now. "Lookit yonder," she said.
"Who you reckon they are?"
  Mrs. Cope leaned back and supported herself with one hand behind
her and looked. The three' came toward them but as if they were
going to walk on through the side of the house. The one with the
suitcase was in front now. Finally about four feet from her, he
stopped and set it down. The three boys looked something alike
except that the middle-sized one wore silver-rimmed spectacles and
carried the suitcase. One of his eyes had a slight cast to it so that his
gaze seemed to be coming from two directions at once as if it had
them surrounded. He had on a sweat shirt with a faded destroyer
printed on it but his chest was so hollow that the destroyer was
broken in the middle and seemed on the point of going under. His
hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat. He looked to be about
thirteen. All three boys had white penetrating stares. "I don't reckon
you remember me, Mrs. Cope," he said.
  "Your face is certainly familiar," she murmured, scrutinizing him.
"Now let's see ... "
  "My daddy used to work here," he hinted.
  "Boyd?" she said. "Your father was Mr. Boyd and you're I.e.?"
  "Nome, I'm Powell, the secant one, only I've growed some since
then and my daddy he's daid now. Done died."
  "Dead. Well I declare," Mrs. Cope said as if death were always
an unusual thing. "What was Mr. Boyd's trouble?"
  One of Powell's eyes seemed to be making a circle of the place,
examining the house and the white water tower behind it and the
chicken houses and the pastures that rolled away on either side
until they met the first line of woods. The other eye looked at her.
  "Died in Florda," he said and began kicking the valise.
  "Well I declare," she murmured. After a second she said, "And
how is your mother?"
  "Mah'd again." He kept watching his foot kick the suitcase.
  The other two boys stared at her impatiently.
  "And where do you all live now?" she asked.
  "Atlanta," he said. "You know, out to one of them developments."
  "Well I see," she said, "I see." After a second she said it again.
Finally she asked, "And who are these other boys ~" and smiled at
them.
"Garfield Smith him, and W. T. Harper him," he said, nodding
his head backward first in the direction of the large boy and then
the small one.
  "How do you boys do?" Mrs. Cope said. "This is Mrs. Pritchard.
Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard work here now."
  They ignored Mrs. Pritchard who watched them with steady
beady eyes. The three seemed to hang there, waiting, watching
Mrs. Cope.
  "Well well," she said, glancing at the suitcase, "it's nice of you
to stop and see me. I think that was real sweet of you."
Powell's stare seemed to pinch her like a pair of tongs. "Come
back to see how you was doing," he said hoarsely.
  "Listen here," the smallest boy said, "all the time we been knowing
him he's been telling us about this here place. Said it was everything
here. Said it was horses here. Said he had the best time of his entire
life right here on this here place. Talks about it all the time."
  "Never shuts his trap about this place," the big boy grunted,
drawing his arm across his nose as if to muffle his words.
  "Always talking about them horses he rid here," the small one
continued, "and said he would let us ride them too. Said it was
one name Gene."
  Mrs. Cope was always afraid someone would get hurt on her place
and sue her for everything she had. "They aren't shod," she said
quickly. "There was one named Gene but he's dead now but I'm
afraid you boys can't ride the horses because you might get hurt.
They're dangerous," she said, speaking very fast.
  The large boy sat down on the ground with a noise of disgust
and began to finger rocks out of his tennis shoe. The small one
darted looks here and there and Powell fixed her with his stare and
didn't say anything.
  After a minute the little boy said, "Say, lady, you know what
he said one time? He said when he died he wanted to come
here!"
  For a second Mrs. Cope looked blank; then she blushed; then a
peculiar look of pain came over her face as she realized that these
children were hungry. They were staring because they were
hungry! She almost gasped in their faces and then she asked them
quickly if they would have something to eat. They said they would
but their expressions, composed and unsatisfied, didn't lighten any.
They looked as if they were used to being hungry and it was no
business of hers.
  The child upstairs had grown red in the face with excitement.
She was kneeling down by the window so that only her eyes and
forehead showed over the sill. Mrs. Cope told the boys to come
around on the other side of the house where the lawn chairs were
and she led the way and Mrs. Pritchard followed. The child moved
from the right bedroom across the hall and over into the left bedroom
and looked down on the other side of the house where there
were three white lawn chairs and red hammock strung between
two hazelnut trees. She was a pale fat girl of twelve with a frowning
squint and a large mouth full ur silver bands. She knelt down at
the window.
  The three boys came around the corner of the house and the
large one threw himself into the hammock and lit a stub of cigarette.
The small boy tumbled down on the grass next to the black suitcase
and rested his head on it and Powell sat down on the edge of one
of the chairs and looked as if he were trying to enclose the whole
place in one encircling stare. The child heard her mother and Mrs.
Pritchard in a muted conference in the kitchen. She got up and went
out into the hall and leaned over the banisters.
  Mrs. Cope's and Mrs. Pritchard's legs were facing each other in
the back hall. "Those poor children are hungry." Mrs. Cope said in
a dead voice.
  "You seen that suitcase?" Mrs. Pritchard asked. "What if they
intend to spend the night with you?"
  Mrs. Cope gave a slight shriek. "I can't have three boys in here
with only me and Sally Virginia," she said. "I 'm sure they'll go
when I feed them."
  "I only know they got a suitcase." Mrs. Pritchard said.
The child hurried back to the window, The large boy was
stretched out in the hammock with his wrists crossed under his
head and the cigarette stub in the center of his mouth. He spit it
out in an arc just as Mrs. Cope came around the corner of the
house with a plate of crackers. She stopped instantly as if a snake
had been slung in her path. "Ashfield!' she said. "Please pick
that up. I'm afraid of fires."
  "Gawfield!" the little boy shouted indignantly. "Gawfield!"
  The large boy raised himself without a word and lumbered for
the butt. He picked it up and put it in his pocket and stood with
his back to her, examining a tattooed heart on his forearm. Mrs.
Pritchard came up holding three Coca-Colas by the necks in one
hand and gave one to each of them.
  "I remember everything about this place," Powell said, looking
down the opening of his bottle.
  "Where did you all go when you left here?" Mrs. Cope asked
and put the plate of crackers on the arm of his chair.
  He looked at it but didn't take one. He said, "I remember it was
one name Gene and it was one name George, We gone to Florda
and my daddy he, you know, died, and then we gone to my sister's
and then my mother she, you know, mah'd, and we been there
ever since. "
  "There are some crackers," Mrs. Cope said and sat down in the
chair across from him.
  "He don't like it in Atlanta," the little boy said, sitting up and
reaching indifferently for a cracker. "He ain't ever satisfied with
where he's at except this place here. Lemme tell you what he'll do,
lady. We'll be playing ball, see, on this here place in this development
we got to play ball on, see, and he'll quit playing and say,
  'Goddam, it was a horse down there name Gene and if I had him
here I'd bust this concrete to hell riding him!'"
  "I'm sure Powell doesn't use words like that, do you, Powell?"
Mrs. Cope said.
  "No, mam," Powell said. His head was turned completely to the
side as if he were listening for the horses in the field,
  "I don't like them kind of crackers," the little boy said and returned
his to the plate and got up.
  Mrs. Cope shifted in her chair. "So you boys live in one of those
nice new developments," she said,
  "The only way you can tell your own is by smell," the small boy
volunteered. "They're four stories high and there's ten of them,
one behind the other. Let's go see them horses," he said.
  Powell turned his pinching look on Mrs, Cope. "We thought we
would just spend the night in your barn," he said. "My uncle
brought us this far on his pick-up truck and he's going to stop for
us again in the morning."
  There was a moment in which she didn't say a thing and the child
in the window thought: she's going to fly out of that chair and hit
the tree.
  "Well, I'm afraid you can't do that," she said, getting up suddenly,
  "The barn's full of hay and I'm afraid of fire from your cigarettes."
  "We won't smoke," he said.
  "I'm afraid you can't spend the night in there just the same," she
repeated as if she were talking politely to a gangster.
  "Well, we can camp out in the woods then," the little boy said.
  "We brought our own blankets anyways. That's what we got in
theter suitcase. Come on."
  "In the woods!" she said. "Oh no! The woods are very dry now,
I can't have people smoking in my woods. You'll have to camp out
in the field, in this field here next to the house, where there aren't
any trees."
  "Where she can keep her eye on you," the child said under her
breath.
  "Her woods," the large boy muttered and got out of the hammock.
  "We'll sleep in the field," Powell said but not particularly as if
he were talking to her. "This afternoon I'm going to show them
about this place." The other two were already walking away and he
got up and bounded after them and the two women sat with the
black suitcase between them.
  "Not no thank you, not no nothing," Mrs. Pritchard remarked.
  "They only played with what we gave them to eat," Mrs. Cope
said in a hurt voice.
  Mrs. Pritchard suggested that they might not like soft drinks.
  "They certainly looked hungry," Mrs. Cope said.
  About sunset they appeared out of the woods, dirty and sweating,
and came to the back porch and asked for water. They did not
ask for food but Mrs. Cope could tell that they wanted it. "All I
have is some cold guinea," she said. "Would you boys like some
guinea and some sandwiches?"
  "I wouldn't eat nothing bald-headed like a guinea," the little boy
said. "I would eat a chicken or a turkey but not no guinea."
  "Dog wouldn't eat one of them," the large boy said. He had
taken off his shirt and stuck it in the hack of his trousers like a
tail. Mrs. Cope carefully avoided looking at him. The little boy
had a cut on his arm.
  "You boys haven't been riding the horses when I asked you not
to, have you?" she asked suspiciously and they all said, "No mam!"
at once in loud enthusiastic voices like the Amens are said in country
churches.
She went into the house and made them sandwiches and, while
she did it, she held a conversation with them from inside the kitchen,
asking what their fathers did and how many brothers and sisters
they had and where they went to school. They answered in short
explosive sentences, pushing each other's shoulders and doubling up
with laughter as if the questions had meanings she didn't know
about. "And do you have men teachers or lady teachers at your
schoo1?" she asked.
  "Some of both and some you can't tell which," the big boy
hooted.
  "And does your mother work, Powell?" she asked quickly.
  "She ast you does your mother work!" the little boy yelled. "His
mind's affected by them horses he only looked at," he said. "His
mother she works at a factory and leaves him to mind the rest of
them only he don't mind them much. Lemme tell you, lady, one
time he locked his little brother in a box and set it on fire."
  ''I'm sure Powell wouldn't do a thing like that." she said, coming
out with the plate of sandwiches and setting it down on the step.
They emptied the plate at once and she picked it up and stood
holding it, looking at the sun which was going down in front of
them, almost on top of the tree line. It was swollen and flame-colored
and hung in a net of ragged cloud as if it might burn through any
second and fall into the woods. From the upstairs window the child
saw her shiver and catch both arms to her sides. "We have so much
to be thankful for," she said suddenly in a mournful marveling
tone. "Do you boys thank God every night for all He's done for
you? Do you thank Him for everything)"
  This put an instant hush over them. They bit into the sandwiches
as if they had lost all taste for food.
  "Do you?" she persisted.
  They were as silent as thieves hiding. They chewed without a
sound.
  "Well, I know I do," she said at length and turned and went
back to the house and the child watched their shoulders drop.
The large one stretched his legs out as if he were releasing himself
from a trap. The sun burned so fast that it seemed to be trying to
set everything in sight on fire. The white water tower was glazed
pink and the grass was an unnatural green as if it were turning to
glass. The child suddenly stuck her head far out the window and
said, "Ugggghhrhh," in a loud voice, crossing her eyes and hanging
her tongue out as far as possible as if she were going to vomit.
The large boy looked up and stared at her. "Jesus," he growled,
"another woman."
  She dropped back from the window and stood with her back
against the wall, squinting fiercely as if she had been slapped in
the face and couldn't see who had done it. As soon as they left
the steps, she came down into the kitchen where Mrs. Cope was
washing the dishes. "If I had that big boy down I'd beat the
daylight out of him," she said.
  "You keep away from those boys," Mrs. Cope said, turning
sharply. "Ladies don't beat the daylight out of people. You keep
out of their way. They'll be gone in the morning."
  But in the morning they were not gone.
  When she went out on the porch after breakfast, they were standing
around the back door, kicking the steps. They were smelling
the bacon she had had for her breakfast. "Why boys!" she said. "I
thought you were going to meet your uncle." They had the same
look of hardened hunger that had pained her yesterday but today
she felt faintly provoked.
  The big boy turned his back at once and the small one squatted
down and began to scratch in the sand. "We ain't, though," Powell
said.
  The big boy turned his head just enough to take in a small section
of her and said, "We ain't bothering nothing of yours."
  He couldn't see the why her eyes enlarged but he could take note
of the significant silence. After a minute she said in an altered voice,
  "Would you boys care for some breakfast?"
  "We got plenty of our own food," the big boy said. "We don't
want nothing of yours."
  She kept her eyes on Powell. His thin while face seemed to
confront but not actually to see her. "You boys know that I'm
glad to have you," she said, "but I expect you to behave. I expect you
to act like gentlemen." They stood there, each looking in a different direction, as if they were waiting for her to leave. "After all," she said in a suddenly high voice, "this is my place."
  The big boy made some ambiguous noise and they turned and
walked off toward the barn, leaving her there with a shocked look
as if she had had a searchlight thrown on her in the middle of the
night.
  In a little while Mrs. Pritchard came over and stood in the kitchen
door with her cheek against the edge of it. "I reckon you know
they rode them horses all yesterday afternoon," she said. "Stole a
bridle out the saddleroom and rode bareback because Hollis seen
them. He runnum out the barn at nine o'clock last night and then
he runnum out the milk room this morning and there was milk all
over their mouths like they had been drinking out the cans."
  "I cannot have this," Mrs Cope said and stood at the sink with
both fists knotted at her sides. "I cannot have this," and her expression
was the same as when she tore at the nut grass.
  "There ain't a thing you can do about it," Mrs. Pritchard said.
  "What I expect is you'll have them for a week or so until school
begins. They just figure to have themselves a vacation in the country
and there ain't nothing you can do but fold your hands."
  "I do not fold my hands," Mrs. Cope said. "Tell Mr. Pritchard
to put the horses up in the stalls."
  "He's already did that. You take a boy thirteen year old is equal
in meanness to a man twict his age. It's no telling what he'll think
up to do. You never know where he'll strike next, This morning
Hollis seen them behind the bull pen and that big one ast if it
wasn't some place they could wash at and Hollis said no it wasn't
and that you didn't want no boys dropping cigarette butts in your
woods and he said, 'She don't own them woods,' and Hollis said,
'Shes does too,' and that there little one he said, 'Man, Gawd owns
them woods and her too,' and that there one with the glasses said,
'I reckon she owns the sky over this place too,' and that there
littlest one says, 'Owns the sky and can't no airplane go over here
without she says so,' and then the big one says, 'I never seen a place
with so many damn women on it, how do you stand it here?' and
Hollis said he had done had enough of their big talk by then and he
turned and walked off without giving no reply one way or the
other."
  "I'm going out there and tell those boys they can get a ride away
from here on the milk truck," Mrs. Cope said and she went out the
back door, leaving Mrs. Pritchard and the child together in the
kitchen.
  "Listen," the child said. "I could handle them quicker than that."
  "Yeah?" Mrs. Pritchard murmured, giving her a long leering
look. "How'd you handle them?"
  The child gripped both hands together and made a contorted face
as if she were strangling someone.
  "They'd handle you," Mrs. Pritchard said with satisfaction.
  The child retired to the upstairs window to get out of her way
and looked down where her mother was walking off from the three
boys who were squatting under the water tower eating something
out of a cracker box. She heard her come in the kitchen door and
say, "They say they'll go on the milk truck, and no wonder they
aren't hungry-they have that suitcase half full of food."
  "Likely stole every bit of it too," Mrs. Pritchard said.
When the milk truck came, the three boys were nowhere in sight,
but as soon as it left without them their three faces appeared,
looking out of the opening in the top of the calf barn. "Can you
beat this?" Mrs. Cope said, standing at one of the upstairs windows
with her hands at her hips. "It's not that 1 wouldn't be glad to have
them--it's their attitude."
  "You never like nobody's attitude," the child said. "I'll go tell
them they got five minutes to leave here in."
  "You are not to go anywhere near those boys, do you hear me?"
Mrs. Cope said.
  "Why?" the child asked,
  ''I'm going out there and give them a piece of my mind," Mrs.
Cope said.
  The child took over the position in the window and in a few
minutes she saw the stiff green hat catching the glint of the sun
as her mother crossed the road toward the calf barn, The three faces
immediately disappeared from the opening, and in a  second the large
boy dashed across the lot, followed in instant later by the other two.
Mrs. Pritchard came out and the two women started for the grove
of trees the boys had vanished into. Presently the two sunhats disappeared in the woods and the three boys came out at the left side
of it and ambled across the field and into another patch of woods.
By the time Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard reached the field, it
was empty and there was nothing for them to do but come home
again.
  Mrs. Cope had not been inside long before Mrs. Pritchard came
running toward the house, shouting something. "They've let out
the bull!" she hollered. "Let out the bull!" And in a second she was
followed by the bull himself, ambling, black and leisurely, with four
geese hissing at his heels. He was not mean until hurried and it took
Mr. Pritchard and the two Negroes a half-hour to ease him back
to his pen. While the men were engaged in this, the boys let the
oil out of the three tractors and then disappeared again into the
woods.
  Two blue veins had come out on either side of Mrs. Cope's forehead
and Mrs. Pritchard observed them with satisfaction. "Like I
toljer," she said, "there ain't a thing you can do about it."
  Mrs. Cope ate her dinner hastily, not conscious that she had her
sunhat on. Every time she heard a noise, she jumped up. Mrs.
Pritchard came over immediately after dinner and said, "Well, you
want to know where they are now?" and smiled in an omniscient
rewarded way.
  "I want to know at once," Mrs. Cope said, coming to an almost
military attention.
  "Down to the road, throwing rocks at your mailbox," Mrs.
Pritchard said, leaning comfortably in the dour. "Done already
about knocked it off its stand."
  "Get in the car," Mrs. Cope said.
  The child got in too and the three of them drove down the road
to the gate. The boys were sitting on the embankment on the other
side of the highway, aiming rocks across the road at the mailbox.
Mrs. Cope stopped the car almost directly beneath them and looked
up out of her window. The three of them stared at her as if they
had never seen her before, the large boy with a sullen glare, the
small one glint-eyed and unsmiling, and Powell with his two-sided
glassed gaze hanging vacantly over the crippled destroyer on his
shirt.
  "Powell," she said, "I'm sure your mother would be ashamed of
you," and she stopped and waited for this to make its effect. His
face seemed to twist slightly but he continued to look through her at
nothing in particular.
  "Now I've put up with this as long as I can," she said. "I've
tried to be nice to you boys. Haven't I been nice to you boys?"
They might have been three statues except that the big one,
barely opening his mouth, said, "We're not even on your side the
road, lady."
  "There ain't a thing you can do about it," Mrs. Pritchard hissed
loudly. The child was sitting on the back seat close to the side. She
had a furious outraged look on her face but she kept her head drawn
back from the window so that they couldn't see her.
  Mrs. Cope spoke slowly, emphasizing every word. "I think I have
been very nice to you boys. I've fed you twice. Now I'm going into
town and if you're still here when I come back, I'll call the sheriff,"
and with this, she drove off. The child, turning quickly so that
she could see out the back window, observed that they had not
moved; they had not even turned their heads.
  "You done angered them now," Mrs. Pritchard said, "and it ain't
any telling what they'll do."
  "They'll be gone when we get back," Mrs. Cope said.
  Mrs. Pritchard could not stand an anticlimax. She required the
taste of blood from time to time to keep her equilibrium. "I known
a man oncet that his wife was poisoned by a child she had adopted
out of pure kindness," she said. When they returned from town,
the boys were not on the embankment and she said, "I would
rather to see them than not to see them. When you see them you
know what they're doing."
  "Ridiculous," Mrs. Cope muttered. "I've scared them and they've
gone and now we can forget them."
  "I ain't forgetting them," Mrs. Pritchard said. "I wouldn't be
none surprised if they didn't have a gun in that there suitcase."
  Mrs. Cope prided herself on the way she handled the type of mind
that Mrs. Pritchard had. When Mrs. Pritchard saw signs and omens,
she exposed them calmly for the figments of imagination that they
were, but this afternoon her nerves were taut and she said, "Now
I've had about enough of this. Those boys are gone and that's that."
  "Well, we'll wait and see," Mrs. Pritchard said.
  Everything was quiet for the rest of the afternoon but at supper
time, Mrs. Pritchard came over to say that she had heard a high
vicious laugh pierce out of the bushes near the hog pen. It was an
evil laugh, full of calculated meanness, and she had heard it come
three times, herself, distinctly.
  "I haven't heard a thing," Mrs. Cope said.
  "I look for them to strike just after dark," Mrs. Pritchard said.
  That night Mrs. Cope and the child sat on the porch until nearly
ten o'clock and nothing happened. The only sounds came from tree
frogs and from one whippoorwill who called faster and faster from
the same spot of darkness, "They've gone," Mr. Cope said, "poor
things," and she began to tell the child how milch they had to be
thankful for, for she said they might have had to live in a development
themselves or they might have been Negroes or they might
have been in iron lungs or they might have been Europeans ridden
in boxcars like cattle, and she began a litany of her blessings, in a
stricken voice, that the child, straining her attention for a sudden
shriek in the dark, didn't listen to.
  There was no sign of them the next morning either. The fortress
line of trees was a hard granite blue, the wind had risen overnight
and the sun had come up a pale gold. The sea ion was changing.
Even a small change in the weather made Mrs. Cope thankful, but
when the seasons changed she seemed almost frightened at her good
fortune in escaping whatever it was that pursued her. As she sometimes
did when one thing was finished and another about to begin,
she turned her attention to the child who had put on a pair of overalls
over her dress and had pulled a man's old felt hat down as far
as it would go on her head and was arming herself with two pistols
in a decorated holster that she had fastened around her waist. The
hat was very tight and seemed to be squeezing the redness into her
face. It came down almost to the tops of her glasses. Mrs. Cope
watched her with a tragic look. "Why do you have to look like an
idiot?" she asked. "Suppose company were to cone? When are you
going to grow up? What's going to become of you? I look at you
and I want to cry! Sometimes you look like you might belong to
Mrs. Pritchard!"
  "Leave me be," the child said in a high irritated voice. "Leave me
be. Just leave me be. I ain't you," and she went  into the woods as
if she were stalking out an enemy, her head thrust forward and
each hand gripped on a gun.
  Mrs. Pritchard came over, sour-humored, because she didn't have
anything calamitous to report. "I got the misery in my face today,"
she said, holding on to what she could salvage. "Theseyer teeth.
They each one feel like an individual boil."

  The child crashed through the woods, making the fallen leaves
sound ominous under her feet. The sun had risen a little and was
only a white hole like an opening for the wind to escape through
in a sky a little darker than itself, and the tops of the trees were
black against the glare. "I'm going to get you one by one and beat
you black and blue. Line up. LINE UP!" she said and waved one
of the pistols at a cluster of long bare-trunked pines, four times her
height, as she passed them. She kept moving, muttering and growling
to herself and occasionally hitting out with one of the guns at a
branch that got in her way. From time to time she stopped to remove
the thorn vine that caught in her shirt and she would say,
"Leave me be, I told you. Leave me be," and give it a crack with
the pistol and then stalk on.
  Presently she sat down on a stump to cool off but she planted
both feet carefully and firmly on the ground. She lifted them and
put them down several times, grinding them fiercely into the dirt
as if she were crushing something under her heels. Suddenly she
heard a laugh.
  She sat up, prickle-skinned. It came again. She heard the sound
of splashing and she stood up, uncertain which way to run. She
was not far from where this patch of woods ended and the back
pasture began. She eased toward the pasture, careful not to make a
sound, and coming suddenly to the edge of it, she saw the three
boys, not twenty feet away, washing in the cow trough. Their
clothes were piled against the black valise out of reach of the water
that flowed over the side of the tank. The large boy was standing
up and the small one was trying to climb onto his shoulders. Powell
was sitting down looking straight ahead through glasses that were
splashed with water. He was not paying any attention to the other
two. The trees must have looked like green waterfalls through his
wet glasses. The child stood partly hidden behind a pine trunk, the
side of her face pressed into the bark.
  "I wish I lived here!" the little boy shouted, balancing with his
knees clutched around the big one's head.
  "I'm goddam glad 1 don't," the big boy panted, and jumped up
to dislodge him.
  Powell sat without moving, without seeming to know that the
other two were behind him, and looked straight ahead like a ghost
sprung upright in his coffin. "If this place was not here any more,"
he said, "you would never have to think of it again."
  "Listen," the big boy said, sitting down quietly in the water with
the little one still moored to his shoulders, "it don't belong to
nobody."
  "It's ours," the little boy said.
  The child behind the tree did not move.
  Powell jumped out of the trough and began to run. He ran all
the way around the field as if something were atter him and as he
passed the tank again, the other two jumped out and raced with
him, the sun glinting on their long wet bodies. The big one ran the
fastest and was the leader. They dashed around the field twice and
finally dropped down by their clothes and lay there with their
ribs moving up and down. After a while, the big one said hoarsely,
"Do you know what I would do with this place if I had the chance?"
  "No, what?" the little boy said and sat up to give him his full
attention.
  "I'd build a big parking lot on it, or something," he muttered.
They began to dress. The sun made two white spots an Powell's
glasses and blotted out his eyes. "I know what let's do," he said. He
took something small from his pocket and showed it to them. For
almost a minute they sat looking at what he had til his hand. Then
without any more discussion, Powell picked up the suitcase and
they got up and moved past the child and entered the woods not ten
feet from where she was standing, slightly away from the tree now,
with the imprint of the bark embossed red and white on the side of
her face.
  She watched with a dazed stare as they stopped and collected all
the matches they had between them and began to, set the brush on
fire. They began to whoop and holler and beat their hands over
their mouths and in a few seconds there was a narrow line of fire
widening between her and them. While she watched, it reached up
from the brush, snatching and biting at the lowest branches of the
trees. The wind carried rags of it higher and the boys disappeared
shrieking behind it.
  She turned and tried to run across the field but her legs were
too heavy and she stood there, weighted down with some new unplaced
misery that she had never felt before. But finally she began
to run.
  Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard were in the field behind the barn
when Mrs. Cope saw smoke rising from the woods across the
pasture. She shrieked and Mrs. Pritchard pointed up the road to
where the child came loping heavily, screaming, "Mama, Mama,
they're going to build a parking lot here!"
  Mrs. Cope began to scream for the Negroes while Mrs. Pritchard,
charged now, ran down the road shouting. Mr. Pritchard came out
of the open end of the barn and the two Negroes stopped filling the
manure spreader in the lot and started toward Mrs. Cope with
their shovels. "Hurry, hurry!" she shouted. "Start throwing dirt on
it!" They passed her almost without looking at her and headed off
slowly across the field toward the smoke. She ran after them a little
way, shrilling, "Hurry, hurry, don't you see it! Don't you see it!"
  "It'll be there when we git there," Culver said and they thrust
their shoulders forward a little and went on at the same pace.
The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her
face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new
misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if
it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to
Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the
Negroes' ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising
and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood
taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high
shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in
the circle the angel had cleared for them.

End

The Displaced Person

1954
 
THE PEACOCK was following Mrs. Shortley up the road to the
hill where she meant to stand. Moving one behind the other,
they looked like a complete procession. Her arms were folded and as
she mounted the prominence, she might have been the giant wife
of the countryside, come out at some sign of danger to see what the
trouble was. She stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand
self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of
granite, to two icy blue points of light that pierced forward, surveying
everything. She ignored the white afternoon sun which was
creeping behind a ragged wall of cloud as if it pretended to be an
intruder and cast her gaze down the red clay road that turned off
from the highway.
  The peacock stopped just behind her, his tail--glittering greengold
and blue in the sunlight-lifted just enough so that it would
not touch the ground. It flowed out on either side like a floating
train and his head on the long blue reed-like neck was drawn back
as if his attention were fixed in the distance on something no one
else could see.
  Mrs. Shortley was watching a black car turn through the gate
from the highway. Over by the toolshed, about fifteen feet away, the
two Negroes, Astor and Sulk, had stopped work to watch. They
were hidden by a mulberry tree but Mrs. Shortley knew they were
there.
  Mrs. McIntyre was coming down the steps of her house to meet
the car. She had on her largest smile but Mrs. Shortley, even from
her distance, could detect a nervous slide in it. These people who
were coming were only hired help, like the Shortleys themselves or
the Negroes. Yet here was the owner of the place out to welcome
them. Here she was, wearing her best clothes and a string of beads,
and now bounding forward with her mouth stretched.
  The car stopped at the walk just as she did and the priest was the
first to get out. He was a long-legged black-suited old man with a
white hat on and a collar that he wore backwards, which, Mrs.
Shortley knew, was what priests did who wanted to be known as
priests. It was this priest who had arranged for these people to come
here. He opened the back door of the car and out jumped two
children, a boy and a girl, and then, stepping more slowly, a woman
in brown, shaped like a peanut. Then the front door opened and
out stepped the man, the Displaced Person. He was short and a
little sway-backed and wore gold-rimmed spectacles.
  Mrs. Shortley's vision narrowed on him and then widened to
include the woman and the two children in a group picture. The
first thing that struck her as very peculiar was that they looked
like other people. Every time she had seen then in her imagination,
the image she had got was of the three bears, walking single
file, with wooden shoes on like Dutchmen and sailor hats and
bright coats with a lot of buttons. But the woman had on a dress
she might have worn herself and the children wen' dressed like anybody
from around. The man had on khaki pants and a blue shirt.
Suddenly, as Mrs. McIntyre held out her hands to him, he bobbed
down from the waist and kissed it.
  Mrs. Shortley jerked her own hand up toward her mouth and
then after a second brought it down and rubbed it vigorously on
her seat. If Mr. Shortley had tried to kiss her hand Mrs. McIntyre
would have knocked him into the middle of next week, but then
Mr. Shortley wouldn't have kissed her hand anyway. He didn't
have time to mess around.
  She looked closer, squinting. The boy was in the center of the
group, talking. He was supposed to speak the most English because
he had learned some in Poland and so he was to listen to his father's
Polish and say it in English and then listen to Mrs. McIntyre's
English and say that in Polish. The priest had told Mrs. McIntyre
his name was Rudolph and he was twelve and the girl’s name was
Sledgewig and she was nine. Sledgewig sounded to Mrs. Shortley
like something you would name a bug, or vice versa as if you named
a boy Bollweevil. All of them's last name was something that only
they themselves and the priest could pronounce. All she could make
out of it was Gobblehook. She and Mrs. Mcintyre had been calling
them the Gobblehooks all week while they got ready for them.
  There had been a great deal to do to get ready for them because
they didn't have anything of their own, not a stick of furniture or
a sheet or a dish, and everything had had to be scraped together
out of things that Mrs. McIntyre couldn't use anymore herself.
They had collected a piece of odd furniture here and a piece there
and they had taken some flowered chicken feed sacks and made curtains
for the windows, two red and one green, because they had not
had enough of the red sacks to go around. Mrs. McIntyre said she
was not made of money and she could not afford to buy curtains.
"They can't talk," Mrs. Shortley said. "You reckon they'll know
what colors even is?" and Mrs. McIntyre had said that after what
those people had been through, they should be grateful for anything
they could get. She said to think how lucky they were to
escape from over there and come to a place like this.
  Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small
room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap,
their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head
there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking
out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize
that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and
a hollow-sounding voice was saying, "Time marches on!" This was
the kind of thing that was happening every day in Europe where
they had not advanced as in this country, and watching from her
vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the
Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all
those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this
place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to
them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it
to others? The width and breadth of this question nearly shook
her. Her stomach trembled as if there had been a slight quake in
the heart of the mountain and automatically she moved down from
her elevation and went forward to be introduced to them, as if she
meant to find out at once what they were capable of.
  She approached, stomach foremost, head back, arms folded, boots
flopping gently against her large legs. About fifteen feet from the
gesticulating group, she stopped and made her presence felt by
training her gaze on the back of Mrs. Mcl ntyre's neck. Mrs. Me-
Intyre was a small woman of sixty with a round wrinkled face and
red bangs that came almost down to two high orange-colored
penciled eyebrows. She had a little doll's mouth and eyes that were
a soft blue when she opened them wide but more like steel or
granite when she narrowed them to inspect a milk can. She had
buried one husband and divorced two and Mrs. Shortley respected
her as a person nobody had put anything over on yet--except, ha,
ha, perhaps the Shortleys. She held out her arm in Mrs. Shortley's
direction and said to the Rudolph boy, "And this is Mrs. Shortley.
Mr. Shortley is my dairyman. Where's Mr. Shortley ," she asked as
his wife began to approach again, her arms still folded. "I want him
to meet the Guizacs."
  Now it was Guizac. She wasn't calling them Gobblehook to their
face. "Chancey's at the barn," Mrs. Shortley said. "He don't have
time to rest himself in the bushes like them niggers over there."
  Her look first grazed the tops of the displaced people's heads and
then revolved downwards slowly, the way a buzzard glides and
drops in the air until it alights on the carcass. She stood far enough
away so that the man would not be able to kiss her hand. He looked
directly at her with little green eyes and gave her a broad grin that
was toothless on one side. Mrs. Shortley, without smiling, turned
her attention to the little girl who stood by the mother, swinging
her shoulders from side to side. She had long braided hair in two
looped pigtails and there was no denying she was a pretty child
even if she did have a bug's name. She was better looking than
either Annie Maude or Sarah Mae, Mrs. Shortleys two girls going
on fifteen and seventeen but Annie Maude had never got her
growth and Sarah Mae had a cast in her eye. She compared the
foreign boy to her son, H.C., and H.C. came out far ahead. H.C.
was twenty years old with her build and eyeglasses. He was going
to Bible school now and when he finished he was going to start
him a church. He had a strong sweet voice for hymns and could
sell anything. Mrs. Shortley looked at the priest and was reminded
that these people did not have an advanced religion. There was no
telling what all they believed since none of the foolishness had
been reformed out of it. Again she saw the room piled high with
bodies.
  The priest spoke in a foreign way himself, English but as if he
had a throatful of hay. He had a big nose and a bald rectangular face
and head. While she was observing him, his large mouth dropped
open and with a stare behind her, he said, "Arrrrrrr!" and pointed.
Mrs. Shortley spun around. The peacock was standing a few feet
behind her, with his head slightly cocked.
  "What a beauti-ful birdrrrd!" the priest murmured.
  "Another mouth to feed," Mrs. McIntyre said, glancing in the
  peafowl's direction.
  "And when does he raise his splendid tail?” Asked the priest.
"Just when it suits him," she said. "There used to be twenty or
thirty of those things on the place but I've let them die off. I don't
like to hear them scream in the middle of the night."
  "So beauti-ful," the priest said. "A tail full of suns," and he crept
forward on tiptoe and looked down on the bird's back where the
polished gold and green design began. The peacock stood still as
if he had just come down from some sun-drenched height to be a
vision for them all. The priest's homely red face hung over him,
glowing with pleasure.
  Mrs. Shortley's mouth had drawn acidly to one side. "Nothing
but a peachicken," she muttered.
  Mrs. Mcintyre raised her orange eyebrows and exchanged a look
with her to indicate that the old man was in his second childhood.
"Well, we must show the Guizacs their new home," she said impatiently
and she herded them into the car again. The peacock
stepped off toward the mulberry tree where the two Negroes were
hiding and the priest turned his absorbed face away and got in the
car and drove the displaced people down to the shack they were to
occupy.
  Mrs. Shortley waited until the car was out of sight and then she
made her way circuitously to the mulberry tree and stood about
ten feet behind the two Negroes, one an old man holding a bucket
half full of calf feed and the other a yellowish boy with a short
woodchuck-like head pushed into a rounded felt hat. "Well," she
said slowly, "yawl have looked long enough. What you think about
them?"
  The old man, Astor, raised himself. "We been watching," he said
as if this would be news to her. "Who they now?"
  "They come from over the water," Mrs. Shortley said with a wave
of her arm. "They're what is called Displaced Persons."
  "Displaced Persons," he said. "Well now. I declare. What do
that mean?"
  "It means they ain't where they were born at and there's nowhere
for them to go--like if you was run out of here and wouldn't
nobody have you."
  "It seem like they here, though," the old man said in a reflective
voice. "If they here, they somewhere."
  "Sho is," the other agreed. "They here."
  The illogic of Negro-thinking always irked Mrs. Shortley. "They
ain't where they belong to be at," she said. "They belong to be
back over yonder where everything is still like they been used to.
Over here it's more advanced than where they come from. But yawl
better look out now," she said and nodded her head. "There's about
ten million billion more just like them and I know what Mrs.
McIntyre said."
  "Say what?" the young one asked.
  "Places are not easy to get nowadays, for white or black, but I
reckon I heard what she stated to me," she said in a sing-song voice.
"You liable to hear most anything," the old man remarked, leaning
forward as if he were about to walk off but holding himself
suspended.
  "I heard her say, 'This is going to put the Fear of the Lord into
those shiftless niggers!'" Mrs. Shortley said in a ringing voice.
  The old man started off. "She say something like that every now
and then," he said. "Ha, Ha. Yes indeed."
  "You better get on in that barn and help Mr. Shortley," she said
to the other one. "What you reckon she pays you for?"
  "He the one sent me out," the Negro muttered. "He the one
gimme something else to do."
  "Well you better get to doing it then," she said and stood there
until he moved off. Then she stood a while longer, reflecting, her
unseeing eyes directly in front of the peacock's tail. He had jumped
into the tree and his tail hung in front of her, full of fierce planets
with eyes that were each ringed in green and set against a sun that
was gold in one second's light and salmon-colored in the next. She
might have been looking at a map of the universe but she didn't
notice it any more than she did the spots of sky that cracked the
dull green of the tree. She was having an inner vision instead. She
was seeing the ten million billion of them pushing their way into
new places over here and herself, a giant angel with wings as wide
as a house, telling the Negroes that they would have to find another
place. She turned herself in the direction of the barn, musing
on this, her expression lofty and satisfied.
  She approached the barn from an oblique angle that allowed her a
look in the door before she could be seen herself. Mr. Chancey
Shortley was adjusting the last milking machine on a large black
and white spotted cow near the entrance, squatting at her heels.
There was about a half-inch of cigarette adhering to the center of
his lower lip. Mrs. Shortley observed it minutely for half a second.
"If she seen or heard of you smoking in this barn, she would blow
a fuse," she said.
  Mr. Shortley raised a sharply rutted face containing a washout
under each cheek and two long crevices eaten down both sides of
his blistered mouth. "You gonter be the one to tell her?" he asked.
"She's got a nose of her own," Mrs. Shortley said.
  Mr. Shortley, without :appearing to give the feat any consideration,
lifted the cigarette stub with the sharp end of his tongue, drew
it into his mouth, closed his lips tightly, rose, stepped out, gave his
wife a good round appreciative stare, and spit the smoldering butt
into the grass.
  "Aw Chancey," she said, "haw haw," and she dug a little hole
for it with her toe and covered it up. This trick of Mr. Shortley's
was actually his way of making love to her. When he had done his
courting, he had not brought a guitar to strum or anything pretty
for her to keep, but had sat on her porch steps, not saying a word,
imitating a paralyzed man propped up to enjoy a cigarette. When
the cigarette got the proper size, he would turn his eyes to her and
open his mouth and draw in the butt and then sit there as if he
had swallowed it, looking at her with the most loving look anybody
could imagine. It nearly drove her wild and every time he did it,
she wanted to pull his hat down over his eyes and hug him to death.
  "Well," she said, going into the barn after him, "the Gobblehooks
have come and she wants you to meet them, says, 'Where's Mr.
Shortley ?' and I says, 'He don't have time .. .' "
  "Tote up them weights," Mr. Shortley said, squatting to the
cow again.
  "You reckon he can drive a tractor when he don't know English?"
she asked. "I don't think she's going to get her money’s worth out
of them. That boy can talk but he looks delicate. The one can work
can't talk and the one can talk can’t work. She ain't any better off
than if she had more niggers.'
  "I rather have a nigger if it was me," Mr. Shortley said.
  "She says it's ten million more like them. Displaced Persons, she
says that there priest can get her all she wants."
  "She better quit messin with that there priest," Mr. Shortley said.
  "He don't look smart," Mrs. Shortley said, "--kind of foolish."
  "I ain't going to have the Pope of Rome tell me how to run no
dairy," Mr. Shortley said.
  "They ain't Eye-talians, they're Poles," she said. "From Poland
where all them bodies were stacked up at. You remember all them
bodies ?"
  "I give them three weeks here," Mr. Shortley said.

  Three weeks later Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortley drove to the
cane bottom to see Mr. Guizac start to operate the silage cutter, a
new machine that Mrs. McIntyre had just bought because she said,
for the first time, she had somebody who could operate it. Mr.
Guizac could drive a tractor, use the rotary hay-baler, the silage
cutter, the combine, the letz mill, or any other machine she had on
the place. He was an expert mechanic, a carpenter, and a mason.
He was thrifty and energetic. Mrs. McIntyre said she figured he
would save her twenty dollars a month on repair bills alone. She
said getting him was the best day's work she had ever done in her
life. He could work milking machines and he was scrupulously
clean. He did not smoke.
  She parked her car on the edge of the cane field and they got
out. Sulk, the young Negro, was attaching the wagon to the cutter
and Mr. Guizac was attaching the cutter to the tractor. He finished
first and pushed the colored boy out of the way and attached the
wagon to the cutter himself, gesticulating with a bright angry face
when he wanted the hammer or the screwdriver. Nothing was done
quick enough to suit him. The Negroes made him nervous.
  The week before, he had come upon Sulk at the dinner hour,
sneaking with a croker sack into the pen where the young turkeys
were. He had watched him take a frying-size turkey from the lot
and thrust it in the sack and put the sack under his coat. Then he
had followed him around the barn, jumped on him, dragged him to
Mrs. McIntyre's back door and had acted out the entire scene for her,
while the Negro muttered and grumbled and said God might
strike him dead if he had been stealing any turkey, he had only
been taking it to put some black shoe polish on its head because
it had the sorehead. God might strike him dead if that was not the
truth before Jesus. Mrs. McIntyre told him to go put the turkey
back and then she was a long time explaining to the Pole that all
Negroes would steal. She finally had to call Rudolph and tell him
in English and have him tell his father in Polish, and Mr. Guizac
had gone off with a startled disappointed face.
  Mrs. Shortley stood by hoping there would be trouble with the
silage machine but there was none. All of Mr. Cuizac's motions
were quick and accurate. He jumped on the tractor like a monkey
and maneuvered the big orange cutter into the lane; in a second the
silage was spurting in a green jet out of the pipe into the wagon.
He went jolting down the row until his disappeared from sight and
the noise became remote.
  Mrs. McIntyre sighed with pleasure. "At Last," she said, "I've
got somebody I can depend on. For years I've been fooling with
sorry people. Sorry people. Poor white trash and niggers," she
muttered. "They've drained me dry. Before you all came I had
Ringfields and Collins and Jarrells and Perkins and Pinkins and
Herrins and God knows what all else and not a one of them left
without taking something off this place that didn't belong to them.
Not a one!"
  Mrs. Shortley could listen to this with composure because she
knew that if Mrs. McIntyre had considered her trash, they couldn't
have talked about trashy people together. Neither of them approved
of trash. Mrs. McIntyre continued with the monologue that Mrs.
Shortley had heard oftentimes before. "I've been running this place
for thirty years," she said, looking with a deep frown out over the
field, "and always just barely making it. People think you're made
of money. I have taxes to pay. I have the insurance to keep up. I
have the repair bills. I have the feed bills." It all gathered up and
she stood with her chest lifted and her small hands gripped around
her elbows. "Ever since the Judge died," she said, "I've barely been
making ends meet and they all take something when they leave. The
niggers don't leave-they stay and steal. A nigger thinks anybody
is rich he can steal from and that white trash thinks anybody is
rich who can afford to hire people as sorry as they are. And all I've
got is the dirt under my feet!"
  You hire and fire, Mrs. Shortley thought, but she didn't always
say what she thought. She stood by and let Mrs. McIntyre say it all
out to the end but this time it didn't end as usual. "But at last I'm
saved!" Mrs. McIntyre said. "One fellow's misery is the other fellow's
gain. That man there," and she pointed where the Displaced
Person had disappeared, "--he has to work! He wants to work!"
She turned to Mrs. Shortley with her bright wrinkled face. "That
man is my salvation!" she said.
  Mrs. Shortley looked straight ahead as if her vision penetrated
the cane and the hill and pierced through to the other side. "I
would suspicion salvation got from the devil," she said in a slow
detached way.
  "Now what do you mean by that?" Mrs. McIntyre asked, looking
at her sharply.
  Mrs. Shortley wagged her head but would not say anything else.
The fact was she had nothing else to say for this intuition had only
at that instant come to her. She had never given much thought to
the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people
who didn't have the brains to avoid evil without it. For people like
herself, for people of gumption, it was a social occasion providing
the opportunity to sing; but if she had ever given it much thought,
she would have considered the devil the head of it and God the
hanger-on. With the coming of these displaced people, she was
obliged to give new thought to a good many things.
  "I know what Sledgewig told Annie Maude" she said, and when
Mrs. McIntyre carefully did not ask her what but reached down
and broke off a sprig of sassafras to chew, she continued in a way
to indicate she was not telling all, "that they wouldn't be able to live
long, the four of them, on seventy dollars a month."
  "He's worth raising," Mrs. McIntyre said. "He saves me money."
This was as much as to say that Chancey had never saved her
money. Chancey got up at four in the morning to milk her cows,
in winter wind and summer heat, and he had been doing it for the
last two years. They had been with her the longest she had ever had
anybody. The gratitude they got was these hints that she hadn't
been saved any money.
  "Is Mr. Shortley feeling better today?" Mrs. McIntyre asked.
  Mrs. Shortley thought it was about time she was asking that question.
  Mr. Shortley had been in bed two days with an attack. Mr.
Guizac had taken his place in the dairy in addition to doing his
own work. "No he ain't," she said. "That doctor said he was suffering
from over-exhaustion."
  "If Mr. Shortley is over-exhausted," Mrs. McIntyre said, "then he
must have a second job on the side," and she looked at Mrs.
Shortley with almost closed eyes as if she were examining the bottom
of a milk can.
  Mrs. Shortley did not say a word but her dark suspicion grew
like a black thunder cloud. The fact was that Mr. Shortley did
have a second job on the side and that, in a free country, this was
none of Mrs. McIntyre's business. Mr. Shortley made whisky. He
had a small still back in the farthest reaches of the place, on Mrs.
McIntyre's land to be sure, but on land that she only owned and
did not cultivate, on idle land that was not doing anybody any good.
Mr. Shortley was not afraid of work. He got up at four in the morning
and milked her cows and in the middle of the day when he was
supposed to be resting, he was off attending to his still. Not every
man would work like that. The Negroes knew about his still but he
knew about theirs so there had never been any disagreeableness between
them. But with foreigners on the place, with people who were
all eyes and no understanding, who had come from a place continually
fighting, where the religion had not been reformed-with
this kind of people, you had to be on the lookout every minute. She
thought there ought to be a law against them. There was no reason
they couldn't stay over there and take the places of some of the
people who had been killed in their wars and butcherings.
  "What's furthermore," she said suddenly, "Sledgewig said as soon
as her papa saved the money, he was going to buy him a used car.
Once they get them a used car, they'll leave you."
  "I can't pay him enough for him to save money," Mrs. McIntyre
said. "I'm not worrying about that. Of course," she said then, "if
Mr. Shortley got incapacitated, I would have to use Mr. Guizac in
the dairy all the time and I would have to pay him more. He doesn't
smoke," she said, and it was the fifth time within the week that
she had pointed this out.
  "It is no man," Mrs. Shortley said emphatically, "that works as
hard as Chancey, or is as easy with a cow, or is more of a Christian,"
and she folded her arms and her gaze pierced the distance. The
noise of the tractor and cutter increased and Mr. Guizac appeared
coming around the other side of the cane row. "Which can not be
said about everybody," she muttered. She wondered whether, if the
Pole found Chancey's still, he would know what it was. The trouble
with these people was, you couldn't tell what they knew. Every
time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley's
imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil's experiment station.
The tractor, the cutter, the wagon passed, rattling and rumbling
and grinding before them. "Think how long that would have taken
with men and mules to do it," Mrs. McIntyre shouted. "We'll get
this whole bottom cut within two days at this rate."
  "Maybe," Mrs. Shortley muttered, "if don't no terrible accident
occur." She thought how the tractor had made mules worthless.
Nowadays you couldn't give away a mule. The next thing to go,
she reminded herself, will be niggers.
  In the afternoon she explained what was going to happen to them
to Astor and Sulk who were in the cow lot, filling the manure
spreader. She sat down next to the block of salt under a small shed,
her stomach in her lap, her arms on top of it. "All you colored people
better look out," she said. "You know how much you can get for a
mule."
  "Nothing, no indeed," the old man said, "not one thing."
  "Before it was a tractor," she said, "it could be a mule. And before
it was a Displaced Person, it could be a nigger. The time is going
to come," she prophesied, "when it won't be no more occasion to
speak of a nigger."
  The old man laughed politely. "Yes indeed" he said. "Ha ha."
  The young one didn't say anything. He only looked sullen but
when she had gone in the house, he said, "Big Belly act like she
know everything."
  "Never mind," the old man said, "your place too low for anybody
to dispute with you for it."
  She didn't tell her fears about the still to Mr. Shortley until he was
back on the job in the dairy. Then one night after they were in bed,
she said, "That man prowls."
  Mr. Shortley folded his hands on his bony chest and pretended
he was a corpse.
  "Prowls," she continued and gave him a sharp kick in the side
with her knee. "Who's to say what they know and don't know?
Who's to say if he found it he wouldn't go right to her and tell?
How you know they don't make liquor in Europe? They drive
tractors. They got them all kinds of machinery. Answer me."
  "Don't worry me now," Mr. Shortlev said. "I’m a dead man."
  "It's them little eyes of his that's foreign." She muttered. "And
that way he's got of shrugging." She drew her shoulders up and
shrugged several times. "How come he's got everything to shrug
about?" she asked.
  "If everybody was as dead as I am, nobody would have no
trouble," Mr. Shortley said.
  "That priest," she muttered and was silent or a minute. Then
she said, "In Europe they probably got some different way to make
liquor but I reckon they know all the ways. They’re full of crooked
ways. They never have advanced or reformed. They got the same
religion as a thousand years ago. It could only be the devil responsible
for that. Always fighting amongst each other. Disputing. And
then get us into it. Ain't they got us into it twict already and we
ain't got no more sense than to go over there and settle it for them
and then they come on back over here and snoop around and find
your still and go straight to her. And liable to kiss her hand any
minute. Do you hear me?"
  "No," Mr. Shortley said.
  "And I'll tell you another thing," she said. ' I wouldn't be at all
surprised if he don't know everything you say. whether it be in
English or not."
  "I don't speak no other language," Mr. Shortley murmured.
  "I suspect," she said, "that before long there  won’t be no more
niggers on this place. And I tell you what. I'd rather have niggers
than them Poles. And what's furthermore,  I aim to take up for the
niggers when the time comes. When Gobblehook first come here,
you recollect how he shook their hands. like he  didn't know the
difference, like he might have been as black as them, but when it
come to finding out Sulk was taking turkeys, he gone on and told
her. I known he was taking turkeys. I could have  told her myself."
  Mr. Shortley was breathing softly as if he were asleep.
  "A nigger don't know when he has a friend,” She said. "And I'll
tell you another thing. I get a heap out of Sledgewig. Sledgewig
said that in Poland they lived in a brick house and one night a
man come and told them to get out of it before daylight.
Do you believe they ever lived in a brick house;
  "Airs," she said. "That's Just airs. A wooden house is good
enough for me. Chancey," she said, "turn thisaway", I hate to see
niggers mistreated and run out. I have a heap of pity  for niggers
and poor folks. Ain't I always had?” she asked. "I  say ain't I
always been a friend to niggers and poor  folk?
  "When the time comes," she said, "I’ll stand up for the niggers
and that's that. I ain't going to see that  priest  drive out all the
niggers."

 Mrs. McIntyre bought a  new drag harrow and a tractor with a 
power lift because she said, for the first time, she had some one who
could handle machinery. She and Mrs Shortley had driven to the
back field to inspect what he had harrowed the day before.  “That’s 
been done beautifully!" Mrs. McIntyre  said, looking out over he
red undulating ground.
  Mrs. McIntyre had changed since the  t Displaced Person had
working for her and Mrs. Shortley had observed the change very
closely: she had begun to act like somebody who was getting rich
secretly and she didn't confide in Mrs. Shortley the way she used
to. Mrs. Shortley suspected that the priest was at the bottom of the
change. They were very slick. First he would get her into his
Church and then he would get his hand in her pocketbook. Well,
Mrs. Shortley thought, the more fool she! Mrs. Shortley had a
secret herself. She knew something the Displaced Person was doing
that would floor Mrs. McIntyre. "I still say he ain't going to work
forever for seventy dollars a month," she murmured. She intended
to keep her secret to herself and Mr. Shortley.
  "Well," Mrs. McIntyre said, "I may have to get rid of some of
this other help so I can pay him more."
  Mrs. Shortley nodded to indicate she had known this for some
time. ''I'm not saying those niggers ain't had it coming," she said.
  "But they do the best they know how. You can always tell a nigger
what to do and stand by until he does it."
  "That's what the Judge said," Mrs. McIntyre said and looked at
her with approval. The Judge was her first husband, the one who
had left her the place. Mrs. Shortley had heard that she had married
him when she was thirty and he was seventy-five, thinking she
would be rich as soon as he died, but the old man was a scoundrel
and when his estate was settled, they found he didn't have a
nickel. All he left her were the fifty acres and the house. But she
always spoke of him in a reverent way and quoted his sayings, such
as, "One fellow's misery is the other fellow's gain," and "The devil
you know is better than the devil you don't."
  "However," Mrs. Shortley remarked, "the devil you know is better
than the devil you don't," and she had to turn away so that Mrs.
McIntyre would not see her smile. She had found out what the Displaced
Person was up to through the old man, Astor, and she had
not told anybody but Mr. Shortley. Mr. Shortley had risen straight
up in bed like Lazarus from the tomb.
  "Shut your mouth!" he had said.
  "Yes," she had said.
  "Naw!" Mr. Shortley had said.
 "Yes," she had said.
  Mr. Shortley had fallen back flat.
  "The Pole don't know any better," Mrs. Shortley had said. "I
reckon that priest is putting him up to it is all. I blame the priest."
The priest came frequently to see the Guizacs and he would
always stop in and visit Mrs. McIntyre too and they would walk
around the place and she would point out her improvements and
listen to his rattling talk. It suddenly came to Mrs. Shortley that he
was trying to persuade her to bring another Polish family onto the
place. With two of them here, there would be almost nothing spoken
but Polish! The Negroes would be gone and there would be the two
families against Mr. Shortley and herself! She began to imagine a
war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming
at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble
gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and
then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty
and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English
words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled
up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up
like the naked bodies in the newsreel. God save me, she cried
silently, from the stinking power of Satan! And she started from
that day to read her Bible with a new attention. She poured over
the Apocalypse and began to quote from the Prophets and before
long she had come to a deeper understanding of her existence. She
saw plainly that the meaning of the world was a mystery that
had been planned and she was not surprised to suspect that she
had a special part in the plan because she was strong. She saw
that the Lord God Almighty had created the strong people to do
what had to be done and she felt that she would be ready when she
was called. Right now she felt that her business was to watch the
priest.
  His visits irked her more and more. On the last one, he went
about picking up feathers off the ground. He found two peacock
feathers and four or five turkey feathers and an old brown hen
feather and took them off with him like a bouquet. This foolish acting
did not deceive Mrs. Shanley any. Here he was: leading
foreigners over in hordes to places that were not theirs, to cause
disputes, to uproot niggers, to plant the Whore of Babylon in the
midst of the righteous! Whenever he came on the place, she hid
herself behind something and watched until he left.

  It was on a Sunday afternoon that she had her vision. She had
gone to drive in the cows for Mr. Shortley who had a pain in his
knee and she was walking slowly through the pasture, her arms
folded, her eyes on the distant low-lying clouds that looked like
rows and rows of white fish washed up on a great blue beach. She
paused after an incline to heave a sigh of exhaustion for she had
an immense weight to carry around and she  was not as young as
she used to be. At times she could feel her heart, like a child's fist,
clenching and unclenching inside her chest, aid when the feeling
came, it stopped her thought altogether and she would go about like
a large hull of herself, moving for no reason; but she gained this
incline without a tremor and stood at the top of it, pleased with
herself. Suddenly while she watched, the sky folded back in two
pieces like the curtain to a stage and a gigantic" figure stood facing
her. It was the color of the sun in the early afternoon, white-gold.
It was of no definite shape but there were fiery, wheels with fierce
dark eyes in them, spinning rapidly all around it. She was not able
to tell if the figure was going forward or backward because its
magnificence was so great. She shut her eyes in order to look at it
and it turned blood-red and the wheels turned white. A voice, very
resonant, said the one word, "Prophesy!”
  She stood there, tottering slightly but still upright, her eyes shut
tight and her fists clenched and her straw hat low on her
forehead. "The children of wicked nations will be butchered," she
said in a loud voice. "Legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear
in the palm of hand. Who will remain whole? Who will remain
whole? Who?"
  Presently she opened her eyes. The sky was full of white fish
carried lazily on their sides by some invisible current and pieces of
the sun, submerged some distance beyond them, appeared from
time to time as if they were being washed in the opposite direction.
Woodenly she planted one foot in front of the other until she
had crossed the pasture and reached the lot. She walked through
the barn like one in a daze and did not speak  to Mr. Shortley. She
continued up the road until she saw the priest's car parked in front
of Mrs. McIntyre's house. "Here again," she muttered. "Come to
destroy."
  Mrs. McIntyre and the priest were walking in the yard. In order
not to meet them face to face, she turned to the left and entered the
feed house, a single-room shack piled on one side with flowered
sacks of scratch feed. There were spilled oyster shells in one corner
and a few old dirty calendars on the wall, advertising calf feed and
various patent medicine remedies. One showed a bearded gentleman
in a frock coat, holding up a bottle, and beneath his feet was
the inscription, "I have been made regular by this marvelous discovery."
Mrs. Shortley had always felt close to this man as if he
were some distinguished person she was acquainted with but now
her mind was on nothing but the dangerous presence of the priest.
She stationed herself at a crack between two boards where she could
look out and see him and Mrs. McIntyre strolling toward the turkey
brooder, which was placed just outside the feed house.
  "Arrrrr!" he said as they approached the brooder. "Look at the
little biddies!" and he stooped and squinted through the wire.
Mrs. Shortley's mouth twisted.
"  Do you think the Guizacs will want to leave me?" Mrs. Mc-
Intyre asked. "Do you think they'll go to Chicago or some place
like that?"
  "And why should they do that now?" asked the priest, wiggling
his finger at a turkey, his big nose close to the wire.
  "Money," Mrs. McIntyre said.
  "Arrrr, give them some morrre then," he said indifferently. "They
have to get along."
  "So do I," Mrs. McIntyre muttered. "It means I'm going to have
to get rid of some of these others."
  "And arrre the ShortIeys satisfactory?" he inquired, paying more
attention to the turkeys than to her.
  "Five times in the last month I've found Mr. Shortley smoking
in the barn," Mrs. McIntyre said. "Five times."
  "And arrre the Negroes any better?"
  "They lie and steal and have to be watched all the time," she said.
  "Tsk, tsk," he said. "Which will you discharge?'
  "I've decided to give Mr. Shortley his month's notice tomorrow,"
Mrs. McIntyre said.
  The priest scarcely seemed to hear her he was so busy wiggling
his finger inside the wire. Mrs. Shortley sat down on an open sack
of laying mash with a dead thump that sent feed dust clouding up
around her. She found herself looking straight ahead at the opposite
wall where the gentleman on the calendar was holding up his marvelous
discovery but she didn't see him. She looked ahead as if she
saw nothing whatsoever. Then she rose and ran to her house. Her
face was an almost volcanic red.
  She opened all the drawers and dragged out boxes and old battered
suitcases from under the bed. She began to unload the drawers into
the boxes, all the time without pause, without taking off the sunhat
she had on her head. She set the two girls to doing the same. When
Mr. Shortley came in, she did not even look at him but merely
pointed one arm at him while she packed with the other. "Bring
the car around to the back door," she said. "You ain't waiting to be
fired!"
  Mr. Shortley had never in his life doubted her omniscience. He
perceived the entire situation in half a second and, with only a
sour scowl, retreated out the door and went to drive the automobile
around to the back.
  They tied the two iron beds to the top of the car and the two
rocking chairs inside the beds and rolled the two mattresses up
between the rocking chairs. On top of this they tied a crate of
chickens. They loaded the inside of the car with the old suitcases
and boxes, leaving a small space for Annie Maude and Sarah Mae.
It took them the rest of the afternoon and half the night to do this
but Mrs. Shortley was determined that they would leave before four
o'clock in the morning, that Mr. Shortley should not adjust another
milking machine on this place. All the time she had been working,
her face was changing rapidly from red to white and back again.
  Just before dawn, as it began to drizzle rain, they were ready to
leave. They all got in the car and sat there cramped up between
boxes and bundles and rolls of bedding. The square black automobile
moved off with more than its customary grinding noises
as if it were protesting the load. In the back, the two long bony
yellow-haired girls were sitting on a pile of boxes and there was a
beagle hound puppy and a cat with two kittens somewhere under
the blankets. The car moved slowly, like some overfreighted leaking
ark, away from their shack and past the white house where Mrs.
McIntyre was sleeping soundly-hardly guessing that her cows
would not be milked by Mr. Shortley that morning-and past the
Pole's shack on top of the hill and on down the road to the gate
where the two Negroes were walking, one behind the other, on
their way to help with the milking. They looked straight at the
car and its occupants but even as the dim yellow headlights lit up
their faces, they politely did not seem to see anything, or anyhow,
to attach significance to what was there. The loaded car might have
been passing mist in the early morning half-light. They continued
up the road at the same even pace without looking back.
  A dark yellow sun was beginning to rise in a sky that was the
same slick dark gray as the highway. The fields stretched away, stiff
and weedy, on either side. "Where we goin?" Mr. Shortley asked
for the first time.
  Mrs. Shortley sat with one foot on a packing box so that her knee
was pushed into her stomach. Mr. Shortley's elbow was almost
under her nose and Sarah Mae's bare left foot was sticking over the
front seat, touching her ear.
  "Where we goin?" Mr. Shortley repeated and when she didn't
answer again, he turned and looked at her.
  Fierce heat seemed to be swelling slowly and fully into her face
as if it were welling up now for a final assault. She was sitting in
an erect way in spite of the fact that one leg was twisted under her
and one knee was almost into her neck, but there was a peculiar
lack of light in her icy blue eyes. All the vision in them might have
been turned around, looking inside her. She suddenly grabbed Mr.
Shortley's elbow and Sarah Mae's foot at the same time and began
to tug and pull on them as if she were trying to fit the two extra
limbs onto herself.
  Mr. Shortley began to curse and guickly stopped the car and
Sarah Mae yelled to quit but Mrs. Shortley apparently intended to
rearrange the whole car at once. She thrashed forward and backward,
clutching at everything she could get her hands on and
hugging it to herself, Mr. Shortley's head, Sarah Mae's leg, the cat,
a wad of white bedding, her own big moon-like knee; then all at
once her fierce expression faded into a look of astonishment and her
grip on what she had loosened. One of her eyes drew near to the
other and seemed to collapse quietly and she was still.
  The two girls, who didn't know what had happened to her, began
to say, "Where we goin, Ma? Where we goin?” They thought she
was playing a joke and that their father, staring straight ahead at
her, was imitating a dead man. They didn't know that she had had
a great experience or ever been displaced in the world from all that
belonged to her. They were frightened by the gray slick road before
them and they kept repeating in higher and higher voices, "Where
we goin, Ma? Where we gain?" while their mother, her huge body
rolled back still against the seat and her eyes like blue-painted glass,
seemed to contemplate for the first time the tremendous frontiers of
her true country.

II

"Well," Mrs. McIntyre said to the old Negro. "we can get along
without them. We've seen them come and seen them go--black and
white." She was standing in the calf barn while he cleaned it and
she held a rake in her hand and now and then pulled a corn cob
from a corner or pointed to a soggy spot that he had missed. When
she discovered the Shortleys were gone, she was delighted as it
meant she wouldn't have to fire them. The people she hired always
left her-because they were that kind of people. Of all the families
she had had, the Shortleys were the best if she didn't count the Displaced Person. They had been not quite trash; Mrs. Shortley was a
good woman, and she would miss her but as the Judge used to say,
you couldn't have your pie and eat it too, and she was satisfied with
the D.P. "We've seen them come and seen them go," she repeated
with satisfaction.
  "And me and you," the old man said, stooping to drag his hoe under
a feed rack, "is still here."
  She caught exactly what he meant her to catch in his tone. Bars
of sunlight fell from the cracked ceiling across his back and cut
him in three distinct parts. She watched his long hands clenched
around the hoe and his crooked old profile pushed close to them.
You might have been here before I was, she said to herself, but it's
mighty likely I'll be here when you're gone. "I’ve spent half my
life fooling with worthless people," she said in a severe voice, "but
now I'm through."
  "Black and white," he said, "is the same "
  "I am through," she repeated and gave her dark smock that she
had thrown over her shoulders like a cape a quick snatch at the
neck. She had on a broad-brimmed black straw hat that had cost
her twenty dollars twenty years ago and that she used now for a
sunhat. "Money is the root of all evil," she said. "The Judge said so
every day. He said he deplored money. He said the reason you
niggers were so uppity was because there was so much money in
circulation."
  The old Negro had known the Judge. "Judge say he long for the
day when he be too poor to pay a nigger to work," he said. "Say
when that day come, the world be back on its feet."
  She leaned forward, her hands on her hips and her neck stretched
and said, "Well that day has almost come am and here and I'm telling
each and everyone of you: you better look sharp. I don't have
to put up with foolishness any more. I have somebody now who has
to work!"
  The old man knew when to answer and when not. At length
he said, "We seen them come and we seen them go."
  "However, the Shortleys were not the worst by far," she said.
  "I well remember those Carrits."
  "They was before them Collinses," he said.
  "No, before the Ringfields."
  "Sweet Lord, them Ringfields!" he murmured.
  "None of that kind want to work," she said.
  "We seen them come and we seen them go,” he said as if this
were a refrain. "But we ain't never had one before." he said, bending
himself up until he faced her, "like what  we got now." He was
cinnamon-colored with eyes that were so blurred with age that they
seemed to be hung behind cobwebs.
  She gave him an intense stare and held it until, lowering his
hands on the hoe, he bent down again and  dragged a pile of shavings
alongside the wheelbarrow. She said stiffly, "He can wash out that
barn in the time it took Mr. Shortley to make up his mind he had
to do it."
  "He from Pole," the old man muttered.
  "From Poland."
"In Pole it ain't like it is here," he said. "They got different ways
of doing," and he began to mumble unintelligibly.
  "What are you saying?" she said. "If you have anything to say
about him, say it and say it aloud."
  He was silent, bending his knees precariously and edging the rake
along the underside of the trough.
  "If you know anything he's done that he shouldn't, I expect you
to report it to me," she said.
  "It warn't like it was what he should ought or oughtn't," he
muttered. "It was like what nobody else don't do."
  "You don't have anything against him," she said shortly, "and
he's here to stay."
  "We ain't never had one like him before is all," he murmured and
gave his polite laugh.
  "Times are changing," she said. "Do you know what's happening
to this world? It's swelling up. It's getting so full of people
that only the smart thrifty energetic ones are going to survive," and
she tapped the words, smart, thrifty, and energetic out on the
palm of her hand. Through the far end of the stall she could see
down the road to where the Displaced Person was standing in
the open barn door with the green hose in his hand. There was a
certain stiffness about his figure that seemed to make it necessary for
her to approach him slowly, even in her thoughts. She had decided
this was because she couldn't hold an easy conversation with him.
Whenever she said anything to him, she found herself shouting
and nodding extravagantly and she would be conscious that one
of the Negroes was leaning behind the nearest shed, watching.
"No indeed!" she said, sitting down on one of the feed racks and
folding her arms, "I've made up my mind that I've had enough
trashy people on this place to last me a lifetime and I'm not going
to spend my last years fooling with Shortleys and Ringfields and
Collins when the world is full of people who have to work."
  "How  come they so many extra?" he asked.
  "People are selfish," she said. "They have too many children.
There's no sense in it any more."
  He had picked up the wheelbarrow handles and was backing out
the door and he paused, half in the sunlight and half out, and stood
there chewing his gums as if he had forgotten which direction he
wanted to move in.
  "What you colored people don't realize," she said, "is that I'm the
one around here who holds all the strings together. If you don't
work, I don't make any money and I can't pay you. You're all
dependent on me but you each and everyone act like the shoe is
on the other foot."
  It was not possible to tell from his face if he heard her. Finally
he backed out with the wheelbarrow. "Judge say the devil he know
is better than the devil he don't," he said in a clear mutter and
trundled off.
  She got up and followed him, a deep vertical pit appearing suddenly
in the center of her forehead, just under the red bangs. "The
Judge has long since ceased to pay the bills around here," she called
in a piercing voice.
  He was the only one of her Negroes who had known the Judge
and he thought this gave him title. He had had a low opinion of
Mr. Crooms and Mr. McIntyre, her other husbands, and in his
veiled polite way, he had congratulated her after each of her
divorces. When he thought it necessary, he would work under a
window where he knew she was sitting and talk to himself, a
careful roundabout discussion, question and answer and then refrain.
Once she had got up silently and slammed the window down so
hard that he had fallen backwards off his feet. Or occasionally he
spoke with the peacock. The cock would follow him around the
place, his steady eye on the ear of corn that stuck up from the old
man's back pocket or he would sit near him and pick himself.
Once from the open kitchen door, she had heard him say to the
bird, "I remember when it was twenty of you walking about this
place and now it's only you and two hens. Crooms it was twelve.
McIntyre it was five. You and two hens now."
  And that time she had stepped out of the door onto the porch
and said, "MISTER Crooms and MISTER McIntyre! And I don't
want to hear you call either of them anything else again. And
you can understand this: when that peachicken dies there won't
be any replacements."
  She kept the peacock only out of a superstitious fear of annoying
the Judge in his grave. He had liked to see them walking around
the place for he said they made him feel rich. Of her three husbands,
the Judge was the one most present to her although he was the
only one she had buried. He was in the family graveyard, a little
space fenced in the middle of the back cornfield, with his mother
and father and grandfather and three great aunts and two infant
cousins. Mr. Crooms, her second, was forty miles away in the state
asylum and Mr. McIntyre, her last, was intoxicated, she supposed,
in some hotel room in Florida. But the Judge, sunk in the cornfield
with his family, was always at home.
  She had married him when he was an old man and because of
his money but there had been another reason that she would not
admit then, even to herself: she had liked him. He was a dirty
snuff-dipping Court House figure, famous all over the county for
being rich, who wore hightop shoes, a string tie, a gray suit with
a black stripe in it, and a yellowed panama hat, winter and summer.
His teeth and hair were tobacco-colored ang his face a clay
pink pitted and tracked with mysterious prehistoric-looking marks
as if he had been unearthed among fossils. There had been a peculiar
odor about him of sweaty fondled bills but he never carried money
on him or had a nickel to show. She was his secretary for a few
months and the old man with his sharp eye had seen at once that
here was a woman who admired him for himself . The three years
that he lived after they married were the happiest and most prosperous
of Mrs. McIntyre's life, but when he died his estate proved
to be bankrupt. He left her a mortgaged house and fifty acres that
he had managed to cut the timber off before he died. It was as if,
as the final triumph of a successful life, he had been able to take
everything with him.
 But she had survived. She had survived a succession of tenant
farmers and dairymen that the old man himself would have found
hard to outdo, and she had been able to meet the constant drain of
a tribe of moody unpredictable Negroes, and she had even managed
to hold her own against the incidental blood suckers, the cattle
dealers and lumber men and the buyers and sellers of anything
who drove up in pieced-together trucks and honked in the yard.
  She stood slightly reared back with her arms folded under her
smock and a satisfied expression on her face as she watched the
Displaced Person turn off the hose and disappear inside the barn.
She was sorry that the poor man had been chased out of Poland
and run across Europe and had had to take up in a tenant shack
in a strange country, but she had not been responsible for any of
this. She had had a hard time herself. She knew what it was to
struggle. People ought to have to struggle. Mr. Guizac had probably
had everything given to him all the way across Europe and over
here. He had probably not had to struggle enough. She had given
him a job. She didn't know if he was grateful or not. She didn't
know anything about him except that he did the work. The truth
was that he was not very real to her yet. He was a kind of miracle
that she had seen happen and that she talked about but that she
still didn't believe.
  She watched as he came out at the barn and motioned to Sulk.
who was coming around the back of the lot. He gesticulated and
then took something out of his pocket and the two of them stood
looking at it. She started down the lane toward them. The Negro's
figure was slack and tall and he was craning his rolling head forward
in his usual idiotic way. He was a little better than half-witted but
when they were like that they were always good  workers.  The Judge
had said always hire you a half-witted nigger because they don't
have sense enough to stop working. The Pole was gesticulating
rapidly. He left something with the colored boy and then walked
off and before she rounded the turn in the lane, she  heard the tractor
crank up. He was on his way to the field. The Negro was still
hanging there, gaping at whatever he had in his hand.
  She entered the lot and walked through the barn, looking with
approval at the wet spotless concrete floor. It was only nine-thirty
and Mr. Shortley had never got anything washed  until eleven. As
she came out at the other end, she saw the Negro moving very
slowly in a diagonal path across the road in front of her, his
eyes still on what Mr. Guizac had given him. He didn't see her
and he paused and dipped his knees and leaned over his hand, his
tongue describing little circles. He had a photograph. He lifted one
finger and traced it lightly over the surface of the picture. Then he
looked up and saw her and seemed to freeze, his mouth in a halfgrin,
his finger lifted.
  "Why haven't you gone to the field?" she asked.
  He raised one foot and opened his mouth wider while the hand
with the photograph edged toward his back pocket.
  "What's that?" she said.
  "It ain't nothing," he muttered and handed it to her automatically.
It was a photograph of a girl of about twelve in a white dress.
She had blond hair with a wreath in it and she looked forward out
of light eyes that were bland and composed. "Who is this child?"
Mrs. McIntyre asked.
  "She his cousin," the boy said in a high voice.
  "Well what are you doing with it?" she asked.
  "She going to mah me," he said in an even higher voice.
  "Marry you!" she shrieked.
  "I pays half to get her over here," he said. "I pays him three dollar
a week. She bigger now.  She his cousin. She don't care who she
mah she so glad to get away from there." The high voice seemed
to shoot up like a nervous jet of sound and then fall flat as he
watched her face. Her eyes were the color of blue granite when the
glare falls on it, but she was not looking at him. She was looking
down the road where the distant sound of the tractor could be heard.
  "I don't reckon she gain to come nohow." the boy murmured.
  "I'll see that you get every cent of your money back," she said
in a toneless voice and turned and walked off, holding the photograph
bent in two. There was nothing about her small stiff figure
to indicate that she was shaken.
  As soon as she got in the house, she lay down on her bed and
shut her eyes and pressed her hand over her heart as if she were
trying to keep it in place. Her mouth opened and she made two
or three dry little sounds. Then after a minute she sat up and said
aloud, "They're all the same. It's always been like this," and she fell
back flat again. "Twenty years of being beaten and done in and
they even robbed his grave!" and remembering that, she began to
cry quietly, wiping her eyes every now and then with the hem of
her smock.
  What she had thought of was the angel over the Judge's grave.
This had been a naked granite cherub that the old man had seen
in the city one day in a tombstone store window. He had been
taken with it at once, partly because its face reminded him of his
wife and partly because he wanted a genuine work of art over
his grave. He had come home with it sitting on the green plush
train seat beside him. Mrs. Mclntyre had never noticed the resemblance
to herself. She had always thought it hideous but when the
Herrins stole it off the old man's grave, she w.is shocked and outraged.
Mrs. Herrin had thought it very pretty and had walked to
the graveyard frequently to see it, and when the Herrins left the
angel left with them, all but its toes, for the ax old man Herrin
had used to break it off with had struck slightly too high. Mrs.
Mclntyre had never been able to afford to have it replaced.
  When she had cried all she could, she got up and went into the
back hall, a closet-like space that was dark and quiet as a chapel and
sat down on the edge of the Judge's black mechanical chair with
her elbow on his desk. This was a giant roll-top piece of furniture
pocked with pigeon holes full of dusty papers. Old bankbooks and
ledgers were stacked in the half-open drawers and there was a
small safe, empty but locked, set like a tabernacle in the center
of it. She had left this part of the house unchanged since the old
man's time. It was a kind of memorial to him, sacred because he
had conducted his business here. With the slightest tilt one way
or the other, the chair gave a rusty skeletal groan that sounded
something like him when he had complained of his poverty. It had
been his first principle to talk as if he were the poorest man in the
world and she followed it, not only because he had but because it
was true. When she sat with her intense constricted face turned
toward the empty safe, she knew there was nobody poorer in the
world than she was.
  She sat motionless at the desk for ten or fifteen minutes and then
as if she had gained some strength, she got up and got in her car and
drove to the cornfield.
  The road ran through a shadowy pine thicket and ended on top
of a hill that rolled fan-wise down and up again in a broad expanse
of tassled green. Mr. Guizac was cutting from the outside of the
field in a circular path to the center where the graveyard was all but
hidden by the corn, and she could see him on the high far side of
the slope, mounted on the tractor with the cutter and wagon behind
him. From time to time, he had to get off the tractor and climb
in the wagon to spread the silage because the Negro had not arrived.
She watched impatiently, standing in front of her black coupe with
her arms folded under her smock, while he progressed slowly
around the rim of the field, gradually getting close enough for her
to wave to him to get down. He stopped the machine and jumped
off and came running forward, wiping his red jaw with a piece of
grease rag.
  "I want to talk to you," she said and beckoned him to the edge of
the thicket where it was shady. He took off the cap and followed her,
smiling, but his smile faded when she turned and faced him. Her
eyebrows, thin and fierce as a spider's leg, had drawn together
ominously and the deep vertical pit had plunged down from under
the red bangs into the bridge of her nose. She removed the bent
picture from her pocket and handed it to him silently. Then she
stepped back and said, "Mr. Guizac! You would bring this poor innocent
child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving
black stinking nigger! What kind of a monster are you!"
  He took the photograph with a slowly returning smile. "My
cousin," he said. "She twelve here. First Communion. Six-ten now."
  Monster! she said to herself and looked at him as if she were
seeing him for the first time. His forehead and skull were white
where they had been protected by his cap but the rest of his face
was red and bristled with short yellow hairs, his eyes were like two
bright nails behind his gold-rimmed spectacles that had been
mended over the nose with haywire. His whole: face looked as if it
might have been patched together out of several others. "Mr.
Guizac," she said, beginning slowly and then speaking faster until
she ended breathless in the middle of a word, "that nigger cannot
have a white wife from Europe. You can't talk to a nigger that way.
You'll excite him and besides it can't be done. Maybe it can be done
in Poland but it can't be done here and you'll have to stop. It's all
foolishness. That nigger don't have a grain of sense and you'll excite
... "
  "She in camp three year," he said.
  "Your cousin," she said in a positive voice, "cannot come over here
and marry one of my Negroes."
  "She six-ten year," he said. "From Poland. Mamma die, pappa die.
She wait in camp. Three camp." He pulled a wallet from his pocket
and fingered through it and took out another picture of the same
girl, a few years older, dressed in something dark and shapeless.
She was standing against a wall with a short wornan who apparently
had no teeth. "She mamma," he said, pointing to the woman. "She
die in two camp."
  "Mr. Guizac," Mrs. McIntyre said, pushing the picture back at
him, "I will not have my niggers upset. I cannot run this place
without my niggers. I can run it without you but not without them
and if you mention this girl to Sulk again, you won't have a job
with me. Do you understand?"
  His face showed no comprehension. He seemed to be piecing all
these words together in his mind to make a thought.
  Mrs. McIntyre remembered Mrs. Shortlev'c words: "He understands
everything, he only pretends he don't so as to do exactly as
he pleases," and her face regained the look of shocked wrath she
had begun with. "I cannot understand how a min who calls himself
a Christian," she said, "could bring a poor innocent girl over
here and marry her to something like that. I cannot understand it.
I cannot!" and she shook her head and looked into the distance with
a pained blue gaze.
  After a second he shrugged and let his arms drop  as if he were
tired. "She no care black," he said. "She in camp three year."
  Mrs. McIntyre felt a peculiar weakness behind her knees. "Mr.
Guizac," she said, "I don't want to have to speak 'you about this
again. If I do, you'll have to find another place yourself. Do you
understand? "
  The patched face did not say. She had the impression that he
didn't see her there. "This is my place," she said. "I  say who will
come here and who won't."
  "Ya," he said and put back all his cap.
  "I am not responsible for the world's misery,' she said as an
afterthought.
 "Ya," he said.
  "You have a good job. You should be grateful to be here," she
added, "but I'm not sure you are."
  "Ya," he said and gave his little shrug and turned back to the
tractor.
  She watched him get on and maneuver the machine into the
corn again. When he had passed her and rounded the turn, she
climbed to the top of the slope and stood with her arms folded and
looked out grimly over the field. "They're all the same," she muttered,
"whether they come from Poland or Tennessee. I've handled
Herrins and Ringfields and Shortleys and I can handle a Guizac,"
and she narrowed her gaze until it closed entirely around the
diminishing figure on the tractor as if she were watching him
through a gunsight. All her life she had been fighting the world's
overflow and now she had it in the form of a Pole. "You're just like
all the rest of them," she said, "--only smart and thrifty and energetic
but so am I. And this is my place," and she stood there, a small
black-hatted, black-smocked figure with an aging cherubic face, and
folded her arms as if she were equal to anything. But her heart was
beating as if some interior violence had already been done to her.
She opened her eyes to include the whole field so that the figure
on the tractor was no larger than a grasshopper in her widened view.
She stood there for some time. There was a slight breeze and the
corn trembled in great waves on both sides of the slope. The big
cutter, with its monotonous roar, continued to shoot it pulverized
into the wagon in a steady spurt of fodder. By nightfall, the Displaced
Person would have worked his way around and around until
there would be nothing on either side of the two hills but the
stubble, and down in the center, risen like a little island, the graveyard
where the Judge lay grinning under his desecrated monument.

III

The priest, with his long bland face supported on one finger, had
been talking for ten minutes about Purgatory while Mrs. McIntyre
squinted furiously at him from an opposite chair. They were drinking
ginger ale on her front porch and she kept rattling the ice in her
glass, rattling her beads, rattling her bracelet like an impatient pony
jingling its harness. There is no moral obligation to keep him, she
was saying under her breath. there is absolutely no moral obligation.
Suddenly she lurched up and her voice fell across his brogue like a
drill into a mechanical saw. "Listen," she said, "I'm not theological.
I'm practical! I want to talk to you about something practical!"
  "Arrrrrrr," he groaned, grating to a halt.
  She had put at least a finger of whiskey in her own ginger ale
so that she would be able to endure his full-length visit and she sat
down awkwardly, finding the chair closer to her than she had expected.
  "Mr. Guizac is not satisfactory," she said.
  The old man raised his eyebrows in mock wonder.
"He's extra," she said, "He doesn't fit in. I have to have somebody
who fits in."
  The priest carefully turned his hat on his knees. He had a little
trick of waiting a second silently and then swinging the conversation
back into his own paths. He was about eighty. She had never known
a priest until she had gone to see this one on the business of getting
her the Displaced Person. After he had got her the Pole, he
had used the business introduction to try to convert her--just as she
had supposed he would.
  "Give him time," the old man said. "He'll learn to fit in. Where
is that beautiful birrrrd of yours?" he asked and then said, "Arrrrr, I
see him!" and stood up and looked out over the lawn where the
peacock and the two hens were stepping at a strained attention,
their long necks ruffled, the cock's violent blue and the hens' silvergreen,
glinting in the late afternoon sun.
  "Mr. Guizac," Mrs. Mclntyre continued, bearing down with a flat
steady voice, "is very efficient. “I’ll admit that. But he doesn't understand
how to get on with my niggers and they don't like him. I
can't have my niggers run off. And I don't like his attitude. He's not
the least grateful for being here."
  The priest had his hand on the screen door and he opened it,
ready to make his escape. "Arrrr, I must be off," he murmured.
"I tell you if I had a white man who understood the Negroes, I'd
have to let Mr. Guizac go," she said and stood up again.
  He turned then and looked her in the face. "He has nowhere to
go," he said. Then he said, "Dear lady, I know you well enough to
know you wouldn't turn him out for a trifle!”' and without waiting
for an answer, he raised his hand and gave her his blessing in a
rumbling voice.
  She smiled angrily and said, "I didn't create  this situation, of
course."
  The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds.  They had reached
the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his
neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread t with a shimmering
timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold
haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs.
McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man.
"Christ will come like that!" he said in a loud gay voice and wiped
his hand over his mouth and stood there,  gaping.
  Mrs. McIntyre's face assumed a set puritanical,  expression and she
reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed  her the way sex
had her mother. "It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has
nowhere to go," she said. "I don't find myself responsible for all
the extra people in the world."
  The old man didn't seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on
the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against
the spread tail. "The Transfiguration," he murmured.
  She had no idea what he was talking about. "Mr. Guizac didn't
have to come here in the first place," she said giving him a hard
look.
  The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.
  "He didn't have to come in the first  place,” she repeated, emphasizing
each word.
  The old man smiled absently.   "He came to redeem us," he said
and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.

  If Mr. Shortley had not returned a few weeks  later, she would
have gone out looking for a new man to hire. She had not wanted
him back but when she saw the familiar black automobile  drive up
the road and stop by the sick of the house, she had the feeling that
she was the one returning, after a long miserable  trip to her own
place. She realized all at once that it was Mrs, Shortley  she had been
missing. She had had no one to talk to since Mrs  Shortley left, and
she ran to the door, expecting to see her heaving herself up the steps.
  Mr. Shortley stood there alone. He had on a black felt hat and a
shirt with red and blue palm trees designed in it but the hollows
in his long bitten blistered face were deeper than they had been a
month ago.
  "Well!" she said. "Where is Mrs. Shortley?"
  Mr. Shortley didn't say anything. The change in his face seemed to
have come from the inside; he looked like a man who had gone for
a long time without water. "She was God's own angel," he said in a
loud voice. "She was the sweetest woman in the world."
  "Where is she?" Mrs. McIntyre murmured.
  "Daid," he said. "She had herself a stroke on the day she left out
of here." There was a corpse-like composure about his face. "I
figure that Pole killed her," he said. "She seen through him from
the first. She known he come from the devil. She told me so."
  It took Mrs. McIntyre three days to get over Mrs. Shortley's
death. She told herself that anyone would have thought they were
kin. She rehired Mr. Shortley to do farm work though actually she
didn't want him without his wife. She told him she was going
to give thirty days' notice to the Displaced Person at the end of the
month and that then he could have his job hack in the dairy. Mr.
Shortley preferred the dairy job but he was willing to wait. He said
it would give him some satisfaction to see the Pole leave the place,
and Mrs. McIntyre said it would give her a great deal of satisfaction.
She confessed that she should have been content with the help she
had in the first place and not have been reaching into other parts of
the world for it. Mr. Shortley said he never had cared for foreigners
since he had been in the first world's war and seen what they were
like. He said he had seen all kinds then but that none of them were
like us. He said he recalled the face of one man who had thrown
a hand-grenade at him and that the man had had little round eyeglasses
exactly like Mr. Guizac's.
  "But Mr. Guizac is a Pole, he's not a German," Mrs. McIntyre
said.
  "It ain't a great deal of difference in them two kinds," Mr.
Shortley had explained.
  The Negroes were pleased to see Mr. Shortley back. The Dis-
placed Person had expected them to work as hard as he worked
himself, whereas Mr. Shortlev recognized their limitations. He had
never been a very good worker himself with Mrs. Shanley to keep
him in line, but without her, he was even more forgetful and slow.
The Pole worked as fiercely as ever and seemed to have no inkling
that he was about to be fired. Mrs. McIntyre saw jobs done in a
short time that she had thought would never get done at all. Still
she was resolved to get rid of him. The sight of his small stiff figure
moving quickly here and there had come to be the most irritating
sight on the place for her, and she felt she had been tricked by the
old priest. He had said there was no legal obligation for her to keep
the Displaced Person if he was not satisfactory, but then he had
brought up the moral one.
  She meant to tell him that her moral obligation was to her own
people, to Mr. Shortley, who had fought in the world war for his
country and not to Mr. Guizac who had merely arrived here to take
advantage of whatever he could. She felt she must have this out with
the priest before she fired the Displaced Person. When the first of
the month came and the priest hadn't called, she put off giving the
Pole notice for a little longer.
  Mr. Shortley told himself that he should have known all along
that no woman was going to do what she said she was when she
said she was. He didn't know how long he could afford to put up
with her shilly-shallying. He thought himself that she was going
soft and was afraid to turn the Pole out for fear he would have a
hard time getting another place. He could tell her the truth about
this: that if she let him go, in three years he would own his own
house and have a television aerial sitting on top of it. As a matter
of policy, Mr. Shortley began to come to her back door every evening
to put certain facts before her. "A white man sometimes don't
get the consideration a nigger gets," he said, "but that don't matter
because he's still white, but sometimes," and here he would pause
and look off into the distance, "a man that's fought and bled
and died in the service of his native land don't get the consideration
of one of them like them he was fighting. I ast you: is that
right?" When he asked her such questions he could watch her face
and tell he was making an impression. She didn't look too well
these days. He noticed lines around her eyes that hadn't been there
when he and Mrs. Shortley had been the only white help on the
place. Whenever he thought of Mrs. Shortley, he felt his heart go
down like an old bucket into a dry well.
  The old priest kept away as if he had been frightened by his last
visit but finally, seeing that the Displaced Person had not been fired,
he ventured to call again to take up giving Mrs. McIntyre instructions
where he remembered leaving them off. She had not asked
to be instructed but he instructed anyway, forcing a little definition
of one of the sacraments or of some dogma into each conversation
he had, no matter with whom. He sat on her porch, taking no notice
of her partly mocking, partly outraged expression as she sat shaking
her foot, waiting for an opportunity to drive a wedge into his talk.
"For," he was saying, as if he spoke of something that had happened
yesterday in town, "when God sent his Only Begotten Son, Jesus
Christ Our Lord"-he slightly bowed his head-"as a Redeemer to
mankind, He ... "
  "Father Flynn!" she said in a voice that made him jump. "I
want to talk to you about something serious!"
  The skin under the old man's right eye flinched.
  "As far as I'm concerned," she said and glared at him fiercely,
  "Christ was just another D.P."
  He raised his hands slightly and let them drop on his knees.
  "Arrrrrr," he murmured as if he were considering this.
  "I'm going to let that man go," she said. "I don't have any
obligation to him. My obligation is to the people who've done something
for their country, not to the ones who've just come over to
take advantage of what they can get," and she began to talk rapidly,
remembering all her arguments. The priest's attention seemed to
retire to some private oratory to wait until she got through. Once
or twice his gaze roved out onto the lawn as if he were hunting
some means of escape but she didn't stop. She told him how she had
been hanging onto this place for thirty years, always just barely
making it against people who came from nowhere and were going
nowhere, who didn't want anything but an automobile. She said
she had found out they were the same whether they came from
Poland or Tennessee. When the Guizacs got ready, she said, they
would not hesitate to leave her. She told him how the people who
looked rich were the poorest of all because they had the most to
keep up. She asked him how he thought she paid her feed bills.
She told him she would like to have her house done over but she
couldn't afford it. She couldn't even afford to have the monument
restored over her husband's grave. She asked him if he would like
to guess what her insurance amounted to for the year. Finally she
asked him if he thought she was made of money and the old man
suddenly let out a great ugly bellow as if this were a comical question.
   When the visit was over, she felt let down, though she had clearly
triumphed over him. She made up her mind now that on the first of
the month, she would give the Displaced Person his thirty days'
notice and she told Mr. Shortley so.
  Mr. Shortley didn't say anything. His wife had been the only
woman he was ever acquainted with who was never scared off
from doing what she said. She said the Pole had been sent by the
devil and the priest. Mr. Shortley had no doubt that the priest had
got some peculiar control over Mrs. McIntyre and that before long
she would start attending his Masses. She looked as if something
was wearing her down from the inside. She was thinner and more
fidgety, and not as sharp as she used to be. She would look at a milk
can now and not see how dirty it was and he had seen her lips
move when she was not talking. The Pole never did anything the
wrong way but all the same he was very irritating to her. Mr.
Shortley himself did things as he pleased--not always her way--but
she didn't seem to notice. She had noticed though that the Pole and
all his family were getting fat; she pointed out to, Mr. Shortley that
the hollows had come out of their cheeks and that they saved every
cent they made. "Yes'm, and one of these days he'll be able to buy
and sell you out," Mr. Shortley had ventured to say, and he could
tell that the statement had shaken her.
  "I'm just waiting for the first," she had said.
  Mr. ShortIey waited too and the first came and went and she didn't
fire him. He could have told anybody how it would be. He was not
a violent man but he hated to see a woman done in by a foreigner.
He felt that that was one thing a man couldn't stand by and see
happen.
  There was no reason Mrs. McIntyre should not fire Mr. Guizac at
once but she put it off from day to day. She wad worried about her
bills and about her health. She didn't sleep at night or when she did
she dreamed about the Displaced Person. She hid never discharged
anyone before; they had all left her. One nigh: she dreamed that
Mr. Guizac and his family were moving into her house and that she
was moving in with Mr. Shortley. This was tau much for her and
she woke up and didn't sleep again for several nights; and one night
she dreamed that the priest came to call and droned on and on saying,
"Dear lady, I know your tender heart won't suffer you to turn
the porrrrr man out. Think of the thousands of them, think of the
ovens and the boxcars and the camps and the sick children and
Christ Our Lord."
  "He's extra and he's upset the balance around here," she said,
"and I'm a logical practical woman and there arc no ovens here and
no camps and no Christ Our Lord and when h- leaves, he'll make
more money. He'll work at the mill and buy a c.ir and don't talk to
me--all they want is a car."
  "The ovens and the boxcars and the sick children," droned the
priest, "and our dear Lord."
  "Just one too many," she said.
  The next morning, she made up her mind while she was eating her
breakfast that she would give him his notice at once, and she stood
up and walked out of the kitchen and down the load with her table
napkin still in her hand. Mr. Guizac was spraying, the barn, standing
in his swaybacked way with one hand on his hip. He turned off the
hose and gave her an impatient kind of attention as if she were
interfering with his work. She had not thought of what she would
say to him, she had merely come. She stood in the barn door, looking
severely at the wet spotless floor and the dripping stanchions.
  “Ya goat?" he said.
  "Mr. Guizac," she said, "I can barely meet my obligations now."
Then she said in a louder, stronger voice, emphasizing each word,
  "I have bills to pay."
  "I too," Mr. Guizac said. "Much bills, little money," and he
shrugged.
  At the other end of the barn, she saw a long beak-nosed shadow
glide like a snake halfway up the sunlit open door and stop; and
somewhere behind her, she was aware of a silence where the sound
of the Negroes shoveling had come a minute before. "This is my
place," she said angrily. "All of you are extra. Each and everyone
of you are extra!"
  "Ya," Mr. Guizac said and turned on the hose again.
  She wiped her mouth with the napkin she had in her hand and
walked off, as if she had accomplished what she came for.
Mr. Shortley's shadow withdrew from the door and he leaned
against the side of the barn and lit half of a cigarette that he took out
of his pocket. There was nothing for him to do now but wait on
the hand of God to strike, but he knew one thing: he was not going
to wait with his mouth shut.
  Starting that morning, he began to complain and to state his side
of the case to every person he saw, black or white. He complained
in the grocery store and at the courthouse and on the street corner
and directly to Mrs. Mcintyre herself, for there was nothing underhanded
about him. If the Pole could have understood what he had
to say, he would have said it to him too. "All men was created free
and equal," he said to Mrs. McIntyre, "and I risked my life and
limb to prove it. Gone over there and fought and bled and died and
come back on over here and find out who's got my job-just exactly
who I been fighting. It was a hand-grenade come that near to killing
me and I seen who throwed it--little man with eye-glasses just like
his. Might have bought them at the same store. Small world," and he
gave a bitter little laugh. Since he didn't have Mrs. Shortley to do
the talking any more, he had started doing it himself and had found
that he had a gift for it. He had the power of making other people
see his logic. He talked a good deal to the Negroes.
  "Whyn't you go back to Africa?" he asked Sulk one morning as
they were cleaning out the silo. "That's your country, ain't it?"
  "I ain't gain there," the boy said. "They might eat me up."
  "Well, if you behave yourself it isn't any reason you can't stay
here," Mr. Shortley said kindly. "Because you didn't run away
from nowhere Your granddaddy was bought. He didn't have a
thing to do with coming. It's the people that run away from where
they come from that I ain't got any use for."
  "I never felt no need to travel," the Negro said.
  "Well," Mr. Shortley said, "if I was going to travel again, it
would be to either China or Africa. You go to either of them two
places and you can tell right away what the difference is between
you and them. You go to these other places and the only way you
can tell is if they say something. And then you can't always tell
because about half of them know the English language. That's
where we make our mistake," he said, "--letting all them people
onto English. There'd be a heap less trouble if everybody only knew
his own language. My wife said knowing two languages was like
having eyes in the back of your head. You couldn't put nothing
over on her."
  "You sho couldn't," the boy muttered, and then he added, "She
was fine. She was sho fine. I never known a finer white woman than
her."
  Mr. Shortley turned in the opposite direction and worked silently
for a while. After a few minutes he leaned up and tapped the colored
boy onn the shoulder with the handle of his shovel. For a second he
only looked at him while a great deal of meaning gathered in his
wet eyes. Then he said softly, "Revenge is mine, saith the Lord."
  Mrs. McIntyre found that everybody in town knew Mr. Shortley's
version of her business and that everyone was critical of her conduct.
She began to understand that she had a moral obligation to fire
the Pole and that she was shirking it because she found it hard to
do. She could not stand the increasing guilt any longer and on a
cold Saturday morning, she started off after breakfast to fire him.
She walked down to the machine shed where she heard him cranking
up the tractor.
  There was a heavy frost on the ground that made the fields look
like the rough backs of sheep; the sun was almost silver and the
woods stuck up like dry bristles on the sky line. The countryside
seemed to be receding from the little circle of noise around the shed.
Mr. Guizac was squatting on the ground beside the small tractor,
putting in a part. Mrs. Mcintyre hoped to get the fields turned over
while he still had thirty days to work (Or her. The colored boy was
standing by with some tools in his hand and Mr. Shortley was under
the shed about to get up or the large tractor and back it out. She
meant to wait until he and the Negro got out of the way before she
began her unpleasant duty.
  She stood watching Mr. Guizac, stamping her feet on the hard
ground, for the cold was climbing like a paralysis up her feet and
legs. She had on a heavy black coat and a red head-kerchief with
her black hat pulled down on top of it to keep the glare out of her
eyes. Under the black brim her face had an abstracted look and
once or twice her lips moved silently. Mr. Guizac shouted over the
noise of the tractor for the Negro to hand him a screwdriver and
when he got it, he turned over on his back on the icy ground and
reached up under the machine. She could not see his face, only his
feet and legs and trunk sticking impudently out from the side of
the tractor. He had on rubber boots that were cracked and splashed
with mud. He raised one knee and then lowered it and turned himself
slightly. Of all the things she resented about him, she resented
most that he hadn't left on his own accord.
  Mr. Shortley had got on the large tractor and was backing it out
from under the shed. He seemed to be warmed by it as if its heat
and strength sent impulses up through him that he obeyed instantly.
He had headed it toward the small tractor but he braked it on a
slight incline and jumped off and turned back toward the shed.
Mrs. Mcintyre was looking fixedly at Mr. Guizac's legs lying flat
on the ground now. She heard the brake on the large tractor slip
and, looking up, she saw it move forward, calculating its own path.
Later she remembered that she had seen the Negro jump silently
out of the way as if a spring in the earth had released him and that
she had seen Mr. Shortley turn his head with incredible slowness
and stare silently over his shoulder and that she had started to shout
to the Displaced Person but that she had not. She had felt her eyes
and Mr. Shortley's eyes and the Negro's eyes come together in one
look that froze them in collusion forever, and she had heard the little
noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone. The
two men ran forward to help and she fainted.
  She remembered, when she came to, running somewhere, perhaps
into the house and out again but she could not remember what for
or if she had fainted again when she got there. When she finally
came back to where the tractors were, the ambulance had arrived.
Mr. Guizac's body was covered with the bent bodies of his wife
and two children and by a black one which hung over him, murmuring
words she didn't understand. At first she thought this must
be the doctor but then with a feeling of annoyance she recognized
the priest, who had come with the ambulance and was slipping something into the crushed man's mouth. After a minute he stood up and she looked first at his bloody pants legs and then at his face which
was not averted from her but was as withdrawn and expressionless as
the rest of the countryside. She only stared at him for she was too
shocked by her experience to be quite herself. Her mind was not
taking hold of all that was happening. She felt she was in some
foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives,
and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried
away in the ambulance.
  That evening, Mr. Shortley left without notice to look for a new
position and the Negro, Sulk, was taken with a sudden desire to
see more of the world and set off for the southern part of the state.
The old man Astor could not work without company. Mrs. McIntyre
hardly noticed that she had no help left for she came down with a
nervous affliction and had to go to the hospital. When she came
back, she saw that the place would be too much for her to run now
and she turned her cows over to a professional auctioneer (who
sold them at a loss) and retired to live on what she had, while she
tried to save her declining health. A numbness developed in one of
her legs and her hands and head began to jiggle and eventually
she had to stay in bed all the time with only a colored woman to
wait on her. Her eyesight grew steadily worse and she lost her
voice altogether. Not many people remembered to come out to the
country to see her except the old priest. He came regularly once a
week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the
peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain
the doctrines of the Church.

End

A Temple of the Holy Ghost

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 them 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

The Artificial Nigger

1952

          Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of  moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards the color of silver and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for  his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything.  The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an
order and Mr. Head's trousers, hanging to the back of  it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him.

          Mr. Head could have said to it that age was a choice blessing and that only with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of life that makes him asuitable guide for the young. This, at least, had been his own experience.
 
          He sat up and grasped the iron posts at the foot of his bed and raised himself until he could see the face on the alarm clock which sat on an overturned bucket beside the chair. The hour was two in the morning. The alarm on the clock did notwork but he was not dependent on any mechanical means to awaken him. Sixty years had not dulled his responses; his physical reactions, like his moral ones, were
guided by his will and strong character, and these could be seen plainly in his features. He had a long tube- like face with a long rounded open jaw and a long depressed nose. His eyes were alert but quiet, and in the miraculous moonlight they had a look of composure and of ancient wisdom as if they belonged to one of the great guides of men. He might have been Vergil summoned in the middle of the night to go to Dante or better, Raphael, awakened by a blast of God's light to fly to
the side of Tobias. The only dark spot in the room was Nelson's pallet, underneath the shadow of the window.

         Nelson was hunched over on his side, his knees under his chin and his heels under his bottom. His new suit and hat were in the boxes that they had been sent in and these were on the floor at the foot of the pallet where he could get his hands on them as soon as he woke up. The step jar, out of the shadow and made snow-white in the moonlight, appeared to stand guard over him like a small personal angel. Mr.Head lay back down, feeling entirely confident that he could carry out the moral
mission of  the coming day. He meant to be up before Nelson and to have the breakfast cooking by the time he awakened. The boy was always  irked when Mr.Head was the first up. They would have to leave the house at four to get to the railroad junction by five-thirty. The train was to stop for them at five forty-five and they had to be there on time for this train was stopping merely to accommodate
them.

         This would be the boy's first trip to the city though he claimed it would be his second because he had been born there. Mr. Head had tried to point out to him that when he was born he didn't have the intelligence to determine his whereabouts but this had made no impression on the child at all and he continued to insist that this was to be his second trip. It would be Mr. Head's third trip. Nelson had said, "I will've already been there twict and I ain't but ten."

         Mr. Head had contradicted him.

         "If you ain't been there in fifteen years, how you know you'll be able to find your way about?" Nelson had asked. "How you know it hasn't changed some?"

         "Have you ever," Mr. Head had asked, "seen me lost?"

         Nelson certainly had not but he was a child who was never satisfied until he had given an impudent answer and he replied, "It's nowhere around here to get lost at."

         "The day is going to come," Mr. Head prophesied, "when you'll find you ain't as smart as you think you are." He had been thinking about this trip for several months but it was for the most part in moral terms that he conceived it. It was to be a lesson that the boy would never forget. He was to find out from it that he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in a city. He was to find out that the city is
not a great place. Mr. Head meant him to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life. He fell asleep thinking how the boy would at last find out that he was not as smart as he thought he was.

         He was awakened at three-thirty by the smell of fatback frying and he leaped off his cot. The pallet was empty and the clothes boxes had been thrown open. He put on his trousers and ran into the other room. The boy had a corn pone on cooking and had fried the meat. He was sitting in the half-dark at the table, drinking cold coffee out of a can. He had on his new suit and his new gray hat pulled low over his
eyes. It was too big for him but they had ordered it a size large because they expected his head to grow. He didn't say anything but his entire figure suggested satisfaction at having arisen before Mr. Head.

         Mr. Head went to the stove and brought the meat to the table in the skillet."It's no hurry," he said. "You'll get there soon enough and it's no guarantee you'lllike it when you do neither," and he sat down across from the boy whose hatteetered back slowly to reveal a fiercely expressionless face, very much the sameshape as the old man's. They were grandfather and grandson but they looked enough
alike to be brothers and brothers not too far apart in age, for Mr. Head had ayouthful expression by daylight, while the boy's look was ancient, as if he kneweverything already and would be pleased to forget it.

         Mr. Head had once had a wife and daughter and when the wife died, the daughter ran away and returned after an interval with Nelson. Then one morning, without getting out of bed, she died and left Mr. Head with sole care of the year-old child. He had made the mistake of telling Nelson that he had been born in Atlanta. If he hadn't told him that, Nelson couldn't have insisted that this was going to be his
second trip.

         "You may not like it a bit," Mr. Head continued.  "It'll be full of niggers."

         The boy made a face as if he could handle a nigger.
         "All right," Mr. Head said.  "You ain't ever seen a nigger."
         "You wasn't up very early," Nelson said.
         "You ain't ever seen a nigger," Mr. Head repeated. "There hasn't been a nigger in this county since we run that one out twelve years ago and that was before you were born." He looked at the boy as if he were daring him to say he had ever seen a Negro.

         "How you know I never saw a nigger when I lived there before?" Nelson asked. "I probably saw a lot of niggers."

         "If you seen one you didn't know what he was," Mr. Head said, completely exasperated. "A six-month-old child don't know a nigger from anybody else."

         "I reckon I'll know a nigger if I see one," the boy said and got up and straightened his slick sharply creased gray hat and went outside to the privy.

         They reached the junction some time before the train was due to arrive and stood about two feet from the first set of tracks. Mr. Head carried a paper sack with some biscuits and a can of sardines in it for their lunch. A coarse-looking orange-colored sun coming up behind the east range of mountains was making the sky a dull red behind them, but in front of them it was still gray and they faced a gray transparent moon, hardly stronger than a thumbprint and completely without
light. A small tin switch box and a black fuel tank were all there was to mark the place as a junction; the tracks were double and did not converge again until they were hidden behind the bends at either end of the clearing. Trains passing appeared to emerge from a tunnel of trees and, hit for a second by the cold sky, vanish terrified into the woods again. Mr. Head had had to make special arrangements with
the  ticket agent to have this train stop and he was secretly afraid it would not, in which case, he knew Nelson would say, "I never thought no train was going to stopfor you." Under the useless morning moon the tracks looked white and fragile. Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.

         Then suddenly, before Mr. Head could make up his mind to turn back, there was a deep warning bleat and the train appeared, gliding very slowly, almost silently around the bend of trees about two hundred yards down the track, with one yellow front light shining. Mr. Head was still not certain it would stop and he felt it would make an even bigger idiot of him if it went by slowly. Both he and Nelson, however,were prepared to ignore the train if it passed them.

         The engine charged by, filling their noses with the smell of hot metal and then the second coach came to a stop exactly where they were standing. A conductor with the face of an ancient bloated bulldog was on the step as if he expected them, though he did not look as if it mattered one way or the other to him if they got on or not. "To the right," he said.

         Their entry took only a fraction of a second and the train was already speeding on as they entered the quiet car. Most of the travelers were still sleeping, some with their heads hanging off the chair arms, some stretched across two seats, and some sprawled out with their feet in the aisle. Mr. Head saw two unoccupied seats and pushed Nelson toward them. "Get in there by the winder," he said in his normal voice which was very loud at this hour of the morning. "Nobody cares if you sit there because it's nobody in it. Sit right there."

         "I heard you," the boy muttered. "It's no use in you yelling," and he sat down and turned his head to the glass. There he saw a pale ghost-like face scowling at him beneath the brim of a pale ghost-like hat. His grandfather, looking quickly too, saw a different ghost, pale but grinning, under a black hat.

         Mr. Head sat down and settled himself and took out his ticket and started reading aloud everything that was printed on it. People began to stir. Several woke up and stared at him. "Take off your hat," he said to Nelson and took off his own and put it on his knee. He had a small amount of white hair that had turned  tobac cocolored over the years and this lay flat across the back of his head. The front of hishead was bald and creased. Nelson took off his hat and put it on his knee and they
waited for the conductor to come ask for their tickets.

         The man across the aisle from them was spread out over two seats, his feet propped on the window and his head jutting into the aisle. He had on a light blue suit and a yellow shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His eyes had just opened and Mr.Head was ready to introduce himself when the conductor came up from behind and
growled, "Tickets."

         When the conductor had gone, Mr. Head gave Nelson the return half of his ticket and said, "Now put that in your pocket and don't lose it or you'll have to stayin the city."

         "Maybe I will," Nelson said as if this were a reasonable suggestion.

         Mr. Head ignored him. "First time this boy has ever been on a train," he explained to the man across the aisle, who was sitting up now on the edge of his seat with both feet on the floor.

         Nelson jerked his hat on again and turned angrily to the window.

         "He's never seen anything before," Mr. Head continued. "Ignorant as the dayhe was born, but I mean for him to get his fill once and for all."

         The boy leaned forward, across his grandfather and toward the stranger. "l was born in the city," he said. "l was born there. This is my second trip." He said itin a high positive voice but the man across the aisle didn't look as if he understood. There were heavy purple circles under his eyes.

         Mr. Head reached across the aisle and tapped him on the arm. "The thing to
do with a boy," he said sagely, "is to show him all it is to show. Don't hold nothing
back."

         "Yeah," the man said. He gazed down at his swollen feet and lifted the left one about ten inches from the floor. After a minute he put it down and lifted the other. All through the car people began to get up and move about and yawn and stretch. Separate voices could be heard here and there and then a general hum. Suddenly Mr. Head's serene expression changed. His mouth almost closed and alight, fierce and cautious both, came into his eyes. He was looking down the length of the car. Without turning, he caught Nelson by the arm and pulled him forward.
  "Look," he said.

         A huge coffee-colored man was coming slowly forward. He had on a  light suit and a yellow satin tie with a ruby pin in it. One of his hands rested on his stomach which rode majestically under his buttoned coat, and in the other he held the head of a black walking stick that he picked up an set down with a deliberate outward motion each time he took a step. He was proceeding very slowly, his large brown eyes gazing over the heads of the passengers. He had a small white mustache and white crinkly hair. Behind him there were two young women, both coffee-
colored, one in a yellow dress and one in a green. Their progress was kept at the rate of his and they chatted in low throaty voices as they followed him.
         
         Mr. Head's grip was tightening insistently on Nelson's arm. As the procession passed them, the light from a sapphire ring on the brown hand that picked up the cane reflected in Mr. Head's eye, but he did not look up nor did the tremendous man look at him. The group proceeded up the rest of the aisle and out of the car. Mr.Head's grip on Nelson's arm loosened. "What was that?" he asked.

         "A man," the boy said and gave him an indignant look as if he were tired of having his intelligence insulted.

         "What kind of a man?" Mr. Head persisted, his voice expressionless.

         "A fat man," Nelson said. He was beginning to feel that he had better be cautious.

         "You don't know what kind ?" Mr. Head said in a final tone.

         "An old man," the boy said and had a sudden foreboding that he was not going to enjoy the day.

         "That was a nigger," Mr. Head said and sat back.

         Nelson jumped up on the seat and stood looking backward to the end of the car but the Negro had gone.

         "I'd of thought you'd know a nigger since you seen so many when you was inthe city on your first visit," Mr. Head continued. "That's his first nigger," he said tothe man across the aisle.

         The boy slid down into the seat. "You said they were black," he said in anangry voice. "You never said they were tan. How do you expect me to knowanything when you don't tell me right?"

         "You're just ignorant is all," Mr. Head said and he got up and moved over in the vacant seat by the man across the aisle.

         Nelson turned backward again and looked where the Negro had disappeared. He felt that the Negro had deliberately walked down the aisle in order to make a fool of him and he hated him with a fierce raw fresh hate; and also, he understood now why his grandfather disliked them. He looked toward the window and the face there seemed to suggest that he might be inadequate to the day's exactions. He wondered if he would even recognize the city when they came to it.

         After he had told several stories, Mr. Head realized that the man he was talking to was asleep and he got up and suggested to Nelson that they walk over the train and see the parts of it. He particularly wanted the boy to see the toilet so they went first to the men's room and examined the plumbing. Mr. Head demonstrated the ice-water cooler as if he had invented it and showed Nelson the bowl with thesingle spigot where the travelers brushed their teeth. They went through several cars
and came to the diner.

         This was the most elegant car in the train. It was painted a rich egg-yellow and had a wine-colored carpet on the floor. There were wide windows over the tables and great spaces of the rolling view were caught in miniature in the sides of the coffee pots and in the glasses. Three very black Negroes in white suits and aprons were running up and down the aisle, swinging trays and bowing and bending over the travelers eating breakfast. One of them rushed up to Mr. Head and Nelson
and said, holding up two fingers, "Space for two!" but Mr. Head replied in a loud voice, "We eaten before we left!"

         The waiter wore large brown spectacles that increased the size of his eye whites. "Stan' aside then please," he said with an airy wave of the arm as if he were brushing aside flies.

         Neither Nelson nor Mr. Head moved a fraction of an inch. "Look," Mr. Head said.

         The near corner of the diner, containing two tables, was set off from the rest by a saffron-colored curtain. One table was set but empty but at the other, facing them, his back to the drape, sat the tremendous Negro. He was speaking in a soft voice to the two women while he buttered a muffin. He had a heavy sad face and his neck bulged over his white collar on either side. "They rope them off," Mr. Head
explained. Then he said, "Let's go see the kitchen," and they walked the length ofthe diner but the black waiter was coming fast behind them.

         "Passengers are not allowed in the kitchen!" he said in a haughty voice. "Passengers are NOT allowed in the kitchen!"

         Mr. Head stopped where he was and turned. "And there's good reason for that," he shouted into the Negro's chest, "because the cockroaches would run the passengers out!"

         All the travelers laughed and Mr. Head and Nelson walked out, grinning. Mr.Head was known at home for his quick wit and Nelson felt a sudden keen pride in him. He realized the old man would be his only support in the strange place they were approaching. He would be entirely alone in the world if he were ever lost from his grandfather. A terrible excitement shook him and he wanted to take hold of Mr.
Head's coat and hold on like a child.

         As they went back to their seats they could see through the passing windows that the countryside was becoming speckled with small houses and shacks and that a highway ran alongside the train. Cars sped by on it, very small and fast. Nelson felt that there was less breath in the air than there had been thirty minutes ago. The man across the aisle had left and there was no one near for Mr. Head to hold a  conversation with so he looked out the window, through his own reflection, and read aloud the names of the buildings they were passing. "The Dixie Chemical Corp!" he announced. "Southern Maid Flour! Dixie Doors! Southern Belle Cotton Products! Patty's Peanut Butter! Southern Mammy Cane Syrup!"

         "Hush up!" Nelson hissed.

         All over the car people were beginning to get up and take their luggage of fthe overhead racks. Women were putting on their coats and hats. The conductor stuck his head in the car and snarled, '"Firstopppppmry,",,, and Nelson lunged out of
his sitting position, trembling. Mr. Head pushed him down by the shoulder.

         "Keep your seat," he said in dignified tones. "The first stop is on the edge of town. The second stop is at the main railroad station." He had come by this knowledge on his first trip when he had got off at the first stop and had had to pay a man fifteen cents to take him into the heart of town. Nelson sat back down, very pale. For the first time in his life, he understood that his grandfather was indispensable to him.

         The train stopped and let off a few passengers and glided on as if it had never ceased moving. Outside, behind rows of brown rickety houses, a line of blue buildings stood up, and beyond them a pale rose-gray sky faded away to nothing. The train moved into the railroad yard. Looking down, Nelson saw lines and lines of silver tracks multiplying and criss-crossing. Then before he  could start counting them, the face in the window started out at him, gray but distinct, and he looked the
other way. The train was in the station. Both he and Mr. Head jumped up and ran to the door.   Neither noticed that they had left the paper sack with the lunch in it on the seat.

         They walked stiffly through the small station and came out of
a heavy door into the squall of traffic. Crowds were hurrying to
work. Nelson didn't know where to look. Mr. Head leaned against
the side of the building and glared in front of him.
         
         Finally Nelson said, "Well, how do you see what all it is to see?"
         Mr. Head didn't answer. Then as if the sight of people passing had
given him the clue, he said, "You walk," and started off down the
street. Nelson followed, steadying his hat. So many sights and
sounds were flooding in on him that for the first block he hardly
knew what he was seeing. At the second corner, Mr. Head turned
and looked behind him at the station they had left, a putty-colored
terminal with a concrete dome on top. He thought that if he could
keep the dome always in sight, he would be able to get back in
the afternoon to catch the train again.  

         As they walked along, Nelson began to distinguish details and
take note of the store windows, jammed with every kind of equipment hardware, drygoods, chicken feed, liquor. They passed one that Mr. Head called his particular attention to where you walked in and sat on a chair with your feet upon two rests and let a Negro polish your shoes. They walked slowly and stopped and stood at the entrances so he could see what went on in each place but they did not go into any of them. Mr. Head was determined not to go into any city store because on his first trip here, he had got lost in a large one and bad found his way out only after many people had insulted him.  

         They came in the middle of the next block to a store that had a
weighing machine in front of it and they both in turn stepped up on it and put in a penny and received a ticket. Mr. Head's ticket said, "You weigh 120 pounds. You are upright and brave and all your friends admire you." He put the ticket in his pocket, surprised that the machine should have got his character correct but his weight wrong, for he had weighed on a grain scale not long before and knew he weighed 110. Nelson's ticket said, "You weigh  98 pounds. You have a great destiny ahead of you but beware of dark women. Nelson did not know any women and he weighed only 68 pounds but Mr. Head pointed out that the machine had probably printed the number upside down, meaning the 9 for a 6.

         They walked on and at the end of five blocks the dome of the terminal sank out of sight and Mr. Head turned to the left. Nelson could have stood in front of every store window for an hour if there had not been an other more interesting one next to it. Suddenly he said, "I was born here!" Mr. Head turned and looked at him with horror. There was a sweaty brightness about his face. "This is where I come
from!" he said.

         Mr. Head was appalled. He saw the moment had come for drastic action. "Lemme show you one thing you ain't seen yet," he said and took him to the corner where there was a sewer entrance. "Squat down," he said, "and stick you head in there," and he held the back of the boy's coat while he got down and put his head in the sewer. He drew it back quickly, hearing a gurgling in the depths under the sidewalk. Then Mr. Head explained the sewer system, how the entire city was underlined with it, how it contained all the drainage and was full of rats and how a
man could slide into it and be sucked along down endless pitch black tunnels. At any minute any man in the city might be sucked into the sewer and never heard from again. He described it so well that Nelson was for some seconds shaken. He connected the sewer passages with the entrance to hell and understood for the first time how the world was put together in its lower parts. He drew away from the
curb.

         Then he said, "Yes, but you can stay away from the holes," and his face took on that stubborn look that was so exasperating to his grandfather. "This is where  Icome from!" he said.

         Mr. Head was dismayed but he only muttered, "You'll get your
fill," and they walked on. At the end of two more blocks he turned
to the left, feeling that he was circling the dome; and he was correct for in a half-hour they passed in front of the railroad station again. At first Nelson did not notice that he was seeing the same stores twice but when they passed the one where you put your feet on the rests while the Negro polished your shoes, he perceived that they were walking in a circle.

         "We done been here!" he shouted. "I don't believe you know where you're at!"

         "The direction just slipped my mind for a minute," Mr. Head said and they turned down a different street. He still did not intend to let the dome get too faraway and after two blocks in their  new direction, he turned to the left. This street contained two and three-story wooden dwellings. Anyone passing on the sidewalk could see into the rooms and Mr. Head, glancing through one window, saw a woman lying on an iron bed, looking out, with a sheet pulled over her. Her knowing expression shook him. A fierce-looking boy on a bicycle came driving down out of
nowhere and he had to jump to the side to keep from being hit. "It's nothing to them
if they knock you down," he said. "You better keep closer to me."

         They walked on for some time on streets like this before he remembered to turn again. The houses they were passing now were all unpainted and the wood inthem looked rotten; the street between was narrower. Nelson saw a colored man. Then another. Then another. "Niggers live in these houses," he observed.

         "Well come on and we'll go some wheres else," Mr. Head said. "We didn't come to look at niggers," and they turned down another street but they continued to see Negroes everywhere. Nelson's skin began to prickle and they stepped along at a faster pace in order to leave the neighborhood as soon as possible. There wer ecolored men in their undershirts standing in the doors and colored women rocking on the sagging porches. Colored children played m the gutters and stopped what they were doing to look at them. Before long they began to pass rows of stores with colored customers in them but they didn't pause at the entrances of these. Black eyesin black faces were watching them from every direction. "Yes," Mr. Head said, "this is where you were born right here with all these niggers."

         Nelson scowled. "I think you done got us lost," he said.

         Mr. Head swung around sharply and looked for the dome. It was nowhere insight. "I ain't got us lost either," he said. "You're just tired of walking."

         "I ain't tired, I'm hungry," Nelson said. "Give me a biscuit."
         They discovered then that they had lost the lunch.
         "You were the one holding the sack," Nelson said. "I would have kepaholt of it."

         "If you want to direct this trip, I'll go on by myself and leave you right here," Mr.Head said and was pleased to see the boy turn white. However, he realized they were lost and drifting farther every minute from the station. He was hungry himself and beginning to be thirsty and since they had been in the colored neighborhood,t hey had both begun to sweat. Nelson had on his shoes and he was unaccustomed to
them. The concrete sidewalks were very hard. They both wanted to find a place to sit down but this was impossible and they kept on walking, the boy muttering  under his breath, "First you lost the sack and then you lost the way," and Mr. Head growling from time to time, "Anybody wants to be from this nigger heaven can be from it!"

         By now the sun was well forward in the sky. The odor of dinners cookingdrifted out to them. The Negroes were all at their doors to see them pass. "Whyn'tyou ast one of these niggers the way?" Nelson said. "You got us lost."

         "This is where you were born," Mr. Head said. "You can ast one yourself ifyou want to."

         Nelson was afraid of the colored men and he didn't want to be laughed at by the colored children. Up ahead he saw a large colored woman leaning in a doorway that opened onto the sidewalk. Her hair stood straight out from her head for abou tfour inches all around and she was resting on bare brown feet that turned pink at the sides. She had on a pink dress that showed her exact shape. As they came abreast of
her, she lazily lifted one hand to her head and her fingers disappeared into her hair.

         Nelson stopped. He felt his breath drawn up by the woman's dark
eyes. "How do you get back to town?" he said in a voice that did
not sound like his own.

         After a minute she said, "You in town now," in a rich low tone that made Nelson feel as if a cool spray had been turned on him. "How do you get back to the train?" he said in the same reedlike voice.

         "You can catch you a car," she said.

         He understood she was making fun of him but he was too paralyzed even to scowl. He stood drinking in every detail of her. His eyes traveled up from her great knees to her forehead and then made a triangular path from the glistening sweat on her neck 'down and across her tremendous bosom and over her bare arm back to where her fingers lay hidden in her hair. He suddenly wanted  her to reach down
and pick him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before. He felt as if he were reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel.

         "You can go a block down yonder and catch you a car take you to the railroad station, Sugarpie," she said.
 
         Nelson would have collapsed at her feet if Mr. Head had not pulled him roughly away. "You act like you don't have any sense!" the old man growled.

         They hurried down the street and Nelson did not look back at the woman. He pushed his hat sharply forward over his face which was already burning with shame. The sneering ghost he had seen in the train window and all the foreboding feeling she had on the way returned to him and he remembered that his ticket from the scale had said to beware of dark women and that his grandfather's had said he was upright
and brave. He took hold of the old man's hand, a sign of dependence that he seldom
showed.

         They headed down the street toward the car tracks where a long yellow rattling trolley was coming. Mr. Head had never boarded a streetcar and he let that one pass. Nelson was silent. From time to time his mouth trembled slightly but his grandfather, occupied with his own problems, paid him no attention. They stood onthe corner and neither looked at the Negroes who were passing, going about their
business just as if they had been white, except that most of them stopped and eyed Mr. Head and Nelson. It occurred to Mr. Head that since the streetcar ran on tracks, they could simply follow the tracks. He gave Nelson a slight push and explained that they would follow the tracks on into the railroad station, walking, and they setoff.

         Presently to their great relief they began to see white people again and Nelsonsat down on the sidewalk against the wall of a building. "I got to rest myself some, "he said. "You lost the sack and the direction. You can just wait on me to rest myself."

         "There's the tracks in front of us," Mr. Head said. "All we got to do is keep them in sight and you could have remembered the sack as good as me. This is where you were born. This is your old home town. This is your second trip. You ought to know how to do," and he squatted down and continued in. this vein but the boy, easing his burning feet out of his shoes, did not answer.

         "And standing there grinning like a chim-pan-zee while a nigger woman gives you direction. Great Gawd!" Mr. Head said.

         "I never said I was nothing but born here," the boy said in a shaky voice. " I never said I would or wouldn't like it. I never said I wanted to come. I only said I was born here and I never had nothing to do with that. I want to go home. I never wanted to come in the first place. It was all your big idea. How you know you ain't following the tracks in the wrong direction?"

         This last had occurred to Mr. Head too. "All these people are  white," he said.

         "We ain't passed here before," Nelson said. This was a neighborhood of brickbuildings that might have been lived in or might not. A few empty automobiles wereparked along the curb and there was an occasional passerby. The heat of thepavement came up through Nelson's thin suit. His eyelids began to droop, and after
a few minutes his head tilted forward. His shoulders twitched once or twice and thenhe fell over on his side and lay sprawled in an exhausted fit of sleep.

         Mr. Head watched him silently. He was very tired himself but they could not both sleep at the same time and he could not have slept anyway because he did not know where he was. In a few minutes Nelson would wake up, refreshed by his sleep and very cocky, and would begin complaining that he had lost the sack and the way. You'd have a mighty sorry time if I wasn't here, Mr. Head thought; and then another
idea occurred to him. He looked at the sprawled figure for several minutes; presently he stood up.         He justified what he was going to do on the grounds that it is sometimes necessary to teach a child a lesson he won't forget particularly when the child is always reasserting his position with some new impudence. He walked without a sound to the corner about twenty feet away and sat down on a covered garbage can
in the alley where he could look out and watch Nelson wake up alone.

         The boy was dozing fitfully, half conscious of vague noises and black forms moving up from some dark part of him into the light His face worked in his sleep and he had pulled his knees up under his chin. The sun shed a dull dry light on the narrow street; everything looked like exactly what it was. After a while Mr. Head, hunched like an old monkey on the garbage can lid, decided that if Nelson didn't wake up soon, he would make a loud noise by bamming his foot against the can. He
looked at his watch and discovered that it was two o'clock. Their train left at six and the possibility of missing it was too awful for him to think of. He kicked his foot backwards on the can and a hollow boom reverberated in the alley.

         Nelson shot up onto his feet with a shout. He looked where his grandfather should have been and stared. He seemed to whirl several times and then, picking up his feet and throwing his head back, he dashed down the street like a wild maddened pony. Mr. Head jumped off the can and galloped after but the child was almost out of sight. He saw a streak of gray disappearing diagonally a block ahead.He ran as fast as he could, looking both ways down every intersection, but without
sight of him again. Then as he passed the third intersection, completely winded, he saw about half a block down the street a scene that stopped him altogether. He crouched behind a trash box to watch and get his bearings.

         Nelson was sitting with both legs spread out and by his side lay an elderly woman, screaming. Groceries were scattered about the sidewalk. A crowd o fwomen had already gathered to see justice done and Mr. Head distinctly heard theold woman on the pavement shout, "You've broken my ankle and your daddy'll pay  for it! Every nickel! Police! Police!" Several of the women were plucking at Nelson's shoulder but the boy seemed too dazed to get up.

         Something forced Mr. Head from behind the trash box and forward, but only at a creeping pace. He had never in his life been accosted by a policeman. The women were milling around Nelson as if they might suddenly all dive on him at once and tear him to pieces, and the old woman continued to scream that her ankle was broken and to call for an officer. Mr. Head came on so slowly that he could have been taking a backward step after each forward one, but when he was about
ten feet away, Nelson saw him and sprang. The child caught him around the hips and clung panting against him.

         The women all turned on Mr. Head. The injured one sat up and shouted,
"You sir! You'll pay every penny of my doctor's bill that your boy has caused. He's a juvenile delinquent! Where is an officer? Somebody take this man's name and address!"

         Mr. Head was trying to detach Nelson's fingers from the flesh in the back ofhis legs. The old man's head had lowered itself into his collar like a turtle's; his eyeswere glazed with fear and caution.

         "Your boy has broken my ankle!" the old woman shouted. "Police!"

         Mr. Head sensed the approach of the policeman from behind. He stared straight ahead at the women who were massed in their fury like a solid wall to block his escape, "This is not my boy," he said. "l never seen him before."

         He felt Nelson's fingers fall out of his flesh.

         The women dropped back, staring at him with horror, as if they were sore pulsed by a man who would deny his own image and likeness that they could not bear to lay hands on him. Mr. Head walked on, through a space they silently cleared, and left Nelson behind. Ahead of him he saw nothing but a hollow tunnel that had once been the street.
 
         The boy remained standing where he was, his neck craned forward and his hands hanging by his sides. His hat was jammed on his head so that there were no longer any creases in it. The injured woman got up and shook her fist at him and the others gave him pitying looks, but he didn't notice any of them. There was no policeman in sight.

         In a minute he began to move mechanically, making no effort to
catch up with his grandfather but merely following at about twenty paces. They walked on for five blocks in this way. Mr. Head's shoulders were sagging and his neck hung forward at such an angle that it was not visible from behind. He was afraid to turn his head. Finally he cut a short hopeful glance over his shoulder. Twenty feet behind him, he saw two small eyes piercing into his back like pitchfork
prongs.

         The boy was not of a forgiving nature but this was the first time he had ever had anything to forgive. Mr. Head had never disgraced himself before. After two more blocks, he turned and called over his shoulder in a high desperately gay voice, "Let's us go get us a Co' Cola somewheres!"

         Nelson, with a dignity he had never shown before, turned and stood with his back to his grandfather.

         Mr. Head began to feel the depth of his denial. His face as they walked on became all hollows and bare ridges. He saw nothing they were passing but he perceived that they had lost the car tracks. There was no dome to be seen anywhere and the afternoon was advancing. He knew that if dark overtook them in the city, they would be beaten and robbed. The speed of God's justice was only what he expected for himself, but he could not stand to think that his sins would be visited
upon Nelson and that even now, he was leading the boy to his doom.

         They continued to walk on block after block through an endless section of small brick houses until Mr. Head almost fell over a water spigot sticking up about six inches off the edge of a grass plot. He had not had a drink of water since early morning but he felt he did not deserve it now. Then he thought that Nelson would be thirsty and they would both drink and be brought together. He squatted down and put his mouth to the nozzle and turned a cold stream of water into his throat. Then he called out in the high desperate voice, "Come on and "etcher some water!"

         This time the child stared through him for nearly sixty seconds. Mr. Head got up and walked on as if he had drunk poison. Nelson, though he had not had water since some he had drunk out of a paper cup on the train, passed by the spigot, disdaining to drink where his grandfather had. When Mr. Head realized this, he lost all hope. His face in the waning afternoon light looked ravaged and abandoned. He
could feel the boy's steady hate, traveling at an even pace behind him and he knew that (if by some miracle they escaped being murdered in the city) it would continuejust that way for the rest of his life. He knew that now he was wandering into a black strange place where nothing was like it had ever been before, a long old age without respect and an end that would be welcome because it would be the end.

         As for Nelson, his mind had frozen around his grandfather's treachery as if he were trying to preserve it intact to present at the final judgment. He walked without looking to one side or the other, but every now and then his mouth would twitch and this was when he felt, from some remote place inside himself, a black mysterious form reach up as if it would melt his frozen vision in one hot grasp.

         The sun dropped down behind a row of houses and hardly noticing, they passed into an elegant suburban section where mansions were set back from the road by lawns with birdbaths on them. Here everything was entirely deserted. For blocks they didn't pass even a dog. The big white houses were like partially submerged icebergs in the distance. There were no sidewalks, only drives, and these
wound around and around in endless ridiculous circles. Nelson made no move to come nearer to Mr. Head. The old man felt that if he saw a sewer entrance he would drop down into it and let himself be carried away; and he could imagine the boy standing by, watching with only a slight interest, while he disappeared.

         A loud bark jarred him to attention and he looked up to see a fat man approaching with two bulldogs. He waved both arms like someone shipwrecked on a desert island. "I'm lost!" he called. "I'm lost and can't find my way and me and this boy have got to catch this train and I can't find the station. Oh Gawd I'm lost! Oh hep me Gawd I'm lost!"

         The man, who was bald-headed and had on golf knickers, asked him what train he was trying to catch and Mr. Head began to get out his tickets, trembling so violently he could hardly hold them. Nelson had come up to within fifteen feet and
stood watching.

         "Well," the fat man said, giving him back the tickets, "you won't have time to get back to town to make this but you can catch it at the suburb stop. That's three blocks from here," and he began explaining how to get there.

         Mr. Head stared as if he were slowly returning from the dead and when the man had finished and gone off with the dogs jumping at his heels, he turned to Nelson and said breathlessly, "We're going to get home!"
 
         The child was standing about ten feet away, his face bloodless under the gray hat. His eyes were triumphantly cold. There was no light in them, no feeling, no interest. He was merely there, a small figure, waiting. Home was nothing to him.

         Mr. Head turned slowly. He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation. He didn't care if he never made the train and if it had not been for what suddenly caught his attention, like a cry out of the gathering dusk, he might have forgotten there was a station to go to.

         He had not walked five hundred yards down the road when he saw, within reach of him, the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over on a low yellow brickfence that curved around a wide lawn. The Negro was about Nelson's size and h ewas pitched forward at an unsteady angle because the putty that held him to the wall
had cracked. One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon.

         Mr. Head stood looking at him silently until Nelson stopped at a little distance. Then as the two of them stood there, Mr. Head breathed, "An artificial nigger!"

         It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he looked too miserable to be either. He was meant to look happy because his mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead.

         "An artificial nigger!" Nelson repeated in Mr. Head's exact tone.

         The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets.

         Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. Mr. Head had never known before what mercy felt like because he had been
too good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now. He looked at Nelson and understood that he must say something to the child to show that he was still wise and in the look the boy returned he saw a hungry need for chat assurance. Nelson's eyes seemed to implore him to explain once and for all the mystery of existence.

         Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say, "They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one."
 
         After a second, the boy nodded with a strange shivering about his mouth, and said, "Let's go home before we get ourselves lost again."

         Their train glided into the suburb stop just as they reached the station and they boarded it together, and ten minutes before it was due to arrive at the junction, they went to the door and stood ready to jump off if it did not stop; but it did, just as the moon,  restored to its full splendor, sprang from a cloud and flooded the clearing with light. As they stepped off, the sage grass was shivering gently in shades of silver and the clinkers under their feet glittered with a fresh black light. The
treetops, fencing the junction like the protecting walls of a garden, were darker than the sky which was hung with gigantic white clouds illuminated like lanterns.

         Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world chat could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame chat he had so little ofit to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of
God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought him self a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no Sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in
proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

         Nelson,  composing his expression under the shadow of his hat brim, watched him with a mixture of fatigue and suspicion, but as the train glided past them and disappeared like a frightened serpent into the woods, even his face lightened and he muttered, "I'm glad I've went once, but I'll never go back again!" 

End

Good Country People

1955

Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real  as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would stand there and if she could be brought to say anything,  it was something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of them figs you put up last summer.”
  They carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast. Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated. Joy would get up while her mother was  eating and lumber into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs. Freeman would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on in,” and then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in the bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather report and were on one or the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae. Joy called them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last report.
  Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be into everything,” the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles, you can bet she’s dead, that’s all. She’ll want to know all your business. I can stand him real good,” he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have stood that woman one more minute on this place.” That had put Mrs. Hopewell off for a few days.

  She had hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but she had made up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was into everything – she would give her the responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she had kept them four years.
  Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was: that is life! And still another,  the most important, was: well, other people have their opinions too. She would make  these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it.
  When Mrs. Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would say, “I always said so myself.” Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not first been arrived at by her. She was quicker than Mr. Freeman. When Mrs. Hopewell said to her after they had been on the place for a while, “You know, you’re the wheel behind the wheel,” and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know it. I’ve always been quick. It’s some that are quicker than others.”
  “Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
  “Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.
  “It takes all kinds to make the world.”
  “I always said it did myself.”
  The girl was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for dinner; sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no guest they ate in the kitchen because that was easier. Mrs. Freeman always managed to arrive at some point during the meal and to watch them finish it. She would stand in the doorway if it were summer but in the winter she would stand with one elbow on top of the refrigerator and look down at them, or she would stand by the gas heater, lifting the back of her skirt slightly. Occasionally she would stand against the wall and roll her head from side to side. At no time was she in any hurry to leave. All this was very trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she was a woman of great patience. She realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good country people, you had better hang onto them.
  She had had plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had averaged one tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers were not the kind you would want to be around you for very long. Mrs. Hopewell, who  had divorced her husband long ago, needed someone to walk over the fields with her; and when Joy had to be impressed for these services, her remarks were usually so ugly and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl, standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply, “If you want me, here I am – LIKE I AM.”
  Mrs. Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. Her name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.
  When Mrs. Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank hull of a battleship. She would not use it. She continued to call her Joy to which the girl responded but in a purely mechanical way.
  Hulga had learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her from taking walks with her mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were useful when they occupied attention that might otherwise have been directed at her. At first she had thought she could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had found it was not possible to be rude to her. Mrs. Freeman would take on strange resentments and for days together she would be sullen but the source of her displeasure was always obscure; a direct attack, a positive leer, blatant ugliness to her face – these never touched her. And without warning one day, she began calling her Hulga.
  She did not call her that in front of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been  incensed but when she and the girl happened to be out of  the house together, she would say something and add the name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon. She considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga. However, Mrs. Freeman’s relish for using the name only irritated her. It was as if Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact. Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of the hunting accident, how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had never lost consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it had happened an hour ago.
  When Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk without making the awful noise but she made it – Mrs. Hopewell was certain – because it was ugly-sounding), she glanced at them and did not speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be in her red kimono with her hair tied around her head in rags. She would be sitting at the table, finishing her breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would be hanging by her elbow outward from the refrigerator, looking down at the table. Hulga always put her eggs on the stove to boil and then stood over them with her  arms folded, and Mrs. Hopewell would look at her – a kind of indirect gaze divided between her and Mrs. Freeman – and would think that if she would only keep  herself up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking. There was nothing wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn’t help. Mrs. Hopewell said that people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not.
  Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it would have been better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It had certainly not brought her out any and now that she had it, there was no more excuse for her to go to school again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to school to have a good time but Joy had “gone through.” Anyhow, she would not have been strong enough to go again. The doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the best of care, Joy might see forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could very well picture here there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the same. Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought this was funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought it was idiotic and showed simply that she was still a child. She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other people and more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said – without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full – “Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!” Mrs. Hopewell had no idea to this day what brought that on. She had only made the remark, hoping Joy would take it in, that a smile never hurt anyone. 
  The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a school teacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
  One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing – how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out of the room as if she were having a chill.
  This morning when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae. “She thrown up four times after supper,” she said, “and was up twict in the night after three o’clock. Yesterday she didn’t do nothing but ramble in the bureau drawer. All she did. Stand up there and see what she could run up on.”
  “She’s got to eat,” Mrs. Hopewell muttered, sipping her coffee, while she watched Joy’s back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the Bible salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a conversation she could possibly have had with him.
  He was a tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. He had appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that weighted him so heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against the door facing. He seemed on the point of collapse but he said in a cheerful voice, “Good morning, Mrs. Cedars!” and set the suitcase down on the mat. He was not a bad-looking young man though he had on a bright blue suit and yellow socks that were not pulled up far enough. He had prominent face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead.
  “I’m Mrs. Hopewell,” she said.
  “Oh!” he said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes sparkling, “I saw it said ‘The Cedars’ on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs. Cedars!” and he burst out in a pleasant laugh. He picked up the satchel and under cover of a pant, he fell forward into her hall. It was rather as if the suitcase had moved first, jerking him after it. “Mrs. Hopewell!” he said and grabbed her hand. “I hope you are well!” and he laughed again and then all at once his face sobered completely. He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and said, “Lady, I’ve come to speak of serious things.”
  “Well, come in,” she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was almost ready. He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a straight chair and put the suitcase between his feet and glanced around the room as if he were sizing her up by it. Her silver gleamed on the two sideboards; she decided he had never been in a room as elegant as this.
  “Mrs. Hopewell,” he began, using her name in a way that sounded almost intimate, “I know you believe in Chrustian service.”
  “Well, yes,” she murmured.
  “I know,” he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked on one side, “that you’re a good woman. Friends have told me.”
  Mrs. Hopewell never liked to be taken for a fool. “What are you selling?” she asked.
  “Bibles,” the young man said and his eye raced around the room before he added, “I see you have no family Bible in your parlor, I see that is the one lack you got!”
  Mrs. Hopewell could not say, “My daughter is an atheist and won’t let me keep the Bible in the parlor.” She said, stiffening slightly, “I keep my Bible by my bedside.” This was not the truth. It was in the attic somewhere.
  “Lady,” he said, “the word of God ought to be in the parlor.”
  “Well, I think that’s a matter of taste,” she began, “I think…”
  “Lady,” he said, “for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every room in the house besides in his heart. I know you’re a Chrustian because I can see it in every line of your face.”
  She stood up and said, “Well, young man, I don’t want to buy a Bible and I smell my dinner burning.”
  He didn’t get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly, “Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth – not many people want to buy one nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face. “People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”
  “Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round. That’s life!”
  “You said a mouthful,” he said.
  “Why, I think there aren’t enough good country people in the world!” she said, stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”
  His face had brightened. “I didn’t intraduce myself,” he said. “I’m Manley Pointer from out in the country around Willohobie, not even from a place, just from near a place.”
  “You wait a minute,” she said. “I have to see about my dinner.” She went out to the kitchen and found Joy standing near the door where she had been listening.
  “Get rid of the salt of the earth,” she said, “and let’s eat.”
 Mrs. Hopewell gave her a pained look and turned the heat down under the vegetables. “I can’t be rude to anybody,” she murmured and went back into the parlor.

  He had opened the suitcase and was sitting with a Bible on each knee.
  “I appreciate your honesty,” he said. “You don’t see any more real honest people unless you go way out in the country.”
  “I know,” she said, “real genuine folks!” Through the crack in the door she heard a groan.
  “I guess a lot of boys come telling you they’re working their way through college,” he said, “but I’m not going to tell you that. Somehow,” he said, “I don’t want to go to college. I want to devote my life to Chrustian service. See,” he said, lowering his voice, “I got this heart condition. I may not live long. When you know it’s something wrong with you and you may not live long, well then, lady…” He paused, with his mouth open, and stared at her.
  He and Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were filling with tears but she collected herself quickly and murmured, “Won’t you stay for dinner? We’d love to have you!” and was sorry the instant she heard herself say it.
  “Yes mam,” he said in an abashed voice. “I would sher love to do that!”
  Joy had given him one look on being introduced to him and then throughout the meal had not glanced at him again. He had addressed several remarks to her, which she had pretended not to hear. Mrs. Hopewell could not understand deliberate rudeness, although she lived with it, and she felt she had always to overflow with hospitality to make up for Joy’s lack of courtesy. She urged him to talk about himself and he did. He said he was the seventh child of twelve and that his father had been crushed under a tree when he himself was eight years old. He had been crushed very badly, in fact, almost cut in two and was practically not recognizable. His mother had got along the best she could by hard working and she had always seen that her children went to Sunday School and that they read the Bible every evening. He was now nineteen years old and he had been selling Bibles for four months. In that time he had sold seventy-seven Bibles and had the promise of two more sales. He wanted to become a missionary because he thought that was the way you could do most for people. “He who losest his life shall find it,” he said simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and earnest that Mrs. Hopewell would not for the world have smiled. He prevented his peas from sliding onto the table by blocking them with a piece of bread which he later cleaned his plate with. She could see Joy observing sidewise how he handled his knife and fork and she saw too that every few minutes, the boy would dart a keen appraising glance at the girl as if he were trying to attract her attention.
  After dinner Joy cleared the dishes off the table and disappeared and Mrs. Hopewell was left to talk with him. He told her again about his childhood and his father’s accident and about various things that had happened to him. Every five minutes or so she would stifle a yawn. He sat for two hours until finally she told him she must go because she had an appointment in town. He packed his Bibles and thanked her and prepared to leave, but in the doorway he stopped and wring her hand and said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady as nice as her and he asked if he could come again. She had said she would always be happy to see him.
  Joy had been standing in the road, apparently looking at something in the distance, when he came down the steps toward her, bent to the side with his heavy valise. He stopped where she was standing and confronted her directly. Mrs. Hopewell could not hear what he said but she trembled to think what Joy would say to him. She could see that after a minute Joy said something and that then the boy began to speak again, making an excited gesture with his free hand. After a minute Joy said something else at which the boy began to speak once more. Then to her amazement, Mrs. Hopewell saw the two of them walk off together, toward the gate. Joy had walked all the way to the gate with him and Mrs. Hopewell could not imagine what they had said to each other, and she had not yet dared to ask.
  Mrs. Freeman was insisting upon her attention. She had moved from the refrigerator to the heater so that Mrs. Hopewell had to turn and face her in order to seem to be listening. “Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again last night,” she said. “She had this sty.”
  “Hill,” Mrs. Hopewell said absently, “is that the one who works in the garage?”
  “Nome, he’s the one that goes to chiropractor school,” Mrs. Freeman said. “She had this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her in the other night he says, ‘Lemme get rid of that sty for you,’ and she says, ‘How?’ and he says, ‘You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of that car and I’ll show you.’ So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several times until she made him quit. This morning,” Mrs. Freeman said, “she ain’t got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty.”
  “I never heard of that before,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
  “He ast her to marry him before the Ordinary,” Mrs. Freeman went on, “and she told him she wasn’t going to be married in no office.”
  “Well, Glynese is a fine girl,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Glynese and Carramae are both fine girls.”
  “Carramae said when her and Lyman was married Lyman said it sure felt sacred to him. She said he said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars for being married by a preacher.”
  “How much would he take?” the girl asked from the stove.
  “He said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars,” Mrs. Freeman repeated.
  “Well we all have work to do,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
  “Lyman said it just felt more sacred to him,” Mrs. Freeman said. “The doctor wants Carramae to eat prunes. Says instead of medicine. Says them cramps is coming from pressure. You know where I think it is?”
  “She’ll be better in a few weeks,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
  “In the tube,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Else she wouldn’t be as sick as she is.”
  Hulga had cracked her two eggs into a saucer and was bringing them to the table along with a cup of coffee that she had filled too full. She sat down carefully and began to eat, meaning to keep Mrs. Freeman there by questions if for any reason she showed an inclination to leave. She could perceive her mother’s eye on her. The first round-about question would be about the Bible salesman and she did not wish to bring it on.   “How did he pop her neck?” she asked.
  Mrs. Freeman went into a description of how he had popped her neck. She said he owned a ’55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather marry a man with only a ’36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher. The girl asked what if he had a ’32 Plymouth and Mrs. Freeman said what Glynese had said was a ’36 Plymouth.
  Mrs. Hopewell said there were not many girls with Glynese’s common sense. She said what she admired in those girls was their common sense. She said that reminded her that they had had a nice visitor yesterday, a young man selling Bibles. “Lord,” she said, “he bored me to death but he was so sincere and genuine I couldn’t be rude to him. He was just good country people, you know,” she said, “—just the salt of the earth.”
  “I seen him walk up,” Mrs. Freeman said, “and then later – I seen him walk off,” and Hulga could feel the slight shift in her voice, the slight insinuation, that he had not walked off alone, had he? Her face remained expressionless but the color rose into her neck and she seemed to swallow it down with the next spoonful of egg. Mrs. Freeman was looking at her as if they had a secret together.
  “Well, it takes all kinds of people to make the world go ‘round,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “It’s very good we aren’t all alike.”
  “Some people are more alike than others,” Mrs. Freeman said.
  Hulga got up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was necessary, into her room and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at ten o’clock at the gate. She had thought about it half the night. She had started thinking of it as a great joke and then she had begun to see profound implications in it. She had lain in bed imagining dialogues for them that were insane on the surface but that reached below the depths that no Bible salesman would be aware of. Their conversation yesterday had been of this kind.
  He had stopped in front of her and had simply stood there. His face was bony and sweaty and bright, with a little pointed nose in the center of it, and his look was different from what it had been at the dinner table. He was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a new fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he had run a great distance to reach her. His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she could not think where she had been regarded with it before. For almost a minute he didn’t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck of breath, he whispered, “You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?”
  The girl looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up for consideration at the meeting of a philosophical association. “Yes,” she presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.
  “It must have been mighty small!” he said triumphantly and shook all over with little nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsiding finally into his gaze of complete admiration, while the girl’s expression remained exactly the same.
  “How old are you?” he asked softly.
  She waited some time before she answered. Then in a flat voice she said, “Seventeen.”
  His smiles came in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a little lake. “I see you got a wooden leg,” he said. “I think you’re real brave. I think you’re real sweet.”
  The girl stood blank and solid and silent.
  “Walk to the gate with me,” he said. “You’re a brave sweet little thing and I liked you the minute I seen you walk in the door.”
  Hulga began to move forward.
  “What’s your name?” he asked, smiling down on the top of her head.
  “Hulga,” she said.
  “Hulga,” he murmured, “Hulga. Hulga. I never heard of anybody name Hulga before. You’re shy, aren’t you, Hulga?” he asked.
  She nodded, watching his large red hand on the handle of the giant valise.
  “I like girls that wear glasses,” he said. “I think a lot. I’m not like these people that a serious thought don’t ever enter their heads. It’s because I may die.”
  “I may die too,” she said suddenly and looked up at him. His eyes were very small and brown, glittering feverishly.
  “Listen,” he said, “don’t you think some people was meant to meet on account of what all they got in common and all? Like they both think serious thoughts and all?” He shifted the valise to his other hand so that the hand nearest her was free. He caught hold of her elbow and shook it a little. “I don’t work on Saturday,” he said. “I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O’er the hills and far away. Picnics and things. Couldn’t we go on a picnic tomorrow? Say yes, Hulga,” he said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his insides about to drop out of him. He had even seemed to sway slightly toward her.
  During the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined that the two of them walked on the place until they came  to the storage barn beyond the two back fields and there, she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind. She imagined that she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful.
  She set off for the gate at exactly ten o’clock, escaping without drawing Mrs. Hopewell’s attention. She didn’t take anything to eat, forgetting that food is usually taken on a picnic. She wore a pair of slacks and a dirty white shirt, and as an afterthought, she had put some Vapex on the collar of it since she did not own any perfume. When she reached the gate no one was there.
  She looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feeling that she had been tricked, that he only meant to make her walk to the gate after the idea of him. Then suddenly he stood up, very tall, from behind a bush on the opposite embankment. Smiling, he lifted his hat which was new and wide-brimmed. He had not worn it yesterday and she wondered if he had bought it for the occasion. It was toast-colored with a red and white band around it and was slightly too large for him. He stepped from behind the bush still carrying the black valise. He had on the same suit and the same yellow socks sucked down in his shoes from walking. He crossed the highway and said, “I knew you’d come!”
  The girl wondered acidly how he had known this. She pointed to the valise and asked, “Why did you bring your Bibles?”
  He took her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. “You can never tell when you’ll need the word of God, Hulga,” he said. She had a moment in which she doubted that this was actually happening and then they began to climb the embankment. They went down into the pasture toward the woods. The boy walked lightly by her side, bouncing on his toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy today; he even swung it. They crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, “Where does your wooden leg join on?”
  She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked abashed. “I didn’t mean you no harm,” he said. “I only meant you’re so brave and all. I guess God takes care of you.”
  “No,” she said, looking forward and walking fast, “I don’t even believe in God.”
  At this he stopped and whistled. “No!” he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else.
  She walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with his hat. “That’s very unusual for a girl,” he remarked, watching her out of the corner of his eye. When they reached the edge of the wood, he put his hand on her back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily.
  The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind’s control. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant but uncertain, pushed her gently away, she turned and walked on, saying nothing as if such business, for her, were common enough.
  He came along panting at her side, trying to help her when he saw a root that she might trip over. He caught and held back the long swaying blades of thorn vine until she had passed beyond them. She led the way and he came breathing heavily behind her. Then they came out on a sunlit hillside, sloping softly into another one a little smaller. Beyond, they could see the rusted top of the old barn where the extra hay was stored.
  The hill was sprinkled with small pink weeds. “Then you ain’t saved?” he asked suddenly, stopping.
  The girl smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at him at all. “In my economy,” she said, “I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in God.”
  Nothing seemed to destroy the boy’s look of admiration. He gazed at her now as if the fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to kiss her again and she walked on before he had the chance.
  “Ain’t there somewheres we can sit down sometime?” he murmured, his voice softening toward the end of the sentence.
  “In that barn,” she said.
  They made for it rapidly as if it might slide away like a train. It was a large two-story barn, cook and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder that led into the loft and said, “It’s too bad we can’t go up there.”
  “Why can’t we?” she asked.
  “Yer leg,” he said reverently.
  The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She pulled herself expertly through the opening and then looked down at him and said, “Well, come on if your coming,” and he began to climb the ladder, awkwardly bringing the suitcase with him.
  “We won’t need the Bible,” she observed.
  “You never can tell,” he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he was a few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of straw. A wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over her. She lay back against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the front opening of the barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the loft. The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and cold blue. The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the other over her and began methodically kissing her face, making little noises like a fish. He did not remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not to interfere. When her glasses got in his way, he took them off of her and slipped them into his pocket.
  The girl at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there, kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child’s and the kisses were sticky like a child’s. He mumbled about loving her and about knowing when he first seen her that he loved her, but the mumbling was like the sleepy fretting of a child being put to sleep by his mother. Her mind, throughout this, never stopped or lost itself for a second to her feelings. “You ain’t said you loved me none,” he whispered finally, pulling back from her. “You got to say that.”
  She looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a black ridge and then down farther into what appeared to be two green swelling lakes. She didn’t realize he had taken her glasses but this landscape could not seem exceptional to her for she seldom paid any close attention to her surroundings.
  “You got to say it,” he repeated. “You got to say you love me.”
  She was always careful how she committed herself. “In a sense,” she began, “if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it’s not a word I use. I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.”
  The boy was frowning. “You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it,” he said.
  The girl looked at him almost tenderly. “You poor baby,” she murmured. “It’s just as well you don’t understand,” and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against her. “We are all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”
  The boy’s astonished eyes looked blankly through the ends of her hair. “Okay,” he almost whined, “but do you love me or don’tcher?”
  “Yes,” she said and added, “in a sense. But I must tell you something. There mustn’t be anything dishonest between us.” She lifted his head and looked him in the eye. “I am thirty years old,” she said. “I have a number of degrees.”
  The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, “Yes, yes.”
  “Okay then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”
  She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.
  He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he whispered.
  The girl uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away. “No,” she said.
  “I known it,” he muttered, sitting up. “You’re just playing me for a sucker.”
  “On no no!” she cried. “It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to see it?”
  The boy gave her a long penetrating look. “Because,” he said, “it’s what makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else.”
  She sat staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round freezing-blue eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if her heart had stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided that for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. When after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice, “All right,” it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his.
  Very gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a white sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy’s face and his voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, “Now show me how to take it off and on.”
  She took it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off himself, handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. “See!” he said with a delighted child’s face. “Now I can do it myself!”
  “Put it back on,” she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again. “Put it back on,” she said.
  “Not yet,” he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. “Leave it off for awhile. You got me instead.”
  She gave a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again. Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at. Different expressions raced back and forth over her face. Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two steel spikes, would glance behind him where the leg stood. Finally she pushed him off and said, “Put it back on me now.”
  “Wait,” he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward him and opened it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-spaced row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a goddess. He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, she read, and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. “Take a swig,” he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her, but like one mesmerized, she did not move.
  Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,” she murmured, “aren’t you just good country people?”
  The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. “Yeah,” he said, curling his lip slightly, “but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week.”
  “Give me my leg,” she said.
  He pushed it farther away with his foot. “Come on now, let’s begin to have us a good time,” he said coaxingly. “We ain’t got to know one another good yet.”
  “Give me my leg!” she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.
  “What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. “You just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!”
  Her face was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all – say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect Christian, you’re…”
  The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”
  “Give me my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box back into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had passed but his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any admiration in it. “I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” and then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.
  Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging up onions, saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward the highway. “Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. “He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple,” she said, “but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.”
  Mrs. Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she was lifting from the ground. “Some can’t be that simple,” she said. “I know I never could.”

End

You Can’t Be Any Poorer
Than Dead

1954

FRANCIS MARION TARWATER'S uncle had been dead for only half a
day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave
and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug
filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table
where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way,
with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt
on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along
about noon, and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had
never returned from the still.
  The old man had been Tarwater's great uncle, or said he was, and
they had always lived together so far as the child knew. His uncle
had said he was seventy years of age at the time he had rescued
him and undertaken to bring him up; he was eighty-four when he
died. Tarwater figured this made his own age fourteen. His uncle
had taught him figures, reading, writing, and historv beginning with
Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the
presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the
Second Coming and the Day of Judgment. Besides giving him a
good education, he had rescued him from his only other connection,
old Tarwater's nephew, a school teacher who had no child of his own
at the time and wanted this one of his dead sister's to raise according
to his own ideas. The old man was in a position to know what
his ideas were.
  He had lived for three months in the nephew's house on what he
had thought at the time was Charity but what he said he had found
out was not Charity or anything like it. All the time he had lived
there, the nephew had secretly been making a study of him. The
nephew, who had taken him in under the name of Charity, had at
the same time been creeping into his soul by the back door, asking
him questions that meant more than one thing, planting traps
around the house and watching him fall into them, and finally
coming up with a written study of him for a school teacher magazine.
The stench of his behavior had reached heaven and the Lord
Himself had rescued the old man. He had sent him a rage of vision,
had told him to fly with the orphan boy to the farthest part of the
backwoods and raise him up to justify his Redemption. The Lord
had assured him a long life and he had snatched the child from
under the school teacher's nose and taken him to live in a clearing
that he had title to for his lifetime.
  Eventually Rayber, the school teacher, had discovered where they
were and had come out to the clearing to get the boy back. He had
had to leave his car on the dirt road and walk a mile through the
woods, on a path that appeared and disappeared, before he came to
the corn patch with the gaunt two-story shack standing in the middle
of it. The old man had been fond of recalling for Tarwater the red,
sweating, bitten face of his nephew bobbing up and down through
the corn and behind it the pink, flowered hat of a welfare woman
he had brought along with him. The corn was planted up to two
feet from the porch step, and as the nephew came out of it, the old
man appeared in the door with his shotgun and said that he would
shoot any foot that touched his step, and the two stood facing each
other while the welfare woman bristled out of the corn like a peahen
upset on the nest. The old man said if it hadn't been for the welfare
woman his nephew wouldn't have taken a step, but she stood there
waiting, pushing back the wisps of dyed red hair that were plastered
on her long forehead. Both their faces were scratched and bleeding
from thorn bushes, and the old man recalled a switch of blackberry
bush hanging from the sleeve of the welfare woman's blouse. She
only had to let out her breath slowly as if she were releasing the last
patience on earth and the nephew lifted his foot and set it down on
the step and the old man shot him in the leg. The two of them had
scuttled off, making a disappearing rattle in the corn, and the woman
had screamed, "You knew he was crazy!"; but when they came out
of the corn on the other side, old Tarwater had noted from the
upstairs window where he had run that she had her arm around
him and was holding him up while he hopped into the woods; and
later he learned that he had married her though she was twice his
age and he could only possibly get one child out of her. She had
never let him come back again.
  The morning the old man died, he came down and cooked the
breakfast as usual and died before he got the first spoonful to his
mouth. The downstairs of their shack was all kitchen, large and
dark, with a wood tove in the center of it and a board table drawn
up to the stove. Sacks of feed and mash were stacked in the corners,
and scrap metal, wood shavings, old rope, ladders, and other
tinder were wherever he or Tarwater had let them fall. They had
slept in the kitchen until a wild cat sprang in the window one night
and frightened him into carrying the bed upstairs where there were
two empty rooms. He prophesied at the time that the stairsteps
would take ten years off his life. At the moment of his death, he
had sat down to his breakfast and lifted his knife in one square red
hand halfway to his mouth and then, with a look of complete
astonishment, he had lowered it until the hand rested on the edge of
the plate and tilted it up off the table.
  He was a bull-like old man with a short head set directly into his
shoulders and silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining
to get out of a net of red threads. He had on a putty-colored hat
with the brim turned up all around and over his undershirt a gray
coat that had once been black. Tarwater, sitting across the table
from him, saw red ropes appear in his face and a tremor pass over
him. It was like the tremor of a quake that had begun at his heart
and run outward and was just reaching the surface. His mouth
twisted down sharply on one side and he remained exactly as he
was, perfectly balanced, his back a good six inches from the chair
back and his stomach caught just under the edge of the table. His
eyes, dead silver, were focused on the boy across from him.
Tarwater felt the tremor transfer itself and run lightly over him.
He knew the old man was dead without touching him and he continued
to sit across the table from the corpse, finishing his breakfast
in a kind of sullen embarrassment, as if he were in the presence of
a new personality and couldn't think of anything to say. Finally he
said in a querulous tone, "Just hold your horses. I already told you
I would do it right." The voice sounded like a stranger's voice, as
if the death had changed him instead of the old man.
  He got up and took his plate out the back door and set it down
on the bottom step, and two long-legged black game roosters tore
across the yard and finished what was on it. He sat down on a long
pine box on the back porch, and his hands began absently to unravel
a length of rope, while his long cross-shaped face stared ahead
beyond the clearing over woods that ran in gray and purple folds
until they touched the light-blue fortress line of trees set against the
empty morning sky.
  The clearing was not simply off the dirt road but off the wagon
track and footpath, and the nearest neighbors, colored not white,
still had to walk through the woods, pushing plum branches out
of their way to get to it. The old man had started an acre of cotton
to the left and had run it beyond the fence line almost up to the
house on one side. The two strands of barbed wire ran through the
middle of the patch. A line of fog, hump-shaped, was creeping
toward it, ready like a white hound dog to crouch under and crawl
across the yard.
  "I'm going to move that fence," Tarwater said. "I ain't going to
have my fence in the middle of a field." The voice was loud and
still strange and disagreeable and he finished the rest of his thought
in his head: because this place is mine now whether I own it or not
because I'm here and nobody can't get me off. If any school teacher
comes here to claim the property, I'll kill him.
  He had on a faded pair of overalls and a gray hat pulled down
over his ears like a cap. He followed his uncle's custom of never
taking off his hat except in bed. He had always followed his uncle's
customs up to this date but: if I want to move that fence before I
bury him, there wouldn't be a soul to hinder me, he thought; no
voice will be lifted.
  "Bury him first and get it over with," the loud stranger's disagreeable
voice said, and he got up and went to look for the shovel.
  The pine box he had been sitting on was his uncle's coffin but he
didn't intend to use it. The old man was too heavy for a thin boy
to hoist over the side of a box, and though old Tarwater had built it
himself a few years before, he had said that if it wasn't feasible to
get him into it when the time came, then just to put him in the hole
as he was, only to be sure the hole was deep. He wanted it ten foot,
he said, not just eight. He had worked on the box a long time, and
when he finished it he had scratched on the top MASON TARWATER,
WITH GOD, and had climbed into it where it stood on
the back porch and had lain there for some time, nothing showing
but his stomach which rose over the top like overleavened bread.
The boy had stood at the side of the box, studying him. "This is the
end of us all," the old man said with satisfaction, his gravel voice
hearty in the coffin.
  "It's too much of you for the box," Tarwater ,aid. "I'll have to sit
on the lid or wait until you rot a little."
  "Don't wait," old Tarwater had said. "Listen. If it ain't feasible to
use the box when the time comes, if you can't lift it or whatever, just
get me in the hole, but I want it deep. I want it ten foot, not just
eight-ten. You can roll me to it if nothing else. I'll roll. Get two
boards and set them down the steps and start me rolling and dig
where I stop and don't let me roll over into it until it's deep enough.
Prop me with some bricks so I won't roll into it and don't let the
dogs nudge me over the edge before it's finished. You better pen up
the dogs," he said.
  "What if you die in bed?" the boy asked. "How'm I going to get
you down the stairs?"
  "I ain't going to die in bed," the old man said. "As soon as I hear
the summons, I'm going to run downstairs. I’ll get as close to the
door as I can. If I should get stuck up there, you'll have to roll me
down the stairs, that's all."
  "My Lord," the child said.
  The old man sat up in the box and brought his fist down on the
edge of it. "Listen," he said. "I never asked much of you. I taken
you and raised you and saved you from that ass in town and now
all I'm asking in return is when I die to get me in the ground where
the dead belong and set up a cross over me to show I'm there. That's
all in the world I'm asking you to do."
  "I'll be doing good if I get you in the ground," Tarwater said.
  "I'll be too wore out set up any cross. I ain't bothering with trifles."
  "Trifles!" his uncle hissed. "You'll learn what a trifle is on the day
those crosses are gathered! Burying the dead right may be the only
honor you ever do yourself. I brought you out here to raise you a
Christian," he hollered, "and I'm damned if you won't be one!"
"If I don't have the strength to do it," the child said, watching him
with a careful detachment, "I'll notify my uncle in town and he can
come out and take care of you. The school teacher," he drawled, observing that the pockmarks in his uncle's face had already turned
pale against the purple, "he'll 'tend to you."
  The threads that restrained the old man's eyes thickened. He
gripped both sides of the coffin and pushed forward as if he were
going to drive it off the porch. "He'd burn me," he said hoarsely.
"He'd have me cremated in an oven and scatter my ashes. 'Uncle,'
he said to me, 'you're a type that's almost extinct!' He'd be willing
to pay the undertaker to burn me to be able to scatter my ashes," he
said. "He don't believe in the Resurrection. He don't believe in the
Last Day. He don't believe in ... "
  "The dead don't bother with particulars," the boy interrupted.
  The old man grabbed the front of his overalls and pulled him up
against the side of the box so that their faces were not two inches
apart. "The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead
there are," he said and then, as if he had conceived the answer for
all insolence, he said, "There's a million times more dead than living
and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are
alive!" and he released him with a laugh.
  The boy had shown only by a slight quiver in the eyes that he was
shaken by this, and after a minute he had said, 'The school teacher
is my uncle. The only blood connection I'll have and a living man
and if I wanted to go to him, I'd go, now."
  The old man looked at him silently for what seemed a full minute.
Then he slammed his hands on the sides of the box and roared,
"Whom the plague beckons, to the plague! Whom the sword, to the
sword! Whom fire, to fire!" and the child trembled visibly.
  A living man, he thought as he went to get the shovel, but he
better not come out here and try to get me off this property because
I'll kill him. Go to him and be dammed, his uncle had said. I've
saved you from him this far and if you go to him the minute I'm in
the ground, there's nothing I can do about it.
  The shovel lay against the side of the hen house. "I'll never set my
foot in the city again," Tarwater said. "I'll never go to him. Him nor
nobody else will ever get me off this place." He decided to dig the
grave under the fig tree because the old man would be good for the
figs. The ground was sandy on top and solid brick underneath and
the shovel made a clanging sound when he struck it in the sand. Two
hundred pounds of dead mountain to bury, he thought, and stood
with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, studying the white sky
through the leaves of the tree. It would take all day to get a hole big
enough out of this rock and the school teacher would burn him in a
minute.
  Tarwater had never seen the school teacher but he had seen his
child, a boy who resembled old Tarwater himself. The old man had
been so shocked by the likeness that the time he and Tarwater had
gone there, he had only stood in the door, staring at the little boy
and rolling his tongue around outside his mouth like an old idiot.
That had been the first and only time the old man had seen the boy.
"Three months there," he would say. "It shames me. Betrayed for
three months in the house of my own kin, and if when I'm dead you
want to turn me over to my betrayer and see my body burned, go
ahead. Go ahead, boy!" he had shouted, sitting up splotch-faced in
his box. "Go ahead and let him burn me but watch out for the crab
that begins to grip your neck after that!" and he had clawed his hand
in the air to show Tarwater his grip. "I been leavened by the yeast
he don't believe in," he said, "and I won't be burned. And when I'm
gone you'll be better off in these woods by yourself with just as much
light as that dwarf sun wants to let in than you would be in the city
with him!"
  The white fog had eased through the yard and disappeared into
the next bottom and now the air was clear and blank. "The dead are
poor," Tarwater said in the voice of the stranger. "You can't be any
poorer than dead. He'll have to take what he gets." Nobody to bother
me, he thought. Ever. No hand uplifted to hinder me from anything.
A sand-colored hound beat its tail on the ground nearby and a few
black chickens scratched in the raw clay he was turning up. The sun
had slipped over the blue line of trees and, circled by a haze of
yellow, was moving slowly across the sky. "Now I can do anything I
want to," he said, softening the stranger's voice so that he could
stand it. Could kill off all those chickens if I had a mind to, he
thought, watching the worthless black game bantams that his uncle
had been fond of keeping.
  "He favored a lot of foolishness," the stranger said. "The truth is
he was childish. Why, that school teacher never did him any harm.
You take, all he did was to watch him and write down what he seen
and heard and put it in a paper for school teachers to read. Now
what was wrong in that? Why nothing. Who cares what a school
teacher reads? And the old fool acted like he had been killed in his
very soul. Well, he wasn't so near dead then as he thought he was.
Lived on fifteen years and raised up a boy to bury him, suitable to
his own taste."
  As Tarwater slashed at the ground with the shovel, the stranger's
voice took on a kind of restrained fury and he kept repeating, "You
got to bury him whole and completely by hand and that school
teacher would burn him in a minute." After he had dug for an hour
or more, the grave was only a foot deep, not as deep yet as the corpse.
He sat down on the edge of it for a while. The sun was like a furious
white blister in the sky. "The dead are a heap more trouble than the
living," the stranger said. "That school teacher wouldn't consider for
a minute that on the last day all the bodies marked by crosses will be
gathered. In the rest of the world they do things different than what
you been taught."
  "I been there oncet," Tarwater muttered. "Nobody has to tell me."
His uncle two or three years before had gone there to call on the
lawyers to try and get the property unentailed so that it would skip
the school teacher and go to Tarwater. Tarwater had sat at the
lawyer's twelfth-story window and looked down into the pit of the
city street while his uncle transacted the business. On the way from
the railroad station he had walked tall in the mass of moving metal
and concrete speckled with the very small eyes of people. The glitter
of his own eyes was shaded under the stiff rootlike brim of a new
gray hat balanced perfectly straight on his buttressing ears. Before
coming he had read facts in the almanac and he knew that there
were 60,000 people here who were seeing him for the first time. He
wanted to stop and shake hands with each of them and say his name
was Francis M. Tarwater and that he was here only for the day to
accompany his uncle on business at a lawyer's. His head jerked backwards after each passing figure until they began to pass too thickly
and he observed that their eyes didn't grab at you like the eyes of
country people. Several of them bumped into him and this contact
that should have made an acquaintance for life made nothing because
the hulks shoved on with ducked heads and muttered apologies
that he would have accepted if they had waited. At the lawyer's window,
he had knelt down and let his face hang out upside-down over
the floating speckled street moving like a river of tin below and had
watched the glints on it from the sun which drifted pale in a pale
sky. You have to do something particular here to make them look
at you, he thought. They ain't going to look at you just because God
made you. When I come for good, he said to himself, I'll do something
to make every eye stick on me for what I clone; and leaning
forward, he saw his hat drop down gently, lost and casual, dallied
slightly by the breeze on its way to be smashed in the traffic below.
He clutched at his bare head and fell back inside the room.
His uncle was in argument with the lawyer, hath hitting the desk
that separated them, bending their knees and hitting their fists at
the same time. The lawyer, a tall dome-headed man with an eagle's
nose, kept repeating in a restrained shriek, "But] didn't make the
will. I didn't make the law," and his uncle's voice grated, "I can't
help it. My daddy wouldn't have wanted it this way. It has to skip
him. My daddy wouldn't have seen a fool inherit his property.
That's not how he intended it."
  "My hat is gone," Tarwater said.
  The lawyer threw himself backwards into his chair and screaked
it toward Tarwater and saw him without interest from pale-blue
eyes and screaked it forward again and said to his uncle, "There's
nothing I can do. You're wasting your time and mine. You might
as well resign yourself to this will."
  "Listen," old Tarwater said, "at one time I thought I was finished,
old and sick and about to die and no money, nothing, and I accepted
his hospitality because he was my closest blood connection and
you could have called it his duty to take me, only I thought it was
Charity, I thought ... "
  "I can't help what you thought or did or what your connection
thought or did," the lawyer said and closed his eyes.
  "My hat fell," Tarwater said.
  "I'm only a lawyer," the lawyer said, letting his glance rove over
the lines of clay-colored books of law that fortressed his office.
  "A car is liable to have run over it by now."
  "Listen," his uncle said, "all the time he was studying me for a
paper he was writing. Only had me there to study me for this paper.
Taking secret tests on me, his own kin, looking into my soul like a
Peeping Tom, and then says to me, 'Uncle, you're a type that's almost
extinct!' Almost extinct!" the old man piped, barely able to force a
thread of sound from his throat. "You see how extinct I am!"
The lawyer shut his eyes and smiled into one cheek.
  "Other lawyers," the old man growled, and they had left and
visited three more without stopping, and Tarwater had counted
eleven men who might have had on his hat or might not. Finally
when they came out of the fourth lawyer's office, they sat down on
the window ledge of a bank building and his uncle felt in his pocket
for some biscuits he had brought and handed one to Tarwater. The
old man unbuttoned his coat and allowed his stomach to ease forward
and rest on his lap while he ate. His face worked wrathfully;
the skin between the pockmarks grew pink and then purple and
then white and the pockmarks appeared to jump from one spot to
another. Tarwater was very pale and his eyes glittered with a peculiar
hollow depth. He had an old work handkerchief tied around his
head, knotted at the four corners. He didn't observe the passing
people who observed him now. "Thank God, we're finished here and
can go home," he muttered.
  "We ain't finished here," the old man said and got up abruptly and
started down the street.
  "My Jesus," the boy hissed, jumping to catch up with him. "Can't
we sit down for one minute? Ain't you got any sense? They all tell
you the same thing. It's only one law and it's nothing you can do
about it. I got sense enough to get that; why ain't you? What's the
matter with you?"
  The old man strode on with his head thrust forward as if he were
smelling out an enemy.
  "Where we going?" Tarwater asked after they had walked out of
the business streets and were passing between rows of gray bulbous
houses with sooty porches that overhung the sidewalks. "Listen," he
said, hitting his uncle's hip, "I never ast to come."
  "You would have asked to come soon enough," the old man muttered.
  "Get your fill now."
  "I never ast for no fill. I never ast to come at all. I'm here before
  I knew this here was here."
  "Just remember," the old man said, "just remember that I told
you to remember when you ast to come that you never liked it when
you were here," and they kept on going, crossing one length of sidewalk
after another, row after row of overhanging houses with halfopen
doors that let a little dried light fall on the stained passageways
inside. Finally they came out into another section where the houses
were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass
in front of it like a dog gripping a stolen steak. After a few blocks,
Tarwater dropped down on the sidewalk and said, "I ain't going a
step further."
  "I don't even know where I'm going and I ain't going no further!"
he shouted at his uncle's heavy figure which didn't stop or look back.
In a second he jumped up and followed him again, thinking: If
anything happened to him, I would be lost here.
  The old man kept straining forward as if his blood scent were
leading him closer and closer to the place where his enemy was
hiding. He suddenly turned up the short walk of a pale-yellow
house and moved rigidly to the white door, his heavy shoulders
hunched as if he were going to crash through like a bulldozer. He
struck the wood with his fist, ignoring a polished brass knocker. By
the time Tarwater came up behind him, the door had opened and a
small pink-faced fat boy stood in it. He was a white-haired child
and wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had pale-silver eyes like the
old man's. The two stood staring at each other, old Tarwater with
his fist raised and his mouth open and his tongue lolling idiotically
from side to side. For a second the little fat boy seemed shocked still
with astonishment. Then he guffawed. He raised his fist and opened
his mouth and let his tongue roll out as far as it would go. The old
man's eyes seemed about to strain out of their sockets.
  "Tell your father," he roared, "that I'm not extinct!"
  The little boy shook as if a blast had hit him and pushed the door
almost shut, hiding himself all but one spectacled eye. The old man
grabbed Tarwater by the shoulder and swung him around and
pushed him down the path away from the place.
  He had never been back there again, never seen his cousin again,
never seen the school teacher at all, and he hoped to God, he told
the stranger digging the grave along with him now, that he would
never see him, though he had nothing against him and he would
dislike to kill him, but if he came out here, messing with what was
none of his business except by law, then he would be obliged to.
  "Listen," the stranger said, "what would he want to come out
here for--where there's nothing?"
  Tarwater began to dig again and didn't answer. He didn't search
out the stranger's face, but he knew by now it was sharp and friendly
and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed hat. He had lost
his dislike for the sound of the voice. Only, every now and then it
sounded like a stranger's voice to him. He began to feel that he was
only just now meeting himself, as if, as long as his uncle had lived,
he had been deprived of his own acquaintance.
  "I ain't denying the old man was a good one," his new friend said,
"but like you said: you can't be an y poorer than dead. They have to
take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his
body is not going to feel the pinch of fire or anything else."
  "It was the last day he was thinking of," Tarwater said.
  "Well now," the stranger said, "don't you think any cross you set
up in the year 1954 or 5 or 6 would be rotted out by the year the
Day of Judgment comes in? Rotted to as much dust as his ashes if
you reduced him to ashes? And lemme ast you this: what's God
going to do with sailors drowned at sea that the fish have et and the
fish that et them et by other fish and they et by yet others? And
what about people that get burned up naturally in house fires?
Burnt up one way or another or lost in machines until they're a
pulp? And all these sojers blasted to nothing? What about all these
naturally left without a piece to fit a piece?"
  "1f I burnt him," Tarwater said, "it wouldn't be natural, it would
be deliberate."
  "Oh, I see," the stranger said. "It ain't the Day of Judgment for
him you're worried about, it's the Day of Judgement for you."
  "That's my bidnis," Tarwater said.
  "I ain't buttin into your bidnis," the stranger said. "It don't mean a
thing to me. You're left by yourself in this empty place. Forever by
yourself in the empty place with just as much light as that dwarf
sun wants to let in. You don't mean a thing to a soul as far as I can
see."
  "Redeemed," Tarwater muttered.
  "Do you smoke?" the stranger asked.
  "Smoke if I want to and don't if I don't," Tarwater said. "Bury
if need be and don't if don't."
  "Go take a look at him and see if he's fell off his chair," his friend
suggested.
  Tarwater let the shovel drop in the grave and returned to the
house. He opened the front door a crack and put his face to it. His
uncle glared slightly to the side of him, like a judge intent upon
some terrible evidence. The child shut the door quickly and went
back to the grave. He was cold in spite of the sweat that stuck his
shirt to his back.
  The sun was directly overhead, apparently dead still, holding its
breath waiting out the noontime. The grave was about two feet deep.
"Ten foot now, remember," the stranger said and laughed. "Old men
are selfish. You got to expect the least from them. The least from
everybody," he added, and let out a flat sigh that was like a gust of
sand raised and dropped suddenly by the wind.
  Tarwater looked up and saw two figures cutting across the field, a
colored man and woman, each dangling an empty vinegar jug by a
finger. The woman, tall and Indian-like, had on a green sunhat. She
stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the
yard toward the grave; the man held the wire down and swung his
leg over and followed at her elbow. They kept their eyes on the
hole and stopped at the edge of it, looking down into the raw ground
with shocked satisfied expressions. The man, Buford, had a crinkled,
burnt-rag face, darker than his hat. "Old man passed," he said.
  The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail,
piercing and formal. She set her jug down on the' ground and crossed
her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again.
  "Tell her to shut up that," Tarwater said, "I'm in charge here now
and I don't want no nigger-mourning."
  "I seen his spirit for two nights," she said, "Seen him two nights
and he was unrested."
  "He ain't been dead hut since this morning,' Tarwater said. "If
you all want your jugs filled, give them to me and dig while I'm
gone."
  "He'd been perdicting his passing for many years," Buford said.
"She seen him in her dream several nights and he wasn't rested. I
known him well. I known him very well indeed."
  "Poor sweet sugar boy," the woman said to Tarwater, "what you
going to do here now by yourself in this lonesome place?"
  "Mind by bidnis," the boy growled, jerking the jug out of her
hand, and started off so quick lv that he almost fell. He stalked across
the back field toward the rim of trees that surrounded the clearmg.
  The birds had gone into the deep woods to escape the noon sun
and one thrush, hidden some distance ahead of him, called the same
four notes again and again, stopping each time after them to make a
silence. Tarwater began to waslk faster, then he began to lope, and
in a second he was running like something hunted, sliding down
slopes waxed with pine needles and grasping the limbs of trees to
pull himself, panting, up the slippery inclines. He crashed through a
wall of honeysuckle and leapt across a sandy stream bed that was
almost dry now and fell down against the high clay bank that
formed the back wall of a cove where the old man had kept his extra
liquor hidden. He hid it in a hollow of the balk, covered with a
large stone. Tarwater began to fight at the stone to pull it away,
while the stranger stood over his shoulder, panting, "He was crazy!
He was crazy! That's the long and short of it. He was crazy!" Tarwater
got the stone away and pulled out a black jug and sat down
against the bank with it. "Crazy!" the stranger hissed, collapsing by
his side. The sun appeared, edging its way secretly behind the tops of
the trees that rose over the hiding place.
  "A man, seventy years of age, to bring a baby out into the backwoods
to raise him right! Suppose he had died when you were four
years old? Could you have toted mash to the still then and supported
yourself? I never heard of no four-year-old running a still.
  "Never did I hear of that," he continued. "You weren't anything to
him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when
the time came, and now that he's dead, he's shut of you but you got
two hundred pounds of him to carry below the face of the earth.
And don't think he wouldn't heat up like a coal stove to see you
take a drop of liquor," he added. "He might say it would hurt you
but what he would mean was you might get so much you wouldn't
be in no fit condition to bury him. He said he brought you out here
to raise you according to principle and that was the principle: that
you should be fit when the time came to bury him so he would
have a cross to mark where he was at.
  "Well," he said in a softer tone, when the boy had taken a long
swallow from the black jug, "a little won't interfere. Moderation
never hurt no one."
  A burning arm slid down Tarwater's throat as if the devil were
already reaching inside him to finger his soul. He squinted at the
angry sun creeping behind the topmost fringe of the trees.
  "Take it easy," his friend said. "Do you remember them nigger
gospel singers you saw one time, all drunk, all singing, all dancing
around that black Ford automobile? Jesus, they wouldn't have been
near so glad they were redeemed if they hadn't had that liquor in
them. I wouldn't pay too much attention to my Redemption if I was
you," he said. "Some people take everything too hard."
  Tarwater drank more slowly. He had been drunk only one time
before and that time his uncle had beat him with a board for it,
saying liquor would dissolve a child's gut; another of his lies because
his gut had not dissolved.
  "It should be clear to you," his kind friend said, "how all your
life you been tricked by that old man. You could have been a city
slicker for the last ten years. Instead, you been deprived of any company
but his, you been living in a two-story barn in the middle of
this earth's bald patch, following behind a mule and plow since you
were seven. And how do you know the education he give you is
true to the fact? Maybe he taught you a system of figures nobody
else uses? How do you know that two added to two makes four?
Four added to four makes eight? Maybe other people don't use that
system. How do you know if there was an Adam or if Jesus eased
your situation any when He redeemed you? Or how you know if
He actually done it? Nothing but that old man's word and it ought
to be obvious to you by now that he was crazy. And as for Judgment
Day," the stranger said, "every day is Judgment Day.
  "Ain't you old enough to have learnt that yet for yourself? Don't
everything you do, everything you have ever done, work itself out
right or wrong before your eye and usually before the sun has set?
Have you ever got by with anything) No you ain't nor ever thought
you would," he said. "You might as well drink all that liquor since
you've already drunk so much. Once you pass the moderation mark
you've passed it, and that gyration you feel working down from the
top of your brain," he said, "that's the Hand of God laying a blessing
on you. He has given you your release. That old man was the stone
before your door and the Lord has rolled it away. He ain't rolled
it quite far enough yet, of course. You got to finish up yourself but
He's done the main part. Praise Him."
  Tarwater had ceased to have any feeling in his legs. He dozed
for a while, his head hanging to the side and his mouth open and the
liquor trickling slowly down the side of his overalls where the jug
had overturned in his lap. Eventually there was just a drip at the
neck of the bottle, forming and filling and dropping, silent and
measured and sun-colored. The bright, even sky began to fade,
coarsening with clouds until every shadow had gone in. He woke
with a wrench forward, his eyes focusing and unfocusing on something
that looked like burnt rag hanging close to his face.
  Buford said, "This ain't no way for you to act. Old man don't
deserve this. There's no rest until the dead is buried." He was
squatting on his heels, one hand gripped around Tarwater's arm. "I
gone yonder to the door and seen him sitting there at the table, not
even laid out on a cooling board. He ought to be laid out and have
some salt on his bosom if you mean to keep him overnight."
The boy's lids pinched together to hold the image steady and in
a second he made out the two small red blistered eyes. "He deserves
to lie in a grave that fits him," Buford said. "He was deep in this
life, he was deep in Jesus' misery."
  "Nigger," the child said, working his strange swollen tongue,
"take your hand off me."
  Buford lifted his hand. "He needs to be rested," he said.
"He'll be rested all right when I get through with him," Tarwater
said vaguely. "Go on and lea' me to my bidnis."
  "Nobody going to bother you," Buford said, standing up. He
waited a minute, bent, looking down at the limp figure sprawled
against the bank. The boy's head was tilted backwards over a root
that jutted out of the clay wall. His mouth hung open, and his hat,
turned up in front, cut a straight line across his forehead, just over
his half-open eyes. His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like
the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them held an ancient look
as if the child's skeleton beneath were as old as the world. "Nobody
going to bother you," the Negro muttered, pushing through the
wall of honeysuckle without looking back. "That going to be your
trouble."
  Tarwater closed his eyes again.
  Some night bird complaining close by woke him up. It was not
a screeching noise, only an intermittent hump-hump as if the bird
had to recall his grievance each time before he repeated it. Clouds
were moving convulsively across a black sky and there was a pink
unsteady moon that appeared to be jerked up a foot or so and then
dropped and jerked up again. This was because as he observed in
an instant, the sky was lowering, coming down fast to smother him.
The bird screeched and flew off in time and Tarwater lurched into
the middle of the stream bed and crouched on h! s hands and knees.
The moon was reflected like pale fire in the few spots of water in the
sand. He sprang at the wall of honeysuckle and began to tear through
it, confusing the sweet familiar odor with the weight coming down
on him. When he stood up on the other side, the black ground swung
slowly and threw him down again. A flare of pink 1ightning lit the
woods and he saw the black shapes of trees pierce out of the ground
all around him. The night bird began to hump again from a thicket
where he had settled.
  Tarwater got up and started moving in the direction of the
clearing, feeling his way from tree to tree, the trunks very cold and
dry to his touch. There was distant thunder and a continuous flicker
of pale lightning firing one section of woods and then another.
Finally he saw the shack, standing gaunt-black and tall in the middle
of the clearing, with the pink moon trembling directly over it. His
eyes glittered like open pits of light as he moved across the sand,
dragging his crushed shadow behind him. He didn't turn his head
to that side of the yard where he had started the grave.
  He stopped at the far back corner of the house and squatted down
on the ground and looked underneath at the litter there, chicken
crates and barrels and old rags and boxes. He had four matches in
his pocket. He crawled under and began to set small fires, building
one from another and working his way out at the front porch,
leaving the fire behind him eating greedily at the dry tinder and the
floor boards of the house. He crossed the front side of the clearing
and went under the barbed-wire fence and through the rutted field
without looking back until he reached the edge of the opposite
woods. Then he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the pink
moon had dropped through the roof of the shack and was bursting
and he began to run, forced on through the woods by two bulging
silver eyes that grew in immense astonishment in the center of the
fire behind him.
  Toward midnight he came out on the highway and caught a
ride with a salesman who was a manufacturer's representative selling
copper flues throughout the Southeast and who gave the silent boy
what he said was the best advice he could give any young fellow
setting out to find himself a place in the world. While they sped
forward on the black untwisting highway watched on either side
by a dark wall of trees, the salesman said that it had been his personal
experience that you couldn't sell a copper flue to a man you didn't
love. He was a thin fellow with a narrow gorgelike face that appeared
to have been worn down to the sharpest possible depressions.
He wore a broad-brimmed stiff gray hat of the kind used by business
men who would like to look like cowboys. He said love was the
only policy that worked ninety-five per cent of the time. He said
when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's
wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that
he kept the names of his customer's families in and what was wrong
with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the
book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he
went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched
her name out and wrote dead there "And I say thank God when
they're dead," the salesman said, "that's one less to remember."
  "You don't owe the dead anything,' Tarwater said in a loud
voice, speaking for almost the first time since he had got in the car.
  "Nor they you," said the stranger. "And that's the way it ought
to be in this world--nobody owing nobody nothing."
  "Look," Tarwater said suddenly, sitting forward, his face close
to the windshield, "we're headed in the wrong direction. We're
going back where we came from. There's the fire again. There's
the fire we left." Ahead of them in the sky there was a faint glow,
steady and not made by lightning. "That's the same fire we come
from!" the boy said in a high wild voice.
  "Boy, you must be nuts," the salesman said. "That's the city
we're coming to. That's the glow from the city lights. I reckon
this is your first trip anywhere."
  You're turned around," the child said. "It's the same fire."
  The stranger twisted his rutted face sharply. "I've never been
turned around in my life," he said. "And I didn't come from any
fire. I come from Mobile. And I know where I'm going. What's the
matter with you?"
  Tarwater sat staring at the glow in front of him. "I was asleep,"
he muttered. "I'm just now waking up."
  "Well you should have been listening to me," the salesman said.
"I been telling you things you ought to know."

End

Greenleaf 

1955

MRS. MAY'S bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened?--like some patient god come down to woo her--for a stir inside the room. The window was dark and the sound of her breathing too light to be carried outside. Clouds crossing the moon blackened him and in the dark he began to tear at the hedge. Presently they passed and he appeared again in the same spot, chewing steadily, with a hedge-wreath that he had ripped loose for himself caught in the tips of his horns. When the moon drifted into retirement again, there was nothing to mark his place but the sound of steady chewing. Then abruptly a pink glow filled the window. Bars of light slid across him as the venetian blind was slit. He took a step backward and lowered his head as if to show the wreath across his horns. 
  For almost a minute there was no sound from inside, then as he raised his crowned head again, a woman's voice, guttural as if addressed to a dog, said, "Get away from here, Sir!" and in a second muttered, "Some nigger's scrub bull." 
  The animal pawed the ground and Mrs. May, standing bent forward behind the blind, closed it quickly lest the light make him charge into the shrubbery. For a second she waited, still bent forward, her nightgown hanging loosely from her narrow shoulders. Green rubber curlers sprouted neatly over her forehead and her face beneath them was smooth as concrete with an egg-white paste that drew the wrinkles out while she slept. 
  She had been conscious in her sleep of a steady rhythmic chewing as if something were eating one wall of the house. She had been aware that whatever it was had been eating  as long as she had had the place and had eaten everything from the beginning of her fence line up to the house and now was eating the house and calmly with the same steady rhythm would continue through the house, eating her and the boys, and then on, eating everything but the Greenleafs, on and on, eating everything until nothing was left but the Greenleafs on a little island all their own in the middle of what had been her place. When the munching reached her elbow, she jumped up and found herself, fully awake, standing in the middle of her room. She identified the sound at once: a cow was tearing at the shrubbery under her window. Mr. Greenleaf had left the lane gate open and she didn't doubt that the entire herd was on her lawn. She turned on the dim pink table lamp and then went to the window and slit the blind. The bull, gaunt and long-legged, was standing about four feet from her, chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor. 
  For fifteen years, she thought as she squinted at him fiercely, she had been having shiftless people's hogs root up her oats, their mules wallow on her lawn, their scrub bulls breed her cows. If this one was not put up now, he would be over the fence, ruining her herd before morning--and Mr. Greenleaf was soundly sleeping a half mile down the road in the tenant house. There was no way to get him unless she dressed and got in her car and rode down there and woke him up. He would come but his expression, his whole figure, his every pause, would say: "Hit looks to me like one or both of them boys would not make their maw ride out in the middle of the night thisaway. If hit was my boys, they would have got thet bull up theirself." 
  The bull lowered his head and shook it and the wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown. She had closed the blind then; in a few seconds she heard him move off heavily. 
  Mr. Greenleaf would say, "If hit was my boys they would never have allowed their maw to go after hired help in the middle of the night. They would have did it theirself." 
  Weighing it, she decided not to bother Mr. Greenleaf. She returned to bed thinking that if the Greenleaf boys had risen in the world it was because she had given their father employment when no one else would have him. She had had Mr. Greenleaf fifteen years but no one else would have had him five minutes. Just the way he approached an object was enough to tell anybody with eyes what kind of a worker he was. He walked with a high-shouldered creep and he never appeared to come directly forward. He walked on the perimeter of some invisible circle and if you wanted to look him in the face, you had to move and get in front of him. She had not fired him because she had always doubted she could do better. He was too shiftless to go out and look for another job; he didn't have the  initiative to steal, and after she had told him three or four times to do a thing, he did it; but he never told her about a sick cow until it was too late to call the veterinarian and if her barn had caught on fire, he would have called his wife to see the flames before he began to put them out. And of the wife, she didn't even like to think. Beside the wife, Mr. Greenleaf was an aristocrat.
  If it had been my boys," he would have said, "they would have cut off their right arm before they would have allowed their maw to . . . ." 
  "If your boys had any pride, Mr. Greenleaf," she would like to say to him some day, "there are many things that they would not allow their mother to do." 

  The next morning as soon as Mr. Greenleaf came to the back door, she told him there was a stray bull on the place and that she wanted him penned up at once. 
  "Done already been here three days," he said, addressing his right foot which he held forward, turned slightly as if he were trying to look at the sole. He was standing at the bottom of the three back steps while she leaned out the kitchen door, a small woman with pale near-sighted eyes and grey hair that rose on top like the crest of some disturbed bird. 
  "Three days!" she said in the restrained screech that had become habitual with her. 
  Mr. Greenleaf, looking into the distance over the near pasture, removed a package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and let one fall into his hand. He put the package back and stood for a while looking at the cigarette. "I put him in the bull pen but he torn out of there," he said presently. "I didn't see him none after that." He bent over the cigarette and lit it and then turned his head briefly in her direction. The upper part of his face sloped gradually into the lower which was long and narrow, shaped like a rough chalice. He had deep-set fox-colored eyes shadowed under a grey felt hat that he wore slanted forward following the line of his nose. His build was insignificant. 
  "Mr. Greenleaf," she said, "get that bull up this morning before you do anything else. You know he'll ruin the breeding schedule. Get him up and keep him up and the next time there's a stray bull on this place, tell me at once. Do you understand?" 
  "Where you want him put at?" Mr. Greenleaf asked. 
  "I don't care where you put him," she said. "You are supposed to have some sense. Put him where he can't get out. Whose bull is he?" 
  For a moment Mr. Greenleaf seemed to hesitate between silence and speech. He studied the air to the left of him. "He must be somebody's bull," he said after a while. 
  "Yes, he must!" she said and shut the door with a precise little slam. 
  She went into the dining room where the two boys were eating breakfast and sat down on the edge of her chair at the head of the table. She never ate breakfast but she sat with them to see that they had what they wanted. "Honestly!" she said, and began to tell about the bull, aping Mr. Greenleaf saying, "It must be somebody's bull." 
  Wesley continued to read the newspaper folded beside his plate but Scofield interrupted his eating from time to time to look at her and laugh. The two boys never had the same reaction to anything. They were as different, she said, as night and day. The only thing they did have in common was that neither of them cared what happened on the place. Scofield was a business type and Wesley was an intellectual. 
  Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought that this was what had caused him to be an intellectual. Scofield, who had never had a day's sickness in his life, was an insurance salesman. She would not have minded his selling insurance if he had sold a nicer kind but he sold the kind that only Negroes buy. He was what Negroes call a "policy man." He said there was more money in nigger-insurance than any other kind, and before company, he was very loud about it. He would shout, "Mamma don't like to hear me say it but I'm the best nigger-insurance salesman in this county!" 
  Scofield was thirty-six and he had a broad pleasant smiling face but he was not married. "Yes," Mrs. May would say, "and if you sold decent insurance, some nice girl would be willing to marry you. What nice girl wants to marry a nigger-insurance man? You'll wake up some day and it'll be too late." 
  And at this Scofield would yodel and say, "Why Mamma, I'm not going to marry until you're dead and gone and then I'm going to marry me some nice fat farm girl that can take over this place!" And once he had added, "--some nice lady like Mrs. Greenleaf." When he had said this, Mrs. May had risen from her chair, her back stiff as a rake handle, and had gone to her room. There she had sat down on the edge of her bed for some time with her small face drawn. Finally she had whispered, "I work and slave, I struggle and sweat to keep this place for them and soon as I'm dead, they'll marry trash and bring it in here and ruin everything. They'll marry trash and ruin everything I've done," and she had made up her mind at that moment to change her will. The next day she had gone to her lawyer and had had the property entailed so that if they married, they could not leave it to their wives.
  The idea that one of them might marry a woman even remotely like Mrs. Greenleaf was enough to make her ill. She had put up with Mr. Greenleaf for fifteen years, but the only way she had endured his wife had been by keeping entirely out of her sight. Mrs. Greenleaf was large and loose. The yard around her house looked like a dump and her five girls were always filthy; even the youngest one dipped snuff. Instead of making a garden or washing their clothes, her preoccupation was what she called "prayer healing." 
  Every day she cut all the morbid stories out of the newspaper--the accounts of women who had been raped and criminals who had escaped and children who had been burned and of train wrecks and plane crashes and the divorces of movie stars. She took these to the woods and dug a hole and buried them and then she fell on the ground over  them and mumbled and groaned for an hour or so, moving her huge arms back and forth under her and out again and finally just lying down flat and, Mrs. May suspected, going to sleep in the dirt. 
  She had not found out about this until the Greenleafs had been with her a few months. One morning she had been out to inspect a field that she had wanted planted in rye but that had come up in clover because Mr. Greenleaf had used the wrong seeds in the grain drill. She was returning through a wooded path that separated two pastures, muttering to herself and hitting the ground methodically with a long stick she carried in case she saw a snake. "Mr. Greenleaf," she was saying in a low voice, "I cannot afford to pay for your mistakes. I am a poor woman and this place is all I have. I have two boys to educate. I cannot . . . " 
  Out of nowhere a guttural agonized voice groaned, "Jesus! Jesus!" In a second it came again with a terrible urgency. "Jesus! Jesus!" 
  Mrs. May stopped still, one hand lifted to her throat. The sound was so piercing that she felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out of the ground and was charging toward her. Her second thought was more reasonable: somebody had been hurt on the place and would sue her for everything she had. She had no insurance. She rushed forward and turning a bend in the path, she saw Mrs. Greenleaf sprawled on her hands and knees off the side of the road, her head down. 
  "Mrs. Greenleaf!" she shrilled, "what's happened?" 
  Mrs. Greenleaf raised her head. Her face was a patchwork of dirt and tears and her small eyes, the color of two field peas, were red-rimmed and swollen, but her expression was as composed as a bulldog's. She swayed back and forth on her hands and knees and groaned. "Jesus, Jesus." 
  Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true. "What is the matter with you?" she asked sharply. 
  "You broken my healing," Mrs. Greenleaf said, waving her aside. "I can't talk to you until I finish." 
  Mrs. May stood, bent forward, her mouth open and her stick raised off the ground as if she were not sure what she wanted to strike with it. 
  "Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart!" Mrs. Greenleaf shrieked. "Jesus, stab me in the heart!" and she fell back flat in the dirt, a huge human mound, her legs and arms spread out as if she were trying to wrap them around the earth. 
  Mrs. May felt as furious and helpless as if she had been insulted by a child.   "Jesus," she said, drawing herself back, "would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from there this instant and go wash your children's clothes!" and she had turned and walked off as fast as she could. 
  Whenever she thought of how the Greenleaf boys had advanced in the world, she had only to think of Mrs. Greenleaf sprawled obscenely on the ground, and say to herself, "Well, no matter how far they go, they came from that."
  She would like to have been able to put in her will that when she died, Wesley and Scofield were not to continue to employ Mr. Greenleaf. She was capable of handling Mr. Greenleaf; they were not. Mr. Greenleaf had pointed out to her once that her boys didn't know hay from silage. She had pointed out to him that they had other talents, that Scofield was a successful business man and Wesley a successful intellectual. Mr. Greenleaf did not comment, but he never lost an opportunity of letting her see, by his expression or some simple gesture, that he held the two of them in infinite contempt. As scrub-human as the Greenleafs were, he never hesitated to let her know that in any like circumstance in which his own boys might have been involved, they--O. T. and E. T. Greenleaf--would have acted to better advantage. 
  The Greenleaf boys were two or three years younger than the May boys. They were twins and you never knew when you spoke to one of them whether you were speaking to 0. T. or E. T., and they never had the politeness to enlighten you. They were long-legged and raw-boned and red-skinned, with bright grasping fox-colored eyes like their father's. Mr. Greenleaf's pride in them began with the fact that they were twins. He acted, Mrs. May said, as if this were something smart they had thought of themselves. They were energetic and hard-working and she would admit to anyone that they had come a long way--and that the Second World War was responsible for it. 
  They had both joined the service and, disguised in their uniforms, they could not be told from other people's children. You could tell, of course, when they opened their mouths but they did that seldom. The smartest thing they had done was to get sent overseas and there to marry French wives. They hadn't married French trash either. They had married nice girls who naturally couldn't tell that they murdered the king's English or that the Greenleafs were who they were. 
  Wesley's heart condition had not permitted him to serve his country but Scofield had been in the army for two years. He had not cared for it and at the end of his military service, he was only a Private First Class. The Greenleaf boys were both some kind of sergeants, and Mr. Greenleaf, in those days, had never lost an opportunity of referring to them by their rank. They had both managed to get wounded and now they both had pensions. Further, as soon as they were released from the army, they took advantage of all the benefits and went to the school of agriculture at the university--the taxpayers meanwhile supporting their French wives. The two of them were living now about two miles down the highway on a piece of land that the government had helped them to buy and in a brick duplex bungalow that the government had helped to build and pay for. If the war had made anyone, Mrs. May said, it had made the Greenleaf boys. They each had three little children apiece, who spoke Greenleaf English and French, and who, on account of their mothers' background, would be sent to the convent school and brought up with manners. "And in twenty years," Mrs. May asked Scofield and Wesley, "do you know what those people will be? 
  "Society," she said blackly. 
  She had spent fifteen years coping with Mr. Greenleaf and, by now, handling him had become second nature with her. His disposition on any particular day was as much a factor in what she could and couldn't do as the weather was, and she had learned to read his face the way real country people read the sunrise and sunset. 
  She was a country woman only by persuasion. The late Mr. May, a business man, had bought the place when land was down, and when he died it was all he had to leave her. The boys had not been happy to move to the country to a broken-down farm, but there was nothing else for her to do. She had the timber on the place cut and with the proceeds had set herself up in the dairy business after Mr. Greenleaf had answered her ad. "i seen yor add and i will come have 2 boys," was all his letter said, but he arrived the next day in a pieced-together truck, his wife and five daughters sitting on the floor in back, himself and the two boys in the cab. 
  Over the years they had been on her place, Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf had aged hardly at all. They had no worries, no responsibilities. They lived like the lilies of the field, off the fat that she struggled to put into the land. When she was dead and gone from overwork and worry, the Greenleafs, healthy and thriving, would be just ready to begin draining Scofield and Wesley.
  Wesley said the reason Mrs. Greenleaf had not aged was because she released all her emotions in prayer healing. "You ought to start praying, Sweetheart," he had said in the voice that, poor boy, he could not help making deliberately nasty. 
  Scofield only exasperated her beyond endurance but Wesley caused her real anxiety. He was thin and nervous and bald and being an intellectual was a terrible strain on his disposition. She doubted if he  would marry until she died but she was certain that then the wrong woman would get him. Nice girls didn't like Scofield but Wesley didn't like nice girls. He didn't like anything. He drove twenty miles every day to the university where he taught and twenty miles back every night, but he said he hated the twenty-mile drive and he hated the second-rate university and he hated the morons who attended it. He hated the country and he hated the life he lived; he hated living with his mother and his idiot brother and he hated hearing about the damn dairy and the damn help and the damn broken machinery. But in spite of all he said, he never made any move to leave. He talked about Paris and Rome but he never went even to Atlanta. 
  "You'd go to those places and you'd get sick," Mrs. May would say. "Who in Paris is going to see that you get a salt-free diet? And do you think if you married one of those  odd numbers you take out that she would cook a salt-free diet for you? No indeed, she would not!" When she took this line, Wesley would turn himself roughly around in his chair and ignore her. Once when she had kept it up too long, he had snarled, "Well, why don't you do something practical, Woman? Why don't you pray for me like Mrs. Greenleaf would?" 
"I don't like to hear you boys make jokes about religion," she had said. "If you would go to church, you would meet some nice girls." 
  But it was impossible to tell them anything. When she looked at the two of them now, sitting on either side of the table, neither one caring the least if a stray bull ruined her herd--which was their herd, their future--when she looked at the two of them, one hunched over a paper and the other teetering back in his chair, grinning at  her like an idiot, she wanted to jump up and beat her fist on the table and shout,  "You'll find out one of these days, you'll find out what Reality is when it's too late!" 
  "Mamma," Scofield said, "don't you get excited now but I'll tell you whose bull that is." He was looking at her wickedly. He let his chair drop forward and he got up. Then with his shoulders bent and his hands held up to cover his head, he tiptoed to the door. He backed into the hall and pulled the door almost to so that it hid all of him but his face. "You want to know, Sugarpie?" he asked. 
Mrs. May sat looking at him coldly. 
  "That's 0. T. and E. T.'s bull," he said. "I collected from their nigger yesterday and he told me they were missing it," and he showed her an exaggerated expanse of teeth and disappeared silently. 
  Wesley looked up and laughed. 
  Mrs. May turned her head forward again, her expression unaltered. "I am the only adult on this place," she said. She leaned across the table and pulled the paper from the side of his plate. "Do you see how it's going to be when I die and you boys have to handle him?" she began. "Do you see why he didn't know whose bull that was? Because it was theirs. Do you see what I have to put up with? Do you see that if I hadn't kept my foot on his neck all these years, you boys might be milking cows every morning at four o'clock?" 
  Wesley pulled the paper back toward his plate and staring at her full in the face, he murmured, "I wouldn't milk a cow to save your soul from hell." 
  "I know you wouldn't," she said in a brittle voice. She sat back and began rapidly turning her knife over at the side of her plate. "O. T. and E. T. are fine boys," she said. "They ought to have been my sons." The thought of this was so horrible that her vision of Wesley was blurred at once by a wall of tears. All she saw was his dark shape, rising quickly from the table. "And you two," she cried, "you two should have belonged to that woman!" 
  He was heading for the door. 
  "When I die," she said in a thin voice, "I don't know what's going to become of you." 
  "You're always yapping about when-you-die," he growled as he rushed out, "but you look pretty healthy to me."
  For some time she sat where she was, looking straight ahead through the window across the room into a scene of indistinct greys and greens. She stretched her face and her neck muscles and drew in a long breath but the scene in front of her flowed together anyway into a watery grey mass. "They needn't think I'm going to die any time soon," she muttered, and some more defiant voice in her added: I'll die when I get good and ready. 
  She wiped her eyes with the table napkin and got up and went to the window and gazed at the scene in front of her. The cows were grazing on two pale green pastures across the road and behind them, fencing them in, was a black wall of trees with a sharp sawtooth edge that held off the indifferent sky. The pastures were enough to calm her. When she looked out any window in her house, she saw the reflection of her own character. Her city friends said she was the most remarkable woman they knew, to go, practically penniless and with no experience, out to a rundown farm and make a success of it. "Everything is against you," she would say, "the weather is against you and the dirt is against you and the help is against you. They're all in league against you. There's nothing for it but an iron hand!" 
  "Look at Mamma's iron hand!" Scofield would yell and grab her arm and hold it up so that her delicate blue-veined little hand would dangle from her wrist like the head of a broken lily. The company always laughed. 
  The sun, moving over the black and white grazing cows, was just a little brighter than the rest of the sky. Looking down, she saw a darker shape that might have been its shadow cast at an angle, moving among them. She uttered a sharp cry and turned and marched out of the house. 
  Mr. Greenleaf was in the trench silo, filling a wheelbarrow. She stood on the edge and looked down at him. "I told you to get up that bull. Now he's in with the milk herd." 
  "You can't do two thangs at oncet," Mr. Greenleaf remarked. 
  "I told you to do that first." 
  He wheeled the barrow out of the open end of the trench toward the barn and she followed close behind him. "And you needn't think, Mr. Greenleaf," she said, "that I don't know exactly whose bull that is or why you haven't been in any hurry to notify me he was here. I might as well feed 0. T. and E. T.'s bull as long as I'm going to have him here ruining my herd." 
  Mr. Greenleaf paused with the wheelbarrow and looked behind him. "Is that them boys' bull?" he asked in an incredulous tone. 
She did not say a word. She merely looked away with her mouth taut. 
  "They told me their bull was out but I never known that was him," he said. 
  "I want that bull put up now," she said, "and I'm going to drive over to 0. T. and E. T.'s and tell them they'll have to come get him today. I ought to charge for the time he's been here—then it wouldn't happen again." 
  "They didn't pay but seventy-five dollars for him," Mr. Greenleaf offered. 
  "I wouldn't have had him as a gift," she said. 
  "They was just going to beef him," Mr. Greenleaf went on, "but he got loose and run his head into their pickup truck. He don't like cars and trucks. They had a time getting his horn out the fender and when they finally got him loose, he took off and they was too tired to run after him--but I never known that was him there." 
  "It wouldn't have paid you to know, Mr. Greenleaf," she said. "But you know now. Get a horse and get him." 
  In a half hour, from her front window she saw the bull, squirrel-colored, with jutting hips and long light horns, ambling down the dirt road that ran in front of the house. Mr. Greenleaf was behind him on the horse. "That's a Greenleaf bull if I ever saw one," she muttered. She went out on the porch and called, "Put him where he can't get out." 
  "He likes to bust loose," Mr. Greenleaf said, looking with approval at the bull's rump. "This gentleman is a sport." 
  "If those boys don't come for him, he's going to be a dead sport," she said. "I'm just warning you." 
    He heard her but he didn't answer.
"That's the awfullest looking bull I ever saw," she called but he was too far down the road to hear. 

It was mid-morning when she turned into 0. T. and E. T.'s driveway. The house, a new red-brick, low-to-the-ground building that looked like a warehouse with windows, was on top of a treeless hill. The sun was beating down directly on the white roof of it. It was the kind of house that everybody built now and nothing marked it as belonging to the Greenleafs except three dogs, part hound and part spitz, that rushed out from behind it as soon as she stopped her car. She reminded herself that you could always tell the class of people by the class of dog, and honked her horn. While she sat waiting for someone to come, she continued to study the house. All the windows were down and she wondered if the government could have air-conditioned the thing. No one came and she honked again. Presently a door opened and several children appeared in it and stood looking at her, making no move to come forward. She recognized this as a true Greenleaf trait--they could hang in a door, looking at you for hours. 
  "Can't one of you children come here?" she called. 
  After a minute they all began to move forward, slowly. They had on overalls and were barefooted but they were not as dirty as she might have expected. There were two or three that looked distinctly like Greenleafs; the others not so much so. The smallest child was a girl with untidy black hair. They stopped about six feet from the automobile and stood looking at her. 
  "You're mighty pretty," Mrs. May said, addressing herself to the smallest girl. 
There was no answer. They appeared to share one dispassionate expression between them. 
"Where's your Mamma?" she asked. 
  There was no answer to this for some time. Then one of them said something in French. Mrs. May did not speak French. 
  "Where's your daddy?" she asked. 
  After a while, one of the boys said, "He ain't hyar neither." 
  "Ahhhh," Mrs. May said as if something had been proven. "Where's the colored man?" 
  She waited and decided no one was going to answer. "The cat has six little tongues," she said. "How would you like to come home with me and let me teach you how to talk?" She laughed and her laugh died on the silent air. She felt as if she were on trial for her life, facing a jury of Greenleafs. "I'll go down and see if I can find the colored man," she said. 
  "You can go if you want to," one of the boys said. 
  "Well, thank you," she murmured and drove off. 
  The barn was down the lane from the house. She had not seen it before but Mr. Greenleaf had described it in detail for it had been built according to the latest specifications. It was a milking parlor arrangement where the cows are milked from below. The milk ran in pipes from the machines to the milk house and was never carried in no bucket, Mr. Greenleaf said, by no human hand. "When you gonter get you one?" he had asked. 
  "Mr. Greenleaf," she had said, "I have to do for myself. I am not assisted hand and foot by the government. It would cost me $20,000 to install a milking parlor. I barely make ends meet as it is." 
  "My boys done it," Mr. Greenleaf had murmured, and then--"but all boys ain't alike." 
  "No indeed!" she had said. "I thank God for that!" 
  "I thank Gawd for ever-thang," Mr. Greenleaf had drawled. 
  You might as well, she had thought in the fierce silence that followed; you've never done anything for yourself. 
  She stopped by the side of the barn and honked but no one appeared. For several minutes she sat in the car, observing the various machines parked around, wondering how many of them were paid for. They had a forage harvester and a rotary hay baler. She had those too. She decided that since no one was here, she would get out and have a look at the milking parlor and see if they kept it clean. 
  She opened the milking room door and stuck her head in and for the first second she felt as if she were going to lose her breath. The spotless white concrete room was filled with sunlight that came from a row of windows head-high along both walls. The metal stanchions gleamed ferociously and she had to squint to be able to look at all. She drew her head out the room quickly and closed the door and leaned against it, frowning. The light outside was not so bright but she was conscious that the sun was directly on top of her head, like a silver bullet ready to drop into her brain.
  A Negro carrying a yellow calf-feed bucket appeared from around the corner of the machine shed and came toward her. He was a light yellow boy dressed in the cast-off army clothes of the Greenleaf twins. He stopped at a respectable distance and set the bucket on the ground. 
  "Where's Mr. O. T. and Mr. E. T.?" she asked. 
  "Mist 0. T. he in town, Mist E. T. he off yonder in the field," the Negro said, pointing first to the left and then to the right as if he were naming the position of two planets. 
  "Can you remember a message?" she asked, looking as if she thought this doubtful. 
  "I'll remember it if I don't forget it," he said with a touch of sullenness. 
  "Well, I'll write it down then," she said. She got in her car and took a stub of pencil from her pocket book and began to write on the back of an empty envelope. The Negro came and stood at the window. "I'm Mrs. May," she said as she wrote. "Their bull is on my place and I want him off today. You can tell them I'm furious about it." 
  "That bull lef here Sareday," the Negro said, "and none of us ain't seen him since. We ain't knowed where he was." 
  "Well, you know now," she said, "and you can tell Mr. O. T. and Mr. E. T. that if they don't come get him today, I'm going to have their daddy shoot him the first thing in the morning. I can't have that bull ruining my herd." She handed him the note. 
  "If I knows Mist 0. T. and Mist E. T.," he said, taking it, "they goin to say you go ahead on and shoot him. He done busted up one of our trucks already and we be glad to see the last of him." 
  She pulled her head back and gave him a look from slightly bleared eyes. "Do they expect me to take my time and my worker to shoot their bull?" she asked. "They don't want him so they just let him loose and expect somebody else to kill him? He's eating my oats and ruining my herd and I'm expected to shoot him too?" 
  "I speck you is," he said softly. "He done busted up . . ." 
  She gave him a very sharp look and said, "Well, I'm not surprised. That's just the way some people are," and after a second she asked, "Which is boss, Mr. O. T. or Mr. E. T.?" She had always suspected that they fought between themselves secretly. 
  "They never quarls," the boy said. "They like one man in two skins." 
  "Hmp. I expect you just never heard them quarrel." 
  "Nor nobody else heard them neither," he said, looking away as if this insolence were addressed to some one else. 
  "Well," she said, "I haven't put up with their father for fifteen years not to know a few things about Greenleafs." 
  The Negro looked at her suddenly with a gleam of recognition. "Is you my policy man's mother?" he asked. 
  "I don't know who your policy man is," she said sharply. "You give them that note and tell  them if they don't come for that bull today, they'll be making their father shoot it tomorrow," and she drove off. 

  She stayed at home all afternoon waiting for the Greenleaf twins to come for the bull. They did not come. I might as well be working for them, she thought furiously. They are simply going to use me to the limit. At the supper table, she went over it again for the boys' benefit because she wanted them to see exactly what 0. T. and E. T. would do. "They don't want that bull," she said, "--pass the butter--so they simply turn him loose and let somebody else worry about getting rid of him for them. How do you like that? I'm the victim. I've always been the victim." 
  "Pass the butter to the victim," Wesley said. He was in a worse humor than usual because he had had a flat tire on the way home from the university. 
Scofield handed her the butter and said, "Why Mamma, ain't you ashamed to shoot an old bull that ain't done nothing but give you a little scrub strain in your herd? I declare," he said, "with the Mamma I got it's a wonder I turned out to be such a nice boy!" 
  "You ain't her boy, Son," Wesley said.
  She eased back in her chair, her fingertips on the edge of the table.
  "All I know is," Scofield said, "I done mighty well to be as nice
as I am seeing what I come from."
  When they teased her they spoke Greenleaf English but Wesley
made his own particular tone come through it like a knife edge.
  "Well lemme tell you one thang, Brother," he said, leaning over
the table, "that if you had half a mind you would already know."
  "What's that, Brother?" Scofield asked, his broad face grinning
into the  constricted one across from him.
  "That is," Wesley said, "that neither you nor me is her boy ... ,"
but he stopped abruptly as she gave a kind of hoarse wheeze like
an old horse lashed unexpectedly. She reared up and ran from the
room.
  "Oh, for God's sake," Wesley growled, "What did you start her
off for?"
  "I never started her off," Scofield said. "You started her off."
  "Hah."
  "She's not as young as she used to be and she can't take it."
  "She can only give it out," Wesley said. "I'm the one that takes
it."
  His brother's pleasant face had changed so that an ugly family
resemblance showed between them. "Nobody feels sorry for a lousy
bastard like you," he said and grabbed across the table for the other's
shirtfront.
  From her room she heard a crash of dishes and she rushed back
through the kitchen into the dining room. The hall door was open
and Scofield was going out of it. Wesley was lying like a large
bug on his back with the edge of the overturned table cutting
him across the middle and broken dishes scattered on top of him.
She pulled the table off him and caught his arm to help him rise but
he scrambled up and pushed her off with a furious charge of energy
and flung himself out of the door after his brother.
  She would have collapsed but a knock on the back door stiffened
her and she swung around. Across the kitchen and back porch, she
could see Mr. Greenleaf peering eagerly through the screen wire.
All her resources returned in full strength as if she had only needed
to be challenged by the devil himself to regain them. "I heard a
thump," he called, "and I thought the plastering might have fell
on you."
  If he had been wanted someone would have had to go on a
horse to find him. She crossed the kitchen and the porch and stood
inside the screen and s.iid, "No, nothing happened but the table
turned over. One of the legs was weak," and without pausing, "the
boys didn't come for the bull so tomorrow,  you'll have to shoot
him."
  The sky was crossed with thin red and purple bars and behind
them the sun was moving down slowly as if it were descending a
ladder. Mr. Greenleaf squatted down on the step, his back to her,
the top of his hat on a level with her feet. "Tomorrow I'll drive him
home for you," he said.
  "Oh no, Mr. Greenleaf," she said in a mocking voice, "you drive
him home tomorrow and next week he'll be back here. I know better
than that." Then in a mournful tone, she said, "I'm surprised at
O.T. and E.T. to treat me this way. I thought they'd have more
gratitude. Those boys spent some mighty happy days on this place,
didn't they, Mr. Greenleaf?"
  Mr. Greenleaf didn't say anything.
 "I think they did," she said. "I think thev did. But they've forgotten
all the nice little things I did for them now. If I recall, they
wore my boys' old clothes and played with my boys' old toys and
hunted with my boys' old guns. They swam in my pond and shot
my birds and fished in my stream and I never forgot their birthday
and Christmas seemed to roll around very often if I remember
it right. And do they think of any of those things now?" she asked.
"NOOOOO," she said.
  For a few seconds she looked at the disappearing sun and Mr.
Greenleaf examined the palms of his hands. Presently as if it had
just occurred to her, she asked, "Do you know the real reason
they didn't come for that bull?"
  "Naw I don't," Mr. Greenleaf said in a surly voice.
  "They didn't come because I'm a woman," she said. "You can get
away with anything when you're dealing with a woman. If there
were a man running this place ... "
  Quick as a snake striking Mr. Greenleaf said, "You got two boys.
They know you got two men on the place."
  The sun had disappeared behind the tree line. She looked down
at the dark crafty face, upturned now, and at he wary eyes, bright
under the shadow of the hatbrim. She waited long enough for him
to see that she was hurt and then she said, "Some people learn
gratitude too late, Mr. Greenleaf, and some never learn it at all,"
and she turned and left him sitting on the steps.
  Half the night in her sleep she heard a sound as if some large
stone were grinding a hole on the outside wall of her brain. She
was walking on the inside, over a succession of beautiful rolling
hills, planting her stick in front of each step. She became aware after
a time that the noise was the sun trying to burn through the tree
line and she stopped to watch, sate in the knowledge that it
couldn't, that it had to sink the why it always did outside of her
property. When she first stopped it was a swollen red ball, but
as she stood watching it began to narrow and pale until it looked
like a bullet. Then suddenly it burst through the tree line and
raced down the hill toward her. She woke up with her hand over her
mouth and the same noise, diminished but distant, in her ear. It was
the bull munching under her window. Mr. Greenleaf had let him
out.
  She got up and made her way to the window in the dark and
looked out through the slit blind, but the bull had moved away from
the hedge and at first she didn't see him. Then she saw a heavy
form some distance away, paused as if observing her. This is the
last night I am going to put up with this, she said, and watched
until the iron shadow moved away in the darkness.
  The next morning she waited until exactly eleven o'clock. Then
she got in her car and drove to the barn. Mr. Greenleaf was clean-
ing milk cans. He had seven of them standing up outside the milk
room to get the sun. She had been telling him to do this for 
weeks. "All right, Mr. Greenleaf," she said, "go get your gun. We're
going to shoot that bull."
  "I thought you wanted theseyer cans ... "
  "Go get your gun, Mr. Greenleaf," she said. Her voice and face
were expressionless.
  "That gentleman torn out of there last night," he murmured in a
tone of regret and bent again to the can he had his arm in.
  "Go get your gun, Mr. Greenleaf," she said in the same triumphant
toneless voice. "The bull is in the pasture with the dry cows. I saw
him from my upstairs window. I'm going to drive you up to the
field and you can run him into the empty pasture and shoot him
there."
  He detached himself from the can slowly. "Ain't nobody ever ast
me to shoot my boys' own bull!" he said in a high rasping voice. He
removed a rag from his back pocket and began to wipe his hands
violently, then his nose.
  She turned as if she had not heard this and said, "I'll wait for you
in the car. Go get your gun."
  She sat in the car and watched him stalk off toward the harness
room where he kept a gun. After he had entered the room, there
was a crash as if he had kicked something out of his way. Presently
he emerged again with the gun, circled behind the car, opened the
door violently and threw himself onto the seat beside her. He held
the gun between his knees and looked straight ahead. He'd like
to shoot me instead of the bull, she thought, and turned her face
away so that he could not see her smile.
  The morning was dry and clear. She drove through the woods
for a quarter of a mile and then out into the open where there
were fields on either side of the narrow road. The exhilaration of
carrying her point had sharpened her senses. Birds were screaming
everywhere, the grass was almost too bright to look at, the sky was
an even piercing blue. "Spring is here!" she had gaily. Mr. Greenleaf
lifted one muscle somewhere near his mouth as if he found this
the most asinine remark ever made. When she stopped at the second
pasture gate, he flung himself out of the car door and slammed it
behind him. Then he opened the gate and she drove through. He
closed it and flung himself back in, silently, and she drove around
the rim of the pasture until she spotted the bull, almost in the center
of it, grazing peacefully among the cows.
  "The gentleman is waiting on you," she said and gave Mr. Greenleaf's
furious profile a sly look. "Run him into that next pasture and
when you get him in, I'll drive in behind you and shut the gate
myself."
  He flung himself out again, this time deliberately leaving the car
door open so that she had to lean across the seat and close it. She
sat smiling as she watched him make his way across the pasture
toward the opposite gate. He seemed to throw himself forward at
each step and then pull back as if he were calling on some power
to witness that he was being forced. "Well," she said aloud as if he
were still in the car, "it's your own boys who are making you do
this, Mr. Greenleaf." O.T. and E.T. were probably splitting their
sides laughing at him now. She could hear their identical nasal voices
saying, "Made Daddy shoot our bull for us. Daddy don't know no
better than to think that's a fine bull he's shooting. Gonna kill Daddy
to shoot that bull!"
  "If those boys cared a thing about you, Mr. Greenleaf," she said,
they would have come for that bull. I'm surprised at them."
  He was circling around to open the gate first. The bull, dark
among the spotted cows, had not moved. He kept his head down,
eating constantly. Mr. Greenleaf opened the gate and then began
circling back to approach him from the rear. When he was about
ten feet behind him, he flapped his arms at his sides. The bull
lifted his head indolently and then lowered it again and continued
to eat. Mr. Greenleaf stooped again and picked up something and
threw it at him with a vicious swing. She decided it was a sharp
rock for the bull leapt and then began to gallop until he disappeared
over the rim of the hill. Mr. Greenleaf followed at his leisure.
  "You needn't think you're going to lose him!" she cried and
started the car straight across the pasture. She had to drive slowly
over the terraces and when she reached the gate, Mr. Greenleaf and
the bull were nowhere in sight. This pasture was smaller than the
last, a green arena, encircled almost entirely by woods. She got out
and closed the gate and stood looking for some sign of Mr. Greenleaf
but he had disappeared completely. She knew at once that his
plan was to lose the bull in the woods. Eventually, she would see
him emerge somewhere from the circle of trees and come limping
toward her and when he finally reached her, he would say, "If you
can find that gentleman in them woods, you're better than me."
  She was going to say, "Mr. Greenleaf, if I have to walk into those
woods with you and stay all afternoon, we are going to find that
bull and shoot him. You are going to shoot him if I have to pull
the trigger for you." When he saw she meant business he would
return and shoot the bull quickly himself.
  She got back into the car and drove to the center  of the pasture
where he would not have so far to walk to reach her when he came
out of the woods. At this moment she could picture him sitting on
a stump, marking lines in the ground with a stick. She decided she
would wait exactly ten minutes by her watch. Then she would begin
to honk. She got out of the car and walked around a little and then
sat down on the front bumper to wait and rest. She was very tired
and she lay her head back against the hood and closed her eyes. She
did not understand why she should be so tired when it was only
mid-morning. Through her closed eyes, she could feel the sun, redhot
overhead. She opened her eyes slightly but the white light forced
her to close them again.
  For some time she lay back against the hood, wondering drowsily
why she was so tired. With her eyes closed, she didn't think of time
as divided into days and nights but into past and future. She decided
she was tired because she had been working continuously for
fifteen years. She decided she had every right to be tired, and to rest
for a few minutes before she began working again. Before any kind
of judgement seat, she would be able to say: I've worked, I have not
wallowed. At this very instant while she was recalling a lifetime of
work, Mr. Greenleaf was loitering in the woods and Mrs. Greenleaf
was probably flat on the ground, asleep over her holeful of
clippings. The woman had got worse over the years and Mrs. May
believed that now she was actually demented. "I'm afraid your wife
has let religion warp her," she said once tactfully to Mr. Greenleaf.
"Everything in moderation, you know."
  "She cured a man oncet that half his gut was cat out with worms,"
Mr. Greenleaf said, and she had turned away, half-sickened. Poor
souls, she thought now, so simple. For a few seconds she dozed.
  When she sat up and looked at her watch, more than ten minutes
had passed. She had not heard any shot. A new thought occurred
to her; suppose Mr. Greenleaf had aroused the bull chunking stones
at him and the animal had turned on him and run him up against
a tree and gored him? The irony of it deepened: O.T. and E.T.
would then get a shyster lawyer and sue her. It would be the fitting
end to her fifteen years with the Greenleafs. She thought of it almost
with pleasure as if she had hit on the perfect ending for a story she
was telling her friends. Then she dropped it, for Mr. Greenleaf had
a gun with him and she had insurance.
  She decided to honk. She got up and reached inside the car window
and gave three sustained honks and two or three shorter ones to let
him know she was getting impatient. Then she went back and sat
down on the bumper again.
  In a few minutes something emerged from the tree line, a black
heavy shadow that tossed its head several times and then bounded
forward. After a second she saw it was the bull. He was crossing
the pasture toward her at a slow gallop, a gay almost rocking gait
as if he were overjoyed to find her again. She looked beyond him to
see if Mr. Greenleaf was coming out of the woods too but he was
not. "Here he is, Mr. Greenleaf!" she called and looked on the
other side of the pasture to see if he could be coming out there but
he was not in sight. She looked back and saw that the bull, his head
lowered, was racing toward her. She remained perfectly still, not in
fright, but in a freezing unbelief. She stared at the violent black
streak bounding toward her as if she had no sense of distance, as if
she could not decide at once what his intention was, and the bull
had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before
her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her
heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable
grip. She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire
scene in front of her had changed-the tree line was a dark wound
in a world that was nothing but sky-and she had the look of a person
whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light
unbearable.
  Mr. Greenleaf was running toward her from the side with his gun
raised and she saw him coming though she was not looking in his
direction. She saw him approaching on the out side of some invisible
circle, the tree line gaping behind him and nothing under his feet.
He shot the bull four times through the eye. She did not hear the
shots but she felt the quake in the huge body as it sank, pulling her
forward on its head, so that she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached
her, to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal's
ear.

End

A View of the Woods

1956

THE week before, Mary Fortune and the old man had spent
every morning watching the machine that lifted out dirt and
threw it in a pile. The construction was going on by the new lakeside
on one of the lots that the old man had sold to somebody who
was going to put up a fishing club. He and Mary Fortune drove
down there every morning about ten o'clock and he parked his car,
a battered mulberry-colored Cadillac, on the embankment that overlooked the spot where the work was going on. The red corrugated
lake eased up to within fifty feet of the construction and was
bordered on the other side by a black line of woods which appeared
at both ends of the view to walk across the water and continue along
the edge of the fields.
  He sat on the bumper and Mary Fortune straddled the hood and
they watched, sometimes for hours, while the machine systematically
ate a square red hole in what had once been a cow pasture. It happened
to be the only pasture that Pitts had succeeded in getting the
bitter weed off and when the old man had sole it, Pitts had nearly
had a stroke; and as far as Mr. Fortune was concerned, he could
have gone on and had it.
  "Any fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress is
not on my books," he had said to Mary Fortune-- several times from
his seat on the bumper, but the child did not have eyes for anything
but the machine. She sat on the hood, locking down into the
red pit, watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay,
then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical
revulsion, turn and spit it up. Her pale eyes behind her
spectacles followed the repeated motion of it again and again and
her face-a small replica of the old man's-never lost its look of
complete absorption.
  No one was particularly glad that Mary Fortune looked like her
grandfather except the old man himself, He thought it added greatly
to her attractiveness. He thought she was the smartest and the
prettiest child he had ever seen and he let the rest of them know that
if, IF that was, he left anything to anybody, it would be Mary
Fortune he left it to. She was now nine, short and broad like himself,
with his very light blue eyes, his wide prominent forehead, his steady
penetrating scowl and his rich florid complexion; but she was like
him on the inside too. She had, to a singular degree, his intelligence,
his strong will, and his push and drive. Though there was seventy
years' difference in their ages, the spiritual distance between them
was slight. She was the only member of the family he had any respect
for.
  He didn't have any use for her mother, his third or fourth daughter
(he could never remember which), though she considered that
she took care of him. She considered--being careful not to say it,
only to look it--that she was the one putting up with him in his old
age and that she was the one he should leave the place to. She had
married an idiot named Pitts and had had seven children, all likewise
idiots except the youngest, Mary Fortune, who was a throwback
to him. Pitts was the kind who couldn't keep his hands on a nickel
and Mr. Fortune had allowed them, ten years ago, to move onto
his place and farm it. What Pitts made went to Pitts but the land
belonged to Fortune and he was careful to keep the fact before
them. When the well had gone dry, he had not allowed Pitts to
have a deep well drilled but had insisted that they pipe their water
from the spring. He did not intend to pay for a drilled well himself
and he knew that if he let Pitts pay for it, whenever he had occasion
to say to Pitts, "It's my land you're sitting on, " Pitts would be able
to say to him, "Well, it's my pump that's pumping the water you're
drinking."
  Being there ten years, the Pittses had got to feel as if they owned
the place. The daughter had been born and raised on it but the old
man considered that when she married Pitts she showed that she
preferred Pitts to home; and when she came back, she came back
like any other tenant, though he would not allow them to pay rent
for the same reason he would not allow them to drill a well. Anyone
over sixty years of age is in an uneasy position unless he controls
the greater interest and every now and then he gave the Pittses a
practical lesson by selling off a lot. Nothing infuriated Pitts more
than to see him sell off a piece of the property to an outsider, because
Pitts wanted to buy it himself.
  Pitts was a thin, long-jawed, irascible, sullen, sulking individual
and his wife was the duty-proud kind: It's my duty to stay here and
take care of Papa. Who would do it if I didn't? I do it knowing
full well I'll get no reward for it. I do it because it's my duty.
  The old man was not taken in by this for a minute. He knew they
were waiting impatiently for the day when they could put him in a
hole eight feet deep and cover him up with dirt. Then, even if he
did not leave the place to them, they figured they would be able to
buy it. Secretly he had made his will and left everything in trust to
Mary Fortune, naming his lawyer and not Pitts as executor. When
he died Mary Fortune could make the rest of them jump; and he
didn't doubt for a minute that she would be able to do it.
  Ten years ago they had announced that they were going to name
the new baby Mark Fortune Pitts, after him, if it were a boy, and
he had not delayed in telling them that if they coupled his name
with the name Pitts he would put them off the place. When the
baby came, a girl, and he had seen that even at the age of one day
she bore his unmistakable likeness, he had relented and suggested
himself that they name her Mary Fortune, after his beloved mother,
who had died seventy years ago, bringing him into the world.
  The Fortune place was in the country on a clay road that left the
paved road fifteen miles away and he would never have been able to
sell off any lots if it had not been for progress, which had always been
his ally. He was not one of these old people who fight improvement,
who object to everything new and cringe at every change. He
wanted to see a paved highway in front of his house with plenty
of new-model cars on it, he wanted to see a supermarket store across
the road from him, he wanted to see a gas station, a motel, a
drive-in picture-show within easy distance. Progress had suddenly set
all this in motion. The electric power company had built a dam on
the river and flooded great areas of the surrounding country and the
lake that resulted touched his land along a half-mile stretch. Every
Tom, Dick and Harry, every dog and his brother, wanted a lot on
the lake. There was talk of their getting a telephone line. There was
talk of paving the road that ran in front of the Fortune place. There
was talk of an eventual town. He thought this should be called
Fortune, Georgia. He was a man of advanced vision, even if he was
seventy-nine years old.
  The machine that drew up the dirt had stopped the day before
and today they were watching the hole being smoothed out by
two huge yellow bulldozers. His property had amounted to eight
hundred acres before he began selling lots, He had sold five twentyacre
lots on the back of the place and every time he sold one, Pitts's
blood pressure had gone up twenty points. "The Pittses are the kind
that would let a cow pasture interfere with the future," he said to
Mary Fortune, "but not you and me." The fact that Mary Fortune
was a Pitts too was something he ignored, in a gentlemanly fashion,
as if it were an affliction the child was nut responsible for. He liked
to think of her as being thoroughly of his clay . He sat on the bumper
and she sat on the hood with her bare feet on his shoulders. One of
the bulldozers had moved under them to shave the side of the embankment they were parked on. If he had moved his feet a few
inches out, the old man could have dangled them over the edge.
  "If you don't watch him," Mary Fortune shouted above the noise
of the machine, "he'll cut off some of your dirt."
  "Yonder's the stob," the old man yelled, "Ill hasn't gone beyond
the stob."
  "Not YET he hasn't," she roared.
The bulldozer passed beneath them and went on to the far side.
"Well you watch," he said. "Keep your eyes open  and if he knocks
that stob, I'll stop him. The Pittses are the kind that would let a
cow pasture or a mule lot or a row of beans interfere with progress,"
he continued. "The people like you and me  with heads on their
shoulders know you can't stop the marcher time for a cow .... "
  "He's shaking the stob on the other side!" she  screamed and before
he could stop her, she had jumped down from the hood and was
running along the edge of the embankment, her little yellow dress
billowing out behind.
  "Don't run so near the edge," he yelled but she had already
reached the stab and was squatting down by it to see how much it
had been shaken. She leaned over the embankment and shook her
first at the man on the bulldozer. He waved at her and went on
about his business. More sense in her little finger than all the rest of
that tribe in their heads put together, the old man said to himself,
and watched with pride as she started back to him.
  She had a head of thick, very fine, sand-colored hair--the exact
kind he had had when he had had any--that grew straight and was
cut just above her eyes and down the sides of her cheeks to the tips
of her ears so that it formed a kind of door opening onto the central
part of her face. Her glasses were silver-rimmed like his and she
even walked the way he did, stomach forward, with a careful abrupt
gait, something between a rock and a shuttle. She was walking so
close to the edge of the embankment that the outside of her right
foot was flush with it.
  "I said don't walk so close to the edge," he called; "you fall off
there and you won't live to see the day this place gets built up." He
was always very careful to see that she avoided dangers. He would
not allow her to sit in snakey places or put her hands on bushes that
might hide hornets.
  She didn't move an inch. She had a habit of his of not hearing
what she didn't want to hear and since this was a little trick he
had taught her himself, he had to admire the way she practiced it.
He foresaw that in her own old age it would serve her well. She
reached the car and climbed back onto the hood without a word and
put her feet back on his shoulders where she had had them before,
as if he were no more than a part of the automobile. Her attention
returned to the far bulldozer.
  "Remember what you won't get if you don't mind," her grandfather
remarked.
  He was a strict disciplinarian but he had never whipped her. There
were some children, like the first six Pittses, whom he thought
should be whipped once a week on principle, but there were other
ways to control intelligent children and he had never laid a rough
hand on Mary Fortune. Furthermore, he had never allowed her
mother or her brothers and sisters so much as to slap her. The elder
Pitts was a different matter.
  He was a man of a nasty temper and of ugly unreasonable resentments.
Time and again, Mr. Fortune's heart had pounded to
see him rise slowly from his place at the table--not the head, Mr.
Fortune sat there, but from his place at the side--and abruptly, for
no reason, with no explanation, jerk his head at Mary Fortune and
say, "Come with me," and leave the room, unfastening his belt as
he went. A look that was completely foreign to the child's face would
appear on it. The old man could not define the look but it infuriated
him. It was a look that was part terror and part respect and part
something else, something very like cooperation. This look would
appear on her face and she would get up and follow Pitts out. They
would get in his truck and drive down the road out of earshot, where
he would beat her.
  Mr. Fortune knew for a fact that he beat her because he had followed
them in his car and had seen it happen. He had watched
from behind a boulder about a hundred feet away while the child
clung to a pine tree and Pitts, as methodically as if he were whacking
a bush with a sling blade, beat her around the ankles with his belt.
All she had done was jump up and down as if she were standing
on a hot stove and make a whimpering noise like a dog that was
being peppered. Pitts had kept at it for about three minutes and
then he had turned, without a word, and got back in his truck and
left her there, and she had slid down under the tree and taken both
feet in her hands and rocked back and forth. The old man had
crept forward to catch her. Her face was contorted into a puzzle of
small red lumps and her nose and eyes were running. He sprang on
her and sputtered, "Why didn't you hit him back? Where's your
spirit? Do you think I'd a let him beat me)"
  She had jumped up and started backing away from him with her
jaw stuck out. "Nobody beat me," she said.
  "Didn't I see it with my own eyes?" he exploded.
  "Nobody is here and nobody beat me," she said. "Nobody's ever
beat me in my life and if anybody did, I'd kill him. You can see for
yourself nobody is here."
  "Do you call me a liar or a blindman!" he shouted. "I saw him
with my own two eyes and you never did a thing but let him do it,
you never did a thing but hang onto that tree and dance up and
down a little and blubber and if it had been me, I'd a swung my fist
in his face and ... "
  "Nobody was here and nobody beat me and if anybody did I'd kill
him!" she yelled and then turned and dashed off through the woods.
  "And I'm a Poland china pig and black is white!" he had roared
after her and he had sat down on a small rock under the tree, disgusted
and furious. This was Pitts's revenge on him. It was as if it
were he that Pitts was driving down the road to beat and it was as if
he were the one submitting to it. He had thought at first that he
could stop him by saying that if he beat her, he would put them
off the place but when he had tried that, Pitts had said, "Put me off
and you put her off too. Go right ahead. She's mine to whip and
I'll whip her every day of the year if it suits me."
  Anytime he could make Pitts feel his hand he was determined to
do it and at present he had a little scheme up his sleeve that was
going to be a considerable blow to Pitts. He was thinking of it with
relish when he told Mary Fortune to remember what she wouldn't
get if she didn't mind, and he added, without waiting for an answer,
that he might be selling another lot soon and that if he did, he might give her a bonus but not if she gave him any sass. He had
frequent little verbal tilts with her but this was a sport like putting a
mirror up in front of a rooster and watching him fight his reflection.
  "I don't want no bonus," Mary Fortune said.
  " I ain't ever seen you refuse one."
  "You ain't ever seen me ask for one neither," she said.
  "How much have you laid by?" he asked.
  "Noner yer bidnis," she said and stamped his shoulders with her
feet. "Don't be buttin into my bidnis."
  "I bet you got it sewed up in your mattress," he said, "just like an
old nigger woman. You ought to put it in the bank. I'm going to
start you an account just as soon as I complete this deal. Won't anybody
be able to check on it but me and you."
  The bulldozer moved under them again and drowned out the rest
of what he wanted to say. He waited and when the noise had passed,
he could hold it in no longer. ''I'm going to sell the lot right in front
of the house for a gas station," he said. "Then we won't have to go
down the road to get the car filled up, just step out the front door."
  The Fortune house was set back about two hundred feet from the
road and it was this two hundred feet that he intended to sell. It
was the part that his daughter airily called "the lawn" though it was
nothing but a field of weeds.
  "You mean," Mary Fortune said after a minute, "the lawn?"
  "Yes mam!" he said. "I mean the lawn," and he slapped his
knee.
  She did not say anything and he turned and looked up at her.
There in the little rectangular opening of hair was his face looking
back at him, but it was a reflection not of his present expression but
of the darker one that indicated his displeasure. "That's where we
play," she muttered.
   "Well there's plenty of other places you can play," he said, irked
by this lack of enthusiasm.
  "We won't be able to see the woods across the road," she said.
  The old man stared at her. "The woods across the road?" he repeated.
  "We won't be able to see the view," she said.
  "The view?" he repeated.
  "The woods," she said; "we won’t be able to see the woods from
the porch."
  "The woods from the porch?" he repeated.
  Then she said, "My daddy grazes his calves on that lot."
  The old man's wrath was delayed all instant by shock. Then it
exploded in a roar. He jumped up and turned and slammed his fist
on the hood of the car. "He can graze them somewheres else!"
  "You fall off that embankment and you'll wish you hadn't," she
said.
  He moved from in front of the car around to the side, keeping his
eye on her all the time. "Do you think I care where he grazes his
calves! Do you think I'll let a calf interfere with my bidnis? Do you
think I give a damn hoot where that fool grazes his calves?"
She sat, her red face darker than her hair, exactly reflecting his
expression now. "He who calls his brother a fool is subject to hell
fire," she said.
  "Jedge not," he shouted, "lest ye be not jedged!" The tinge of his
face was a shade more purple than hers. "You!" he said. "You let
him beat you any time he wants to and don't do a thing but blubber
a little and jump up and down!"
  "He nor nobody else has ever touched me," she said, measuring
off each word in a deadly flat tone. "Nobcdy's ever put a hand on
me and if anybody did, I'd kill him."
  "And black is white," the old man piped, "and night is day!"
  The bulldozer passed below them. With their faces about a foot
apart, each held the same expression until the noise had receded.
Then the old man said, "Walk home by yourself. I refuse to ride a
Jezebel!"
  "And I refuse to ride with the Whore of Babylon," she said and
slid off the other side of the car and started off through the pasture.
  "A whore is a woman!" he roared. "That's how much you know!"
But she did not deign to turn around and answer him back, and as
he watched the small robust figure stalk across the yellow-dotted field
toward the woods, his pride in her, as if it couldn't help itself, returned
like the gentle little tide on the new lake—all except that part
of it that had to do with her refusal to stand up to Pitts; that pulled
back like an undertow. If he could have taught her to stand up to
Pitts the way she stood up to him, she would have been a perfect
child, as fearless and sturdy-minded as anyone could want; but it
was her one failure of character. It was the one point on which she
did not resemble him. He turned and looked away over the lake to
the woods across it and told himself that in five years, instead of
woods, there would be houses and stores and parki1g places, and
that the credit for it could go largely to him.
  He meant to teach the child spirit by example and since he had
definitely made up his mind, he announced that noon at the dinner
table that he was negotiating with a man named Tilman to sell the
lot in front of the house for a gas station.
  His daughter, sitting with her worn-out air at the foot of the
table, let out a moan as if a dull knife were being tuned slowly in
her chest. "You mean the lawn!" she moaned and fell back in her
chair and repeated in an almost inaudible voice, "He means the
lawn."
  The other six Pitts children began to bawl and pipe, "Where we
play!" "Don't let him do that, Pa!" "We won't be able to see the
road!" and similar idiocies. Mary Fortune did not say anything. She
had a mulish reserved look as if she were planning some business of
her own. Pitts had stopped eating and was staring in front of him.
His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz
stones on either side of it. His eyes began to move from child to
child around the table as if he were hunting for one particular one
of them. Finally they stopped on Mary Fortune sitting next to her
grandfather. "You done this to us," he muttered.
  "I didn't," she said but there was no assurance in her voice. It was
only a quaver, the voice of a frightened child.
  Pitts got up and said, "Come with me," and turned and walked
out, loosening his belt as he went, and to the old man's complete
despair, she slid away from the table and followed him, almost ran
after him, out the door and into the truck behind him, and they
drove off.
  This cowardice affected Mr. Fortune as if it were his own. It made
him physically sick. "He beats an innocent child," he said to his
daughter, who was apparently still prostrate at the end of the table,
"and not one of you lifts a hand to stop him."
  "You ain't lifted yours neither," one of the boys said in an undertone
and there was a general mutter from that chorus of frogs.
  "I'm an old man with a heart condition," he said. "I can't stop an
ox. "
  "She put you up to it," his daughter murmured in a languid listless
tone, her head rolling back and forth on the rim of her chair.
  "She puts you up to everything."
  "No child never put me up to nothing!" he yelled. "You're no
kind of a mother! You're a disgrace! That child is an angel! A
saint!" he shouted in a voice so high that it broke and he had to
scurry out of the room.
  The rest of the afternoon he had to lie on his bed. His heart,
whenever he knew the child had been beaten, felt as if it were
slightly too large for the space that was supposed to hold it. But now
he was more determined than ever to see the filling station go up
in front of the house, and if it gave Pitts a stroke, so much the
better. If it gave him a stroke and paralyzed him, he would be
served right and he would never be able to beat her again.
  Mary Fortune was never angry with him for long, or seriously,
and though he did not see her the rest of that day, when he woke up
the next morning, she was sitting astride his chest ordering him to
make haste so that they would not miss the concrete mixer.
  The workmen were laying the foundation for the fishing club
when they arrived and the concrete mixer was already in operation.
It was about the size and color of a circus elephant; they stood and
watched it churn for a half-hour or so. At eleven-thirty, the old
man had an appointment with Tilman to discuss his transaction and
they had to leave. He did not tell Mary Fortune where they were
going but only that he had to see a man.
  Tilman operated a combination country store, filling station,
scrap-metal dump, used-car lot and dance hall five miles down the
highway that connected with the dirt road that passed in front of
the Fortune place. Since the dirt road would soon be paved, he
wanted a good location on it for another such enterprise. He was
an up-and-coming man-the kind, Mr. Fortune thought, who was
never just in line with progress but always a little ahead of it so that
he could be there to meet it when it arrived. Signs up and down the
highway announced that Tilman's was only five miles away, only
four, only three, only two, only one; "Watch out for Tilman's,
Around this bend!" and finally, "Here it is, Friends, TILMAN'S!" in
dazzling red letters.
  Tilman's was bordered on either side by a field of old used-car
bodies, a kind of ward for incurable automobiles. He also sold outdoor
ornaments, such as stone cranes and chickens, urns, jardinieres,
whirligigs, and farther back from the road, so as not to depress his
dance-hall customers, a line of tombstones and monuments. Most
of his businesses went on out-of-doors, so that his store building itself
had not involved excessive expense. It was a one-room wooden structure
onto which he had added, behind, a long tin hall equipped for
dancing. This was divided into two sections, Colored and White,
each with its private nickelodeon. He had a barbecue pit and sold
barbecued sandwiches and soft drinks.
  As they drove up under the shed of Tilman's place, the old man
glanced at the child sitting with her feet drawn up on the seat and
her chin resting on her knees. He didn't know if she would remember that it was Tilman he was going to sell the lot to or not.
  "What you going in here for?" she asked suddenly, with a sniffing
look as if she scented an enemy.
  "Noner yer bidnis," he said. "You just sit in the car and when I
come out, I'll bring you something."
  "Don'tcher bring me nothing," she said darkly, "because I won't
be here."
  "Haw!" he said. "Now you're here, it's nothing for you to do but
wait," and he got out and without paying her any further attention,
he entered the dark store where Tilman was waiting for him.
  When he came out in half an hour, she was not in the car. Hiding,
he decided. He started walking around the store to see if she was
in the back. He looked in the doors of the two sections of the dance
hall and walked on around by the tombstones. Then his eye roved
over the field of sinking automobiles and he realized that she could
be in or behind anyone of two hundred of t hem, He came back
out in front of the store. A Negro boy, drinking a  purple drink, was
sitting on the ground with his back against the sweating ice
cooler.
  "Where did that little girl go to, boy?" he asked.
  "I ain't seen nair little girl," the boy said.
  The old man irritably fished in his pocket and handed him a
nickel and said, "A pretty little girl in a yeller cotton dress."
  "If you speakin about a stout chile look lak you," the boy said, "she
gone off in a truck with a white man."
  "What kind of a truck, what kind of a white man'" he yelled.
  "It were a green pick-up truck," the boy said smacking his lips,
"and a white man she call 'daddy.' They gone thataway some time
ago."
  The old man, trembling, got in his car and starrted home. His
feelings raced back and forth between fur y and mortification. She
had never left him before and certainly never for Pitts. Pitts had
ordered her to get in the truck and she was afraid not to. But when
he reached this conclusion he was more furious than ever. What was
the matter with her that she couldn't stand up to Pitts? Why was
there this one flaw in her character when he had trained her so well
in everything else? It was an ugly mystery.
When he reached the house and climbed the front steps, there
she was sitting in the swing, looking glum-faced in front of her
across the field he was going to sell. Her eyes were puffy and pinkrimmed
but he didn't see any red marks on her legs. He sat down
in the swing beside her. He meant to make his voice severe but instead
it came out crushed, as if it belonged to a suitor trying to reinstate
himself.
  "What did you leave me for? You ain't ever left me before," he
said.
  "Because I wanted to," she said, looking straight ahead.
  "You never wanted to," he said. "He made you."
  "I toljer I was going and I went," she said in a slow emphatic
voice, not looking at him, "and now you can go on and lemme
alone." There was something very final, in the sound of this, a tone
that had not come up before in their disputes. She stared across the
lot where there was nothing but a profusion of pink and yellow and
purple weeds, and on across the red road, to the sullen line of black
pine woods fringed on top with green. Behind that line was a
narrow gray-blue line of more distant woods and beyond that nothing
but the sky, entirely blank except for one or two threadbare
clouds. She looked into this scene as if it were a person that she
preferred to him.
  "It's my lot, ain't it?" he asked. "Why are you so up-in-the-air
about me selling my own lot?"
  "Because it's the lawn," she said. Her nose and eyes began to run
horribly but she held her face rigid and licked the water off as soon
as it was in reach of her tongue. "We won't be able to see across the
road," she said.
  The old man looked across the road to assure himself again that
there was nothing over there to see. "I never have seen you act in
such a way before," he said in an incredulous voice. "There's not
a thing over there but the woods."
  "We won't be able to see 'urn," she said, "and that's the lawn and
my daddy grazes his calves on it."
  At that the old man stood up. "You act more like a Pitts than a
Fortune," he said. He had never made such an ugly remark to her
before and he was sorry the instant he had said it. It hurt him more
than it did her. He turned and went in the house and upstairs to
his room.
  Several times during the afternoon, he got up from his bed and
looked out the window across the "lawn" to the line of woods she
said they wouldn't be able to see any more. Every time he saw the
same thing: woods-not a mountain, not a waterfall, not any kind
of planted bush or flower, just woods. The sunlight was woven
through them at that particular time of the afternoon so that every
thin pine trunk stood out in all its nakedness. A pine trunk is a
pine trunk, he said to himself, and anybody that wants to see one
don't have to go far in this neighborhood. Every time he got up and
looked out, he was reconvinced of his wisdom in selling the lot. The
dissatisfaction it caused Pitts would be permanent, but he could make
it up to Mary Fortune by buying her something. With grown people,
a road led either to heaven or hell, but with children there were
always stops along the way where their attention could be turned
with a trifle.
  The third time he got up to look at the woods, it was almost six
o'clock and the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised if. a pool of red
light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them.
The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he
were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future
and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that
he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as if
someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed
in blood. After a few minutes this unpleasant vision was broken by
the presence of Pitts's pick-up truck grinding to a halt below the
window. He returned to his bed and shut his eyes and against the
closed lids hellish red trunks rose up in a black wood.
  At the supper table nobody addressed a word to him, including
Mary Fortune. He ate quickly and returned again to his room and
spent the evening pointing out to himself the advantages for the
future of having an establishment like Tilman's so near. They would
not have to go any distance for gas. Anytime they needed a loaf
of bread, all they would have to do would be step out their front
door into Tilman's back door. They could sell milk to Tilman.
Tilman was a likable fellow. Tilman would draw other business.
The road would soon be paved. Travelers from all over the country
would stop at Tilman's. If his daughter thought she was better than
Tilman, it would be well to take her down a little. All men were
created free and equal. When this phrase sounded in his head, his
patriotic sense triumphed and he realized that it was his duty to sell
the lot, that he must insure the future. He looked out the window at
the moon shining over the woods across the road and listened for a
while to the hum of crickets and treefrogs, and beneath their racket,
he could hear the throb of the future town of Fortune.
  He went to bed certain that just as usual, he would wake up in
the morning looking into a little red mirror framed in a door of
fine hair. She would have forgotten all about the sale and after breakfast
they would drive into town and get the legal papers from the
courthouse. On the way back he would stop at Tilman's and close
the deal.
  When he opened his eyes in the morning, he opened them on the
empty ceiling. He pulled himself up and looked around the room
but she was not there. He hung over the edge of the bed and looked
beneath it but she was not there either. He got up and dressed and
went outside. She was sitting in the swing on the front porch, exactly
the way she had been yesterday, looking across the lawn into the
woods. The old man was very much irritated. Every morning since
she had been able to climb, he had waked up to find her either on
his bed or underneath it. It was apparent that this morning she preferred
the sight of the woods. He decided to ignore her behavior for
the present and then bring it up later when she was over her pique.
He sat down in the swing beside her but she continued to look at
the woods. "I thought you and me'd go into town and have us a
look at the boats in the new boat store," he said.
  She didn't turn her head but she asked suspiciously, in a loud
voice. "What else are you going for?"
  "Nothing else," he said.
  After a pause she said, "If that's all, I'll go," but she did not bother
to look at him.
  "Well put on your shoes," he said. "I ain't going to the city with a
barefoot woman." She did not bother to laugh at this joke.
  The weather was as indifferent as her disposition. The sky did
not look as if it were going to rain or as if it were not going to rain.
It was an unpleasant gray and the sun had not troubled to come
out. All the way into town, she sat looking at her feet, which stuck
out in front of her, encased in heavy brown school shoes. The old
man had often sneaked up on her and found her alone in conversation
with her feet and he thought she was speaking with them
silently now. Every now and then her lips moved but she said nothing
to him and let all his remarks pass as if she had not heard them.
He decided it was going to cost him considerable to buy her good
humor again and that he had better do it with a boat, since he
wanted one too. She had been talking boats ever since the water
backed up onto his place. They went first to the boat store. "Show
us the yachts for po' folks!" he shouted jovially to the clerk as they
entered.
  "They're all for po' folks!" the clerk said. "You'll be po' when you
finish buying one!" He was a stout youth in a yellow shirt and blue
pants and he had a ready wit. They exchanged several clever remarks
in rapid-fire succession. Mr. Fortune looked at Mary Fortune
to see if her face had brightened. She stood staring absently over
the side of an outboard motor boat at the opposite wall.
  "Ain't the lady innerested in boats?" the clerk asked.
  She turned and wandered back out onto the sidewalk and got in
the car again. The old man looked after her with amazement. He
could not believe that a child of her intelligence could be acting this
way over the mere sale of a field. "I think she must be coming down
with something," he said. "We'll come back again," and he returned
to the car.
  "Let's go get us an ice-cream cone," he suggested, looking at her
with concern.
  "I don't want no ice-cream cone," she said.
   His actual destination was the courthouse but he did not want to
make this apparent. "How'd you like to visit the ten-cent store while
I tend to a little bidnis of mine?" he asked. "You can buy yourself
something with a quarter I brought along."
  "I ain't got nothing to do in no ten-cent store," she said. "I don't
want no quarter of yours."
  If a boat was of no interest, he should not have thought a quarter
would be and reproved himself for that stupidity. "Well what's the
matter, sister?" he asked kindly. "Don't you feel good?"
  She turned and looked him straight in the face arid said with a
slow concentrated ferocity, "It's the lawn. My daddy grazes his calves
there. We won't be able to see the woods any more."
  The old man had held his fury in as long as he could. "He beats
you!" he shouted. "And you worry about where he's going to graze
his calves!"
  "Nobody's ever beat me in my life," she said, "and if anybody did,
I'd kill him."
  A man seventy-nine years of age cannot let himself be run over by
a child of nine. His face set in a look that was just a; determined as
hers. "Are you a Fortune," he said, "or are you a Pitt? Make up
your mind."
  Her voice was loud and positive and belligerent "I'm Mary-
Fortune-Pitts," she said.
  "Well I," he shouted, "am PURE Fortune!"
  There was nothing she could say to this and she showed it. For
an instant she looked completely defeated, and the old man saw with
a disturbing clearness that this was the Pitts look. What he saw was
the Pitts look, pure and simple, and he felt personally stained by it,
as if it had been found on his own face. He turned in disgust and
backed the car out and drove straight to the courthouse,
  The courthouse was a red and white blaze-faced building set in
the center of a square from which most of the grass had been worn
off. He parked in front of it and said, "Stay here," in  an imperious
tone and got out and slammed the car door.
  It took him a half-hour to get the deed and have the sale paper
drawn up and when he returned to the car, she was sitting on the
back seat in the corner. The expression on that part her face that
he could see was foreboding and withdrawn. The sky had darkened
also and there was a hot sluggish tide in the air, the kind felt when
a tornado is possible.
  "We better get on before we get caught in a storm" he said and
emphatically, "because I got one more place to stop on the way
home," but he might have been chauffeuring a small dead body for
all the answer he got.

  On the way to Tilman's he reviewed once more he many just
reasons that were leading him to his present action and he could
not locate a flaw in any of them. He decided that while this attitude
of hers would not he permanent, he was permanently disappointed
in her and that when she came around she would have
to apologize; and that there would be no boat. He was coming to
realize slowly that his trouble with her had always been that he had
not shown enough firmness. He had been too generous. He was
so occupied with these thoughts that he did not notice the signs
that said how many miles to Tilman's until the last one exploded
joyfully in his face: "Here it is, Friends, TILMAN'S!" He pulled in
under the shed.
  He got out without so much as looking at Mary Fortune and
entered the dark store where Tilman, leaning on the counter in
front of a triple shelf of canned goods. was waiting for him.
  Tilman was a man of quick action and few words. He sat habitually
with his arms folded on the counter and his insignificant
head weaving snake-fashion above them. He had a triangular-shaped
face with the point at the bottom and the top of his skull was
covered with a cap of freckles. His eyes were green and very narrow
and his tongue was always exposed in his partly opened mouth.
He had his checkbook handy and they got down to business at once.
It did not take him long to look at the deed and sign the bill of
sale. Then Mr. Fortune signed it and they grasped hands over the
counter.
  Mr. Fortune's sense of relief as he grasped Tilman's hand was
extreme. What was done, he felt, was done and there could be no
more argument, with her or with himself. He felt that he had acted
on principle and that the future was assured.
  Just as their hands loosened, an instant's change came over Tilman's
face and he disappeared completely under the counter as if
he had been snatched by the feet from below. A bottle crashed
against the line of tinned goods behind where he had been. The
old man whirled around. Mary Fortune was in the door, red-faced
and wild-looking, with another bottle lifted to hurl. As he ducked,
it broke behind him on the counter and she grabbed another from
the crate. He sprang at her but she tore to the other side of the
store, screaming something unintelligible and throwing everything
within her reach. The old man pounced again and this time he
caught her by the tail of her dress and pulled her backward out of
the store. Then he got a better grip and lifted her, wheezing and
whimpering but suddenly limp in his arms, the few feet to the car.
He managed to get the door open and dump her inside. Then he
ran around to the other side and got in himself and drove away as
fast as he could.
  His heart felt as if it were the size of the car and was racing
forward, carrying him to some inevitable destination faster than he
had ever been carried before. For the first five minutes he did not
think but only sped forward as if he were being driven inside his
own fury. Gradually the power of thought returned to him. Mary
Fortune, rolled into a ball in the corner of the seat, was snuffling
and heaving.
  He had never seen a child behave in such a way in his life. Neither
his own children nor anyone else's had ever displayed such temper
in his presence, and he had never for an instant imagined that the
child he had trained himself, the child who had been his constant
companion for nine years, would embarrass him like this. The child
he had never lifted a hand to!
  Then he saw, with the sudden vision that sometimes comes with
delayed recognition, that that had been his mistake.
  She respected Pitts because, even with no just cause, he beat her;
and if he--with his just cause--did not beat her now, he would
have nobody to blame but himself if she turned out a hellion. He
saw that the time had come, that he could no longer avoid whipping
her, and as he turned off the highway onto the dirt road leading to
home, he told himself that when he finished with her, she would
never throw another bottle again.
  He raced along the clay road until he came to the line where his
own property began and then he turned off onto a side path, just
wide enough for the automobile and bounced for a half a mile
through the woods. He stopped the car at the exact spot where he
had seen Pitts take his belt to her. It was a place where the road
widened so that two cars could pass or one could turn around, an
ugly red bald spot surrounded by long thin pines that appeared to
be gathered there to witness anything that would take place in such
a clearing. A few stones protruded from the clay.
  "Get out," he said and reached across her and opened the door.
She got out without looking at him or asking what they were
going to do and he got out on his side and carne around the front
of the car.
  "Now I'm going to whip you!" he said , and his voice was extra
loud and hollow and had a vibrating quality that appeared to be
taken up and passed through the tops of the pines. He did not
want to get caught in a downpour while he was whipping her
and he said, "Hurry up and get ready against that tree," and began
to take of his belt.
  What he had in mind to do appeared to come very slowly as if
it had to penetrate a fog in her head. She did not move but gradually
her confused expression began to clear . Where a few seconds
before her face had been red and distorted and unorganized, it
drained now of every vague line until nothing was left on it but
positiveness, a look that went slowly past determination and reached
certainty. "Nobody has ever beat me," she said, "and if anybody
tries it, I'll kill him."
  "I don't want no sass," he said and started toward her. His knees
felt very unsteady, as if they might turn either backward or forward.
  She moved exactly one step back and, keeping her eye on him
steadily, removed her glasses and dropped them behind a small
rock near the tree he had told her to get ready against. "Take off
your glasses," she said
  "Don't give me orders!" he said in a high, voice and slapped awkwardly
at her ankles with his belt.
  She was on him so quickly that he could not have recalled which
blow he felt first, whether the weight of her whole solid body or
the jabs of her feet or the pummeling of her fist on his chest. He
flailed the belt in the air, not knowing where to hit but trying to
get her off him until he could decide where to get a grip on her.
"Leggo!" he shouted. "Leggo I tell you!" But she seemed to be
everywhere, coming at him from all directions  at once. It was as if
he were being attacked not by one child but by a pack of small
demons all with stout brown school shoe, and  small rocklike fists.
His glasses flew to the side.
  "I toljer to take them off," she growled without  pausing.
  He caught his knee and danced on one foot and a rain of blows
fell on his stomach. He felt five claws in the flesh of his upper arm
where she was hanging from while her feet mechanically battered
his knees and her free fist pounded him again and again in the
chest. Then with horror he saw her face rise up in front of his,
teeth exposed, and he roared like a bull as she bit the side of his
jaw. He seemed to see his own face coming to bite him from several
sides at once but he could not attend to it for he was being kicked
indiscriminately, in the stomach and then in the crotch. Suddenly
he threw himself on the ground and began to roll like a man on
fire. She was on top of him at once, rolling with him and still
kicking, and now with both fists free to batter his chest.
  "I'm an old man!" he piped. "Leave me alone!" But she did not
stop. She began a fresh assault on his jaw.
  "Stop stop!" he wheezed. "I'm your grandfather!"
She paused, her face exactly on top of his. Pale identical eye
looked into pale identical eye. "Have you had enough?" she asked.
  The old man looked up into his own image. It was triumphant
and hostile. "You been whipped," it said, "by me," and then it
added, bearing down on each word, "and I'm PURE Pitts."
  In the pause she loosened her grip and he got hold of her throat.
With a sudden surge of strength, he managed to roll over and reverse
their positions so that he was looking down into the face that
was his own but had dared to call itself Pitts. With his hands still
tight around her neck, he lifted her head and brought it down once
hard against the rock that happened to be under it. Then he brought
it down twice more. Then looking into the face in which the eyes,
slowly rolling back, appeared to pay him not the slightest attention,
he said, "There's not an ounce of Pitts in me."
  He continued to stare at his conquered image until he perceived
that though it was absolutely silent, there was no look of remorse
on it. The eyes had rolled back down and were set in a fixed glare
that did not take him in. "This ought to teach you a good lesson,"
he said in a voice that was edged with doubt.
  He managed painfully to get up on his unsteady kicked legs and
to take two steps, but the enlargement of his heart which had
begun in the car was still going on. He turned his head and looked
behind him for a long time at the little motionless figure with its
head on the rock.
  Then he fell on his back and looked up helplessly along the bare
trunks into the tops of the pines and his heart expanded once
more with a convulsive motion. It expanded so fast that the old man
felt as if he were being pulled after it through the woods, felt as if
he were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines toward the
lake. He perceived that there would be a little opening there, a
little place where he could escape and leave the woods behind him.
He could see it in the distance already, a little opening where the
white sky was reflected in the water. It grew as he ran toward it
until suddenly the whole lake opened up before him, riding majestically
in little corrugated folds toward his feet. He realized suddenly
that he could not swim and that he had not bought the boat.
On both sides of him he saw that the gaunt trees had thickened
into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and
away into the distance. He looked around desperately for someone
to help him but the place was deserted except for one huge yellow
monster which sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorging itself
on clay.

End

The Enduring Chill

1958

Asbury's train stopped so that he would get off exactly where
his mother was standing waiting to meet him. Her thin
spectacled face below him was bright with a wide smile that
disappeared as she caught sight of him bracing himself behind
the conductor. The smile vanished so suddenly, the
shocked look that replaced it was so complete, that he
realized for the first time that he must look as ill as he was.
The sky was a chill gray and a startling white-gold sun, like
some strange potentate from the east, was rising beyond the
black woods that surrounded Timberboro. It cast a strange
light over the single block of one-story brick and wooden
shacks. Asbury felt that he was about to witness a majestic
transformation, that the flat of roofs might at any moment
turn into the mounting turrets of some exotic temple for a
god he didn't know. The illusion lasted only a moment before
his attention was drawn back to his mother.
  She had given a little cry; she looked aghast. He was
pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His
mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to
reality and he supposed that if the experience didn't kill her,
it would assist her in the process of growing up. He stepped
down and greeted her.
  "You  don't look very well," she said and gave him a long
clinical stare.
  "I don't feel like talking," he said at once. "I've had a
bad trip."
  Mrs. Fox observed that his left eye was bloodshot. He
was puffy and pale and his hair had receded tragically for a
boy of twenty-five. The thin reddish wedge of it left on top
bore down in a point that seemed to lengthen his nose and
give him an irritable expression that matched his tone of
voice when he spoke to her. "It must have been cold up
there," she said. "Why don't you take off your coat? It's not
cold down here."
  "You don't have to tell me what the temperature is!" he
said in a high voice. "I'm old enough to know when I want
to take my coat off!" The train glided silently away behind
him, leaving a view of the twin blocks of dilapidated stores.
He gazed after the aluminum speck disappearing into the
woods. It seemed to him that his last connection with a larger
world were vanishing forever. Then he turned and faced his
mother grimly, irked that he had allowed himself, even for
an instant, to see an imaginary temple in this collapsing
country junction. He had become entirely accustomed to the
thought of death, but he had not become accustomed to the
thought of death here.
  He had felt the end coming on for nearly four months.
Alone in his freezing flat, huddled under his two blankets
and his overcoat and with three thicknesses of the New York
Times between, he had had a chill one night, followed by a
violent sweat that left the sheets soaking and removed all
doubt from his mind about his true condition. Before this
there had been a gradual slackening of his energy and vague
inconsistent aches and headaches. He had been absent so
many days from his part-time job in the bookstore that he
had lost it. Since then he had been living, or just barely so,
on his savings and these, diminishing day by day, had been
all he had between him and home. Now there was nothing.
He was here.
  "Where's the car?" he muttered.
  "It's over yonder," his mother said. "And your sister is
asleep in the back because I don't like to come out this early
by myself. There's no need to wake her up."
  "No," he said, "let sleeping dogs lie," and he picked up
his two bulging suitcases and started across the road with
them.
 They were too heavy for him and by the time he reached
the car, his mother saw that he was exhausted. He had never
come home with two suitcases before. Ever since he had first
gone away to college, he had come back every time with
nothing but the necessities for a two-week stay and with a
wooden resigned expression that said he was prepared to
endure the visit for exactly fourteen days. "You've brought
more than usual," she observed, but he did not answer.
  He opened the car door and hoisted the two bags in
beside his sister's upturned feet, giving first the feet-in Girl
Scout shoes-and then the rest of her a revolted look of
recognition. She was packed into a black suit and had a white
rag around her head with metal curlers sticking out from
under the edges. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was
open. He and she had the same features except that hers were
bigger. She was eight years older than he was and was prin-
cipal of the county elementary school. He shut the door softly
so she wouldn't wake up and then went around and got in
the front seat and closed his eyes. His mother backed the
car into the road and in a few minutes he felt it swerve into
the highway. Then he opened his eyes. The road stretched
between two open fields of yellow bitterweed.
  "Do you think Timberboro has improved?" his mother
asked. This was her standard question, meant to be taken
literally.
  "It's still there, isn't it?" he said in an ugly voice.
  "Two of the stores have new fronts," she said. Then with
a sudden ferocity, she said, "You did well to come home
where you can get a good doctor!  I'll take you to Doctor
Block  this afternoon."
  "I am not," he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking,
"going to Doctor Block. This afternoon or ever. Don't you
think if I'd wanted to go to a doctor I'd have gone up there
where they have some good ones? Don't you know they have
better doctors in New York?"
  "He would take a personal interest in you," she said.
"None of those doctors up there would take a personal interest
in you."
  "I don't want him taking a personal interest in me." Then
after a minute, staring out across a blurred purple-looking
field, he said, "What's wrong with me is way beyond Block,"
and his voice trailed off into a frayed sound, almost a sob.
  He could not, as his friend Goetz had recommended,
prepare to see it all as illusion, either what had gone before
or the few weeks that were left to him. Goetz was certain that
death was nothing at all. Goetz, whose whole face had always
been purple-splotched with a million indignations, had returned
from six months in Japan as dirty as ever but as bland
as the Buddha himself. Goetz took the news of Asbury's approaching end with a calm indifference. Quoting something
or other he said, "Although the Bodhisattva leads an infinite
number of creatures into nirvana, in reality there are neither
any Bodhisattvas to do the leading nor any creatures to be
led." However, out of some feeling for his welfare, Goetz had
put forth $4.50 to take him to a lecture on Vedanta. It had
been a waste of his money. While Goetz had listened enthralled
to the dark little man on the platform, Asbury's bored
gaze had roved among the audience. It had passed over the
heads of several girls in saris, past a Japanese youth, a blueblack
man with a fez, and several girls who looked like secretaries.
Finally, at the end of the row, it had rested on a lean
spectacled figure in black, a priest. The priest's expression was
of a polite but strictly reserved interest. Asbury identified his
own feelings immediately in the taciturn superior expression.
When the lecture was over a few students met in Goetz's flat,
the priest among them, but here he was equally reserved. He
listened with a marked politeness to the discussion of Asbury's
approaching death, but he said little. A girl in a sari
remarked that self-fulfillment was out of the question since
it meant salvation and the word was meaningless. "Salvation,"
quoted Goetz, "is the destruction of a simple prejudice, and
no one is saved."
  "And what do you say to that?" Asbury asked the priest
and returncd his reserved smile over the heads of the others.
The borders of this smile seemed to touch on some icy
clarity.
  "There is," the priest said, "a real probability of the New
Man, assisted, of course," he added brittlely, "by the Third
Person of the Trinity."
  "Ridiculous!" the girl in the sari said, but the priest
only brushed her with his smile, which was slightly amused
  When he got up to leave, he silently handed Asbury a
small card on which he had written his name, Ignatius
Vogle, S.J., and an address. Perhaps, Asbury thought now,
he should have used it for the priest appealed to him as a
man of the world, someone who would have understood
the unique tragedy of his death, a death whose meaning
had been far beyond the twittering group around them.
And how much more beyond Block. "What's wrong with
me," he repeated, "is way beyond Block."
  His mother knew at once what he meant: he meant he
was going to have a nervous breakdown. She did not say
a word. She did not say that this was precisely what she
could have told him would happen. When people think they
are smart-even when they are smart-there is nothing anybody
else can say to make them see things straight, and with
Asbury, the trouble was that in addition to being smart, he
had an artistic temperament. She did not know where he had
got it from because his father, who was a lawyer and businessman
and farmer and politician all rolled into one, had
certainly had his feet on the ground; and she had certainly
always had hers on it. She had managed after he died to get
the two of them through college and beyond; but she had
observed that the more education they got, the less they
could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse
through the eighth grade and he could do anything.
  She could have told Asbury what would help him. She
could have said, "If you would get out in the sunshine, or if
you would work for a month in the dairy, you'd be a different
person!" but she knew exactly how that suggestion would be
received. He would be a nuisance in the dairy but she would
let him work in there if he wanted to. She had let him work
in there last year when he had come home and was writing
the play. He had been writing a play about Negroes (why
anybody would want to write a play about Negroes was
beyond her) and he had said he wanted to work in the dairy
with them and find out what their interests were. Their interests
were in doing as little as they could get by with, as she
could have told him if anybody could have told him anything.
The Negroes had put up with him and he had learned to
put the milkers on and once he had washed all the cans and
she thought that once he had mixed feed. Then a cow had
kicked him and he had not gone back to the barn again. She
knew that if he would get in there now, or get out and fix
fences, or do any kind of work-real work, not writing that
he might avoid this nervous breakdown. "Whatever
happened to that play you were writing about the Negroes?"
she asked.
  "I am not writing plays," he said. "And get this through
your head: 1 am not working in any dairy. I am not getting
out in the sunshine. I'm ill. I have fever and chills and I'm
dizzy and all I want you to do is leave me alone."
  "Then if you are really ill, you should see Doctor Block."
  "And I am not seeing Block," he finished and ground
himself down in the seat and stared intensely in front of him.
  She turned into their driveway, a red road that ran for a
quarter of a mile through the two front pastures. The dry
cows were on one side and the milk herd on the other. She
slowed the car and then stopped altogether, her attention
caught by a cow with a bad quarter. "They haven't been attending
to her," she said. "Look at that bag!"
  Asbury turned his head abruptly in the opposite direction,
but there a small, walleyed Guernsey was watching him
steadily as if she sensed some bond between them. "Good
God!" he cried in an agonized voice, "can't we go on? It's six
o'clock in the morning!"
  "Yes yes," his mother said and started the car quickly.
  "What's that cry of deadly pain?" his sister drawled from
the back seat. "Oh it's you," she said. "Well well, we have the
artist with us again. How utterly utterly." She had a decidedly
nasal voice.
  He didn't answer her or turn his head. He had learned
that much. Never answer her.
  "Mary George!" his mother said sharply. "Asbury is sick.
Leave him alone."
  "What's wrong with him?" Mary George asked.
  "There's the house!" his mother said as if they were all
blind but her. It rose on the crest of the hill--a white two story
farmhouse with a wide porch and pleasant columns.
She always approached it with a feeling of pride and she had
said more than once to Asbury, "You have a home here that
half those people up there would give their eyeteeth for!"
  She had been once to the terrible place he lived in New
York. They had gone up five flights of dark stone steps, past
open garbage cans on every landing, to arrive finally at two
damp rooms and a closet with a toilet in it. "You wouldn't
live like this at home," she had muttered.
  "No!" he'd said with an ecstatic look, "it wouldn't be
possible!"
  She supposed the truth was that she simply didn't understand
how it felt to be sensitive or how peculiar you were
when you were an artist. His sister said he was not an artist
and that he had no talent and that that was the trouble with
him; but Mary George was not a happy girl herself. Asbury
said she posed as an intellectual but that her I.Q. couldn't
be over seventy-five, that all she was really interested in was
getting a man but that no sensible man would finish a first
look at her. She had tried to tell him that Mary George could
be very attractive when she put her mind to it and he had
said that that much strain on her mind would break her
down. If she were in any way attractive, he had said, she
wouldn't now be principal of a county elementary school,
and Mary George had said that if Asbury had had any
talent, he would by now have published something. What
had he ever published, she wanted to know, and for that
matter, what had he ever written?
  Mrs. Fox had pointed out that he was only twenty-five
years old and Mary George had said that the age most people
published something at was twenty-one, which made him
exactly four years overdue. Mrs. Fox was not up on things
like that but she suggested that he might be writing a very
long book. Very long book, her eye, Mary George said, he
would do well if he came up with so much as a poem. Mrs.
Fox hoped it wasn't going to be just a poem.
  She pulled the car into the side drive and a scattering of
guineas exploded into the air and sailed screaming around
the house. "Home again, home again jiggity jig!" she said.
  "Oh God," Asbury groaned.
  "The artist arrives at the gas chamber," Mary Gewge said
in her nasal voice.
  He leaned on the door and got out, and forgetting his
bags he moved toward the front of the house as if he were in
a daze. His sister got out and stood by the car door, squinting
at his bent unsteady figure. As she watched him go up the
front steps, her mouth fell slack in her astonished face.
"Why," she said, "there is something the matter with him.
He looks a hundred years old."
  "Didn't I tell you so?" her mother hissed. "Now you keep
your mouth shut and let him alone."
  He went into the house, pausing in the hall only long
enough to see his pale broken face glare at him for an instant
from the pier mirror. Holding onto the banister, he pulled
himself up the steep stairs, across the landing and then up the
shorter second flight and into his room, a large open airy
room with a faded blue rug and white curtains freshly put up
for his arrival. He looked at nothing, but fell face down on
his own bed. It was a narrow antique bed with a high ornamental
headboard on which was carved a garlanded basket
over growing with wooden fruit.
  While he was still in New York, he had written a letter
to his mother which filled two notebooks. He did not mean
it to be read until after his death. It was such a letter as
Kafka had addressed to his father. Asbury's father had died
twenty years ago and Asbury considered this a great blessing.
The old man, he felt sure, had been one of the courthouse
gang, a rural worthy with a dirty finger in every pie and he
knew he would not have been able to stomach him. He had
read some of his correspondence and had been appalled by its
stupidity.
  He knew, of course, that his mother would not understand
the letter at once. Her literal mind would require some
time to discover the significance of it, but he thought she
would be able to see that he forgave her for all she had done to
him. For that matter, he supposed that she would realize
what she had done to him only through the letter. He didn't
think she was conscious of it at all. Her self-satisfaction itself
was barely conscious, but because of the letter, she might experience
a painful realization and this would be the only
thing of value he had to leave her.
  If reading it would be painful to her, writing it had
sometimes been unbearable to him-for in order to face her,
he had had to face himself. "I came here to escape the slave's
atmosphere of home," he had written, "to find freedom, to
liberate my imagination, to take it like a hawk from its cage
and set it 'whirling off into the widening gyre' (Yeats) and
what did I find? It was incapable of flight. It was some bird
you had domesticated, sitting huffy in its pen, refusing to
come out!" The next words were underscored twice. "I have
no imagination. I have no talent. I can't create. I have nothing
but the desire for these things. Why didn't you kill that
too? Woman, why did you pinion me?"
  Writing this, he had reached the pit of despair and he
thought that reading it, she would at least begin to sense his
tragedy and her part in it. It was not that she had ever forced
her way on him. That had never been necessary. Her way had
simply been the air he breathed and when at last he had
found other air, he couldn't survive in it. He felt that even
if she didn't understand at once, the letter would leave her
with an enduring chill and perhaps in time lead her to see
herself as she was.
  He had destroyed everything else he had ever written his
two lifeless novels, his half-dozen stationary plays, his
prosy poems, his sketchy short stories--and kept only the two
notebooks that contained the letter. They were in the black
suitcase that his sister, huffing and blowing, was now dragging
up the second flight of stairs. His mother was carrying
the smaller bag and came on ahead. He turned over as she
entered the room.
  "I'll open this and get out your things," she said, "and
you can go right to bed and in a few minutes I'll bring your
breakfast."
  He sat up and said in a fretful voice, "I don't want any
breakfast and I can open my own suitcase. Leave that alone."
  His sister arrived in the door, her face full of curiosity,
and let the black bag fall with a thud over the doorsill. Then
she began to push it across the room with her foot until she
was close enough to get a good look at him. "If I looked as
bad as you do," she said, "I'd go to the hospital."
  Her mother cut her eyes sharply at her and she left.
Then Mrs. Fox closed the door and came to the bed and sat
down on it beside him. "Now this time I want you to make a
long visit and rest," she said.
  "This visit, "he said, "will be permanent."
  "Wonderful!" she cried. "You can have a little studio in
your room and in the mornings you can write plays and in
the afternoons you can help in the dairy!"
  He turned a white wooden face to her. "Close the blinds
and let me sleep," he said.
  When she was gone, he lay for some time staring at the
water stains on the gray walls. Descending from the top molding,
long icicle shapes had been etched by leaks and, directly
over his bed on the ceiling, another leak had made a fierce
bird with spread wings. It had an icicle crosswise in its beak
and there were smaller icicles depending from its wings and
tail. It had been there since his childhood and had always
irritated him and sometimes had frightened him. He had
often had the illusion that it was in motion and about to
descend mysteriously and set the icicle on his head. He
closed his eyes and thought: I won't have to look at it for
many more days. And presently he went to sleep.

When he woke up in the afternoon, there was a pink openmouthed
face hanging over him and from two large familiar
ears on either side of it the black tubes of Block's stethoscope
extended down to his exposed chest. The doctor, seeing he
was awake, made a face like a Chinaman, rolled his eyes
almost out of his head and cried, "Say AHHHHH!"
  Block was irresistible to children. For miles around they
vomited and went into fevers to have a visit from him. Mrs.
Fox was standing behind him, smiling radiantly. "Here's Doctor
Block!" she said as if she had captured this angel on the
rooftop and brought him in for her little boy.
  "Get him out of here," Asbury muttered. He looked at
the asinine face from what seemed the bottom of a black
hole.
  The doctor peered closer, wiggling his ears. Block was
bald and had a round face as senseless as a baby's. Nothing
about him indicated intelligence except two cold clinical
nickel-colored eyes that hung with a motionless curiosity
over whatever he looked at. "You sho do look bad, Azzberry,"
he murmured. He took the stethoscope off and dropped it in
his bag. "I don't know when I've seen anybody your age look
as sorry as you do. What you been doing to yourself?"
  There was a continuous thud in the back of Asbury's
head as if his heart had got trapped in it and was fighting to
get out. "I didn't send for you," he said.
  Block put his hand on the glaring face and pulled the
eyelid down and peered into it. "You must have been on the
bum up there," he said. He began to press his hand in the
small of Asbury's back. "I  went up there once myself," he
said, "and saw exactly how little they had and came straight
on back home. Open your mouth."
  Asbury opened it automatically and the drill-like gaze
swung over it and bore down. He snapped it shut and in a
wheezing breathless voice he said, "If I'd wanted a doctor,
I'd have stayed up there where I could have got a good one!"
  "Asbury!"his mother said.
  "How long you been having the so' throat?" Block asked.
  "She sent for you!" Asbury said. "She can answer the
questions."
  "Asbury!" his mother said.
Block leaned over his bag and pulled out a rubber tube.
He pushed Asbury's sleeve up and tied the tube around his
upper arm. Then he took out a syringe and prepared to find
the vein, humming a hymn as he pressed the needle in. As-
bury lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his
blood was invaded by this idiot. "Slowly Lord but sure,"
Block sang in a murmuring voice, "Oh slowly Lord but sure."
When the syringe was full, he withdrew the needle. "Blood
don't lie," he said. He poured it in a bottle and stopped it up
and put the bottle in his bag. "Azzberry," he started, "how
long ... "
  Asbury sat up and thrust his thudding head forward and
said, "I didn't send for you. I'm not answering any questions.
You're not my doctor. What's wrong with me is way beyond
you."
  "Most things are beyond me," Block said. "I ain't found
anything yet that I thoroughly understood," and he sighed
and got up. His eyes seemed to glitter at Asbury as if from
a great distance.
  "He wouldn't act so ugly," Mrs. Fox explained, "if he
weren't really sick. And I want you to come back every day
until you get him well."
  Asbury's eyes were a fierce glaring violet. "What's wrong
with me is way beyond you," he repeated and lay back down
and closed his eyes until Block and his mother were gone.

  In the next few days, though he grew rapidly worse, his
mind functioned with a terrible clarity. On the point of
death, he found himself existing in a state of illumination
that was totally out of keeping with the kind of talk he had
to listen to from his mother. This was largely about cows
with names like Daisy and Bessie Button and their intimate
functions-their mastitis and their screwworms and their
abortions. His mother insisted that in the middle of the day
he get out and sit on the porch and "enjoy the view" and as
resistance was too much of a struggle, he dragged himself out
and sat there in a rigid slouch, his feet wrapped in an afghan
and his hands gripped on the chair arms as if he were about
to spring forward into the glaring china blue sky. The lawn
extended for a quarter of an acre down to a barbed-wire
fence that divided it from the front pasture. In the middle
of the day the dry cows rested there under a line of sweetgum
trees. On the other side of the road were two hills with a
pond between and his mother could sit on the porch and
watch the herd walk across the dam to the hill on the other
side. The whole scene was rimmed by a wall of trees which,
at the time of day he was forced to sit there, was a washed out
blue that reminded him sadly of the Negroes' faded
overalls.
  He listened irritably while his mother detailed the faults
of the help. "Those two are not stupid," she said. "They
know how to look out for themselves."
  "They need to," he muttered, but there was no use to
argue with her. Last year he had been writing a play about
the Negro and he had wanted to be around them for a while
to see how they really felt about their condition, but the two
who worked for her had lost all their initiative over the
years. They didn't talk. The one called Morgan was light
brown, part Indian; the other, older one, Randall, was very
black and fat. When they said anything to him, it was as if
they were speaking to an invisible body located to the right
or left of where he actually was, and after two days working
side by side with them, he felt he had not established rapport.
He decided to try something bolder than talk and one afternoon
as he was standing near Randall, watching him adjust a
milker, he had quietly taken out his cigarettes and lit one.
The Negro had stopped what he was doing and watched him.
He waited until Asbury had taken two draws and then he
said, "She don't 'low no smoking in here."
  The other one approached and stood there, grinning.
  "I know it," Asbury said and after a deliberate pause, he
shook the package and held it out, first to Randall, who took
one, and then to Morgan, who took one. He had then lit the
cigarettes for them himself and the three of them had stood
there smoking. There were no sounds but the steady click of
the two milking machines and the occasional slap of a cow's
tail against her side. It was one of those moments of communion
when the difference between black and white is
absorbed into nothing.
  The next day two cans of milk had been returned from
the creamery because it had absorbed the odor of tobacco.
He took the blame and told his mother that it was he and not
the Negroes who had been smoking. "If you were doing it,
they were doing it," she had said. "Don't you think I know
those two?" She was incapable of thinking them innocent;
but the experience had so exhilarated him that he had been
determined to repeat it in some other way.
  The next afternoon when he and Randall were in the
milk house pouring the fresh milk into the cans, he had
picked up the jelly glass the Negroes drank out of and, inspired,
had poured himself a glassful of the warm milk and
drained it down. Randall had stopped pouring and had remained,
half-bent, over the can, watching him. "She don't
'low that," he said. "That the thing she don't 'low."
  Asbury poured out another glassful and handed it to
him.
  "She don't 'low it," he repeated.
  "Listen," Asbury said hoarsely, "the world is changing.
There's no reason I shouldn't drink after you or you after
Me!"
  "She don't 'low noner us to drink noner this here milk,"
Randall said.
  Asbury continued to hold the glass out to him. "You took
the cigarette," he said. "Take the milk. It's not going to hurt
my mother to lose two or three glasses of milk a day. We've
got to think free if we want to live free!"
  The other one had come up and was standing in the.
door.
  "Don't want noner that milk," Randall said.
  Asbury swung around and held the glass out to Morgan.
  "Here boy, have a drink of this," he said.
  Morgan stared at him; then his face took on a decided
look of cunning. "I ain't seen you drink none of it yourself,"
he said.
  Asbury despised milk. The first warm glassful had turned
his stomach. He drank half of what he was holding and
handed the rest to the Negro, who took it and gazed down
inside the glass as if it contained some great mystery; then
he set it on the floor by the cooler.
  "Don't you like milk?" Asbury asked.
  "I likes it but 1ain't drinking noner that."
  "Why?"
  "She don't 'low it," Morgan said.
  "My God!' Asbury exploded, "she she she!" He had tried
the same thing the next day and the next and the next but he
could not get them to drink the milk. A few afternoons later
when he was standing outside the milk house about to go in,
he heard Morgan ask, "How corm you let him drink all that
milk every day?"
  "What he do is him," Randall said. "What I do is me."
  "Howcome he talks so ugly about his ma?"
  "She ain't whup him enough when he was little," Randall
said.
  The insufferableness of life at home had overcome him
and he had returned to New York two days early. So far as
he was concerned he had died there, and the question now
was how long he could stand to linger here. He could have
hastened his end but suicide would not have been a victory.
Death was coming to him legitimately, as a justification, as
a gift from life. That was his greatest triumph. Then too, to
the fine minds of the neighborhood, a suicide son would indicate
a mother who had been a failure, and while this was
the case, he felt that it was a public embarrassment he could
spare her. What she would learn from the letter would be a
private revelation. He had sealed the notebooks in a manila
envelope and had written on it: "To be opened only after
the death of Asbury Porter Fox." He had put the envelope in
the desk drawer in his room and locked it and the key was in
his pajama pocket until he could decide on a place to leave it.
  When they sat on the porch in the morning, his mother felt
that some of the time she should talk about subjects that were
of interest to him. The third morning she started in on his
writing. "When you get well," she said, "I think it would be
nice if you wrote a book about down here. We need another
good book like Gone With the Wind."
  He could feel the muscles in his stomach begin to
tighten.
  "Put the war in it," she advised. "That always makes a
long book."
  He put his head back gently as if he were afraid it would
crack. After a moment he said, "I am not going to write any
book."
  "Well," she said, "if you don't feel like writing a book,
you could just write poems. They're nice." She realized that
what he needed was someone intellectual to talk to, but
Mary George was the only intellectual she knew and he
would not talk to her. She had thought of Mr. Bush, the retired
Methodist minister, but she had not brought this up.
Now she decided to hazard it. "I think I'll ask Dr. Bush to
come to see you," she said, raising Mr. Bush's rank. "You'd
enjoy him. He collects rare coins."
  She was not prepared for the reaction she got. He began
to shake all over and give loud spasmodic laughs. He seemed
about to choke. After a minute he subsided into a cough. "If
you think I need spiritual aid to die," he said, "you're quite
mistaken. And certainly not from that ass Bush. My God!"
  "I didn't mean that at all," she said. "He has coins dating
from the time of Cleopatra."
  "Well if you ask him here, I'll tell him to go to hell,"
he said. "Bush! That beats all!"
  "I'm glad something amuses you," she said acidly.
  For a time they sat there in silence. Then his mother
looked up. He was sitting forward again and smiling at her.
His  face was brightening more and more as if he had just had
an Idea that was brilliant. She stared at him. "I'll tell you who
I want to come," he said. For the first time since he had come
home, his expression was pleasant; though there was also,
she thought, a kind of crafty look about him.
  "Who do you want to come?" she asked suspiciously.
  "I want a priest," he announced.
  “A priest?" his mother said in an uncomprehending voice.
Preferably a Jesuit," he said, brightening more and
more. "Yes, by all means a Jesuit. They have them in the city.
You can call up and get me one."
  "What is the matter with you?" his mother asked.
  "Most of them are very well-educated," he said, "but
Jesuits are foolproof. A Jesuit would be able to discuss something
besides the weather." Already, remembering Ignatius
Vogle, S.J., he could picture the priest. This one would be a
trifle more worldly perhaps, a trifle more cynical. Protected
by their ancient institution, priests could afford to be cynical,
to play both ends against the middle. He would talk to a
man of culture before he died--even in this desert.  Furthermore,
nothing would irritate his mother so much. He could
not understand why he had not thought of this sooner.
  "You're not a member of that church," Mrs. Fox said
shortly. "It's twenty miles away. They wouldn't send one."
She hoped that this would end the matter.
He sat back absorbed in the idea, determined to force
her to make the call since she always did what he wanted if
he kept at her. "I'm dying," he said, "and I haven't asked you
to do but one thing and you refuse me that."
  "You are NOT dying."
  "When you realize it," he said, "it'll be too late."
  There was another unpleasant silence. Presently his
mother said, "Nowadays doctors don't let young people die.
They give them some of these new medicines." She began
shaking her foot with a nerve-rattling assurance. "People
just don't die like they used to," she said.
  "Mother," he said, "you ought to be prepared. I think
even Block knows and hasn't told you yet." Block, after the
first visit, had come in grimly every time, without his jokes
and funny faces, and had taken his blood in silence, his
nickel-colored eyes unfriendly. He was, by definition, the
enemy of death and he looked now as if he knew he was
battling the real thing. He had said he wouldn't prescribe
until he knew what was wrong and Asbury had laughed in
his face. "Mother," he said, "I AM going to die," and he tried
to make each word like a hammer blow on top of her head.
She paled slightly but she did not blink. "Do you think
for one minute," she said angrily, "that I intend to sit here
and let you die?" Her eyes were as hard as two old mountain
ranges seen in the distance. He felt the first distinct stroke of
doubt.
  "Do you?" she asked fiercely.
  "I don't think you have anything to do with it," he said in
a shaken voice.
  "Humph," she said and got up and left the porch as if
she could not stand to be around such stupidity an instant
longer. '
  Forgetting the Jesuit, he went rapidly over his symptoms:
his fever had increased, interspersed by chills; he barely
had the energy to drag himself out on the porch; food was
abhorrent to him; and Block had not been able to give her
the least satisfaction. Even as he sat there, he felt the beginning
of a new chill, as if death were already playfully
rattling his bones. He pulled the afghan off his feet and put it
around his shoulders and made his way unsteadily up the
stairs to bed.
  He continued to grow worse. In the next few days he
became so much weaker and badgered her so constantly
about the Jesuit that finally in desperation she decided to
humor his foolishness. She made the call, explaining in a
chilly voice that her son was ill, perhaps a little out of his
head, and wished to speak to a priest. 'While she made the
call, Asbury hung over the banisters, barefooted, with the
afghan around him, and listened. When she hung up he
called down to know when the priest was coming.
  "Tomorrow sometime, "his mother said irritably.
  He could tell by the fact that she made the call that her
assurance was beginning to shatter. Whenever she let Block
in or out, there was much whispering in the downstairs hall.
That evening, he heard her and Mary George talking in low
voices in the parlor. He thought he heard his name and he got
up and tiptoed into the hall and down the first three steps
until he could hear the voices distinctly.
  "I had to call that priest," his mother was saying. "I'm
afraid this is serious. I thought it was just a nervous break
down but now I think it's something real. Doctor Block thinks
it's something real too and whatever it is is worse because
he's so run-down."
  "Grow up, Mamma," Mary George said, "I've told you
and I tell you again: what's wrong with him is purely psychosomatic."
There was nothing she was not an expert on.
  "No, "his mother said, "it's a real disease. The doctor says
so." He thought he detected a crack in her voice.
  "Block is an idiot," Mary George said. "You've got to
face the facts: Asbury can't write so he gets sick. He's going
to be an invalid instead of an artist. Do you know what he
needs?"
  "N0," his mother said.
  "Two or three shock treatments," Mary George said.
  "Get that artist business out of his head once and for all."
His mother gave a little cry and he grasped the banister.
  "Mark my words," his sister continued, "all he's going to
be around here for the next fifty years is a decoration."
  He went back to bed. In a sense she was right. He had
failed his god, Art, but he had been a faithful servant and
Art was sending him Death. He had seen this from the first
with a kind of mystical clarity. He went to sleep thinking of
the peaceful spot in the family burying ground where he
would soon lie, and after a while he saw that his body was
being borne slowly toward it while his mother and Mary
George watched without interest from their chairs on the
porch. As the bier was carried across the dam, they could
look up and see the procession reflected upside down in the
pond. A lean dark figure in a Roman collar followed it. He
had a mysteriously saturnine face in which there was a subtle
blend of asceticism and corruption. Asbury was laid in a
shallow grave on the hillside and the indistinct mourners,
after standing in silence for a while, spread out over the dark
ening green. The Jesuit retired to a spot beneath a dead tree
to smoke and meditate. The moon came up and Asbury was
aware of a presence bending over him and a gentle warmth
on his cold face. He knew that this was Art come to wake him
and he sat up and opened his eyes. Across the hill all the
lights were on in his mother's house. The black pond was
speckled with little nickel-colored stars. The Jesuit had disappeared.
All around him the cows were spread out grazing
in the moonlight and one large white one, violently spotted,
was softly licking his head as if it were a block of salt. He
awoke with a shudder and discovered that his bed was soaking
from a night sweat and as he sat shivering in the dark, he
realized that the end was not many days distant. He gazed
down into the crater of death and fell back dizzy on his
pillow.
   The next day his mother noted something almost ethereal
about his ravaged face. He looked like one of those dying
children who must have Christmas early. He sat up in the
bed and directed the rearrangement of several chairs and had
her remove a picture of a maiden chained to a rock for he
knew it would make the Jesuit smile. He had the comfortable
rocker taken away and when he finished, the room with its
severe wall stains had a certain cell-like quality. He felt it
would be attractive to the visitor.
  All morning he waited, looking irritably up at the ceiling
where the bird with the icicle in its beak seemed poised and
waiting too; but the priest did not arrive until late in the
afternoon. As soon as his mother opened the door, a loud
unintelligible voice began to boom in the downstairs hall.
Asbury's heart beat wildly. In a second there was a heavy
creaking on the stairs. Then almost at once his mother, her
expression constrained, came in followed by a massive old
man who plowed straight across the room, picked up a chair
by the side of the bed and put it under himself.
  "I'm Fahther Finn-from Purrgatory," he said in a
hearty voice. He had a large red face, a stiff brush of gray
hair and was blind in one eye, but the good eye, blue and
clear, was focussed sharply on Asbury. There was a grease
spot on his vest. "So you want to talk to a priest?" he said.
  "Very wise. None of us knows the hour Our Blessed Lord
may call us." Then he cocked his good eye up at Asbury's
mother and said, "Thank you, you may leave us now."
  Mrs. Fox stiffened and did not budge.
  "I'd like to talk to Father Finn alone," Asbury said, feeling
suddenly that here he had an ally, although he had not
expected a priest like this one. His mother gave him a disgusted
look and left the room. He knew she would go no
farther than just outside the door.
   "It's so nice to have you come," Asbury said. "This place
is incredibly dreary. There's no one here an intelligent person
can talk to. I wonder what you think of Joyce, Father?"
The priest lifted his chair and pushed closer. "You'll  have
to shout," he said. "Blind in one eye and deaf in one ear."
  "What do you think of Joyce?" Asbury said louder.
  "Joyce? Joyce who?" asked the priest.
  "James Joyce," Asbury said and laughed.
  The priest brushed his huge hand in the air as if he
were bothered by gnats. "I haven't met him," he said. "Now.
  Do you say your morning and night prayers?"
  Asbury appeared confused. "Joyce was a great writer," he
murmured, forgetting to shout.
  "You don't eh?" said the priest. "Well you will never
learn to be good unless you pray regularly. You cannot love
Jesus unless you speak to Him."
  "The myth of the dying god has always fascinated me,"
Asbury shouted, but the priest did not appear to catch it.
“Do you have trouble with purity?" he demanded, and as
Asbury paled, he went on without waiting for an answer. "We
all do but you must pray to the Holy Ghost for it. Mind,
heart and body. Nothing is overcome without prayer. Pray
with your family. Do you pray with your family?"
  "God forbid," Asbury murmured. "My mother doesn't
have time to pray and my sister is an atheist," he shouted.
  "A shame!" said the priest. "Then you must pray for
them."
  "The artist prays by creating," Asbury ventured.
  "Not enough!" snapped the priest. "If you do not pray
daily, you are neglecting your immortal soul. Do you know
your catechism?"
  "Certainly not," Asbury muttered.
  "Who made you?" the priest asked in a martial tone.
  “Different people believe different things about that,"
Asbury said.
  "God made you," the priest said shortly. "Who is God?"
  "God is an idea created by man," Asbury said, feeling
that he was getting into stride, that two could play at this.
  "God is a spirit infinitely perfect," the priest said. ''You
are a very ignorant boy. Why did God make you?"
  "God didn't .... "
  "God made you to know Him, to love Him, to serve
Him in this world and to be happy with Him in the next!"
the old priest said in a battering voice. "If you don't apply
yourself to the catechism how do you expect to know how to
save your immortal soul?"
  Asbury saw he had made a mistake and that it was
time to get rid of the old fool. "Listen," he said, "I'm not a Roman.”
  “A poor excuse for not saying your prayers!" the old man
snorted.
  Asbury slumped slightly in the bed. "I'm dying," he
shouted.
  "But you're not dead yet!" said the priest, "and how do
you expect to meet God face to face when you've never
spoken to Him? How do you expect to get what you don't ask
for? God does not send the Holy Ghost to those who don't
ask for Him. Ask Him to send the Holy Ghost."
  "The Holy Ghost?" Asbury said.
  "Are you so ignorant you've never heard of the Holy
Ghost?" the priest asked.
  "Certainly I've heard of the Holy Ghost" Asbury said
furiously, "and the Holy Ghost is the last thing I'm looking
for!"
  "And He may be the last thing you get," the priest said,
his one fierce eye inflamed. "Do you want your soul to suffer
eternal damnation? Do you want to be deprived of God for
all eternity? Do you want to suffer the most terrible pain,
greater than fire, the pain of loss? Do you want to suffer the
pain of loss for all eternity?"
  Asbury moved his arms and legs helplessly as if he were
pinned to the bed by the terrible eye.
  "How can the Holy Ghost fill your soul when it's full of
trash?" the priest roared. "The Holy Ghost will not come until
you see yourself as you are-a lazy ignorant conceited
youth!" he said, pounding his fist on the little bedside table.
  Mrs. Fox burst in. "Enough of this!" she cried. "How
dare you talk that way to a poor sick boy? You're upsetting
him. You'll have to go."
  "The poor lad doesn't even know his catechism," the
priest said, rising. "I should think you would have taught him
to say his daily prayers. You have neglected your duty as his
mother." He turned back to the bed and said affably, "I’ll
give you my blessing and after this you must say your daily
prayers without fail," whereupon he put his hand on Asbury's
head and rumbled something in Latin. "Call me any time,"
he said, "and we can have another little chat," and then he
followed Mrs. Fox's rigid back out. The last thing Asbury
heard him say was, "He's a good lad at heart but very ignorant."
  When his mother had got rid of the priest she came
rapidly up the steps again to say that she had told him so,
but when she saw him, pale and drawn and ravaged, sitting
up in his bed, staring in front of him with large childish
shocked eyes, she did not have the heart and went rapidly
out again.
  The next morning he was so weak that she made up her
mind he must go to the hospital. "I'm not going to any
hospital," he kept repeating, turning his thudding head from
side to side as if he wanted to work it loose from his body.
"I'm not going to any hospital as long as I'm conscious." He
was thinking bitterly that once he lost consciousness, she
could drag him off to the hospital and fill him full of blood
and prolong his misery for days. He was convinced that the
end was approaching, that it would be today, and he was
tormented now thinking of his useless life. He felt as if he
were a shell that had to be filled with something but he did
not know what. He began to take note of everything in the
room as if for the last time--the ridiculous antique furniture,
the pattern in the rug, the silly picture his mother had replaced.
He even looked at the fierce bird with the icicle in its
beak and   felt that it was there for some purpose that he
could not divine.
   There was something he was searching for, something
that he felt he must have. some last Significant culminating
experience that he must make for himself before he died-- make
for himself out of his own intelligence. He had always
relied on himself and had never been a sniveler after the
ineffable.
  Once when Mary George was thirteen and he was five,
she had lured him with the promise of an unnamed present
into a large tent full of people and had dragged him backwards
up to the front where a man in a blue suit and red
and white tie was standing. "Here," she said in a loud voice.
"I'm already saved but you can save him. He's a real stinker
and too big for his britches." He had broken her grip and
shot out of there like a small cur and later when he had asked
for his present, she had said, "You would have got Salvation
if you had waited for it but since you acted the way you did,
you get nothing!"
  As the day wore on, he grew more and more frantic for
fear he would die without making some last meaningful
experience for himself. His mother sat anxiously by the side
of the bed. She had called Block twice and could not get
him. He thought even now she had not realized that he was
going to die, much less than the end was only hours off.
The light in the room was beginning to have an odd
quality, almost as if it were taking on presence. In a darkened
form it entered and seemed to wait. Outside it appeared to
move no farther than the edge of the faded treeline, which he
could see a few inches over the sill of his window. Suddenly
he thought of that experience of communion that he had had
in the dairy with the Negroes when they had smoked together,
and at once he began to tremble with excitement.
  They would smoke together one last time.
  After a moment, turning his head on the pillow, he
said, "Mother, I want to tell the Negroes good-bye."
  His mother paled. For an instant her face seemed about
to fly apart. Then the line of her mouth hardened; her brows
drew together. "Good-bye?" she said in a flat voice. "Where
are you going?"
  For a few seconds he only looked at her. Then he said,
  "I think you know. Get them. I don't have long."
  "This is absurd," she muttered but she got up and hurried
out. He heard her try to reach Block again before she went
outside. He thought her clinging to Block at a time like this
was touching and pathetic. He waited, preparing himself for
the encounter as a religious man might prepare himself for
the last sacrament. Presently he heard their steps on the stair.
  "Here's Randall and Morgan," his mother said, ushering
them in. "They've come to tell you hello."
  The two of them came in grinning and shuffled to the
side of the bed. They stood there, Randall in front and
Morgan behind. "You sho do look well," Randall said. "You
looks very well."
  "You looks well," the other one said. "Yessuh, you looks
fine."
  "I ain't ever seen you looking so well before," Randall
said.
  "Yes, doesn't he look well?" his mother said. "1 think he
looks just fine."
  "Yessuh,"Randall said, "I speck you ain't even sick."
  "Mother," Asbury said in a forced voice. "I'd like to
talk to them alone."
  His mother stiffened; then she marched out. She walked
across the hall and into the room on the other side and sat
down. Through the open doors he could see her begin to rock
in little short jerks. The two Negroes looked as if their last
protection had dropped away.
  Asbury's head was so heavy he could not think what he
had been going to do. "I'm dying," he said.
Both their grins became gelid. "You looks fine," Randall
said.
  "I'm going to die," Asbury repeated. Then with relief he
remembered that they were going to smoke together. He
reached for the package on the table and held it out to
Randall, forgetting to shake out the cigarettes.
  The Negro took the package and put it in his pocket. "I
thank you," he said. "I certainly do prechate it."
  Asbury stared as if he had forgotten again. After a
second he became aware that the other Negro's face had
turned infinitely sad; then he realized that it was not sad
but sullen. He fumbled in the drawer of the table and pulled
out an unopened package and thrust it at Morgan.
  "I thanks you, Mist Asbury," Morgan said, brightening.
  "You certainly does look well."
  "I'm about to die," Asbury said irritably.
  "You looks fine," Randall said.
  "You be up and around in a few days," Morgan predicted.
Neither of them seemed to find a suitable place to rest
his gaze. Asbury looked wildly across the hall where his
mother had her rocker turned so that her back faced him. It
was apparent she had no intention of getting rid of them
for him.
  "I speck you might have a little cold," Randall said after
a time.
  "I takes a little turpentine and sugar when I has a cold,"
Morgan said.
  "Shut your mouth," Randall said, turning on him.
  "Shut your own mouth," Morgan said. "I know what 1
takes."
  "He don't take what you take," Randall growled.
  "Mother!" Asbury called in a shaking voice.
  His mother stood up. "Mister Asbury has had company
long enough now," she called. "You all can come back tomorrow."
'We be going," Randall said. "You sho do look well."
"You sho does," Morgan said.
  They filed out agreeing with each other how well he
looked but Asbury's vision became blurred before they
reached the hall. For an instant he saw his mother's form as if
it were a shadow in the door and then it disappeared after
them down the stairs. He heard her call Block again but he
heard it without interest. His head was spinning. He knew
now there would be no significant experience before he died.
There was nothing more to do but give her the key to the
drawer where the letter was, and wait for the end.
  He sank into a heavy sleep from which he awoke about
five o'clock to see her white face, very small, at the end of
a well of darkness. He took the key out of his pajama pocket
and handed it to her and mumbled that there was a letter in
the desk to be opened when he was gone, but she did not
seem to understand. She put the key down on the bedside
table and left it there and he returned to his dream in which
two large boulders were circling each other inside his head.
  He awoke a little after six to hear Block's car stop below
in the driveway. The sound was like a summons, bringing
him rapidly and with a clear head out of his sleep. He had a
sudden terrible foreboding that the fate awaiting him was
going to be more shattering than any he could have reckoned
on. He lay absolutely motionless, as still as an animal the
instant before an earthquake.
  Block and his mother talked as they came up the stairs
but he did not distinguish their words. The doctor came in
making faces; his mother was smiling. "Guess what you've
got, Sugarpie!" she cried. Her voice broke in on him with the
force of a gunshot.
  "Found theter ol' bug, did ol' Block," Block said, sinking
down into the chair by the bed. He raised his hands over
his head in the gesture of a victorious prize fighter and let
them collapse in his lap as if the effort had exhausted him.
Then he removed a red bandanna handkerchief that he
carried to be funny with and wiped his face thoroughly,
having a different expression on it every time it appeared
from behind the rag.
  "I think you're just as smart as you can be!" Mrs. Fox
said. "Asbury," she said, "you have undulant fever. It'll keep
coming back but it won't kill you!" Her smile was as bright
and intense as a lightbulb without a shade. "I'm so relieved,"
she said.
  Asbury sat up slowly, his face expressionless; then he
fell back down again.
  Block leaned over him and smiled. "You ain't going to
die," he said, with deep satisfaction.
  Nothing about Asbury stirred except his eyes. They did
not appear to move on the surface but somewhere in their
blurred depths there was an almost imperceptible motion
as if something were struggling feebly. Block's gaze seemed
to reach down like a steel pin and hold whatever it was until
the life was out of it. "Undulant fever ain't so bad, Azzberry,"
he murmured. "It's the same as Bang's in a cow."
  The boy gave a low moan and then was quiet.
  "He must have drunk some unpasteurized milk up
there," his mother said softly and then the two of them tiptoed
out as if they thought he were about to go to sleep.
  When the sound of their footsteps had faded on the
stairs, Asbury sat up again. He turned his head, almost surreptitiously,
to the side where the key he had given his
mother was lying on the bedside table. His hand shot out and
closed over it and returned it to his pocket. He glanced
across the room into the small oval-framed dresser mirror.
The eyes that stared back at him were the same that had
returned his gaze every day from that mirror but it seemed
to him that they were paler. They looked shocked clean as
if they had been prepared for some awful vision about to
come down on him. He shuddered and turned his head
quickly the other way and stared out the window. A blinding
red-gold sun moved serenely from under a purple cloud.
Below it the treeline was black against the crimson sky. It
formed a brittle wall, standing as if it were the frail defense
he had set up in his mind to protect him from what was
coming. The boy fell back on his pillow and stared at the
ceiling. His limbs that had been racked for so many weeks
by fever and chill were numb now. The old life in him was
exhausted. He awaited the coming of new. It was then that
he felt the beginning of a chill, a chill so peculiar, so light,
that it was like a warm ripple across a deeper sea of cold.
His breath came short. The fierce bird which through the
years of his childhood and the days of his illness had been
poised over his head, waiting mysteriously, appeared all at
once to be in motion. Asbury blanched and the last film of
illusion was torn as if by a whirlwind from his eyes. He saw
that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he
would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a
last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost,
emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to
descend.

End

The Comforts of Home

By Flannery O’ Connor

1960

Thomas withdrew to the side of the window and with his
head between the wall and the curtain he looked down on
the driveway where the car had stopped. His mother and the
little slut were getting out of it. His mother emerged slowly,
stolid and awkward, and then the little slut's long slightly
bowed legs slid out, the dress pulled above the knees. With
a shriek of laughter she ran to meet the dog, who bounded,
overjoyed, shaking with pleasure, to welcome her. Rage
gathered throughout Thomas's large frame with a silent
ominous intensity, like a mob assembling.
  It was now up to him to pack a suitcase, go to the hotel,
and stay there until the house should be cleared.
  He did not know where a suitcase was, he disliked to
pack, he needed his books, his typewriter was not portable,
he was used to an electric blanket, he could not bear to eat in restaurants. His mother, with her daredevil charity, was
about to wreck the peace of the house.
  The back door slammed and the girl's laugh shot up
from the kitchen, through the back hall, up the stairwell and
into his room, making for him like a bolt of electricity. He
jumped to the side and stood glaring about him. His words
of the morning had been unequivocal: "If you bring that
girl back into this house, I leave. You can choose--her or
me."
  She had made her choice. An intense pain gripped his
throat. It was the first time in his thirty-five years ... He felt
a sudden burning moisture behind his eyes. Then he steadied
himself, overcome by rage. On the contrary: she had not
made any choice. She was counting on his attachment to his
electric blanket. She would have to be shown.
  The girl's laughter rang upward a second time and
Thomas winced. He saw again her look of the night before.
She had invaded his room. He had waked to find his door
open and her in it. There was enough light from the hall to
make her visible as she turned toward him. The face was
like a comedienne's in a musical comedy--a pointed chin,
wide apple cheeks and feline empty eyes. He had sprung
out of his bed and snatched a straight chair and then he
had backed her out the door, holding the chair in front of
him like an animal trainer driving out a dangerous cat. He
had driven her silently down the hall, pausing when he
reached it to beat on his mother's door. The girl, with a gasp,
turned and fled into the guest room.
  In a moment his mother had opened her door and
peered out apprehensively. Her face, greasy with whatever
she put on it at night, was framed in pink rubber curlers.
She looked down the hall where the girl had disappeared.
Thomas stood before her, the chair still lifted in front of him as if he were about to quell another beast. "She tried
to get in my room," he hissed, pushing in. "I woke up and
she was trying to get in my room." He closed the door behind
him and his voice rose in outrage. "I won't put up with this!
I won't put up with it another day!"
  His mother, backed by him to her bed, sat down on the
edge of it. She had a heavy body on which sat a thin,
mysteriously gaunt and incongruous head.
  “I’ m telling you for the last time," Thomas said, "I won't
put up with this another day." There was an observable
tendency in all of her actions. This was, with the best intentions
in the world, to make a mockery of virtue, to pursue
it with such a mindless intensity that everyone involved was
made a fool of and virtue itself became ridiculous. "Not
another day," he repeated.
  His mother shook her head emphatically, her eyes still
on the door.
  Thomas put the chair on the floor in front of her and sat
down on it He leaned forward as if he were about to explain
something to a defective child.
  "That's just another way she's unfortunate," his mother
said. "So awful, so awful. She told me the name of it but 1
forget what it is but it's something she can't help. Something
she was born with. Thomas," she said and put her hand
to her jaw, "suppose it were you?"
  Exasperation blocked his windpipe. "Can't 1 make you
see," he croaked, "that if she can't help herself you can't
help her?"
His mother's eyes, intimate but untouchable, were the
blue of great distances after sunset. "Nimpermaniac," she
murmured.
  "Nymphomaniac," he said fiercely. "She doesn't need to
supply you with any fancy names. She's a moral moron. That's all you need to know. Born without the moral faculty
--like somebody else would be born without a kidney or a
leg. Do you understand?"
  “I keep thinking it might be you," she said, her hand
still on her jaw. "If it were you, how do you think I'd feel
if nobody took you in? What if you were a nimpermaniac
and not a brilliant smart person and you did what you
couldn't help and ... "
  Thomas felt a deep unbearable loathing for himself as if
he were turning slowly into the girl.
  "What did she have on?" she asked abruptly, her eyes
narrowing.
  "Nothing!" he roared. Now will you get her out of
here!"
  "How can I turn her out in the cold?" she said. "This
morning she was threatening to kill herself again."
  "Send her back to jail," Thomas said.
  "I would not send you back to jail, Thomas," she said.
He got up and snatched the chair and fled the room
while he was still able to control himself.
  Thomas loved his mother. He loved her because it was
his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not
endure her love for him. There were times when it became
nothing but pure idiot mystery and he sensed about him
forces, invisible currents entirely out of his control. She
proceeded always from the tritest of considerations--it was
the nice thing to do--into the most foolhardy engagements
with the devil, whom, of course, she never recognized.
  The devil for Thomas was only a manner of speaking,
but it was a manner appropriate to the situations his mother
got into. Had she been in any degree intellectual, he could
have proved to her from early Christian history that no
excess of virtue is justified, that a moderation of good produces likewise a moderation in evil, that if Antony of Egypt
had stayed at home and attended to his sister, no devils
would have plagued him.
  Thomas was not cynical and so far from being opposed
to virtue, he saw it as the principle of order and the only
thing that makes life bearable. His own life was made bearable
by the fruits of his mother's saner virtues--by the well regulated
house she kept and the excellent meals she served.
But when virtue got out of hand with her, as now, a sense of
devils grew upon him, and these were not mental quirks in
himself or the old lady, they were denizens with personalities,
present though not visible, who might any moment be
expected to shriek or rattle a pot.
  The girl had landed in the county jail a month ago on a
bad check charge and his mother had seen her picture in the
paper. At the breakfast table she had gazed at it for a long
time and then had passed it over the coffee pot to him.
"Imagine," she said, "only nineteen years old and in that
filthy jail. And she doesn't look like a bad girl."
  Thomas glanced at the picture. It showed the face of a
shrewd ragamuffin. He observed that the average age for
criminality was steadily lowering.
  "She looks like a wholesome girl," his mother said.
  "Wholesome people don't pass bad checks," Thomas
said.
  "You don't know what you'd do in a pinch."
  "I wouldn't pass a bad check," Thomas said.
  "I think," his mother said, "I'll take her a little box of
candy."
  If then and there he had put his foot down, nothing else
would have happened. His father, had he been living, would
have put his foot down at that point. Taking a box of candy
was her favorite nice thing to do. When anyone within her social station moved to town, she called and took a box of
candy; when any of her friend's children had babies or won
a scholarship, she called and took a box of candy; when an
old person broke his hip, she was at his bedside with a box
of candy. He had been amused at the idea of her taking a
box of candy to the jail.
  He stood now in his room with the girl's laugh rocketing
away in his head and cursed his amusement.
  When his mother returned from the visit to the jail, she
had burst into his study without knocking and had collapsed
full-length on his couch, lifting her small swollen feet up
on the arm of it. After a moment, she recovered herself
enough to sit up and put a newspaper under them. Then
she fell pack again. "We don't know how the other half lives,"
she said.
  Thomas knew that though her conversation moved from
cliche to cliche there were real experiences behind them. He
was less sorry for the girl's being in jail than for his mother
having to see her there. He would have spared her all unpleasant
sights. "Well," he said and put away his journal,
"you had better forget it now. The girl has ample reason to
be in [ail."
  "You can't imagine what all she's been through," she
said, sitting up again, "listen." The poor girl, Star, had been
brought up by a stepmother with three children of her own,
one an almost grown boy who had taken advantage of her
in such dreadful ways that she had been forced to run away
and find her real mother. Once found, her real mother had
sent her to various boarding schools to get rid of her. At each
of these she had been forced to run away by the presence
of perverts and sadists so monstrous that their acts defied
description. Thomas could tell that his mother had not been
spared the details that she was sparing him. Now and again when she spoke vaguely, her voice shook and he could tell
that she was remembering some horror that had been put to
her graphically. He had hoped that in a few days the memory
of all this would wear off, but it did not. The next day she
returned to the jail with Kleenex and cold-cream and a few
days later, she announced that she had consulted a lawyer.
  It was at these times that Thomas truly mourned the
death of his father though he had not been able to endure
him in life. The old man would have had none of this foolishness.
Untouched by useless compassion, he would (behind
her back) have pulled the necessary strings with his crony,
the sheriff, and the girl would have been packed off to the
state penitentiary to serve her time. He had always been
engaged in some enraged action until one morning when
(with an angry glance at his wife as if she alone were
responsible) he had dropped dead at the breakfast table.
Thomas had inherited his father's reason without his ruthlessness
and his mother's love of good without her tendency
to pursue it. His plan for all practical action was to wait and
see what developed.
  The lawyer found that the story of the repeated
atrocities was for the most part untrue, but when he explained
to her that the girl was a psychopathic personality,
not insane enough for the asylum, not criminal enough for
the jail, not stable enough for society, Thomas's mother was
more deeply affected than ever. The girl readily admitted
that her story was untrue on account of her being a congenital
liar; she lied, she said, because she was insecure.
She had passed through the hands of several psychiatrists
who had put the finishing touches to her education. She
knew there was no hope for her. In the presence of such an
affliction as this, his mother seemed bowed down by some
painful mystery that nothing would make endurable but are doubling of effort. To his annoyance, she appeared to
look on him with compassion, as if her hazy charity no longer
made distinctions.
  A few days later she burst in and said that the lawyer
had got the girl paroled-to her.
  Thomas rose from his Morris chair, dropping the review
he had been reading. His large bland face contracted in
anticipated pain. "You are not," he said, "going to bring that
girl here!"
  "No, no," she said, "calm yourself, Thomas." She had
managed with difficulty to get the girl a job in a pet shop in
town and a place to board with a crotchety old lady of her
acquaintance. People were not kind. They did not put themselves
in the place of someone like Star who had everything
against her.
  Thomas sat down again and retrieved his review. He
seemed just to have escaped some danger which he did not
care to make clear to himself. "Nobody can tell you anything,"
he said, "but in a few days that girl will have left
town, having got what she could out of you. You'll never
hear from her again."
  Two nights later he came home and opened the parlor
door and was speared by a shrill depthless laugh. His mother
and the girl sat close to the fireplace where the gas logs were
lit. The girl gave the immediate impression of being physically
crooked. Her hair was cut like a dog's or an elf's and she
was dressed in the latest fashion. She was training on him a
long familiar sparkling stare that turned after a second into
an intimate grin.
  "Thomas!" his mother said, her voice firm with the
injunction not to bolt, "this is Star you've heard so much
about. Star is going to have supper with us." 
  The girl called herself Star Drake. The lawyer had found
that her real name was Sarah Ham.
  Thomas neither moved nor spoke but hung in the door
in what seemed a savage perplexity. Finally he said, "How
do you do, Sarah," in a tone of such loathing that he was
shocked at the sound of it. He reddened, feeling it beneath
him to show contempt for any creature so pathetic. He
advanced into the room, determined at least on a decent
politeness and sat down heavily in a straight chair.
  "Thomas writes history," his mother said with a threatening
look at him. "He's president of the local Historical
Society this year."
  The girl leaned forward and gave Thomas an even more
pointed attention.   "Fabulous!" she said in a throaty voice.
  "Right now Thomas is writing about the first settlers in
this county," his mother said.
  "Fabulous!" the girl repeated.
  Thomas by an effort of will managed to look as if he
were alone in the room.
  "Say, you know who he looks like?" Star asked, her head
on one side, taking him in at an angle.
  "Oh someone very distinguished!" his mother said
archly.
  "This cop I saw in the movie I went to last night," Star
said.
  "Star," his mother said, "I think you ought to be careful
about the kind of movies you go to. 1 think you ought to see
only the best ones. I don't think crime stories would be good
for you."
  "Oh this was a crime-does-not-pay," Star said, "and I
swear this cop looked exactly like him. They were always
putting something over on the guy. He would look like he
couldn't stand it a minute longer or he would blow up. He was a riot. And not bad looking," she added with an appreciative
leer at Thomas.
  "Star," his mother said, "I think it would be grand if you
developed a taste for music."
  Thomas sighed. His mother rattled on and the girl, paying
no attention to her, let her eyes play over him. The
quality of her look was such that it might have been her
hands, resting now on his knees, now on his neck. Her eyes
had a mocking glitter and he knew that she was well aware
he could not stand the sight of her. He needed nothing to
tell him he was in the presence of the very stuff of corruption,
but blameless corruption because there was no responsible
faculty behind it. He was looking at the most unendurable
form of innocence. Absently he asked himself what the
attitude of God was to this, meaning if possible to adopt it.
  His mother's behavior throughout the meal was so
idiotic that he could barely stand to look at her and since
he could less stand to look at Sarah Ham, he fixed on the
sideboard across the room a continuous gaze of disapproval
and disgust. Every remark of the girl's his mother met as if
it deserved serious attention. She advanced several plans for
the wholesome use of Star's spare time. Sarah Ham paid no
more attention to this advice than if it came from a parrot.
Once when Thomas inadvertently looked in her direction,
she winked. As soon as he had swallowed the last spoonful
of dessert, he rose and muttered, "I have to go, 1 have a
meeting."
  "Thomas," his mother said, "I want you to take Star
home on your way. I don't want her riding in taxis by herself
at night."
  For a moment Thomas remained furiously silent. Then
he turned and left the room. Presently he came back with a
look of obscure determination on his face. The girl was ready, meekly waiting at the parlor door. She cast up at him a great
look of admiration and confidence. Thomas did not offer his
arm but she took it anyway and moved out of the house and
down the steps, attached to what might have been a
miraculously moving monument.
  "Be good!" his mother called.
  Sarah Ham snickered and poked him in the ribs.
  While getting his coat he had decided that this would
be his opportunity to tell the girl that unless she ceased to be
a parasite on his mother, he would see to it, personally, that
she was returned to jail. He would let her know that he
understood what she was up to, that he was not an innocent
and that there were certain things he would not put up with.
At his desk, pen in hand, none was more articulate than
Thomas. As soon as he found himself shut into the car with
Sarah Ham, terror seized his tongue.
  She curled her feet up under her and said, "Alone at
last," and giggled.
  Thomas swerved the car away from the house and drove
fast toward the gate. Once on the highway, he shot forward
as if he were being pursued.
  "Jesusl" Sarah Ham said, swinging her feet off the seat,
"where's the fire?"
  Thomas did not answer. In a fcw seconds he could feel
her edging closer. She stretched, eased nearer, and finally
hung her hand limply over his shoulder. "Tomsee doesn't
like me," she said, "but I think he's fabulously cute."
Thomas covered the three and a half miles into town in
a little over four minutes. The light at the first intersection
was red but he ignored it. The old woman lived three blocks
beyond. When the car screeched to a halt at the place, he
jumped out and ran around to the girl's door and opened
it. She did not move from the car and Thomas was obliged to wait. After a moment one leg emerged, then her small white
crooked face appeared and stared up at him. There was
something about the look of it that suggested blindness but
it was the blindness of those who don't know that they cannot
see. Thomas was curiously sickened. The empty eyes
moved over him. "Nobody likes me," she said in a sullen
tone. "What if you were me and I couldn't stand to ride
you three miles?"
  "My mother likes you," he muttered.
  "Her!" the girl said. "She's just about seventy-five years
behind the times!"
  Breathlessly Thomas said, "If I find you bothering her
again, I'll have you put back in jail." There was a dull force
behind his voice though it came out barely above a whisper.
  "You and who else?" she said and drew back in the car
as if now she did not intend to get out at all. Thomas
reached into it, blindly grasped the front of her coat, pulled
her out by it and released her. Then he lunged back to the
car and sped off. The other door was still hanging open and
her laugh, bodiless but real, bounded up the street as if it
were about to jump in the open side of the car and ride
away with him. He reached over and slammed the door and
then drove toward home, too angry to attend his meeting.
He intended to make his mother well aware of his displeasure.
He intended to leave no doubt in her mind. The
voice of his father rasped in his head.
  Numbskull, the old man said, put your foot down now.
Show her who's boss before she shows you.
  But when Thomas reached home, his mother, wisely,
had gone to bed.

  The next morning he appeared at the breakfast table,
his brow lowered and the thrust of his jaw indicating that he
was in a dangerous humor. When he intended to be deter-mined, Thomas began like a bull that, before charging, backs
with his head lowered and paws the ground. "All right now
listen," he began, yanking out his chair and sitting down,
"I have something to say to you about that girl and 1 don't
intend to say it but once." He drew breath. "She's nothing
but a little slut. She makes fun of you behind your back.
She means to get everything she can out of you and you are
nothing to her."
  His mother looked as if she too had spent a restless
night. She did not dress in the morning but wore her bathrobe
and a grey turban around her head, which gave her
face a disconcerting omniscient look. He might have been
breakfasting with a sibyl.
  "You'll have to use canned cream this morning", she said,
pouring his coffee. "I forgot the other."
  "All right, did you hear me?" Thomas growled.
  "I'm not deaf," his mother said and put the pot back on
the ,trivet. "I know I'm nothing but an old bag of wind to
her.
  "Then why do you persist in this foolhardy ... "
  "Thomas," she said, and put her hand to the side of her
face, "it might be ... "
  "It is not me!" Thomas said, grasping the table leg at his
knee.
  She continued to hold her face, shaking her head
slightly. "Think of all you have," she began. "All the comforts
of home. And morals, Thomas. No bad inclinations,
nothing bad you were born with."
  Thomas began to breathe like some one who feels the
onset of asthma. "You are not logical," he said in a limp
voice. "He would have put his foot down."
  The old lady stiffened. "You," she said, "are not like him.”
  Thomas opened his mouth silently.
  "However," his mother said, in a tone of such subtle
accusation that she might have been taking back the compliment,
"I won't invite her back again since you're so dead set
against her."
  "I am not set against her," Thomas said. "I am set
against your making a fool of yourself."
  As soon as he left the table and closed the door of his
study on himself, his father took up a squatting position in
his mind. The old man had had the countryman's ability to
converse squatting, though he was no countryman but had
been born and brought up in the city and only moved to a
smaller place later to exploit his talents. With steady skill
he had made them think him one of them. In the midst of
a conversation on the courthouse lawn, he would squat and
his two or three companions would squat with him with no
break in the surface of the talk. By gesture he had lived his
lie; he had never deigned to tell one.
  Let her run over you, he said. You ain't like me. Not
enough to be a man.
  Thomas began vigorously to read and presently the
image faded. The girl had caused a disturbance in the depths
of his being, somewhere out of the reach of his power of
analysis. He felt as if he had seen a tornado pass a hundred
yards away and had an intimation that it would turn again
and head directly for him. He did not get his mind firmly
on his work until mid-morning.
  Two nights later, his mother and he were sitting in the
den after their supper, each reading a section of the evening
paper, when the telephone began to ring with the brassy
intensity of a fire alarm. Thomas reached for it. As soon as
the receiver was in his hand, a shrill female voice screamed
into the room, "Come get this girl! Come get her! Drunk! Drunk in my parlor and I won't have it! Lost her job and
come back here drunk! I won't have it!"
  His mother leapt up and snatched the receiver.
  The ghost of Thomas's father rose before him. Call the
sheriff, the old man prompted. "Call the sheriff," Thomas
said in a loud voice. "Call the sheriff to go there and pick
her up."
  "We'll be right there," his mother was saying. "We'll
come and get her right away. Tell her to get her things
together."
  "She ain't in no condition to get nothing together," the
voice screamed. "You shouldn't have put something like her
off on me! My house is respectable!"
  "Tell her to call the sheriff," Thomas shouted.
  His mother put the receiver down and looked at him.
  "I wouldn't turn a dog over to that man," she said.
  Thomas sat in the chair with his arms folded and looked
fixedly at the wall.
  "Think of the poor girl, Thomas," his mother said, "with
nothing. Nothing. And we have everything.'
  When they arrived, Sarah Ham was slumped spraddlelegged
against the banister on the boarding house front steps.
Her tam was down on her forehead where the old
woman had slammed it and her clothes were bulging out of
her suitcase where the old woman had thrown them in.
She was carrying on a drunken conversation with herself
in a low personal tone. A streak of lipstick ran up one side
of her face. She allowed herself to be guided by his mother
to the car and put in the back seat without seeming to know
who the rescuer was. "Nothing to talk to all day but a pack
of goddamned parakeets," she said in a furious whisper.
  Thomas, who had not got out of the car at all, or looked at her after the first revolted glance, said, "I'm telling you,
once and for all, the place to take her is the jail."
  His mother, sitting on the back seat, holding the girl's
hand, did not answer.
  "All right, take her to the hotel," he said.
  "I cannot take a drunk girl to a hotel, Thomas," she said.
"You know that."
  "Then take her to a hospital."
  "She doesn't need a jail or a hotel or a hospital," his
mother said, "she needs a home."
  "She does not need mine," Thomas said.
  "Only for tonight, Thomas," the old lady sighed. "Only
for tonight."
  Since then eight days had passed. The little slut was
established in the guest room. Every day his mother set out
to find her a job and a place to board, and failed, for the old
woman had broadcast a warning. Thomas kept to his room
or the den. His home was to him home, workshop, church,
as personal as the shell of a turtle and as necessary. He could
not believe that it could be violated in this way. His flushed
face had a constant look of stunned outrage.
  As soon as the girl was up in the morning, her voice
throbbed out in a blues song that would rise and waver, then
plunge low with insinuations of passion about to be satisfied
and Thomas, at his desk, would lunge up and begin frantically
stuffing his ears with Kleenex. Each time he started
from one room to another, one floor to another, she would
be certain to appear. Each time he was half way up or
down the stairs, she would either meet him and pass, cringing
coyly, or go up or down behind him, breathing small
tragic spearmint-flavored sighs. She appeared to adore
Thomas's repugnance to her and to draw it out of him every
chance she got as if it added delectably to her martyrdom. 
  The old man--small, wasp-like, in his yellowed panama
hat, his seersucker suit, his pink carefully-soiled shirt, his
small string tie--appeared to have taken up his station in
Thomas's mind and from there, usually squatting, he shot
out the same rasping suggestion every time the boy paused
from his forced studies. Put your foot down. Go to see the
sheriff.
  The sheriff was another edition of Thomas's father
except that he wore a checkered shirt and a Texas type hat
and was ten years younger. He was as easily dishonest, and
he had genuinely admired the old man. Thomas, like his
mother, would have gone far out of his way to avoid his
glassy pale blue gaze. He kept hoping for another solution,
for a miracle.
  With Sarah Ham in the house, meals were unbearable.
  "Tomsee doesn't like me," she said the third or fourth
night at the supper table and cast her pouting gaze across at
the large rigid figure of Thomas, whose face was set with
the look of a man trapped by insufferable odors. "He doesn't
want me here. Nobody wants me anywhere."
  "Thomas's name is Thomas," his mother interrupted.
  "Not Tomsee.'
"I made Tomsee up," she said. "I think it's cute. He
hates me."
  "Thomas does not hate you," his mother said. "We are
not the kind of people who hate," she added, as if this were
an imperfection that had been bred out of them generations
ago.
  "Oh, I know when I'm not wanted," Sarah Ham continued.
"They didn't even want me in jail. If 1 killed myself
1wonder would God want me?"
  "Try it and see,"Thomas muttered.
  The girl screamed with laughter. Then she stopped abruptly, her face puckered and she began to shake. "The
best thing to do," she said, her teeth clattering, "is to kill
myself. Then I'll be out of everybody's way. I'll go to hell
and be out of God's way. And even the devil won't want me.
Hell kick me out of hell, not even in hell . . . " she wailed.
  Thomas rose, picked up his plate and knife and fork and
carried them to the den to finish his supper. After that, he
had not eaten another meal at the table but had had his
mother serve him at his desk. At these meals, the old man
was intensely present to him. He appeared to be tipping
backwards in his chair, his thumbs beneath his galluses,
while he said such things as, She never ran me away from
my own table.
  A few nights later, Sarah Ham slashed her wrists with a
paring knife and had hysterics. From the den where he was
closeted after supper, Thomas heard a shriek, then a series of
screams, then his mother's scurrying footsteps through the
house. He did not move. His first instant of hope that the
girl had cut her throat faded as he realized she could not
have done it and continue to scream the way she was doing.
He returned to his journal and presently the screams subsided.
In a moment his mother burst in with his coat and
hat. "We have to take her to the hospital," she said. "She
tried to do away with herself. I have a tourniquet on her
arm. Oh Lord, Thomas," she said, "imagine being so low
you'd do a thing like that!"
  Thomas rose woodenly and put on his hat and coat. "We
will take her to the hospital," he said, "and we will leave
her there."
  "And drive her to despair again?" the old lady cried.
  "Thomas!"
  Standing in the center of his room now, realizing that he
had reached the point where action was inevitable, that he must pack, that he must leave, that he must go, Thomas
remained immovable.
  His fury was directed not at the little slut but at his
mother. Even though the doctor had found that she had
barely damaged herself and had raised the girl's wrath by
laughing at the tourniquet and putting only a streak of iodine
on the cut, his mother could not get over the incident. Some
new weight of sorrow seemed to have been thrown across
her shoulders, and not only Thomas, but Sarah Ham was
infuriated by this, for it appeared to be a general sorrow
that would have found another object no matter what good
fortune came to either of them. The experience of Sarah
Ham had plunged the old lady into mourning for the world.
The morning after the attempted suicide, she had gone
through the house and collected all the knives and scissors
and locked them in a drawer. She emptied a bottle of rat
poison down the toilet and took up the roach tablets from
the kitchen floor. Then she came to Thomas's study and said
in a whisper, "Where is that gun of his? I want you to lock
it up."
  "The gun is in my drawer," Thomas roared, "and I will
not lock it up. If she shoots herself, so much the better!"
  "Thomas," his mother said, "she'll hear you!"
  "Let her hear me!" Thomas yelled. "Don't you know she
has no intention of killing herself? Don't you know her kind
never kill themselves? Don't you ... "
  His mother slipped out the door and closed it to silence
him and Sarah Ham's laugh, quite close in the hall, came
rattling into his room. "Tomsee'll find out. I'll kill myself
and then he'll be sorry he wasn't nice to me. I'll use his own
lil gun, his own lil or pearl-handled revol-Iervuh!" she
shouted and let out a loud tormented-sounding laugh in
imitation of a movie monster.
  Thomas ground his teeth. He pulled out his desk drawer
and felt for the pistol. It was an inheritance from the old
man, whose opinion it had been that every house should
contain a loaded gun. He had discharged two bullets one
night into the side of a prowler, but Thomas had never shot
anything. He had no fear that the girl would use the gun
on herself and he closed the drawer. Her kind clung tenaciously
to life and were able to wrest some histrionic advantage
from every moment.
  Several ideas for getting rid of her had entered his head
but each of these had been suggestions whose moral tone
indicated that they had come from a mind akin to his
father's, and Thomas had rejected them. He could not get
the girl locked up again until she did something illegal. The
old man would have been able with no qualms at all to get
her drunk and send her out on the highway in his car, meanwhile
notifying the highway patrol of her presence on the
road, but Thomas considered this below his moral stature.
Suggestions continued to come to him, each more outrageous
than the last.
  He had not the vaguest hope that the girl would get the
gun and shoot herself, but that afternoon when he looked in
the drawer, the gun was gone. His study locked from the
inside, not the out. He cared nothing about the gun, but the
thought of Sarah Ham's hands sliding among his papers
infuriated him. Now even his study was contaminated. The
only place left untouched by her was his bedroom.
  That night she entered it.
  In the morning at breakfast, he did not eat and did not
sit down. He stood beside his chair and delivered his ultimatum
while his mother sipped her coffee as if she were
both alone in the room and in great pain. "I have stood this,"
he said, "for as long as I am able. Since I see plainly thaty ou care nothing about me, about my peace or comfort or
working conditions, I am about to take the only step open to
me. I will give you one more day. If you bring the girl back
into this house this afternoon, I leave. You can choose--her
or me." He had more to say but at that point his voice
cracked and he left.
  At ten o'clock his mother and Sarah Ham left the house.
At four he heard the car wheels on the gravel and rushed
to the window. As the car stopped, the dog stood up, alert,
shaking.
  He seemed unable to take the first step that would set
him walking to the closet in the hall to look for the suitcase.
He was like a man handed a knife and told to operate on
himself if he wished to live. His huge hands clenched helplessly.
His expression was a turmoil of indecision and outrage.
His pale blue eyes seemed to sweat in his broiling face.
He closed them for a moment and on the back of his lids,
his father's image leered at him. Idiot! the old man hissed,
idiot! The criminal slut stole your gun! See the sheriff! See
the sheriff!
  It was a moment before Thomas opened his eyes. He
seemed newly stunned. He stood where he was for at least
three minutes, then he turned slowly like a large vessel reversing
its direction and faced the door. He stood there a
moment longer, then he left, his face set to see the ordeal
through.
  He did not know where he would find the sheriff. The
man made his own rules and kept his own hours. Thomas
stopped first at the jail where his office was, but he was not
in it. He went to the courthouse and was told by a clerk that
the sheriff had gone to barber-shop across the street. "Yonder's
the deppity," the clerk said and pointed out the window
to the large figure of a man in a checkered shirt, who was leaning against the side of a police car, looking into space.
"It has to be the sheriff," Thomas said and left for the
barber-shop. As little as he wanted anything to do with the
sheriff, he realized that the man was at least intelligent and
not simply a mound of sweating flesh.
  The barber said the sheriff had just left. Thomas started
back to the courthouse and as he stepped on to the sidewalk
from the street, he saw a lean, slightly stooped figure
gesticulating angrily at the deputy.
  Thomas approached with an aggressiveness brought on
by nervous agitation. He stopped abruptly three feet away
and said in an over-loud voice, "Can I have a word with
you?" without adding the sheriff's name, which was Farebrother.
  Farebrother turned his sharp creased face just enough
to take Thomas in, and the deputy did likewise, but neither
spoke. The sheriff removed a very small piece of cigarette from
his lip and dropped it at his feet. "I told you what to do," he
said to the deputy. Then he moved off with a slight nod that
indicated Thomas could follow him if he wanted to see him.
The deputy slunk around the front of the police car and got
inside.
  Farebrother, with Thomas following, headed across the
courthouse square and stopped beneath a tree that shaded
a quarter of the front lawn. He waited, leaning slightly forward,
and lit another cigarette.
  Thomas began to blurt out his business. As he had not
had time to prepare his words, he was barely coherent. By
repeating the same thing over several times, he managed at
length to get out what he wanted to say. When he finished,
the sheriff was still leaning slightly forward, at an angle to
him, his eyes on nothing in particular. He remained that
way without speaking. Thomas began again, slower and in a lamer voice, and
  Farebrother let him continue for some time before he said,
'We had her oncet." He then allowed himself a slow, creased,
all-knowing, quarter smile.
  "I had nothing to do with that," Thomas said. "That was
my mother."
  Farebrother squatted.
  "She was trying to help the girl," Thomas said. "She
didn't know she couldn't be helped."
  "Bit off more than she could chew, I reckon," the voice
below him mused.
  "She has nothing to do with this," Thomas said. "She
doesn't know I'm here. The girl is dangerous with that gun."
  "He," the sheriff said, "never let anything grow under
his feet. Particularly nothing a woman planted."
  "She might kill somebody with that gun," Thomas said
weakly, looking down at the round top of the Texas type hat.
There was a long time of silence.
  "Where's she got it?" Farebrother asked.
  "I don't know. She sleeps in the guest room. It must be
in there, in her suitcase probably," Thomas said.
Farebrother lapsed into silence again.
  "You could come search the guest room," Thomas said
in a strained voice. "I can go home and leave the latch off the
front door and you can come in quietly and go upstairs and
search her room."
  Farebrother turned his head so that his eyes looked
boldly at Thomas's knees. "You seem to know how it ought
to be done," he said. "Want to swap jobs?"
  Thomas said nothing because he could not think of
anything to say, but he waited doggedly. Farebrother removed
the cigarette butt from his lips and dropped it on the
grass. Beyond him on the courthouse porch a group of loiterers who had been leaning at the left of the door moved
over  to the right where a patch of sunlight had settled.
From one of the upper windows a crumpled piece of paper
blew out and drifted down.
  "I'll come along about six," Farebrother said. "Leave
the latch off the door and keep out of my way--yourself and
them two women too."
  Thomas let out a rasping sound of relief meant to be
"Thanks," and struck off across the grass like some one
released. The phrase, "them two women," stuck like a burr
in his brain-the subtlety of the insult to his mother hurting
him more than any of Farebrother's references to his own
incompetence. As he got into his car, his face suddenly
flushed. Had he delivered his mother over to the sheriff-to
be a butt for the man's tongue? Was he betraying her to get
rid of the little slut? He saw at once that this was not the
case. He was doing what he was doing for her own good,
to rid her of a parasite that would ruin their peace. He
started his car and drove quickly home but once he had
turned in the driveway, he decided it would be better to
park some distance from the house and go quietly in by
the back door. He parked on the grass and on the grass
walked in a circle toward the rear of the house. The sky was
lined with mustard-colored streaks. The dog was asleep
on the back doormat. At the approach of his master's step,
he opened one yellow eye, took him in, and closed it again.
  Thomas let himself into the kitchen. It was empty and
the house was quiet enough for him to be aware of the loud
ticking of the kitchen clock. It was a quarter to six. He
tiptoed hurriedly through the hall to the front door and took
the latch off it. Then he stood for a moment listening. From
behind the closed parlor door, he heard his mother snoring
softly and presumed that she had gone to sleep while reading. On the other side of the hall, not three feet from his
study, the little slut's black coat and red pocketbook were
slung on a chair. He heard water running upstairs and
decided she was taking a bath.
  He went into his study and sat down at his desk to
wait, noting with distaste that every few moments a tremor
ran through him. He sat for a minute or two doing nothing.
Then he picked up a pen and began to draw squares on the
back of an envelope that lay before him. He looked at his
watch. It was eleven minutes to six. After a moment he
idly drew the center drawer of the desk out over his lap.
For a moment he stared at the gun without recognition.
Then he gave a yelp and leaped up. She had put it back!
  Idiot! his father hissed, idiot! Go plant it in her pocketbook.
Don't just stand there. Go plant it in her pocketbook!
  Thomas stood staring at the drawer.
  Moron! the old man fumed. Quick while there's time!
Go plant it in her pocketbook.
  Thomas did not move.
  Imbecile! his father cried.
  Thomas picked up the gun.
  Make haste, the old man ordered.
  Thomas started forward, holding the gun away from
him. He opened the door and looked at the chair. The black
coat and red pocketbook were lying on it almost within
reach.
  Hurry up, you fool, his father said.
  From behind the parlor door the almost inaudible
snores of his mother rose and fell. They seemed to mark an
order of time that had nothing to do with the instants left to
Thomas. There was no other sound.
  Quick, you imbecile, before she wakes up, the old man
said.
  The snores stopped and Thomas heard the sofa springs
groan. He grabbed the red pocketbook. It had a skin-like
feel to his touch and as it opened, he caught an unmistakable
odor of the girl. Wincing, he thrust in the gun and then
drew back. His face burned an ugly dull red.
  "What is Tomsee putting in my purse?" she called and
her pleased laugh bounced down the staircase. Thomas
whirled.
  She was at the top of the stair, coming down in the
manner of a fashion model, one bare leg and then the other
thrusting out the front of her kimona in a definite rhythm.
"Tomsee is being naughty," she said in a throaty voice.
She reached the bottom and cast a possessive leer at Thomas
whose face was now more grey than red. She reached out,
pulled the bag open with her finger and peered at the
gun.
  His mother opened the parlor door and looked out.
  "Tomsee put his pistol in my bag!" the girl shrieked.
  "Ridiculous," his mother said, yawning. "What would
  Thomas want to put his pistol in your bag for?"
  Thomas stood slightly hunched, his hands hanging helplessly
at the wrists as if he had just pulled them up out of a
pool of blood.
  "I don't know what for," the girl said, "but he sure did
it," and she proceeded to walk around Thomas, her hands on
her hips, her neck thrust forward and her intimate grin
fixed on him fiercely. All at once her expression seemed to
open as the purse had opened when Thomas touched it.
She stood with her head cocked on one side in an attitude
of disbelief. "Oh boy," she said slowly, "is he a case."
  At that instant Thomas damned not only the girl but the
entire order of the universe that made her possible. 
  "Thomas wouldn't put a gun in your bag," his mother
said. "Thomas is a gentleman."
  The girl made a chortling noise. "You can see it in
there," she said and pointed to the open purse.
  You found it in her bag, you dimwit! the old man hissed.
  "I found it in her bag!" Thomas shouted. "The dirty
criminal slut stole my gun!"
  His mother gasped at the sound of the other presence
in his voice. The old lady's sybil-like face turned pale.
  "Found it my eye!" Sarah Ham shrieked and started for
the pocketbook, but Thomas, as if his arm were guided by
his father, caught it first and snatched the gun. The girl in
a frenzy lunged at Thomas's throat and would actually have
caught him around the neck had not his mother thrown
herself forward to protect her.
  Fire! the old man yelled.
  Thomas fired. The blast was like a sound meant to
bring an end to evil in the world. Thomas heard it as a
sound that would shatter the laughter of sluts until all
shrieks were stilled and nothing was left to disturb the
peace of perfect order.
  The echo died away in waves. Before the last one had
faded, Farebrother opened the door and put his head inside
the hall. His nose wrinkled. His expression for some few
seconds was that of a man unwilling to admit surprise. His
eyes were clear as glass, reflecting the scene. The old lady
lay on the floor between the girl and Thomas.
  The sheriff's brain worked instantly like a calculating
machine. He saw the facts as if they were already in print:
the fellow had intended all along to kill his mother and pin
it on the girl. But Farebrother had been too quick for him.
They were not yet aware of his head in the door. As he
scrutinized the scene, further insights were flashed to him. Over her body, the killer and the slut were about to collapse
into each other's arms. The sheriff knew a nasty bit when he
saw it. He was accustomed to enter upon scenes that were
not as bad as he had hoped to find them, but this one met
his expectations.

End

Everything That Rises
Must Converge

1961

Her doctor had told Julian's mother that she must lose twenty
pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday
nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a
reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for
working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds.
His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies
did not tell their age or weight. She would not ride the buses
by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because
the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary
for her health, and free, she said Julian could at least
put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him.
Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but every
Wednesday night he braced himself and took her.
  She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall
mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind him,
appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint
Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was
new and had cost her seven dollars and a half. She kept saying,
"Maybe I shouldn't have paid that for it. No, I shouldn't
have. I'll take it off and return it tomorrow. I shouldn't have
bought it."
  Julian raised his eyes to heaven. "Yes, you should have
bought it," he said. "Put it on and let's go." It was a hideous
hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and
stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked
like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less
comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her
pleasure was small and depressed him. 
  She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly
on top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on
either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as
innocent and untouched by experience as they must have
been when she was ten. Were It not that she was a widow
who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him
through school and who was supporting him still, "until he
got on his feet," she might have been a little girl that he had
to take to town.

  "It's all right, it's all right," he said. "Let's go." He opened the
door himself and started down the walk to get her going. The sky
was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it,
bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no
two were alike. Since this had been a fashionable neighborhood forty
years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well to have an
apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it
in which sat, usually, a grubby child. Julian walked with his hands
in his pockets, his head down and thrust forward and his eyes glazed
with the determination to make himself completely numb during
the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure.
  The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted
by the atrocious hat, coming toward him. "Well," she said,
"you only live once and paying a little more for it, I at least won't
meet myself coming and going."
  "Some day I'll start making money," Julian said gloomily--he
knew he never would--"and you can have one of those jokes whenever
you take the fit." But first they would move. He visualized a
place where the nearest neighbors would be three miles away on
either side.
  "I think you're doing fine," she said, drawing on her gloves.
  "You've only been out of school a year. Rome wasn't built in a
day."
  She was one of the few members of the Y reducing class who
arrived in hat and gloves and who had a son who had been to college.
"It takes time," she said, "and the world is in such a mess.
This hat looked better on me than any of the others, though when
she brought it out I said, 'Take that thing back. I wouldn't have
it on my head,' and she said, 'Now wait till you see it on,' and when
she put it on me, I said, 'We-ull,' and she said, 'If you ask me, that
hat does something for you and you do something for the hat, and
besides,' she said, 'with that hat, you won't meet yourself coming
and going.'''
  Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been
selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at
him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of
his martyrdom he had lost his faith. Catching sight of his long,
hopeless, irritated face, she stopped suddenly with a grief-stricken
look, and pulled back on his arm. "Wait on me," she said. "I'm
going back to the house and take this thing off and tomorrow I'm
going to return it. I was out of my head. I can pay the gas bill with
the seven-fifty."
  He caught her arm in a vicious grip. "You are not going to take
it back," he said. "I like it."
  "Well," she said, "I don't think I ought .. ."
  "Shut up and enjoy it," he muttered, more depressed than ever.
  "With the world in the mess it's in," she said, "it's a wonder we
can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top."
  Julian sighed.
  "Of course," she said, "if you know who you are, you can go anywhere."
She said this every time he took her to the reducing class.
"Most of them in it are not our kind of people," she said, "but I
can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am."
  "They don't give a damn for your graciousness," Julian said
savagely. "Knowing who you are is good for one generation only.
You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are."
  She stopped and allowed her eyes to flash at him. "I most certainly
do know who I am," she said, "and if you don't know who you are,
I'm ashamed of you."
  "Oh hell," Julian said.
  "Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state," she
said. "Your grandfather was a prosperous landowner. Your grandmother
was a Godhigh."
  "Will you look around you," he said tensely, "and see where you
are now?" and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood,
which the growing darkness at least made less dingy.
  "You remain what you are," she said. "Your great-grandfather
had a plantation and two hundred slaves."
  "There are no more slaves," he said irritably.
  "They were better off when they were," she said. He groaned to
see that she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every few days
like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction,
every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her
conclusion would roll majestically into the station: "It's ridiculous.
It's simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side
of the fence."
  "Let's skip it," Julian said.
  "The ones I feel sorry for," she said, "are the ones that are half
white. They're tragic."
  "Will you skip it?"
  "Suppose we were half white. We would certainly have mixed
feelings."
  "I have mixed feelings now," he groaned.
  "Well let's talk about something pleasant," she said. "I remember
going to Grandpa's when I was a little girl. Then the house had
double stairways that went up to what was really the second £loor--all
the cooking was done on the first. I used to like to stay down in
the kitchen on account of the way the walls smelled. I would sit
with my nose pressed against the plaster and take deep breaths.
Actually the place belonged to the Godhighs but your grandfather
Chestny paid the mortgage and saved it for them. They were in
reduced circumstances," she said, "but reduced or not, they never
forgot who they were."
  "Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them," Julian muttered.
He never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without
longing. He had seen it once when he was a child before it had
been sold. The double stairways had rotted and been torn down.
Negroes were living in it. But it remained in his mind as his mother
had known it. It appeared in his dreams regularly. He would stand
on the wide porch, listening to the rustle of oak leaves, then wander
through the high-ceilinged hall into the parlor that opened onto it
and gaze at the worn rugs and faded draperies. It occurred to him
that it was he, not she, who could have appreciated it. He preferred
its threadbare elegance to anything he could name and it was because
of it that all the neighborhoods they had lived in had been a
torment to him-whereas she had hardly known the difference. She
called her insensitivity "being adjustable."
  "And I remember the old darky who was my nurse, Caroline.
There was no better person in the world. I've always had a great
respect for my colored friends," she said. "I'd do anything in the
world for them and they'd ... "
  "Will you for God's sake get off that subject?" Julian said. When
he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside
a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother's sins.
  "You're mighty touchy tonight," she said. "Do you feel all right?"
  "Yes I feel all right," he said. "Now layoff."
  She pursed her lips. "Well, you certainly are in a vile humor," she
observed. "I just won't speak to you at all."
  They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight and
Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets and his head thrust
forward, scowled down the empty street. The frustration of having
to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck
like a hot hand. The presence of his mother was borne in upon him
as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her bleakly. She was holding
herself very erect under the preposterous hat, wearing it like
a banner of her imaginary dignity. There was in him an evil urge to
break her spirit. He suddenly unloosened his tie and pulled it off
and put it in his pocket.
  She stiffened. "Why must you look like that when you take me
to town?" she said. "Why must you deliberately embarrass me?"
  "If you'll never learn where you are," he said, "you can at least
learn where I am."
  "You look like a--thug," she said.
  "Then I must be one," he murmured.
  "I'll just go home," she said. "I will not bother you. If you can't
do a little thing like that for me ... "
  Rolling his eyes upward, he put his tie back on. "Restored to my
class," he muttered. He thrust his face toward her and hissed, "True
culture is in the mind, the mind," he said, and tapped his head,
"the mind."
  "It's in the heart," she said, "and in how you do things
and how you do things is because of who you are."
  "Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are."
  "I care who I am," she said icily.
  The lighted bus appeared on top of the next hill and as
it approached, they moved out into the street to meet it. He
put his hand under her elbow and hoisted her up on the
creaking step. She entered with a little smile, as if she were
going into a drawing room where everyone had been waiting
for her. While he put in the tokens, she sat down on one
of the broad front seats for three which faced the aisle. A thin
woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair was
sitting on the end of it. His mother moved up beside her
and left room for Julian beside herself. He. sat down and
looked at the floor across the aisle where a pair of thin feet
in red and white canvas sandals were planted.
  His mother immediately began a general conversation
meant to attract anyone who felt like talking. "Can it get any
hotter?" she said and removed from her purse a folding fan,
black with a Japanese scene on it, which she began to flutter
before her.
  "I reckon it might could," the woman with the protruding
teeth said, "but 1 know for a fact my apartment couldn't
get no hotter."
  "It must get the afternoon sun," his mother said. She sat
forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half filled.
Everybody was white. "I see we have the bus to ourselves,"
she said. Julian cringed.
  "For a change," said the woman across the aisle, the
owner of the red and white canvas sandals. "I come on one
the other day and they were thick as fleas-up front and all
through."
  "The world is in a mess everywhere," his mother said.
"I don't know how we've let it get in this fix."
  "What gets my goat is all those boys from good families
stealing automobile tires," the woman with the protruding
teeth said. "I told my boy, 1 said you may not be rich but you
been raised right and if I ever catch you in any such mess,
they can send you on to the reformatory. Be exactly where
you belong."
  "Training tells," his mother said. "Is your boy in high
school?"
  "Ninth grade," the woman said.
  "My son just finished college last year. He wants to write
but he's selling typewriters until he gets started," his mother
said.
  The woman leaned forward and peered at Julian. He
threw her such a malevolent look that she subsided against
the seat. On the floor across the aisle there was an abandoned
newspaper. He got up and got it and opened it out in front
of him. His mother discreetly continued the conversation in
a lower tone but the woman across the aisle said in a loud
voice, "Well that's nice. Selling typewriters is close to writing.
He can go right from one to the other."
  "I tell him," his mother said, "that Rome wasn't built in
a day."
  Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the
inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his
time. This was a kind of moral bubble in which he established
himself when he could not bear to be a part of what
was going on around him. From it he could see out 
and judge it but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration
from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the
general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered
it but from it could  see her with absolute clarity.
  The old lady was clever enough and he thought that if
she had started from any of the right premises, more might
have been expected of her. She lived according to the laws
of her own fantasy world, outside of which he had never
seen her set foot. The law of it was to sacrifice herself for
him after she had first created the necessity to do so by making
a mess of things. If he had permitted her sacrifices, it
was only because her lack of foresight had made them
necessary. All of her life had been a struggle to act like a
Chestny without the Chestny goods, and to give him everything
she thought a Chestny ought to have; but since, said
she, it was fun to struggle, why complain? And when you
had won, as she had won, what fun to look back on the hard
times! He could not forgive her that she had enjoyed the
struggle and that she thought she had won.
  What she meant when she said she had won was that
she had brought him up successfully and had sent him to
college and that he had turned out so well-good looking
(her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be straightened),
intelligent (he realized he was too intelligent to be a
success), and with a future ahead of him (there was of
course no future ahead of him). She excused his gloominess
on the grounds that he was still growing up and his radical
ideas on his lack of practical experience. She said he didn't
yet know a thing about "life," that he hadn't even entered
the real world-when already he was as disenchanted with
it as a man of fifty.
  The further irony of all this was that in spite of her, he
had turned out so well. In spite of going to only a third-rate
college, he had, on his own initiative, come out with a first-rate
education; in spite of growing up dominated by a small
mind, he had ended up with a large one; in spite of all her
foolish views, he was free of prejudice and unafraid to face
facts. Most miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by
love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally
free of her and could see her with complete objectivity.
He was not dominated by his mother.
  The bus stopped with a sudden jerk and shook him from
his meditation. A woman from the back lurched forward
with little steps and barely escaped falling in his newspaper
as she righted herself. She got off and a large Negro got on.
Julian kept his paper lowered to watch. It gave him a certain
satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed
his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth
knowing within a radius of three hundred miles. The Negro
was well dressed and carried a briefcase. He looked around
and then sat down on the other end of the seat where the
woman with the red and white canvas sandals was sitting.
He immediately unfolded a newspaper and obscured himself
behind it. Julian’s mother's elbow at once prodded insistently
into his ribs. "Now you see why I won't ride on these buses
by myself, "she whispered.
   The woman with the red and white canvas sandals had
risen at the same time the Negro sat down and had gone
further back in the bus and taken the seat of the woman who
had got off. His mother leaned forward and cast her an
approving look.
  Julian rose, crossed the aisle, and sat down in the place
of the woman with the canvas sandals. From this position, he
looked serenely across at his mother. Her face had turned an
angry red. He stared at her, making his eyes the eyes of a
stranger. He felt his tension suddenly lift as if he had openly
declared war on her.
  He would have liked to get in conversation with the
Negro and to talk with him about art or politics or any
subject that would be above the comprehension of those
around them, but the man remained entrenched behind his
paper. He was either ignoring the change of seating or had
never noticed it. There was no way for Julian to convey his
sympathy.
  His mother kept her eyes fixed reproachfully on his face.
The woman with the protruding teeth was looking at him
avidly as if he were a type of monster new to her.
  "Do you have a light?" he asked the Negro.
  Without looking away from his paper, the man reached
in his pocket and handed him a packet of matches.
  "Thanks," Julian said. For a moment he held the matches
foolishly. A NO SMOKING sign looked down upon him from
over the door. This alone would not have deterred him' he
had no cigarettes. He had quit smoking some months before
because he could not afford it. "Sorry," he muttered and
handed back the matches. The Negro lowered the paper and
gave him an annoyed look. He took the matches and raised
the paper again.
  His mother continued to gaze at him but she did not
take advantage of his momentary discomfort. Her eyes retained
their battered look. Her face seemed to be unnaturally
red, as if her blood pressure had risen. Julian allowed no
glimmer of sympathy to show on his face. Having got the
advantage, he wanted desperately to keep it and carry it
through. He would have liked to teach her a lesson that
would last her a while, but there seemed no way to continue
the point. The Negro refused to come out from behind his
paper.
  Julian folded his arms and looked stolidly before him,
facing her but as if he did not see her, as if he had ceased
to recognize her existence. He visualized a scene in which,
the bus having reached their stop, he would remain in his
seat and when she said, "Aren't you going to get off?" he
would look at her as at a stranger who had rashly addressed
him. The corner they got off on was usually deserted, but
it was well lighted and it would not hurt her to walk by
herself the four blocks to the Y. He decided to wait until the
time came and then decide whether or not he would let her
get off by herself. He would have to be at the Y at ten to
bring her back, but he could leave her wondering if he was
going to show up. There was no reason for her to think she
could always depend on him.
  He retired again into the high-ceilinged room sparsely
settled with large pieces of antique furniture. His soul expanded
momentarily but then he became aware of his
mother across from him and the vision shriveled. He studied
her coldly. Her feet in little pumps dangled like a child's and
did not quite reach the floor. She was training on him an
exaggerated look of reproach. He felt completely detached
from her. At that moment he could with pleasure have
slapped her as he would have slapped a particularly obnoxious child
in his charge.
  He began to imagine various unlikely ways by which he
could teach her a lesson. He might make friends with some
distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home
to spend the evening. He would be entirely justified but her
blood pressure would rise to 300. He could not push her to
the extent of making her have a stroke, and moreover, he
had never been successful at making any Negro friends. He
had tried to strike up an acquaintance on the bus with some
of the better types, with ones that looked like professors or
ministers or lawyers. One morning he had sat down next to
a distinguished-looking dark brown man who had answered
his questions with a sonorous solemnity but who had turned
out to be an undertaker. Another day he had sat down beside
a cigar-smoking Negro with a diamond ring on his finger,
but after a few stilted pleasantries, the Negro had rung the
buzzer and risen, slipping two lottery tickets into Julian's
hand as he climbed over him to leave.
  He imagined his mother lying desperately ill and his
being able to secure only a Negro doctor for her. He toyed
with that idea for a few minutes and then dropped it for a
momentary vision of himself participating as a sympathizer
in a sit-in demonstration. This was possible but he did not
linger with it. Instead, he approached the ultimate horror.
He brought home a beautiful suspiciously Negroid woman.
Prepare yourself, he said. There is nothing you can do about
it. This is the woman I've chosen. She's intelligent, dignified,
even good, and she's suffered and she hasn't thought it fun.
Now persecute us, go ahead and persecute us. Drive her
out of here, but remember, you're driving me too. His eyes
were narrowed and through the indignation he had generated,
he saw his mother across the aisle, purple-faced,
shrunken to the dwarf-like proportions of her moral nature,
sitting like a mummy beneath the ridiculous banner of her
hat.
  He was tilted out of his fantasy again as the bus stopped.
The door opened with a sucking hiss and out of the dark a
large, gaily dressed, sullen-looking colored woman got on
with a little boy. The child, who might have been four, had
on a short plaid suit and a Tyrolean hat with a blue feather
in it. Julian hoped that he would sit down beside him and
that the woman would push in beside his mother. He could
think of no better arrangement.
  As she waited for her tokens, the woman was surveying
the seating possibilities-he hoped with the idea of sitting
where she was least wanted. There was something familiar looking
about her but Julian could not place what it was.
She was a giant of a woman. Her face was set not only to
meet opposition but to seek it out. The downward tilt of
her large lower lip was like a warning sign: DON'T TAMPER
WITH ME. Her bulging figure was encased in a green crepe
dress and her feet overflowed in red shoes. She had on a
hideous hat. A purple velvet Hap came down on one side
of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and
looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. She carried a
mammoth red pocketbook that bulged throughout as if it
were stuffed with rocks.
  To Julian's disappointment, the little boy climbed up on
the empty seat beside his mother. His mother lumped all
children, black and white, into the common category, "cute,"
and she thought little Negroes were on the whole cuter than
little white children. She smiled at the little boy as he
climbed on the seat.
  Meanwhile the woman was bearing down upon the
empty seat beside Julian. To his annoyance, she squeezed
herself into it. He saw his mother's face change as the
woman settled herself next to him and he realized with
satisfaction that this was more objectionable to her than it
was to him. Her face seemed almost gray and there was a
look of dull recognition in her eyes, as if suddenly she had
sickened at some awful confrontation. Julian saw that it was
because she and the woman had, in a sense, swapped sons.
Though his mother would not realize the symbolic significance
of this, she would feel it. His amusement showed
plainly on his face.
  The woman next to him muttered something unintelligible
to herself. He was conscious of a kind of bristling
next to him, a muted growling like that of an angry cat. He
could not see anything but the red pocketbook upright on
the bulging green thighs. He visualized the woman as she
had stood waiting for her tokens-the ponderous figure, rising
from the red shoes upward over the solid hips, the
mammoth bosom, the haughty face, to the green and purple
hat.
  His eyes widened.
  The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him
with the radiance of a brilliant sunrise. His face was suddenly
lit with joy. He could not believe that Fate had thrust
upon his mother such a lesson. He gave a loud chuckle so
that she would look at him and see that he saw. She turned
her eyes on him slowly. The blue in them seemed to have
turned a bruised purple. For a moment he had an uncomfortable
sense of her innocence, but it lasted only a second
before principle rescued him. Justice entitled him to laugh.
His grin hardened until it said to her as plainly as if he
were saying aloud: Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness.
This should teach you a permanent lesson.
  Her eyes shifted to the woman. She seemed unable to
bear looking at him and to find the woman preferable. He
became conscious again of the bristling presence at his side.
The woman was rumbling like a volcano about to become
active. His mother's mouth began to twitch slightly at one
corner. With a sinking heart, he saw incipient signs of recovery on her face and realized that this was going to strike
her suddenly as funny and was going to be no lesson at all.
She kept her eyes on the woman and an amused smile came
over her face as if the woman were a monkey that had stolen
her hat. The little Negro was looking up at her with large
fascinated eyes. He had been trying to attract her attention
for some time.
  "Carver!" the woman said suddenly. "Come heahl"
  When he saw that the spotlight was on him at last,
Carver drew his feet up and turned himself toward julian's
mother and giggled.
  "Carver!" the woman said. "You heah me? Come heah!"
  Carver slid down from the seat but remained squatting
with his back against the base of it, his head turned slyly
around toward Julian's mother, who was smiling at him.
The woman reached a hand across the aisle and snatched
him to her. He righted himself and hung backwards on her
knees, grinning at Julian's mother. "Isn't he cute?" Julian's
mother said to the woman with the protruding teeth.
  "I reckon he is," the woman said without conviction.
  The Negress yanked him upright but he eased out of
her grip and shot across the aisle and scrambled, giggling
wildly, onto the seat beside his love.
  “I think he likes me," Julian's mother said, and smiled at
the woman. It was the smile she used when she was being
particularly gracious to an inferior. Julian saw everything
lost. The lesson had rolled off her like rain on a roof.
  The woman stood up and yanked the little boy off the
seat as if she were snatching him from contagion. Julian
could feel the rage in her at having no weapon like his
mother's smile. She gave the child a sharp slap across his
leg. He howled once and then thrust his head into her
stomach and kicked his feet against her shins. "Be-have," she
said vehemently.
  The bus stopped and the Negro who had been reading
the newspaper got off. The woman moved over and set the
little boy down with a thump between herself and Julian.
She held him firmly by the knee. In a moment he put his
hands in front of his face and peeped at Julian's mother
through his fingers.
  "I see yoooooooo!" she said and put her hand in front
of her face and peeped at him.
  The woman slapped his hand down. "Quit yo' foolishness,"
she said, "before I knock the living Jesus out of you!"
  Julian was thankful that the next stop was theirs. He
reached up and pulled the cord. The woman reached up and
pulled it at the same time. Oh my God, he thought. He had the
terrible intuition that when they got off the bus together,
his mother would open her purse and give the little boy a
nickel. The gesture would be as natural to her as breathing.
The bus stopped and the woman got up and lunged to the
front, dragging the child, who wished to stay on, after her.
Julian and his mother got up and followed. As they neared
the door, Julian tried to relieve her of her pocketbook.
  "No," she murmured, "I want to give the little boy a
nickel."
  No! "Julian hissed. "No!"
  She smiled down at the child and opened her bag. The
bus door opened and the woman picked him up by the arm
and descended with him, hanging at her hip. Once in the
street she set him down and shook him.
  Julian's mother had to close her purse while she got
down the bus step but as soon as her feet were on the ground,
she opened it again and began to rummage inside. "I can't
find but a penny," she whispered, 'out it looks like a new
one."
  "Don't do it!" Julian said fiercely between his teeth.
There was a streetlight on the corner and she hurried to get
under it so that she could better see into her pocketbook.
The woman was heading off rapidly down the street with
the child still hanging backward on her hand.
  "Oh little boy!" Julian's mother called and took a few
quick steps and caught up with them just beyond the lamppost.
"Here's a bright new penny for you," and she held out
the coin, which shone bronze in the dim light.
   The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her
shoulders lifted and her face frozen with frustrated rage, and
stared at Julian's mother. Then all at once she seemed to
explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one
ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing
out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed
as he heard the woman shout, "He don't take nobody's pen-
nies!" When he opened his eyes, the woman was disappearing
down the street with the little boy staring wide-eyed over
her shoulder. Julian's mother was sitting on the Sidewalk.
  "I told you not to do that," Julian said angrily. "I told
you not to do that!"
  He stood over her for a minute, gritting his teeth. Her
legs were stretched out in front of her and her hat was on
her lap. He squatted down and looked her in the face. It
was totally expressionless. "You got exactly what you deserved,"
he said. "Now get up."
  He picked up her pocketbook and put what had fallen
out back in it. He picked the hat up off her lap. The penny
caught his eye on the sidewalk and he picked that up and
let it drop before her eyes into the purse. Then he stood up
and leaned over and held his hands out to pull her up. She
remained immobile. He sighed. Rising above them on either
side were black apartment buildings, marked with irregular
rectangles of light. At the end of the block a man came out
of a door and walked off in the opposite direction. "All
right," he said, "suppose somebody happens by and wants
to know why you're sitting on the sidewalk?"
  She took the hand and, breathing hard, pulled heavily
up on it and then stood for a moment, swaying slightly as if
the spots of light in the darkness were circling around her.
Her eyes, shadowed and confused, finally settled on his
face. He did not try to conceal his irritation. "I hope this
teaches you a lesson," he said. She leaned forward and her
eyes raked his face. She seemed trying to determine his
identity. Then, as if she found nothing familiar about him,
she started off with a headlong movement in the wrong
direction.
  "Aren't you going on to the Y?" he asked.
  "Home," she muttered.
  "Well, are we walking?"
  For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his
hands behind him. He saw no reason to let the lesson she
had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its
meaning. She might as well be made to understand what
had happened to her. "Don't think that was just an uppity
Negro woman," he said. "That was the whole colored race
which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That
was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you,
and to be sure," he added gratuitously (because he thought
it was funny), "it looked better on her than it did on you.
What  all this means," he said, "is that the old world is gone.
The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not
worth a damn." He thought bitterly of the house that had
been lost for him. "You aren't who you think you are," he
said.
  She continued to plow ahead, paying no attention to
him. Her hair had come undone on one side. She dropped
her pocketbook and took no notice. He stooped and picked it
up and handed it to her but she did not take it.
  "You needn't act as if the world had come to an end,"
he said, "because it hasn't. From now on you've got to live in
a new world and face a few realities for a change. Buck
up," he said, "it won't kill you."
  She was breathing fast.
  "Let's wait on the bus," he said.
  "Home," she said thickly.
  "I hate to see you behave like this," he said. "Just like a
child. 1 should be able to expect more of you." He decided
to stop where he was and make her stop and wait for a bus.
"I'm not going any farther," he said, stopping. "We're going
on the bus."
  She continued to go on as if she had not heard him. He
took a few steps and caught her arm and stopped her. He
looked into her face and caught his breath. He was looking
into a face he had never seen before. "Tell Grandpa to come
get me," she said.
  He stared, stricken.
  "Tell Caroline to come get me," she said.
  Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again,
walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of
darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. "Mother!" he
cried. "Darling, sweetheart, wait!" Crumpling, she fell to the
pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying,
"Mamma, Mammal" He turned her over. Her face was
fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly
to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained
fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed,
  "Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and
began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in
the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but
his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights
drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved
numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness
seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment
to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.

End

The Partridge Festival

1961

CALHOUN parked his small pod-shaped car in the driveway to
his great-aunts' house and got out cautiously, looking to the
right and left as if he expected the profusion of azalea blossoms to
have a lethal effect upon him. Instead of a decent lawn, the old
ladies had three terraces crammed with red and white azaleas, beginning
at the sidewalk and running backwards to the very edge
of their imposing unpainted house. The two of them were on the
front porch, one sitting, the other standing.
  "Here's our baby;" his Aunt Bessie intoned in a voice meant to
reach the other one, two feet away but deaf. It turned the head of a
girl in the next yard, who sat cross-legged under a tree, reading.
She raised her spectacled face, stared at Calhoun, and then returned
her attention-with what he saw plainly was a smirk--to the book.
Scowling, he passed stolidly on to the porch to get over the preliminaries
with his aunts. They would take his voluntary presence
in Partridge at Azalea Festival time to be a sign that his character
was improving.
  They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington
with his wooden teeth in. They wore black suits with large
ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back. After each had
embraced him, he dropped limply into a rocker and gave them a
sheepish smile. He was here only because Singleton had captured
his imagination, but he had told his Aunt Bessie over the telephone
that he was coming to enjoy the festival.
  The deaf one, Aunt Mattie, shouted, "Your great-grandfather
would have been delighted to see you taking an interest in the
festival, Calhoun. He initiated it himself, you know."
  "Well," the boy yelled back, "what about the little extra excitement
you've had this time?"
  Ten days before the festival began, a man named Singleton had
been tried by a mock court on the courthouse lawn for not buying
an Azalea Festival Badge. During the trial he had been imprisoned
in a pair of stocks and when convicted, he had been locked in the
"jail" together with a goat that had been tried and convicted previously
for the same offense. The "jail" was an outdoor privy borrowed
for the occasion by the Jaycees. Ten days later, Singleton had
appeared in a side door on the courthouse porch and with a silent
automatic pistol, had shot five of the dignitaries seated there and by
mistake one person in the crowd. The innocent man received the
bullet intended for the mayor who at that moment had reached
down to pull up the tongue of his shoe.
  "An unfortunate incident," his Aunt Mattie said. "It mars the
festive spirit."
  He heard the girl on the other lawn slam her book. The top of
her rose into view above the hedge--a sloping-forward neck and a
small face with a fierce expression, which she trained briefly on
them before she disappeared. "It doesn't seem to have marred anything,"
he said. "As I passed through town I saw more people than
ever before and all the flags were up. Partridge," he shouted, "will
bury its dead but will not lose a nickel." The girl's front door
slammed in the middle of the sentence.
  His Aunt Bessie had gone into the house and come out again
with a small leather box. "You look very like Father," she said and
pulled up her chair beside him.
Without enthusiasm Calhoun opened the box, which shed a rustcolored
dust over his knees, and removed the miniature of his greatgrandfather.
He was shown this every time he came. The old
man-round-faced, bald, altogether unremarkable-looking-sat with
his hands knotted on the head of a black stick. His expression was
all innocence and determination. The master merchant, the boy
thought, and flinched. "And what would this stalwart worthy think
of Partridge today," he asked wryly, "with its festival in full swing
after six citizens have been shot?"
"  Father was progressive," his Aunt Bessie said, "--the most
forward-looking merchant Partridge ever had. He would either
have been one of the prominent men shot or he would have been
the one to subdue the maniac."
  The boy did not know how much of this he could stand. In the
paper there had been pictures of the six "victims" and one of Singleton.
Singleton's was the only distinctive face in the lot. It was broad
but bony and bleak. One eye was more nearly round than the
other and in the more nearly round one Calhoun had recognized
the composure of the man who knows he will and who is willing
to suffer for the right to be himself. A calculating contempt lurked
in the regular eye but in the general expression there was the tortured
look of the man who becomes maddened finally by the madness
around him. The other six faces were of the same general stamp as
his great-grandfather's.
  "As you get older, you'll look more and more like Father," his
Aunt Mattie prophesied. "You have his ruddy complexion and much
the same expression."
  "I'm a different type entirely," he said stiffly.
  "Peaches and cream," his Aunt Bessie guffawed. "You're getting
a little pot-tummy too," she said and took a lunge at his middle
with her fist. "How old is our baby now?"
  "Twenty-three," he muttered, thinking that it could not go on
like this for the whole visit, that once they had roughed him up a
bit, they would leave off.
  "And do you have a girl?" his Aunt Mattie asked.
  "No," he said wearily. "I take it," he went on, "that around here
Singleton is considered nothing but a mental case?"
  "Yes," his Aunt Bessie said, "--peculiar. He never conformed. He
was not like the rest of us here."
  "A terrible drawback," the boy said. Though his eyes were not
mismatched, the shape of his face was broad like Singleton's; but
the real likeness between them was interior.
  "Since he is insane, he is not responsible," his Aunt Bessie said.
The boy's eyes brightened. He sat forward and fixed the old lady
with a narrow gaze. "And where then," he asked, "does the real
guilt lie?"
  "Father's head was as smooth as an infant's by the time he was
thirty," she said. "You had better hurry and get you a girl. Ha ha,
What are you going to do with yourself now;"
  He reached into his pocket and withdrew Ls pipe and a sack of
tobacco. You could not ask them questions in depth. They were
both good low-church Episcopalians but they had amoral imaginations.
"I think I shall write," he said and began to load the bowl.
  "Well," his Aunt Bessie said, "that's fine. Maybe you'll be another
Margaret MitchelL"
  "I hope you'll do us justice," his Aunt Mattie shouted. "Few do."
"I'll do you justice all right," he said grimly. "I'm writing an
expos .... " He stopped and put the pipe in his mouth and sat back.
It would be ridiculous to tell them. He removed the pipe and said,
"Well, that's too much to go into. It wouldn't interest you ladies."
  His Aunt Bessie inclined her head significantly. "Calhoun," she
said, "we wouldn't want to be disappointed in you." They eyed
him as if it had just occurred to them that the pet snake they had
been fondling might after all be poisonous.
  "Know the truth," the boy said with his fiercest look, "and the
truth shall make you free."
  They appeared reassured at his quoting Scripture. "Isn't he sweet,"
his Aunt Mattie asked, "with his little pipe?”
  "Better get you a girl, boy," his Aunt Bessie said.

  He escaped them in a few minutes and took his bag upstairs
and then came down again, ready to go out and immerse himself
in his material. His intention was to spend the afternoon interviewing
people about Singleton. He expected to write something that
would vindicate the madman and he expected the writing of it to
mitigate his own guilt, for his doubleness, his shadow, was cast
before him more darkly than usual in the light of Singleton's purity.
  For the three summer months of the year, he lived with his parents
and sold air-conditioners, boats, and refrigerators so that for
the other nine months he could afford to meet life naturally and
bring his real self-the rebel-artist-mystic-to birth. During these
other months he lived on the opposite side of the city in an unheated
walk-up with two other boys who also did nothing. But
guilt for the summer pursued him into the winter; the fact was,
he could have fared without the orgy of selling he cast himself into
in the summer.
  When he had explained to them that he despised their values, his
parents had looked at each other with a gleam of recognition as if
this were what they had been expecting from what they had read,
and his father had offered to give him a small allowance to finance
the flat. He had refused it for the sake of his independence, but in
the depths of himself, he knew it was not for his independence but
because he enjoyed selling. In the face of a customer, he was carried
outside himself; his face began to beam and sweat and all complexity
left him; he was in the grip of a drive as strong as the drive
of some men for liquor or a woman; and he was horribly good at
it. He was so good at it that the company had given him an
achievement scroll. He had put quotation marks around the word
achievement and he and his friends used the scroll as a target for
darts.
  As soon as he had seen Singleton's picture in the paper, the face
began to burn in his imagination like a dark reproachful liberating
star. The next morning he had telephoned his aunts to expect him
and he had driven the hundred and fifty miles to Partridge in
a little short of four hours.
  On his way out of the house, his Aunt Bessie halted him and said,
"Be back by six, Baby Lamb, and we'll have a sweet surprise for
you."
  "Rice pudding?" he asked. They were terrible cooks.
  "Sweeter by far!" the old lady said and rolled her eyes. He hastened
away.
  The girl next door had returned with her book to the lawn. He
suspected that he might be supposed to know her. When he came
for visits as a child, his aunts had always produced one of the neighbor's
freak children to play with him--once a fat moron in a Girl
Scout suit, another time a near-sighted boy who recited Bible verses,
and another an almost square girl who had blackened his eye and
left. He thanked God he was now grown and they would no
longer dare to fill his time for him. The girl did not look up as
he passed and he did not speak.
  Once on the sidewalk, he was affected by the profusion of azaleas.
They seemed to wash in tides of color across the lawns until they
surged against the white house-fronts, crests of pink and crimson,
crests of white and a mysterious shade that was not yet lavender,
wild crests of yellow-red. The profusion of color almost stopped his
breath with insidious pleasure. Moss hung from the old trees. The
houses were the most picturesque types of run-down ante-bellum.
The taint of the place was expressed in his great-grandfather's
words which had survived as the town's motto: Beauty is Our
Money Crop.
  His aunts lived five blocks from the business section. He walked
them quickly and came after a few minutes to the edge of the bare
commercial scene, which had the ramshackle courthouse for its
center. The sun beat down fiercely on the tops of cars parked in
every available space. Flags, national, state and confederate, flapped
on every corner street light. People milled about. On the quiet
shaded street where his aunts lived and the azaleas were best, he
had not passed three people, but here they all were, staring avidly
at the pathetic store displays and moving with languid reverence
past the courthouse porch, the spot where blood had been spilled.
He wondered if any of them might think he was here for the
same reason they were. He would have liked to start, in Socratic
fashion, a street discussion about where the real guilt for the six
deaths lay, but as he surveyed the scene, he saw no one who looked
capable of any genuine interest in meaning. Without set purpose,
he entered a drugstore. The place was dark and smelled of sour
vanilla.
  He sat down on the high stool at the counter and ordered a
limeade. The boy preparing the drink had elaborate red sideburns
and wore on his shirtfront an Azalea Festival Badge-the emblem
which Singleton had refused to buy. Calhoun's eye fell on it at
once. "I see you've paid your tribute to the god," he said.
  The boy did not seem to get the significance of this.
  "The badge," Calhoun said, "the badge."
  The boy looked down at it and then back at Calhoun. He put
the drink on the counter and continued to look at him as if he
were serving someone with an interesting deformity.
  "Are you enjoying the festive spirit?" Calhoun asked.
  "All these doings?" the boy said.
  "These grand events," Calhoun said, "commencing with, I believe,
six deaths."
  "Yessir," the boy said, "six in cold blood. And I knew four of
them myself."
  "You too have had your share of the glory then," Calhoun said.
He felt suddenly a distinct hush fall on the street outside. He turned
his eyes to the door just in time to see a hearse pass, followed by a
line of slowly moving cars.
  "That's the man that's having his funeral to himself," the boy
said reverently. "The five that were supposed to get shot had theirs
yesterday. One big one. But he didn't die in time for it."
  "They have innocent as well as guilty blood on their hands,"
Calhoun said and glared at the boy.
  "It wasn't no they," the boy said. "One man done it all. A man
named Singleton. He was bats."
  "Singleton was only the instrument," Calhoun said. "Partridge
itself is guilty." He finished his drink in a gulp and put down the
glass.
  The boy was looking at him as if he were mad. "Patridge can't
shoot nobody," he said in a high exasperated voice.
  Calhoun put his dime on the counter and left. The last car had
turned at the end of the block. He thought he observed less activity.
People had obviously hastened away at the sight of the hearse. Two
doors from him an old man leaned out of a hardware store and
glared up the street where the procession had disappeared. Calhoun's
need to communicate was urgent. He approached diffidently.
  "I understand that was the last funeral," he said.
  The old man put a hand behind his ear.
  "The funeral of the innocent man," Calhoun shouted and nodded
up the street.
  The old man cleared his nostrils loudly. His expression was not
affable. "The only bullet that went right," he said in a rasping voice.
  "Biller was a wastrel. Drunk at the time."
  The boy scowled. "I suppose the other five were heroes?" he suggested
archly.
  "Fine men," the old man said. "Perished in the line of duty . We
givem a hero's fu'nel-all five in one big service. Biller's folks tried
to rush up the undertaker so they could get Biller in on it but we
saw to it Biller didn't make it. Would have been a disgrace."
My God, the boy thought.
  "The only thing Singleton ever did good was to rid us of Biller,"
the old man continued. "Now somebody ought to rid us of Singleton.
There he is at Quincy, living in the laper luxury, laying in a
cool bed at no expense, eating up your taxes and mine. They should
have shot him on the spot."
  This was so appalling that Calhoun was speechless.
  "Going to keep him there, they ought to charge him board," the
old man said.
  With a contemptuous glance, the boy walked off. He crossed the
street to the courthouse square, moving at an odd angle in order
to put as much distance between himself and the old fool as quickly
as possible. Here benches were scattered beneath the trees. He found
an unoccupied one and sat down. To the side of the courthouse
steps, several viewers stood admiring the "jail" where Singleton
had been locked with the goat. The pathos of his friend's situation
was borne in on him with a rush of empathy. He felt himself
flung in the privy, the padlock clicked, he glared between the
rotting planks at the fools howling and cavorting outside. The
goat made an obscene noise; he saw that he was confined with
the spirit of the community.
  "Six men was shot here," an odd muffled voice close by said.
The boy jumped.
  A small white girl whose tongue was curled in the mouth of a
Coca-Cola bottle was sitting in a patch of sand at his feet, watching
him with a detached gaze. Her eyes were the same green as the
bottle. She was barefooted and had straight white hair. She withdrew
her tongue from the bottle with an explosive sound. "A bad
man did it," she said.
  The boy felt the kind of frustration that accompanies contact
with the certainty of children. "No," he said, "he was not a bad
man."
  The child put her tongue back in the bottle and withdrew it
silently, her eyes on him.
  "People were not good to him," he explained. "They were mean
to him. They were cruel. What would you do if someone were cruel
to you?"
  "Shoot them," she said.
  "Well, that's what he did," Calhoun said, frowning.
  She continued to sit there and did not take her eyes off him. Her
gaze might have been the depthless gaze of Partridge itself.
  "You people persecuted him and finally drove him mad," the
boy said. "He wouldn't buy a badge. Was that a crime? He was
the Outsider here and you couldn't stand that. One of the fundamental
rights of man," he said, glaring through the child's transparent
stare, "is the right not to behave like a fool. The right to be
different," he said hoarsely, "My God. The right to be yourself."
Without taking her eyes off him, she lifted one of her feet and
set it on her knee.
  "He was a bad bad bad man," she said.
  Calhoun got up and walked off, glaring In front of him. His
indignation swathed his vision in a kind of haze. He saw none of
the activity around him distinctly. Two high school girls in bright
skirts and jackets swung into his path and shrilled, "Buy a ticket
for the beauty contest tonight. See who'll be Miss Partridge Azalea!"
He swerved sharply to the side and did not throw them so much as
a glance. Their giggles followed him until he was past the courthouse
and onto the block behind it. He stood there a moment,
undecided what he would do next. He faced a barber shop which
looked empty and cool. After a moment he entered it.
  The barber, alone in the shop, raised his head from behind the
paper he was reading. Calhoun asked for a haircut and sat down
gratefully in the chair.
The barber was a tall emaciated fellow with eyes that might have
faded from some deeper color. He looked to be a man who had suffered
himself. He put the bib on the boy and stood staring at his
round head as if it were a pumpkin he was wondering how to slice.
Then he twirled the chair so that Calhoun faced the mirror. He was
confronted with an image that was round-faced, unremarkablelooking
and innocent. The boy's expression turned fierce. "Are
you eating up this slop like the rest of them?" he asked belligerently.
  "Come again?" the barber said.
  “Do the tribal rites going on here improve the barber trade? All
these doings, all these doings," he said impatiently.
  "Well," the barber said, "last year it was a thousand extra people
here and this year it looks to be more--on account," he said, "of
the tragedy."
  "The tragedy," the boy repeated and stretched his mouth.
  "The six that was shot," the barber said.
  "That tragedy," the boy said. "And what about the other tragedy
--the man who was persecuted by these idiots until he shot six of
them?"
  "Oh him," the barber said.
  "Singleton," the boy said. "Did he patronize your place?"
  The barber began clipping his hair. A peculiar expression of disdain
had come over his face at the mention of the name. "Tonight
it's a beauty contest," he said, "tomorrow night it's a band concert,
Thursday afternoon it's a big parade with Miss .... "
  "Did you or didn't you know Singleton?" Calhoun interrupted.
  "Known him well," the barber said and shut his mouth.
  A tremor went through the boy as he realized that Singleton had
probably sat in the chair he himself was now sitting in. He searched
his face in the mirror desperately for its hidden likeness to the man.
Slowly he saw it appear, a secret message brought to light by the
heat of his feelings. "Did he patronize your shop?" he asked and
held his breath for the answer.
  "Him and me was related by marriage," the barber said indignantly,
"but he never come in here. He was too big a skinflint to
have his hair cut. He cut his own."
  "An unpardonable crime," Calhoun said in a high voice.
  "His second cousin married my sister-in-law," the barber said,
  "but he never known me on the street. Pass him as close as I am
to you and he'd keep going. Kept his eye on the ground all the time
like he was following a bug."
  "Preoccupied," the boy muttered. "He doubtless didn't know you
were on the street."
  "He known it," the barber said and his mouth curled unpleasantly.
  "He known it. I clip hair and he clipped coupons and that
was that. I clip hair," he repeated as if this sentence had a particularly
satisfying ring to his ears, "and he clipped coupons."
  The typical have-not psychology, Calhoun thought. "Was the
Singleton family once wealthy?" he asked.
  "It wasn't but half of him Singleton," the barber said, "and the
Singleton's claimed there wasn't none of him Singleton. One of the
Singleton girls gone off on a nine-months vacation and come back
with him. Then they all died off and left him their money. It's no
telling what the other half of him is. Something foreign I would
judge." His tone insinuated more.
  "I begin to get the picture," Calhoun said.
  "He ain't clipping no coupons now," said the barber.
  "No," Calhoun said and his voice rose, "now he's suffering. He's
the scapegoat. He's laden with the sins of the community. Sacrificed
for the guilt of others."
  The barber paused, his mouth partway open. After a moment
he said in a more respectful voice, "Reverend, you got him wrong.
He wasn't a church-going man."
  The boy reddened. ''I'm not a church-going man myself," he said.
The barber seemed stopped again. He stood holding the scissors
uncertainly.
  "He was an individualist," Calhoun said. "A man who would
not allow himself to be pressed into the mold of his inferiors. A
non-conformist. He was a man of depth living among caricatures
and they finally drove him mad, unleashed all his violence on themselves.
  Observe," he continued, "that they didn't try him. They
simply had him committed at once to Quincy. Why? Because," he
said, "a trial would have brought out his essential innocence and
the real guilt of the community."
  The barber's face lightened. "You're a lawyer, ain't you?" he
asked.
  "No," the boy said sullenly. "I'm a writer."
  "Ohhh," the barber murmured. "I known it must be something
like that." After a moment he said, "What you written?"
  "He never married?" Calhoun went on rudely. "He lived alone
in the Singleton place in the country?"
  "What there was of it," the barber said. "He wouldn't have spent
a nickel to keep it from falling down and no woman wouldn't
have had him. That was the one thing he always had to pay for,"
he said and made a vulgar noise in his cheek.
  "You know because you were always there," the boy said, barely
able to control his disgust for this bigot.
  "Naw," the barber said, "it was just common knowledge. I clip
hair," he said, "but I don't live like a hog. I got plumbing in my
house and a refrigerator that spits ice cube's into my wife's hand."
  "He was not a materialist," Calhoun said. "There were things
that meant more to him than plumbing. Independence, for instance."
  "Ha," the barber snorted. "He wasn’t so independent. Once
lightning almost struck him and those that saw it said you should
have seen him run. Took off like bees were swarming in his pants.
They liked to died laughing," and he gave a hyena-like laugh himself
and slapped his knee.
"Loathsome," the boy murmured.
  "Another time," the barber continued, "somebody went out there
and put a dead cat in his well. Somebody was always doing something
to see if they could make him turn loose a little money.
Another time ... "
  Calhoun began fighting his way out of the bib as if it were a net
he was caught in. When he was free of it, h« thrust his hand in his
pocket and brought out a dollar which he flung on the startled
barber's shelf. Then he made for the door, letting it slam behind him
in judgment on the place.
  The walk back to his aunts' did not calm him. The colors of the
azaleas had deepened with the approach of sundown and the trees
rustled protectively over the old houses. No one  here had a thought
for Singleton, who lay on a cot in a filthy ward at Quincy. The boy
felt now in a concrete way the force of his innocence, and he
thought that to do justice to all the man had suffered, he would
have to write more than a simple article. He would have to write
a novel; he would have to show, not say, how primary injustice
operated. Preoccupied with this, he went four doors past his aunts'
house and had to turn and go back.
  His Aunt Bessie met him at the door and drew him into the
hall. "Told you we'd have a sweet surprise [or you!" she said, pulling
him by the arm into the parlor.
  On the sofa sat a rangy-looking girl in a lime-green dress. "You
remember Mary Elizabeth," his Aunt Mattie said, "--the cute little
trick you took to the picture show once when you were here."
Through his rage he recognized the girl who had been reading
under the tree. "Mary Elizabeth is home for the spring holidays,"
his Aunt Mattie said. "Mary Elizabeth is a real scholar, aren't you,
Mary Elizabeth?"
  Mary Elizabeth scowled, indicating she was, indifferent to whether
she was a real scholar or not. She gave him a Iook which told him
plainly she expected to enjoy this no more than he did.
  His Aunt Mattie gripped the knob of her cane and began to
lift herself from her chair. "We're going to have supper early," the
other one said, "because Mary Elizabeth is going to take you to the
beauty contest and it begins at seven."
  "Great," the boy said in a tone that would be lost on them but
he hoped not on Mary Elizabeth.
  Throughout the meal he ignored the girl completely. His repartee
with his aunts was markedly cynical but they did not have sense
enough to understand his allusions and laughee like idiots at everything
he said. Twice they called him "Babyboy" and the girl
smirked. Otherwise she did nothing to suggest she was enjoying
herself. Her round face was still childish behind her glasses. Retarded,
Calhoun thought.
  When the meal was over and they were on the way to the beauty
contest, they continued to say nothing to each other. The girl, who
was several inches taller than he, walked slight]y n advance of him
as if she would like to lose him on the way, but after two blocks she
stopped abruptly and began to rummage in a huge grass bag she
carried. She took out a pencil and held it between her teeth while
she continued to rummage. After a minute she brought up from
the bottom of the bag two tickets and a stenographer's note pad.
With these out, she closed the pocketbook and walked on.
"Are you going to take notes;" Calhoun inquired in a tone heavy
with irony.
  The girl looked around as if trying to identify the speaker. "Yes,"
she said, ''I'm going to take notes."
  "You appreciate this sort of thing?" Calhoun asked in the same
tone. "You enjoy it?"
  "It makes me vomit," she said, "I'm going to finish it off with
one swift literary kick."
  The boy looked at her blankly.
  "Don't let me interfere with your pleasure in it," she said, "but
this whole place is false and rotten to the core." Her voice came with
a hiss of indignation. "They prostitute azaleas!"
  Calhoun was astounded. After a moment he recovered himself.
"It takes no great mind to come to that conclusion," he said
haughtily. "What requires insight is finding a way to transcend it."
  "You mean a form to express it in."
  "It comes to the same thing," he said.
  They walked the next two blocks in silence but both appeared
shaken. When the courthouse was in view they crossed the street
to it and Mary Elizabeth stuck the tickets at a boy who stood beside
an entrance that had been formed by roping in the rest of the
square. People were beginning to assemble on the grass inside.
"And do we stand here while you take notes?" Calhoun asked.
The girl stopped and faced him. "Look, Baby Lamb," she said,
"you can do what you please. I'm going up to my father's office in
the building where I can work. You can stay down here and help
select Miss Partridge Azalea if you want to."
  "I shall come," he said, controlling himself, "I'd like to observe a
great female writer taking notes."
  "Suit yourself," she said.
  He followed her up the courthouse steps and through a side door.
His irritation was so extreme that he did not realize he had passed
through the very door where Singleton had stood to shoot. They
walked through an empty barnlike hall and silently up a flight of
tobacco-stained steps into another barn like hall. Mary Elizabeth
rooted in the grass bag for a key and then unlocked the door to
her father's office. They entered a large threadbare room lined with
lawbooks. As if he were an incompetent, the girl dragged two
straight chairs from one wall to a window that overlooked the porch.
Then she sat down and stared out, apparently absorbed at once in
the scene below.
  Calhoun sat down in the other chair. To annoy her he began to
look her over thoroughly. For what seemed at least five minutes, he
did not take his eyes off her as she leaned with her elbows in the
window. He stared at her so long that he was afraid her image
would be etched forever on his retina. Finally he could stand the
silence no longer. "What is your opinion of Singleton?" he asked
abruptly.
  She raised her head and appeared to look through him. "A
Christ-figure," she said.
  The boy was stunned.
  "I mean as myth," she said scowling. "I'm not a Christian." She
returned her attention to the scene outside. Below a bugle sounded.
  "Sixteen girls in bathing suits are about to appear," she drawled.
"Surely this will be of interest to you?"
  "Listen," Calhoun said fiercely, "get this through your head. I'm
not interested in the damn festival or the damn azalea queen. I'm
here only because of my sympathy for Singleton. I'm going to write
about him. Possibly a novel."
  "I intend to write a non-fiction study," the girl said in a tone that
made it evident fiction was beneath her.
  They looked at each other with open and intense dislike. Calhoun
felt that if he probed sufficiently he would expose her essential
shallowness. "Since our forms are different," he said, again with
his ironical smile, "we might compare findings."
  "It's quite simple," the girl said. "He was the scapegoat. While
Partridge flings itself about selecting Miss Partridge Azalea, Singleton
suffers at Quincy. He expiates .. .'''
  "I don't mean your abstract findings," the boy said. "I mean your
concrete findings. Have you ever seen him? What did he look like?
The novelist is not interested in narrow abstractions-particularly
when they're obvious. He's .. ."
  "How many novels have you written?" she asked.
  "This will be my first," he said coldly. "Have you ever seen him?"
  "No," she said, "that isn't necessary for me. What he looks like
makes no difference-whether he has brown eyes or blue-that's
nothing to a thinker."
  "You are probably," he said, "afraid to look at him. The novelist
is never afraid to look at the real object."
  "I would not be afraid to look at him," the girl said angrily, "if
it were at all necessary. Whether he has brown eyes or blue is nothing
to me."
  "There is more to it," Calhoun said, "than whether he has brown
eyes or blue. You might find your theories enriched by the sight of
him. And I don't mean by finding out the color of his eyes. I mean
your existential encounter with his personality. The mystery of
personality," he said, "is what interests the artist. Life does not
abide in abstractions."
  "Then what's keeping you from going and having a look at
him?" she said. "What are you asking me what he looks like for?
Go see for yourself."
  The words fell on his head like a sack of rucks. After a moment
he said, "Go see for yourself? Go see where?"
  "At Quincy," the girl said. "Where do you think?"
"They wouldn't let me see him," he said. The suggestion was
appalling to him; for some reason he could not at the moment
understand, it struck him as unthinkable.
"They would if you said you were kin to him," she said. "It's
only twenty miles from here. What's to stop you?"
  He was about to say, "I'm not kin to him." but he stopped and
reddened furiously on the edge of the betrayal. They were spiritual
kin.
  "Go see whether his eyes are brown or blue and have yourself
a little old exis ... "
  "I take it," he said, "that if I go you would like to go along?
Since you aren't afraid to see him."
  The girl paled. "You won't go," she said. "'You're not up to the
old exis . . ."
  "I will go," he said, seeing his opportunity to shut her up. "And if
you care to go with me, you can be at my aunts' at nine in the morning.
But I doubt," he added, "that I'll see you there."
  She thrust forward her long neck and glared at him. "Oh yes you
will," she said. "You'll see me there."
  She returned her attention to the window and Calhoun looked
at nothing. Each seemed sunk suddenly in some mammoth private
problem. Raucus cheers came intermittently from outside. Every
few minutes there was music and clapping but neither took any
notice of it, or of each other. Finally the girl pulled away from
the window and said, "If you've got the general idea, we can leave.
I prefer to go home and read."
  "I had the general idea before I came," Calhoun said.

  He saw her to her door and when he had left her, his spirits
lifted dizzily for an instant and then collapsed. He knew that
the idea of going to see Singleton would never have occurred to
him alone. It would be a torturing experience, but it might be his
salvation. The sight of Singleton in his misery might cause him
suffering sufficient to raise him once and for all from his commercial
instincts. Selling was the only thing he had proved himself
good at; yet it was impossible for him to believe that every man was
not created equally an artist if he could but suffer and achieve it.
As for the girl, he doubted if the sight of Singleton would do anything
for her. She had that particular repulsive fanaticism peculiar
to smart children-all brain and no emotion.
  He spent a restless night, dreaming in snatches of Singleton. At
one point he dreamed he was driving to Quincy to sell Singleton a
refrigerator. When he awoke in the morning, a slow rain was
descending indifferently. He turned his head to the gray window
pane. He could not remember what he had dreamed but he sensed
it had been unpleasant. A vision of the girl's flat face came to him.
He thought of Quincy and saw rows and rows of low red buildings
with rough heads sticking out of barred windows. He tried to concentrate
on Singleton but his mind shied from the thought. He did
not wish to go to Quincy. He remembered that it was a novel he
was going to write. His desire to write a novel had gone down
overnight like a defective tire.
  While he lay in bed, the drizzle turned into a steady downpour.
The rain might keep the girl from coming, or at least she might
think she could use it as an excuse. He decided to wait until exactly
nine o'clock and if she had not shown up by then to be off. He
would not go to Quincy but would go home. It would be better to
see Singleton at a later date when he would perhaps have responded
to treatment. He got up and wrote the girl a note to be left with
his aunts, saying he presumed she had decided, upon consideration,
that she was not equal to the experience. It was a very concise note
and he ended it, "Cordially yours."
  She arrived at five minutes to nine and stood dripping in his
aunts' hall, a tubular bundle of baby-blue plastic from which nothing
showed but her face. She was holding a damp paper sack and
her large mouth was twisted in an uncertain smile. Overnight she
had apparently lost some of her self-assurance.
  Calhoun was barely able to be polite. His aunts, who thought this
was a romantic outing in the rain, kissed him out the door and
stood on the porch idiotically waving their handkerchiefs until he
and Mary Elizabeth were in the car and gone.
  The girl was much too big for the small car. She kept shifting
about and twisting inside her raincoat. "The rain has beat the azaleas
down," she observed in a neutral tone.
  Calhoun rudely kept silent. He was trying to obliterate her from
his consciousness so that he could reestablish Singleton there. He
had lost Singleton completely. The rain was coming down in gray
swaths. When they reached the highway, they could barely see
across the fields to a faint line of woods. The girl kept leaning
forward, squinting into the opaque windshield. "If a truck were to
come out of that," she said with a gawkish laugh, "that would be
the end of us."
  Calhoun stopped the car. "I'll be glad to take you back and go
on by myself," he said.
  "I have to go," she said hoarsely, staring at him. "I have to see
him." Behind her spectacles, her eyes appeared larger than they
should have been and suspiciously liquid. "I have to face this," she
said.
  Roughly, he started the car again.
  "You have to prove to yourself that you can stand there and
watch a man be crucified," she said. "You have to go through it
with him. I thought about it all night."
  "It may give you," Calhoun muttered, "a more balanced view of
life."
  "This is personal," she said. "You wouldn't understand," and she
turned her head to the window.
  Calhoun tried to concentrate on Singleton. Feature by feature,
he brought the face together in his mind and each time he had it
almost constructed, it fell apart and he was left with nothing. He
drove in silence, at a reckless speed as if he would like to hit a hole
in the road and see the girl go through the windshield. Every now
and then she blew her nose weakly. After fifteen mlies or so the
rain slackened and stopped. The treeline on either side of them
became black and clear and the fields intensely green. They would
have an unmistakable view of the hospital grounds as soon as these
should come in sight.
  "Christ only had to take it three hours," the girl said all at once
in a high voice, "but he'll be in this place the rest of his life!"
  Calhoun cut his eyes toward her. There was a fresh wet line down
the side of her face. He turned his eyes away, awed and furious.
"If you can't stand this," he said, "I can still take you home and
come back by myself."
  "You wouldn't come back by yourself," she said, "and we're
almost there." She blew her nose. "I want him to know that somebody
takes his side. I want to say that to him no matter what it
does to me."
  Through his rage, the terrible thought occurred to the boy that
he would have to say something to Singleton. What could he say
to him in the presence of this woman? She had shattered the communion
between them. "We've come to listen I hope you understand,"
he burst out, "I haven't driven all this way to hear you
startle Singleton with your wisdom. I've come to listen to him."
  "We should have brought a tape recorder!" she cried, "then
we'd have what he says all our lives!"
  "You don't have elementary understanding," Calhoun said, "if
you think you approach a man like this with a tape recorder."
  "Stop!" she shrieked, leaning toward the windshield, "that's it!"
Calhoun slammed on his brakes and looked forward wildly.
A cluster of low buildings, hardly noticeable, rose like a rich
growth of warts on the hill to their right.
  The boy sat helpless while the car, as if of its own volition, turned
and headed toward the entrance. The letters QUINCY STATE HOSPITAL
were cut in a concrete arch which it rolled effortlessly through.
  "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," the girl murmured.
They had to stop within a hundred yards of the gate while a
fat white-capped nurse led a line of patients, straggling like elderly
schoolchildren, across the road in front of them, Ac snaggle-toothed
woman in a candy-striped dress and black wool hat shook her fist
at them, and a baldheaded man waved energetically. A few threw
malevolent looks as the line shuffled off across the green to another
building.
  After a moment the car rolled forward again, "Park in front of
that center building," Mary Elizabeth directed,
  "They won't let us see him," he mumbled.
  "Not if you have anything to do with it," she said. "Park and let
me out. I'll handle this." Her cheek had dried and her voice was
businesslike. He parked and she got out. He watched her disappear
into the building, thinking with grim satisfaction hat she would soon
turn into a full-grown ogre--false intellect, false emotions, maximum
efficiency, all operating to produce the dominant hair-splitting
Ph.D. Another line of patients passed in the road and several of
them pointed at the small car. Calhoun did not look but he sensed
he was being watched. "Hup up there," he heard the nurse say.
  He looked again and gave a little cry A gentle face, wrapped
around with a green hand towel, was in his, window, smiling
toothlessly but with an agonizing tenderness.
  "Get a move on, sweetie," the nurse said and the face retreated.
  The boy rolled his window up rapidly but his    heart was wrenched.
He saw again the agonized face in the stocks--the slightly mismatched
eyes, the wide mouth parted in a stifled  useless cry. The
vision lasted only a moment but when it passed, he was certain
that the sight of Singleton was going to effect a change in him,
that after this visit, some strange tranquility he had not before conceived
of would be his. He sat for ten minute  with his eyes closed,
knowing that a revelation was near and trying  to prepare himself
for it.
  All at once the car door opened and the girl folded herself, panting,
in beside him. Her face was pale. She held up two green permission
slips and pointed to the names written on them: Calhoun
Singleton on one, Mary Elizabeth Singleton on the other. For a
moment they stared at the slips, then at each other. Both appeared
to recognize that in their common kinship with him, a kinship with
each other was unavoidable. Generously, Calhoun held out his hand.
She shook it. "He's in the fifth building to the left," she said.
  They drove to the fifth building and parked. It was a low red
brick structure with barred windows, like all the others except that
the outside of it was streaked with black stains. In one window two
hands hung out, palms downward. Mary Elizabeth opened the paper
sack she had brought and began to take out presents for Singleton.
She had brought a box of candy, a carton of cigarettes and three
Bookss--a Modern Library Thus Spake  Zarathustra ,a paperback Revolt
of the Masses, and a thin decorated volume of Housman. She
handed the cigarettes and the candy to Calhoun and got out of the
car with the books herself. She started forward, but halfway to the
door she stopped and put her hand to her mouth. "I can't take it,"
she murmured.
  "Now now," Calhoun said kindly. He put his hand on her back
and gave her a slight push and she began to move forward again.
  They entered a stained linoleum-covered hall where a peculiar
odor met them at once like an invisible official. There was a desk
facing the door, behind which sat a frail harassed-looking nurse
whose eyes darted to right and left as if she expected ultimately to
be hit from behind. Mary Elizabeth handed her the two green permits.
The woman looked at them and groaned.  “Go in yonder and
wait," she said in a weary insult-bearing voice, 'He'll have to be got
ready. They shouldn't have give you these over there. What
do they know about what goes on over here and what do
them doctors care anyhow?  If it was up to me,  the ones that don't
cooperate wouldn't see nobody."
  "We're his kin," Calhoun said. "We have every right to see him."
The nurse threw her head back in a soundless laugh and went off
muttering.
  Calhoun put his hand on the girl's back again and guided her
into the waitng room where they sat down close together on a
mammoth black leather sofa which faced an identical piece of furniture
five feet away. There was nothing else in the room but a
rickety table in lone corner with an empty white vase on it. A barred
window cast squares of damp light on the floor at their feet. There
seemed an intense stillness about them although the place was anything
but quiet. From one end of the building came a continuous
mourning sound as delicate as the fluttering wail of owls; at the
other end they heard rocketing peals of laughter. Closer at hand, a
steady monotonous cursing broke the silence around it with a machine-
like regularity. Each noise seemed to exist isolated from every
other.
  The two sat together as if they were waiting for some momentous
event in their lives--a marriage or instantaneous deaths. They
seemed already joined in a predestined convergence. At the same
instant each made an involuntary motion as if to run but it was too
late. Heavy footsteps were almost at the door and the machine-like
curses were bearing down.
  Two burly attendants entered with Singleton spider-like between
them. He was holding his feet high up off the floor so that the
attendants had to carry him. It was from him the curses were coming.
He had on a hospital gown of the type that opens and ties up
the back and his feet were stuck in black shoes from which the laces
had been removed. On his head was a black hat, not the kind
countrymen wear, but a black derby hat such as might be worn
by a gunman in the movies. The two attendants came up to the
empty sofa from behind and swung him over the back of it, then
still holding him, each passed around the sofa arms and sat down
beside him, grinning. They might have been twins for though one
was blond and the other bald, they had identical looks of goodnatured
stupidity.
  As for Singleton, he fixed Calhoun with his green slightly mismatched
eyes. "Whadaya want with me?" he shrilled. "Speak up!
My time is valuable." They were almost exactly the eyes that Calhoun
had seen in the paper, except that the penetrating gleam in
them had a slight reptilian quality.
  The boy sat mesmerized.
  After a moment, Mary Elizabeth said in a slow, hoarse, barely
audible voice, "We came to say we understand."
  The old man's glare shifted to her and for one instant his eyes
remained absolutely still like the eyes of a treetoad that has sighted
its prey. His throat appeared to swell. "Ahhh," he said as if he had
just swallowed something pleasant, "eeeee."
  "Mind out now, dad," one of the attendants said.
  "Lemme sit with her," Singleton said and jerked his arm away
from the attendant, who caught it again at once. "She knows what
she wants."
  "Let him sit with her," the blond attendant said, "she's his niece."
  "No," the bald one said, "keep aholt to him. He's liable to pull
off his frock. You know him."
  But the other one had already let one of his wrists loose and
Singleton was leaning outward toward Mary Elizabeth, straining
away from the attendant who held him. The girl's eyes were glazed.
The old man began to make suggestive noises through his teeth.
  "Now now, dad," the idle attendant said.
  "It's not every girl gets a chance at me," Singleton said. "Listen
here, sister, I'm well-fixed. There's nobody in Partridge I can't skin.
I own the place--as well as this hotel." His hand grasped toward
her knee.
  The girl gave a small stifled cry.
  "And I got others elsewhere," he panted. "You and me are two
of a kind. We ain't in their class. You're a queen. I'll put you on a
float!" and at that moment he got his wrist free and lunged toward
her but both attendants sprang after him instantly. As Mary Elizabeth
crouched against Calhoun, the old man jumped nimbly over
the sofa and began to speed around the room. The attendants, their
arms and legs held wide apart to catch him, tried to close in on
him from either side. They almost had him when he kicked off his
shoes and leaped between them onto the table, sending the empty
vase shattering to the floor. "Look girl!" he shrilled and began to
pull the hospital gown over his head
  Mary Elizabeth was already dashing out the room and Calhoun
ran behind her and thrust open the door just in time to prevent her
crashing into it. They scrambled into the car and the boy drove it
away as if his heart were the motor and would never go fast enough.
The sky was bone-white and the slick highway stretched before
them like a piece of the earth's exposed nerve. After five miles Calhoun
pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped from exhaustion.
They sat silently, looking at nothing until finally they
turned and looked at each other. There each was at once the likeness
of their kinsman and flinched. They looked away and then
back, as if with concentration they might find a more tolerable
image. To Calhoun, the girl's face seemed to mirror the nakedness
of the sky. In despair he leaned closer until he was stopped by a
miniature visage which rose incorrigibly in her spectacles and fixed
him where he was. Round, innocent, undistinguished as an iron
link, it was the face whose gift of life had pushed straight forward
to the future to raise festival after festival. Like a master salesman,
it seemed to have been waiting there from all time to claim him.

End

The Lame
Shall Enter First

1962

Sheppard sat on a stool at the bar that divided the kitchen
in half, eating his cereal out of the individual pasteboard
box it came in. He ate mechanically, his eyes on the child,
who was wandering from cabinet to cabinet in the panelled
kitchen, collecting the ingredients for his breakfast. He was
a stocky blond boy of ten. Sheppard kept his intense blue
eyes fixed on him. The boy's future was written in his face.
He would be a banker. No, worse. He would operate a small
loan company. All he wanted for the child was that he be
good and unselfish and neither seemed likely. Sheppard
was a young man whose hair was already white. It stood
up like a narrow brush halo over his pink sensitive face.
  The boy approached the bar with the jar of peanut
butter under his arm, a plate with a quarter of a small
chocolate cake on it in one hand and the ketchup bottle in
the other. He did not appear to notice his father. He
climbed up on the stool and began to spread peanut butter
on the cake. He had very large round ears that leaned away
from his head and seemed to pull his eyes slightly too far
apart. His shirt was green but so faded that the cowboy
charging across the front of it was only a shadow.
  "Norton," Sheppard said, "I saw Rufus Johnson yesterday.
Do you know what he was doing?"
  The child looked at him with a kind of half attention,
his eyes forward but not yet engaged. They were a paler
blue than his father's as if they might have faded like the
shirt, one of them listed, almost imperceptibly, toward the
outer rim.
  "He was in an alley," Sheppard said, "and he had his
hand in a garbage can. He was trying to get something to
eat out of it." He paused to let this soak in. "He was hungry,"
he finished, and tried to pierce the child's conscience with
his gaze.
  The boy picked up the piece of chocolate cake and
began to gnaw it from one comer.
  "Norton," Sheppard said, "do you have any idea what
it means to share?"
  A flicker of attention. "Some of it's yours," Norton said.
  "Some of it's his," Sheppard said heavily. It was hopeless.
Almost any fault would have been preferable to selfishness--
a violent temper, even a tendency to lie.
  The child turned the bottle of ketchup upside-down
and began thumping ketchup onto the cake.
  Sheppard's look of pain increased. "You are ten and
Rufus Johnson is fourteen," he said. "Yet I'm sure your shirts
would fit Rufus." Rufus Johnson was a boy he had been
trying to help at the reformatory for the past year. He had
been released two months ago. "When he was in the reformatory,
he looked pretty good, but when I saw him yesterday, he was skin and bones. He hasn't been eating cake
with peanut butter on it for breakfast."
  The child paused. "It's stale," he said. "That's why I
have to put stuff on it."
  Sheppard turned his face to the window at the end of
the bar. The side lawn, green and even, sloped fifty feet or
so down to a small suburban wood. When his wife was living,
they had often eaten outside, even breakfast, on the
grass. He had never noticed then that the child was selfish.
"Listen to me," he said, turning back to him, "look at me
and listen."
  The boy looked at him. At least his eyes were forward.
  "I gave Rufus a key to this house when he left the
reformatory--to show my confidence in him and so he would
have a place he could come to and feel welcome any time.
He didn't use it, but I think he'll use it now because he's
seen me and he's hungry. And if he doesn't use it, I'm going
out and find him and bring him here. I can't see a child
eating out of garbage cans."
  The boy frowned. It was dawning upon him that something
of his was threatened.
  Sheppard's mouth stretched in disgust. "Rufus's father
died before he was born," he said. "His mother is in the
state penitentiary. He was raised by his grandfather in a
shack without water or electricity and the old man beat him
every day. How would you like to belong to a family like
that?"
  "I don't know," the child said lamely.
  "Well, you might think about it sometime," Sheppard
said.
  Sheppard was City Recreational Director. On Saturdays
he worked at the reformatory as a counselor, receiving nothing
for it but the satisfaction of knowing he was helping
boys no one else cared about. Johnson was the most intelligent
boy he had worked with and the most deprived.
  Norton turned what was left of the cake over as if he no
longer wanted it.
  "Maybe he won't come," the child said and his eyes
brightened slightly.
  "Think of everything you have that he doesn't!" Sheppard
said. "Suppose you had to root in garbage cans for
food? Suppose you had a huge swollen foot and one side
of you dropped lower than the other when you walked?"
The boy looked blank, obviously unable to imagine
such a thing.
  "You have a healthy body," Sheppard said, "a good
home. You've never been taught anything but the truth.
Your daddy gives you everything you need and want. You
don't have a grandfather who beats you. And your mother
is not in the state penitentiary."
  The child pushed his plate away. Sheppard groaned
aloud.
  A knot of flesh appeared below the boy's suddenly distorted
mouth. His face became a mass of lumps with slits for
eyes. "If she was in the penitentiary," he began in a kind
of racking bellow, "I could go to seeeeee her." Tears rolled
down his face and the ketchup dribbled on his chin. He
looked as if he had been hit in the mouth. He abandoned
himself and howled.
  Sheppard sat helpless and miserable, like a man lashed
by some elemental force of nature. This was not a normal
grief. It was all part of his selfishness. She had been dead
for over a year and a child's grief should not last so long.
"You're going on eleven years old," he said reproachfully
  The child began an agonizing high-pitched heaving
noise.
  "If you stop thinking about yourself and think what you
can do for somebody else," Sheppard said, "then you'll stop
missing your mother."
  The boy was silent but his shoulders continued to shake.
Then his face collapsed and he began to howl again.
  "Don't you think I'm lonely without her too?" Sheppard
said. "Don't you think I miss her at all? I do, but I'm not
sitting around moping. I'm busy helping other people. When
do you see me just sitting around thinking about my
troubles?"
  The boy slumped as if he were exhausted but fresh
tears streaked his face.
  "What are you going to do today?" Sheppard asked, to
get his mind on something else.
  The child ran his arm across his eyes. "Sell seeds," he
mumbled.
  Always selling something. He had four quart jars full
of nickels and dimes he had saved and he took them out of
his closet every few days and counted them. "What are you
selling seeds for?"
  "To win a prize."
  "What's the prize?"
  "A thousand dollars."
  "And what would you do if you had a thousand dollars?"
  "Keep it," the child said and wiped his nose on his
shoulder.
  "I feel sure you would," Sheppard said. "Listen," he said
and lowered his voice to an almost pleading tone, "suppose
by some chance you did win a thousand dollars. Wouldn't
you like to spend it on children less fortunate than yourself?
Wouldn't you like to give some swings and trapezes to the
orphanage? Wouldn't you like to buy poor Rufus Johnson
a new shoe?"
  The boy began to back away from the bar. Then suddenly
he leaned forward and hung with his mouth open over
his plate. Sheppard groaned again. Everything came up, the
cake, the peanut butter, the ketchup-a limp sweet batter.
He hung over it gagging, more came, and he waited with
his mouth open over the plate as if he expected his heart
to come up next.
  "It's all right," Sheppard said, "it's all right. You couldn't
help it. Wipe your mouth and go lie down."
  The child hung there a moment longer. Then he raised
his face and looked blindly at his father.
  "Go on," Sheppard said. "Go on and lie down."
  The boy pulled up the end of his t-shirt and smeared
his mouth with it. Then he climbed down off the stool and
wandered out of the kitchen.
  Sheppard sat there staring at the puddle of half-digested
food. The sour odor reached him and he drew back. His
gorge rose. He got up and carried the plate to the sink
and turned the water on it and watched grimly as the mess
ran down the drain. Johnson's sad thin hand rooted in garbage
cans for food while his own child, selfish, unresponsive,
greedy, had so much that he threw it up. He cut off the
faucet with a thrust of his fist. Johnson had a capacity for
real response and had been deprived of everything from
birth; Norton was average or below and had had every
advantage.
  He went back to the bar to finish his breakfast. The
cereal was soggy in the cardboard box but he paid no attention
to what he was eating. Johnson was worth any amount
of effort because he had the potential. He had seen it from
the time the boy had limped in for his first interview.
  Sheppard's office at the reformatory was a narrow
closet with one window and a small table and two chairs
in it. He had never been inside a confessional but he thought
it must be the same kind of operation he had here, except
that he explained, he did not absolve. His credentials were
less dubious than a priest's; he had been trained for what he
was doing.
  When Johnson came in for his first interview, he had
been reading over the boy's record-senseless destruction,
windows smashed, city trash boxes set afire, tires slashed
--the kind of thing he found where boys had been transplanted
abruptly from the country to the city as this one
had. He came to Johnson's 1. Q. score. It was 140. He raised
his eyes eagerly.
  The boy sat slumped on the edge of his chair, his arms
hanging between his thighs. The light from the window fell
on his face. His eyes, steel-colored and very still, were
trained narrowly forward. His thin dark hair hung in a Hat
forelock across the side of his forehead, not carelessly like a
boy's, but fiercely like an old man's. A kind of fanatic intelligence
was palpable in his face.
  Sheppard smiled to diminish the distance between them.
The boy's expression did not soften. He leaned back in
his chair and lifted a monstrous club foot to his knee. The
foot was in a heavy black battered shoe with a sale four or
five inches thick. The leather parted from it in one place
and the end of an empty sock protruded like a grey tongue
from a severed head. The case was clear to Sheppard instantly.
His mischief was compensation for the foot.
  "Well Rufus," he said, "I see by the record here that
you don't have but a year to serve. What do you plan to
do when you get out?"
  "I don't make no plans," the boy said. His eyes shifted
indifferently to something outside the window behind Sheppard
in the far distance.
  "Maybe you ought to," Sheppard said and smiled.
  Johnson continued to gaze beyond him.
  " I want to see you make the most of your intelligence,"
Sheppard said. "What's important to you? Let's talk about
what's important to you." His eyes dropped involuntarily to
the foot.
  "Study it and git your fill," the boy drawled.
  Sheppard reddened. The black deformed mass swelled
before his eyes. He ignored the remark and the leer the boy
was giving him. "Rufus," he said, "you've got into a lot of
senseless trouble but I think when you understand why you
do these things, you'll be less inclined to do them." He
smiled. They had so few friends, saw so few pleasant faces,
that half his effectiveness came from nothing more than
smiling at them. "There are a lot of things about yourself
that I think I can explain to you," he said.
  Johnson looked at him stonily. "I ain't asked for no
explanation," he said. "I already know why I do what I do."
  "Well good!" Sheppard said. "Suppose you tell me what's
made you do the things you've done?"
  A black sheen appeared in the boy's eyes. "Satan," he
said. "He has me in his power."
  Sheppard looked at him steadily. There was no indication
on the boy's face that he had said this to be funny.
The line of his thin mouth was set with pride. Sheppard's
eyes hardened. He felt a momentary dull despair as if he
were faced with some elemental warping of nature that had
happened too long ago to be corrected now. This boy's
questions about life had been answered by signs nailed on
pine trees: DOES SATAN HAVE YOU IN HIS POWER? REPENT OR
BURN IN HELL. JESUS SAVES He would know the Bible with
or without reading it. His despair gave way to outrage.
  "Rubbish!" he snorted. 'We're living in the space age! You're
too smart to give me an answer like that."
  Johnson's mouth twisted slightly. His look was contemptuous
but amused. There was a glint of challenge in his
eyes.
  Sheppard scrutinized his face. Where there was intelligence
anything was possible. He smiled again, a smile that
was like an invitation to the boy to come into a school room
with all its windows thrown open to the light. "Rufus," he
said, "I'm going to arrange for you to have a conference
with me once a week. Maybe there's an explanation for your
explanation. Maybe I can explain your devil to you."
  After that he had talked to Johnson every Saturday for
the rest of the year. He talked at random, the kind of talk
the boy would never have heard before. He talked a little
above him to give him something to reach for. He roamed
from simple psychology and the dodges of the human mind
to astronomy and the space capsules that were whirling
around the earth faster than the speed of sound and would
soon encircle the stars. Instinctively he concentrated on the
stars. He wanted to give the boy something to reach for
besides his neighbor's goods. He wanted to stretch his horizons.
He wanted him to see the universe, to see that the
darkest parts of it could be penetrated. He would have
given anything to be able to put a telescope in Johnson's
hands.
  Johnson said little and what he did say, for the sake of
his pride, was in dissent or senseless contradiction, with the
clubfoot raised always to his knee like a weapon ready for
use, but Sheppard was not deceived. He watched his eyes
and every week he saw something in them crumble. From
the boy's face, hard but shocked, braced against the light
that was ravaging him, he could see that he was hitting dead
center.
  Johnson was free now to live out of garbage cans and
rediscover his old ignorance. The injustice of it was infuriating.
He had been sent back to the grandfather; the
old man's imbecility could only be imagined. Perhaps the
boy had by now run away from him. The idea of getting
custody of Johnson had occurred to Sheppard before, but
the fact of the grandfather had stood in the way. Nothing
excited him so much as thinking what he could do for such
a boy. First he would have him fitted for a new orthopedic
shoe. His back was thrown out of line every time he took a
step. Then he would encourage him in some particular intellectual
interest. He thought of the telescope. He could
buy a second-hand one and they could set it up in the attic
window. He sat for almost ten minutes thinking what he
could do if he had Johnson here with him. What was wasted
on Norton would cause Johnson to flourish. Yesterday when
he had seen him with his hand in the garbage can, he had
waved and started forward. Johnson had seen him, paused
a split-second, then vanished with the swiftness of a rat
but not before Sheppard had seen his expression change:
Something had kindled in the boy's eyes, he was sure of it,
some memory of the lost light.
  He got up and threw the cereal box in the garbage.
Before he left the house, he looked into Norton's room to
be sure he was not stilI sick. The child was sitting crosslegged
on his bed. He had emptied the quart jars of change
into one large pile in front of him, and was sorting it out by
nickels and dimes and quarters.

  That afternoon Norton was alone in the house, squatting
on the floor of his room arranging packages of flower seeds
in rows around himself. Rain slashed against the window
panes and rattled in the gutters. The room had grown dark
but every few minutes it was lit by silent lightning and the
seed packages showed up gaily on the floor. He squatted
motionless like a large pale frog in the midst of this potential
garden. All at once his eyes became alert. Without warning
the rain had stopped. The silence was heavy as if the
downpour had been hushed by violence. He remained motionless,
only his eyes turning.
   Into the silence came the distinct click of a key turning
in the front door lock. The sound was a very deliberate one.
It drew attention to itself and held it as if it were controlled
more by a mind than by a hand. The child leapt up and got
into the closet.
  The footsteps began to move in the hall. They were
deliberate and irregular, a light and then a heavy one, then
a silence as if the visitor had paused to listen himself or to
examine something. In a minute the kitchen door screeked.
The footsteps crossed the kitchen to the refrigerator. The
closet wall and the kitchen wall were the same. Norton
stood with his ear pressed against it. The refrigerator door
opened. There was a prolonged silence.
  He took off his shoes and then tiptoed out of the closet
and stepped over the seed packages. In the middle of the
room, he stopped and remained where he was, rigid. A thin
bony-faced boy in a wet black suit stood in his door, blocking
his escape. His hair was flattened to his skull by the rain.
He stood there like an irate drenched crow. His look went
through the child like a pin and paralyzed him. Then his eyes
began to move over everything in the room-the unmade
bed, the dirty curtains on the one large window, a photograph
of a wide-faced young woman that stood up in the
clutter on top of the dresser.
  The child's tongue suddenly went wild. "He's been expecting
you, he's going to give you a new shoe because you
have to eat out of garbage cans!" he said in a kind of mouselike
shriek.
  "I eat out of garbage cans," the boy said slowly with a
beady stare, 'because I like to eat out of garbage cans. See?"
  The child nodded.
  "And I got ways of getting my own shoe. See?"
  The child nodded, mesmerized.
  The boy limped in and sat down on the bed. He arranged
a pillow behind him and stretched his short leg out
so that the big black shoe rested conspicuously on a fold
of the sheet.
  Norton's gaze settled on it and remained immobile. The
sole was as thick as a brick.
  Johnson wiggled it slightly and smiled. "If I kick somebody
once with this," he said, "it learns them not to mess
with me."
  The child nodded.
  "Go in the kitchen," Johnson said, "and make me a
sandwich with some of that rye bread and ham and bring
me a glass of milk."
  Norton went off like a mechanical toy, pushed in the
right direction. He made a large greasy sandwich with ham
hanging out the sides of it and poured out a glass of milk.
Then he returned to the room with the glass of milk in one
hand and the sandwich in the other.
  Johnson was leaning back regally against the pillow.
  "Thanks, waiter," he said and took the sandwich.
  Norton stood by the side of the bed, holding the glass.
The boy tore into the sandwich and ate steadily until
he finished it. Then he took the glass of milk. He held it with
both hands like a child and when he lowered it for breath,
there was a rim of milk around his mouth. He handed Norton
the empty glass. "Go get me one of them oranges in
there, waiter," he said hoarsely.
  Norton went to the kitchen and returned with the orange.
Johnson peeled it with his fingers and let the peeling
drop in the bed. He ate it slowly, spitting the seeds out in
front of him. When he finished, he wiped his hands on the
sheet and gave Norton a long appraising stare. He appeared
to have been softened by the service. "You're his kid all
right," he said. "You got the same stupid face."
  The child stood there stolidly as if he had not heard.
  "He don't know his left hand from his right," Johnson
said with a hoarse pleasure in his voice.
  The child cast his eyes a little to the side of the boy's
face and looked fixedly at the wall.
  "Yaketty yaketty yak," Johnson said, "and never says a
thing."
  The child's upper lip lifted slightly but he didn't say
anything.
  "Gas," Johnson said. "Gas."
  The child's face began to have a wary look of belligerence.
He backed away slightly as if he were prepared to
retreat instantly. "He's good," he mumbled. "He helps
people."
  "Good!" Johnson said savagely. He thrust his head forward.
  "Listen here," he hissed, "I don't care if he's good or
not. He ain't right!"
  Norton looked stunned.
  The screen door in the kitchen banged and some one
entered. Johnson sat forward instantly. "Is that him?" he
said.
  "It's the cook," Norton said. "She comes in the afternoon."
  Johnson got up and limped into the hall and stood in
the kitchen door and Norton followed him.
  The colored girl was at the closet taking off a bright
red raincoat. She was a tall light-yellow girl with a mouth
like a large rose that had darkened and wilted. Her hair was
dressed in tiers on top of her head and leaned to the side
like the Tower of Pisa.
  Johnson made a noise through his teeth. "Well look at
Aunt Jemima," he said.
  The girl paused and trained an insolent gaze on them.
  They might have been dust on the floor.
  "Come on," Johnson said, "let's see what all you got
besides a nigger." He opened the first door to his right in
the hall and looked into a pink-tiled bathroom. "A pink
can!" he murmured.
  He turned a comical face to the child. "Does he sit on
that?"
  "It's for company," Norton said, "but he sits on it sometimes."
  "He ought to empty his head in it," Johnson said.
  The door was open to the next room. It was the room
Sheppard had slept in since his wife died. An ascetic-looking
iron bed stood on the bare floor. A heap of Little League
baseball uniforms was piled in one corner. Papers were
scattered over a large roll-top desk and held down in various
places by his pipes. Johnson stood looking into the room
silently. He wrinkled his nose. "Guess who?" he said.
  The door to the next room was closed but Johnson
opened it and thrust his head into the semi-darkness within.
The shades were down and the air was close with a faint
scent of perfume in it. There was a wide antique bed and a
mammoth dresser whose mirror glinted in the half light.
Johnson snapped the light switch by the door and crossed
the room to the mirror and peered into it. A silver comb and
brush lay on the linen runner. He picked up the comb and
began to run it through his hair. He combed it straight down
on his forehead. Then he swept it to the side, Hitler fashion.
"Leave her comb alone!" the child said. He stood in the
door, pale and breathing heavily as if he were watching
sacrilege in a holy place.
  Johnson put the comb down and picked up the brush
and gave his hair a swipe with it.
  "She's dead," the child said.
  " I ain't afraid of dead people's things," Johnson said.
He opened the top drawer and slid his hand in.
  "Take your big fat dirty hands off my mother's clothes!"
the child said in a high suffocated voice.
  "Keep your shirt on, sweetheart," Johnson murmured.
  He pulled up a wrinkled red polka dot blouse and dropped
it back. Then he pulled out a green silk kerchief and whirled
it over his head and let it float to the floor. His hand continued
to plow deep into the drawer. After a moment it
came up gripping a faded corset with four dangling metal
supporters. "Thisyer must be her saddle," he observed.
  He lifted it gingerly and shook it. Then he fastened it
around his waist and jumped up and down, making the
metal supporters dance. He began to snap his fingers and
turn his hips from side to side. "Gonter rock, rattle and roll,"
he sang. "Gonter rock, rattle and roll. Can't please that
woman, to save my doggone soul." He began to move
around, stamping the good foot down and slinging the heavy
one to the side. He danced out the door, past the stricken
child and down the hall toward the kitchen.

  A half hour later Sheppard came home. He dropped his
raincoat on a chair in the hall and came as far as the parlor
door and stopped. His face was suddenly transformed. It
shone with pleasure. Johnson sat, a dark figure, in a highbacked
pink upholstered chair. The wall behind him was
lined with books from floor to ceiling. He was reading one.
Sheppard's eyes narrowed. It was a volume of the Encyclopedia
Britannica. He was so engrossed in it that he did not
look up. Sheppard held his breath. This was the perfect
setting for the boy. He had to keep him here. He had to
manage it somehow.
  "Rufus!" he said, "it's good to see you boy!" and he
bounded forward with his arm outstretched.
  Johnson looked up, his face blank. "Oh hello," he said.
He ignored the hand as long as he was able but when Sheppard
did not withdraw it, he grudgingly shook it.
  Sheppard was prepared for this kind of reaction. It was
part of Johnson's make-up never to show enthusiasm.
  "How are things?" he said. "How's your grandfather
treating you?" He sat down on the edge of the sofa.
  "He dropped dead," the boy said indifferently.
  "You don't mean it!" Sheppard cried. He got up and
sat down on the coffee table nearer the boy.
  "Naw," Johnson said, "he ain't dropped dead. I wisht
he had."
  " Well where is he?" Sheppard muttered.
  "He's gone with a remnant to the hills," Johnson said.
  "Him and some others. They're going to bury some Bibles
in a cave and take two of different kinds of animals and all
like that. Like Noah. Only this time it's going to be fire, not
flood."
  Sheppard's mouth stretched wryly. "I see," he said. Then
he said, "In other words the old fool has abandoned you?"
  "He ain't no fool," the boy said in an indignant tone.
  "Has he abandoned you or not?" Sheppard asked impatiently.
The boy shrugged.
  "Where's your probation officer?"
  "I ain't supposed to keep up with him," Johnson said.
He's supposed to keep up with me."
  Sheppard laughed. "Wait a minute," he said. He got up
and went into the hall and got his raincoat off the chair and
took it to the hall closet to hang it up. He had to give himself
time to think, to decide how he could ask the boy so
that he would stay. He couldn't force him to stay. It would
have to be voluntary. Johnson pretended not to like him.
That was only to uphold his pride, but he would have to
ask him in such a way that his pride could still be upheld.
He opened the closet door and took out a hanger. An old
grey winter coat of his wife's still hung there. He pushed it
aside but it didn't move. He pulled it open roughly and
winced as if he had seen the larva inside a cocoon. Norton
stood in it, his face swollen and pale, with a drugged look
of misery on it. Sheppard stared at him. Suddenly he was
confronted with a possibility. "Get out of there," he said. He
caught him by the shoulder and propelled him firmly into
the parlor and over to the pink chair where Johnson was
sitting with the encyclopedia in his lap. He was going to risk
everything in one blow.
  "Rufus," he said, "I've got a problem. I need your help."
Johnson looked up suspiciously.
  "Listen," Sheppard said, "we need another boy in the
house." There was a genuine desperation in his voice. "Norton
here has never had to divide anything in his life. He
doesn't know what it means to share. And I need somebody
to teach him. How about helping me out? Stay here for a
while with us, Rufus. I need your help." The excitement in
his voice made it thin.
  The child suddenly came to life. His face swelled with
fury. "He went in her room and used her comb!" he
screamed, yanking Sheppard's arm. "He put on her corset
and danced with Leola, he ... "
  "Stop' this!" Sheppard said sharply. "Is tattling all you're
capable of? I'm not asking you for a report on Rufus's conduct.
I'm asking you to make him welcome here. Do you
understand?
  "You see how it is?" he asked, turning to Johnson.
Norton kicked the leg of the pink chair viciously, just
missing Johnson's swollen foot. Sheppard yanked him back.
  "He said you weren't nothing but gas!" the child
shrieked.
  A sly look of pleasure crossed Johnson's face.
  Sheppard was not put back. These insults were part of
the boy's defensive mechanism. "What about it, Rufus?" he
said. "Will you stay with us for a while?"
  Johnson looked straight in front of him and said nothing.
He smiled slightly and appeared to gaze upon some
vision of the future that pleased him.
  "I don't care," he said and turned a page of the encyclopedia.
  "I can stand anywhere."
  "Wonderful." Sheppard said. "Wonderful."
  "He said," the child said in a throaty whisper, "you
didn't know your left hand from your right."
There was a silence.
  Johnson wet his finger and turned another page of the
encyclopedia.
  "I have something to say to both of you," Sheppard
said in a voice without inflection. His eyes moved from one
to the other of them and he spoke slowly as if what he was
saying he would say only once and it behooved them to
listen. "If it made any difference to me what Rufus thinks
of me," he said, "then I wouldn't be asking him here. Rufus
is going to help me out and I'm going to help him out and
we're both going to help you out. I'd simply be selfish if I
let what Rufus thinks of me interfere with what I can do for
Rufus. If I can help a person, all I want is to do it. I'm
above and beyond simple pettiness."
  Neither of them made a sound. Norton stared at the
chair cushion. Johnson peered closer at some fine print in the
encyclopedia. Sheppard was looking at the tops of their
heads. He smiled. After all, he had won. The boy was staying.
He reached out and ruffled Norton's hair and slapped
Johnson on the shoulder. "Now you fellows sit here and get
acquainted," he said gaily and started toward the door. "I'm
going to see what Leola left us for supper."
  When he was gone, Johnson raised his head and looked
at Norton. The child looked back at him bleakly. "God, kid,"
Johnson said in a cracked voice, "how do you stand it?"
His face was still with outrage. "He thinks he's Jesus Christ!" 

 II

Sheppard's attic was a large unfinished room with exposed
beams and no electric light. They had set the telescope
up on a tripod in one of the dormer windows. It
pointed now toward the dark sky where a sliver of moon,
as fragile as an egg shell, had just emerged from behind a
cloud with a brilliant silver edge. Inside, a kerosene lantern
set on a trunk cast their shadows upward and tangled them,
wavering slightly, in the joists overhead. Sheppard was sitting
on a packing box, looking through the telescope, and
Johnson was at his elbow, waiting to get at it. Sheppard
had bought it for fifteen dollars two days before at a pawn
shop.
  "Quit hoggin it," Johnson said.
  Sheppard got up and Johnson slid onto the box and put
his eye to the instrument.
  Sheppard sat down on a straight chair a few feet away.
His face was flushed with pleasure. This much of his dream
was a reality. Within a week he had made it possible for
this boy's vision to pass through a slender channel to the
stars. He looked at Johnson's bent back with complete satisfaction.
The boy had on one of Norton's plaid shirts and
Some new khaki trousers he had bought him. The shoe would
be ready next week. He had taken him to the brace shop the
day after he came and had him fitted for a new shoe. Johnson
was as touchy about the foot as if it were a sacred
object. His face had been glum while the clerk, a young man
with a bright pink bald head, measured the foot with his
profane hands. The shoe was going to make the greatest
difference in the boy's attitude. Even a child with normal
feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair
of shoes. When Norton got a new pair, he walked around
for days with his eyes on his feet.
  Sheppard glanced across the room at the child. He was
sitting on the floor against a trunk, trussed up in a rope he
had found and wound around his legs from his ankles to his
knees. He appeared so far away that Sheppard might have
been looking at him through the wrong end of the telescope.
He had had to whip him only once since Johnson had been
with them--the first night when Norton had realized that
Johnson was going to sleep in his mother's bed. He did not
believe in whipping children, particularly in anger. In this
case, he had done both and with good results. He had had
no more trouble with Norton.
  The child hadn't shown any positive generosity toward
Johnson but what he couldn't help, he appeared to be resigned
to. In the mornings Sheppard sent the two of them to
the Y swimming pool, gave them money to get their lunch
at the cafeteria and instructed them to meet him in the park
in the afternoon to watch his Little League baseball practice.
Every afternoon they had arrived at the park, shambling,
silent, their faces closed each on his own thoughts
as if neither were aware of the other's existence. At least he
eould be thankful there were no fights.
  Norton showed no interest in the telescope. "Don't you
want to get up and look through the telescope, Norton?" he
said. It irritated him that the child showed no intellectual
curiosity whatsoever. "Rufus is going to be way ahead of
you."
  Norton leaned forward absently and looked at Johnson's
back.
  Johnson turned around from the instrument. His face
had begun to fill out again. The look of outrage had retreated
from his hollow cheeks and was shored up now in
the caves of his eyes, like a fugitive from Sheppard's kindness.
  "Don't waste your valuable time, kid," he said. "You
seen the moon once, you seen it."
  Sheppard was amused by these sudden turns of perversity.
The boy resisted whatever he suspected was meant for
his improvement and contrived when he was vitally interested
in something to leave the impression he was bored.
Sheppard was not deceived. Secretly Johnson was learning
what he wanted him to learn-that his benefactor was impervious
to insult and that there were no cracks in his armor
of kindness and patience where a successful shaft could be
driven. "Some day you may go to the moon," he said. "In
ten years men will probably be making round trips there on
schedule. Why you boys may be spacemen. Astronauts!"
"Astro-nuts,"Johnson said.
  "Nuts or nauts," Sheppard said, "it's perfectly possible
that you, Rufus Johnson, will go to the moon."
  Something in the depths of Johnson's eyes stirred. All
day his humor had been glum. "I ain't going to the moon and
get there alive," he said, "and when I die I'm going to hell."
  "It's at least possible to get to the moon," Sheppard said
dryly. The best way to handle this kind of thing was with
gentle ridicule. "We can see it. We know it's there. Nobody
has given any reliable evidence there's a hell."
  "The Bible has give the evidence," Johnson said darkly,
"and if you die and go there you burn forever."
  The child leaned forward.
  "Whoever says it ain't a hell," Johnson said, "is contradicting
Jesus. The dead are judged and the wicked are
damned. They weep and gnash their teeth while they burn,"
he continued, "and it's everlasting darkness."
  The child's mouth opened. His eyes appeared to grow
hollow.
  "Satan runs it," Johnson said.
Norton lurched up and took a hobbled step toward
Sheppard. "Is she there?" he said in a loud voice. "Is she
there burning up?" He kicked the rope off his feet. "Is she
on fire?"
  "Oh my God," Sheppard muttered. "No no," he said, "of
course she isn't. Rufus is mistaken. Your mother isn't anywhere.
She's not unhappy. She just isn't." His lot would have
been easier if when his wife died he had told Norton she
had gone to heaven and that some day he would see her
again, but he could not allow himself to bring him up on a
lie.
  Norton's face began to twist. A knot formed in his chin.
  "Listen," Sheppard said quickly and pulled the child to
him, "your mother's spirit lives on in other people and It'll
live on in you if you're good and generous like she was."
  The child's pale eyes hardened in disbelief.
  Sheppard's pity turned to revulsion. The boy would
rather she be in hell than nowhere. "Do you understand?"
he said. "She doesn't exist." He put his hand on the child's
shoulder. "That's all I have to give you," he said in a softer,
exasperated tone, "the truth."
  Instead of howling, the boy wrenched himself away and
caught Johnson by the sleeve. "Is she there, Rufus?" he said.
  "Is she there, burning up?"
  Johnson's eyes glittered. 'Well," he said, "she is if she
was evil. Was she a whore?"
  "Your mother was not a whore," Sheppard said sharply.
He had the sensation of driving a car without brakes. "Now
let's have no more of this foolishness. We were talking about
the moon."
  "Did she believe in Jesus?" Johnson asked.
  Norton looked blank. After a second he said, "Yes," as
if he saw that this was necessary. "She did," he said. "All the
time."
  "She did not," Sheppard muttered.
  "She did all the time," Norton said. "1 heard her say she
did all the time."
  "She's saved," Johnson said.
  The child still looked puzzled. "Where?" he said. "Where
is she at?"
  "On high," Johnson said.
  "Where's that?" Norton gasped.
  "It's in the sky somewhere," Johnson said, "but you got
to be dead to get there. You can't go in no space ship." There
was a narrow gleam in his eyes now like a beam holding
steady on its target.
  "Man's going to the moon," Sheppard said grimly, "is
very much like the first fish crawling out of the water onto
land billions and billions of years ago. He didn't have an
earth suit. He had to grow his adjustments inside. He developed
lungs.”
  "When I'm dead will I go to hell or where she is?" Norton
asked.
  "Right now you'd go where she is," Johnson said, "but
if you live long enough, you'll go to hell."
  Sheppard rose abruptly and picked up the lantern.
  "Close the window, Rufus," he said. "It's time we went to
bed."
  On the way down the attic stairs he heard Johnson say
in a loud whisper behind him, "I'll tell you all about it tomorrow,
kid, when Himself has cleared out:'

  The next day when the boys came to the ball park, he
watched them as they came from behind the bleachers and
around the edge of the field. Johnson's hand was on Norton's
shoulder, his head bent toward the younger boy's ear, and
on the child's face there was a look of complete confidence,
of dawning light. Sheppard's grimace hardened. This would
be Johnson's way of trying to annoy him. But he would not
be annoyed. Norton was not bright enough to be damaged
much. He gazed at the child's dull absorbed little face. Why
try to make him superior? Heaven and hell were for the
mediocre, and he was that if he was anything.
  The two boys came into the bleachers and sat down
about ten feet away, facing him, but neither gave him any
sign of recognition. He cast a glance behind him where the
Little Leaguers were spread out in the field. Then he started
for the bleachers. The hiss of Johnson's voice stopped as he
approached.
  'What have you fellows been doing today?" he asked
genially.
  "He's been telling me . . ." Norton started.
  Johnson pushed the child in the ribs with his elbow.
'We ain't been doing nothing," he said. His face appeared to
be covered with a blank glaze but through it a look of complicity
was blazoned forth insolently.
  Sheppard felt his face grow warm, but he said nothing.
A child in a Little League uniform had followed him and
was nudging him in the back of the leg with a bat. He turned
and put his arm around the boy's neck and went with him
back to the game.
  That night when he went to the attic to join the boys
at the telescope, he found Norton there alone. He was sitting
on the packing box, hunched over, looking intently through
the instrument. Johnson was not there.
  "Where's Rufus?" Sheppard asked.
  "I said where's Rufus?" he said louder.
  "Gone somewhere," the child said without turning
around.
  "Gone where?" Sheppard asked.
  "He just said he was going somewhere. He said he was
fed up looking at stars."
  "I see," Sheppard said glumly. He turned and went back
down the stairs. He searched the house without finding Johnson.
Then he went to the living room and sat down. Yesterday
he had been convinced of his success with the boy.
  Today he faced the possibility that he was failing with him.
He had been over-lenient, too concerned to have Johnson
like him. He felt a twinge of guilt. What difference did it
make if Johnson liked him or not? What was that to him?
When the boy came in, they would have a few things understood.
As long as you stay here there'll be no going out at
night by yourself, do you understand?
  I don't have to stay here. It ain't nothing to me staying
here.
  Oh my God, he thought. He could not bring it to that.
He would have to be firm but not make an issue of it. He
picked up the evening paper. Kindness and patience were
always called for but he had not been firm enough. He sat
holding the paper but not reading it. The boy would not
respect him unless he showed firmness. The doorbell rang
and he went to answer it. He opened it and stepped back,
with a pained disappointed face.
  A large dour policeman stood on the stoop, holding
Johnson by the elbow. At the curb a patrolcar waited. Johnson
looked very white. His jaw was thrust forward as if to
keep from trembling.
  "We brought him here first because he raised such a fit,"
the policeman said, "but now that you've seen him, we're
going to take him to the station and ask him a few questions."
  "What happened?" Sheppard muttered.
  "A house around the comer from here," the policeman
said. "A real smash job, dishes broken all over the floor,
furniture turned upside-down ... "
  "I didn't have a thing to do with it!" Johnson said. "I
was walking along minding my own bidnis when this cop
came up and grabbed me."
  Sheppard looked at the boy grimly. He made no effort to
soften his expression.
  Johnson Hushed. "I was just walking along," he muttered,
but with no conviction in his voice.
  "Come on, bud," the policeman said.
  "You ain't going to let him take me, are you?" Johnson
said. "You believe me, don't you?" There was an appeal in
his voice that Sheppard had not heard there before.
  This was crucial. The boy would have to learn that he
could not be protected when he was guilty. "You'll have to
go with him, Rufus," he said.
  "You're going to let him take me and I tell you I ain't
done a thing?" Johnson said shrilly.
  Sheppard's face became harder as his sense of injury
grew. The boy had failed him even before he had had a
chance to give him the shoe. They were to have got it tomorrow.
  All his regret turned suddenly on the shoe; his irritation
at the sight of Johnson doubled.
  "You made out like you had all this confidence in me,"
the boy mumbled.
  "I did have," Sheppard said. His face was wooden.
Johnson turned away with the policeman but before he
moved, a gleam of pure hatred Hashed toward Sheppard
from the pits of his eyes.
  Sheppard stood in the door and watched them get into
the patrolcar and drive away. He summoned his compassion.
He would go to the station tomorrow and see what he could
do about getting him out of trouble. The night in jail would
not hurt him and the experience would teach him that he
could not treat with impunity someone who had shown him
nothing but kindness. Then they would go get the shoe and
perhaps after a night in jail it would mean even more to the
boy.

  The next morning at eight o'clock the police sergeant
called and told him he could come pick Johnson up. "We
booked a nigger on that charge," he said. "Your boy didn't
have nothing to do with it."
  Sheppard was at the station in ten minutes, his face
hot with shame. Johnson sat slouched on a bench in a drab
outer office, reading a police magazine. There was no else
in the room. Sheppard sat down beside him and put his
hand tentatively on his shoulder.
  The boy glanced up--his lip curled--and back to the
magazine.
  Sheppard felt physically sick. The ugliness of what he
had done bore in upon him with a sudden dull intensity. He
had failed him at just the point where he might have turned
him once and for all in the right direction. "Rufus," he said,
"I apologize. I was wrong and you were right. I misjudged
you."
  The boy continued to read.
  "I'm sorry."
  The boy wet his finger and turned a page.
  Sheppard braced himself. "I was a fool, Rufus," he said.
J  ohnson's mouth slid slightly to the side. He shrugged
without raising his head from the magazine.
  "Will you forget it, this time?" Sheppard said. "It won't
happen again."
  The boy looked up. His eyes were bright and unfriendly.
"I'll forget it," he said, "but you better remember it." He got
up and stalked toward the door. In the middle of the room,
he turned and jerked his arm at Sheppard and Sheppard
jumped up and followed him as if the boy had yanked an
invisible leash.
  "Your shoe," he said eagerly, "today' is the day to get
your shoe!" Thank God for the shoe!
  But when they went to the brace shop, they found that
the shoe had been made two sizes too small and a new one
would not be ready for another ten days. Johnson's temper
improved at once. The clerk had obviously made a mistake in
the measurements but the boy insisted the foot had grown.
He left the shop with a pleased expression, as if, in expanding,
the foot had acted on some inspiration of its own. Sheppard's
face was haggard.
  After this he redoubled his efforts. Since Johnson had
lost interest in the telescope, he bought a microscope and a
box of prepared slides. If he couldn't impress the boy with
immensity, he would try the infinitesimal. For two nights
Johnson appeared absorbed in the new instrument, then he
abruptly lost interest in it, but he seemed content to sit in
the living room in the evening and read the encyclopedia.
He devoured the encyclopedia as he devoured his dinner,
steadily and without dint to his appetite. Each subject appeared
to enter his head, be ravaged, and thrown out. Nothing
pleased Sheppard more than to see the boy slouched on
the sofa, his mouth shut, reading. After they had spent two
or three evenings like this, he began to recover his vision.
His confidence returned. He knew that some day he would
be proud of Johnson.
  On Thursday night Sheppard attended a city council
meeting. He dropped the boys off at a movie on his way
and picked them up on his way back. When they reached
home, an automobile with a single red eye above its windshield
was waiting in front of the house. Sheppard's lights
as he turned into the driveway illuminated two dour faces
in the car.
  "The cops!" Johnson said. "Some nigger has broke in
somewhere and they've come for me again."
  "We'll see about that," Sheppard muttered. He stopped
the car in the driveway and switched off the lights. "You
boys go in the house and go to bed:' he said. "I’ll  handle
this."
  He got out and strode toward the squad car. He thrust
his head in the window. The two policemen were looking
at him with silent knowledgeable faces. "A house on the
corner of Shelton and Mills,"the one in the driver's seat said.
  "It looks like a train run through it."
  "He was in the picture show down town," Sheppard
said. "My boy was with him. He had nothing to do with the
other one and he had nothing to do with this one. I'll be
responsible."
  "If I was you," the one nearest him said, "I wouldn't be
responsible for any little bastard like him."
  "I said I'd be responsible," Sheppard repeated coldly.
  "You people made a mistake the last time. Don't make
another."
  The policemen looked at each other. "It ain't our funeral,"
the one in the driver's seat said, and turned the key
in the ignition.
  Sheppard went in the house and sat down in the living
room in the dark. He did not suspect Johnson and he did
not want the boy to think he did. If Johnson thought he
suspected him again, he would lose everything. But he
wanted to know if his alibi was airtight. He thought of going
to Norton's room and asking him if Johnson had left the
movie. But that would be worse. Johnson would know what
he was doing and would be incensed. He decided to ask
Johnson himself. He would be direct. He went over in his
mind what he was going to say and then he got up and went
to the boy's door.
  It was open as if he had been expected but Johnson
was in bed. Just enough light came in from the hall for
Sheppard to see his shape under the sheet. He came in and
stood at the foot of the bed. "They've gone," he said. "I told
them you had nothing to do with it and that I'd be responsible."
There was a muttered "Yeah," from the pillow.
  Sheppard hesitated. "Rufus," he said, "you didn't leave
the movie for anything at all, did your"
  "You make out like you got all this confidence in me!" a
sudden outraged voice cried, "and you ain't got any! You
don't trust me no more now than you did then!" The voice,
disembodied, seemed to come more surely from the depths
of Johnson than when his face was visible. It was a cry of
reproach, edged slightly with contempt.
  "I do have confidence in you," Sheppard said intensely.
  "I have every confidence in you. I believe in you and I trust
you completely."
  "You got your eye on me all the time," the voice said
sullenly. 'When you get through asking me a bunch of questions,
you're going across the hall and ask Norton a bunch
of them."
  "I have no intention of asking Norton anything and
never did," Sheppard said gently. "And I don't suspect you
at all. You could hardly have got from the picture show
down town and out here to break in a house and back to the
picture show in the time you had."
  "That's why you believe me!" the boy cried, "--because
you think I couldn't have done it."
  "No, no!" Sheppard said. "I believe you because I believe
you've got the brains and the guts not to get in trouble
again. I believe you know yourself well enough now to know
that you don't have to do such things. I believe that you can
make anything of yourself that you set your mind to."
Johnson sat up. A faint light shone on his forehead but
the rest of his face was invisible. "And I could have broke
in there if I’d wanted to in the time I had," he said.
  "But I know you didn't," Sheppard said. "There's not the
least trace of doubt in my mind."
 There was a silence. Johnson lay back down. Then the
voice, low and hoarse, as if it were being forced out with
difficulty, said, "You don't want to steal and smash up things
when you've got everything you want already."
  Sheppard caught his breath. The boy was thanking him!
He was thanking him! There was gratitude in his voice.
There was appreciation. He stood there, smiling foolishly in
the dark, trying to hold the moment in suspension. Involuntarily
he took a step toward the pillow and stretched out his
hand and touched Johnson's forehead. It was cold and dry
like rusty iron.
  "I understand. Good night, son," he said and turned
quickly and left the room. He closed the door behind him
and stood there, overcome with emotion.
  Across the hall Norton's door was open. The child lay
on the bed on his side, looking into the light from the hall.
After this, the road with Johnson would be smooth.
  Norton sat up and beckoned to him.
  He saw the child but after the first instant, he did not
let his eyes focus directly on him. He could not go in and
talk to Norton without breaking Johnson's trust. He hesitated,
but remained where he was a moment as if he saw
nothing. Tomorrow was the day they were to go back for
the shoe. It would be a climax to the good feeling between
them. He turned quickly and went back into his own room.
  The child sat for some time looking at the spot where
his father had stood. Finally his gaze became aimless and he
lay back down.
  The next day Johnson was glum and silent as if he were
ashamed that he had revealed himself. His eyes had a
hooded look. He seemed to have retired within himself and
there to be going through some crisis of determination.
Sheppard could not get to the brace shop quickly enough.
He left Norton at home because he did not want his attention divided. He wanted to be free to observe Johnson's reaction
minutely. The boy did not seem pleased or even interested
in the prospect of the shoe, but when it became an
actuality, certainly then he would be moved.
  The brace shop was a small concrete warehouse lined
and stacked with the equipment of affliction. Wheel chairs
and walkers covered most of the floor. The walls were hung
with every kind of crutch and brace. Artificial limbs were
stacked on the shelves, legs and arms and hands, claws and
hooks, straps and human harnesses and unidentifiable instruments
for unnamed deformities. In a small clearing in
the middle of the room there was a row of yellow plastic cushioned
chairs and a shoe fitting stool. Johnson slouched
down in one of the chairs and set his foot up on the stool
and sat with his eyes on it moodily. What was roughly the
toe had broken open again and he had patched it with a
piece of canvas; another place he had patched with what
appeared to be the tongue of the original shoe. The two sides
were laced with twine.
  There was a excited Hush on Sheppard's face; his heart
was beating unnaturally fast.
  The clerk appeared from the back of the shop with the
new shoe under his arm. "Got her right this time!" he said.
He straddled the shoe-fitting stool and held the shoe up,
smiling as if he had produced it by magic.
  It was a black slick shapeless object, shining hideously.
It looked like a blunt weapon, highly polished.
  Johnson gazed at it darkly.
  "With this shoe," the clerk said, "you won't know you're
walking. You'll think you're riding!" He bent his bright pink
bald head and began gingerly to unlace the twine. He removed
the old shoe as if he were skinning an animal still half
alive. His expression was strained. The unsheathed mass of
foot in the dirty sock made Sheppard feel queasy. He turned
his eyes away until the new shoe was on. The clerk laced it
up rapidly. "Now stand up and walk around," he said, "and
see if that ain't power glide." He winked at Sheppard. "In
that shoe," he said, "he won't know he don't have a normal
foot."
  Sheppard's face was bright with pleasure.
  Johnson stood up and walked a few yards away. He
walked stiHlywith almost no dip in his short side. He stood
for a moment, rigid, with his back to them.
  “Wonderful!" Sheppard said. "Wonderful." It was as
if he had given the boy a new spine.
  Johnson turned around. His mouth was set in a thin
icy line. He came back to the seat and removed the shoe.
He put his foot in the old one and began lacing it up.
  "You want to take it home and see if it suits you first?"
the clerk murmured.
  "No," Johnson said. "I ain't going to wear it at all."
  "What's wrong with it?" Sheppard said, his voice rising.
  "I don't need no new shoe," Johnson said. "And when I
do, I got ways of getting my own." His face was stony but
there was a glint of triumph in his eyes.
  "Boy," the clerk said, "is your trouble in your foot or in
your head?"
  "Go soak your skull," Johnson said. "Your brains are on
fire."
  The clerk rose glumly but with dignity and asked Sheppard
what he wanted done with the shoe, which he dangled
dispiritedly by the lace.
  Sheppard's face was a dark angry red. He was staring
straight in front of him at a leather corset with an artificial
arm attached.
  The clerk asked him again.
  'Wrap it up," Sheppard muttered. He turned his eyes
to Johnson. "He's not mature enough for it yet," he said. "I
had thought he was less of a child."
  The boy leered. "You been wrong before," he said.

That night they sat in the living room and read as usual.
Sheppard kept himself glumly entrenched behind the Sunday
New York Times. He wanted to recover his good humor,
but every time he thought of the rejected shoe, he felt a new
charge of irritation. He did not trust himself even to look
at Johnson. He realized that the boy had refused the shoe
because he was insecure. Johnson had been frightened by
his own gratitude. He didn't know what to make of the new
self he was becoming conscious of. He understood that something
he had been was threatened and he was facing himself
and his possibilities for the first time. He was questioning
his identity. Grudgingly, Sheppard felt a slight return of
sympathy for the boy. In a few minutes, he lowered his paper
and looked at him.
  Johnson was sitting on the sofa, gazing over the top
of the encyclopedia. His expression was trancelike. He might
have been listening to something far away. Sheppard watched
him intently but the boy continued to listen, and did not
turn his head. The poor kid is lost, Sheppard thought. Here
he had sat all evening, sullenly reading the paper, and had
not said a word to break the tension. "Rufus," he said.
Johnson continued to sit, stock-still, listening.
  "Rufus," Sheppard said in a slow hypnotic voice, "you
can be anything in the world you want to be. You can be a
scientist or an architect or an engineer or whatever you set
your mind to, and whatever you set your mind to be, you
can be the best of its kind." He imagined his voice penetrating
to the boy in the black caverns of his psyche. Johnson
leaned forward but his eyes did not turn. On the street a
car door closed. There was a silence. Then a sudden blast
from the door bell.
  Sheppard jumped up and went to the door and opened
it. The same policeman who had come before stood there.
The patrol car waited at the curb.
  "Lemme see that boy," he said.
  Sheppard scowled and stood aside. "He's been here all
evening," he said. "I can vouch for it."
  The policeman walked into the living room. Johnson
appeared engrossed in his book. After a second he looked
up with an annoyed expression, like a great man interrupted
at his work.
  "What was that you were looking at in that kitchen
window over on Winter Avenue about a half hour ago, bud?"
the policeman asked.
  "Stop persecuting this boy!" Sheppard said. “I’ll vouch
for the fact he was here. I was here with him."
  "You heard him," Johnson said. "I been here all the
time."
  "It ain't everybody makes tracks like you," the policeman said and eyed the clubfoot.
  "They couldn't be his tracks," Sheppard growled, infuriated.
  "He's been here all the time. You're wasting your 
own time and you're wasting ours." He felt the ours seal his
solidarity with the boy. "I'm sick of this," he said. "You people
are too damn lazy to go out and find whoever is doing
these things. You come here automatically."
  The policeman ignored this and continued looking
through Johnson. His eyes were small and alert in his fleshy
face. Finally he turned toward the door. 'Well get him
sooner or later," he said, "with his head in a window and his
tail out."
  Sheppard followed him to the door and slammed it
behind him. His spirits were soaring. This was exactly what
he had needed. He returned with an expectant face.
  Johnson had put the book down and was sitting there,
looking at him slyly. "Thanks," he said.
  Sheppard stopped. The boy's expression was predatory.
He was openly leering.
  "You ain't such a bad liar yourself," he said.
  "Liar?" Sheppard murmured. Could the boy have left
and come back? He felt himself sicken. Then a rush of anger
sent him forward. "Did you leave?" he said furiously. "I
didn't see you leave."
  The boy only smiled.
  "You went up in the attic to see Norton," Sheppard said.
  "Naw," Johnson said, "that kid is crazy. He don't want
to do nothing but look through that stinking telescope."
  "I don't want to hear about Norton," Sheppard said
harshly. "Where were you?"
  "I was sitting on that pink can by my own self," Johnson
said. "There wasn't no witnesses."
  Sheppard took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.
He managed to smile.
  Johnson rolled his eyes. "You don't believe in me," he
said. His voice was cracked the way it had been in the dark
room two nights before. "You make out like you got all this
confidence in me but you ain't got any. When things get hot,
you'll fade like the rest of them." The crack became exaggerated,
comic. The mockery in it was blatant. "You don't
believe in me. You ain't got no confidence," he wailed. "And
you ain't any smarter than that cop. All that about tracks that
was a trap. There wasn't any tracks. That whole place
is concreted in the back and my feet were dry."
  Sheppard slowly put the handkerchief back in his
pocket. He dropped down on the sofa and gazed at the rug
beneath his feet. The boy's clubfoot was set within the circle
of his vision. The pieced-together shoe appeared to grin at
him with Johnson's own face. He caught hold of the edge of
the sofa cushion and his knuckles turned white. A chill of
hatred shook him. He hated the shoe, hated the foot, hated
the boy. His face paled. Hatred choked him. He was aghast
at himself.
  He caught the boy's shoulder and gripped it fiercely as
if to keep himself from falling. "Listen," he said, "you looked
in that window to embarrass me. That was all you wanted
--to shake my resolve to help you, but my resolve isn't
shaken. I'm stronger than you are. I'm stronger than you are
and I'm going to save you. The good will triumph."
  "Not when it ain't true," the boy said. "Not when it
ain't right."
  "My resolve isn't shaken," Sheppard repeated. "I'm going
to save you."
  Johnson's look became sly again. "You ain't going to save
me," he said. "You're going to tell me to leave this house. I
did those other two jobs too--the first one as well as the one  I done when I was supposed to be in the picture show."
  "I'm not going to tell you to leave," Sheppard said. His
voice was toneless, mechanical, "I'm going to save you."
Johnson thrust his head forward. "Save yourself," he
hissed. "Nobody can save me but Jesus."
  Sheppard laughed curtly. "You don't deceive me" he
said. "I hushed that out of your head in the reformatory. I
saved you from that, at least."
  The muscles in Johnson's face stiffened. A look of such
repulsion hardened on his face that Sheppard drew back.
The boy's eyes were like distorting mirrors in which he saw
himself made hideous and grotesque. "I’ll show you," John
son whispered. He rose abruptly and started headlong for
the door as if he could not get out of Sheppard's sight quick
enough, but it was the door to the back hall he went through,
not the front door. Sheppard turned on the sofa and looked
behind him where the boy had disappeared. He heard the
door to his room slam. He was not leaving. The intensity
had gone out of Sheppard's eyes. They looked flat and lifeless
as if the shock of the boy's revelation were only now
reaching the center of his consciousness. "If he would only
leave," he murmured. "If he would only leave now of his
own accord."
  The next morning Johnson appeared at the breakfast
table in the grandfather's suit he had come in. Sheppard
pretended not to notice but one look told him what he already
knew, that he was trapped, that there could be nothing
now but a battle of nerves and that Johnson would win it.
He wished he had never laid eyes on the boy. The failure
of his compassion numbed him. He got out of the house as
soon as he could and all day he dreaded to go home in the
evening. He had a faint hope that the boy might be gone
when he returned. The grandfather's suit might have meant
he was leaving. The hope grew in the afternoon. When he
came home and opened the front door, his heart was
pounding.
  He stopped in the hall and looked silently into the living
room. His expectant expression faded. His face seemed
suddenly as old as his white hair. The two boys were sitting
close together on the sofa, reading the same book. Norton's
cheek rested against the sleeve of Johnson's black suit. Johnson’s finger moved under the lines they were reading. The
elder brother and the younger. Sheppard looked woodenly
at this scene for almost a minute. Then he walked into the
room and took off his coat and dropped it on a chair. Neither
boy noticed him. He went on to the kitchen.
  Leola left the supper on the stove every afternoon before
she left and he put it on the table. His head ached and
his nerves were taut. He sat down on the kitchen stool and
remained there, sunk in his depression. He wondered if he
could infuriate Johnson enough to make him leave of his
own accord. Last night what had enraged him was the
Jesus business. It might enrage Johnson, but it depressed
him. Why not simply tell the boy to go? Admit defeat. The
thought of facing Johnson again sickened him. The boy
looked at him as if he were the guilty one, as if he were a
moral leper. He knew without conceit that he was a good
man, that he had nothing to reproach himself with. His
feelings about Johnson now were involuntary. He would
like to feel compassion for him. He would like to be able to
help him. He longed for the time when there would be no
one but himself and Norton in the house, when the child's
simple selfishness would be all he had to contend with, and
his own loneliness.
  He got up and took three serving dishes off the shelf
and took them to the stove. Absently he began pouring the
butterbeans and the hash into the dishes. When the food
was on the table, he called them in.
  They brought the book with them. Norton pushed his
place setting around to the same side of the table as Johnson's
and moved his chair next to Johnson's chair. They sat
down and put the book between them. It was a black book
with red edges.
  "What's that you're reading?" Sheppard asked, sitting
down.
  "The Holy Bible," Johnson said.
  God give me strength, Sheppard said under his breath
  "We lifted it from a ten cent store," Johnson said.
  'We?" Sheppard muttered. He turned and glared at
Norton. The child's face was bright and there was an excited
sheen to his eyes. The change that had come over the boy
struck him for the first time. He looked alert. He had on a
blue plaid shirt and his eyes were a brighter blue than he
had ever seen them before. There was a strange new life
in him, the sign of new and more rugged vices. "So now you
steal?" he said, glowering. "You haven't learned to be generous
but you have learned to steal."
  "No he ain't," Johnson said. "I was the one lifted it. He
only watched. He can't sully himself. It don't make any
difference about me. I'm going to hell anyway."
Sheppard held his tongue.
  "Unless," Johnson said, "I repent."
   "Repent, Rufus," Norton said in a pleading voice. "Repent,
hear? You don't want to go to hell."
  "Stop talking this nonsense," Sheppard said, looking
sharply at the child.
  "If 1 do repent, I'll be a preacher," Johnson said. "If
you're going to do it, it's no sense in doing it half way."
  "What are you going to be, Norton," Sheppard asked
in a brittle voice, "a preacher too?"
  There was a glitter of wild pleasure in the child's eyes.
  "A space man!" he shouted.
  "Wonderful," Sheppard said bitterly.
  "Those space ships ain't going to do you any good unless
you believe in Jesus," Johnson said. He wet his finger
and began to leaf through the pages of the Bible. “I’ll read
you where it says so," he said.
  Sheppard leaned forward and said in a low furious
voice, "Put that Bible up, Rufus, and eat your dinner."
  Johnson continued searching for the passage.
  Put that Bible up! " Sheppard shouted.
  The boy stopped and looked up. His expression was
startled but pleased.
  "That book is something for you to hide behind," Sheppard
said. "It's for cowards, people who are afraid to stand
on their own feet and figure things out for themselves."
  Johnson's eyes snapped. He backed his chair a little
way from the table. "Satan has you in his power," he said.
  "Not only me. You too."
  Sheppard reached across the table to grab the book but
Johnson snatched it and put it in his lap.
  Sheppard laughed. "You don't believe in that book and
you know you don't believe in itl"
  "I believe it!" Johnson said. "You don't know what I
believe and what I don't."
  Sheppard shook his head. "You don't believe it. You're
too intelligent."
  "I ain't too intelligent," the boy muttered. "You don't
know nothing about me. Even if I didn't believe it, it would
still be true."
  "You don't believe it!" Sheppard said. His face was a
taunt.
  "I believe it!" Johnson said breathlessly. "I'll show you
I believe it! " He opened the book in his lap and tore out a
page of it and thrust it into his mouth. He fixed his eyes on
Sheppard. His jaws worked furiously and the paper crackled
as he chewed it.
  "Stop this," Sheppard said in a dry, burnt-out voice.
  "Stop it."
  The boy raised the Bible and tore out a page with his
teeth and began grinding it in his mouth, his eyes burning.
Sheppard reached across the table and knocked the book
out of his hand. "Leave the table," he said coldly.
  Johnson swallowed what was in his mouth. His eyes
widened as if a vision of splendor were opening up before
him. "I've eaten it!" he breathed. "I've eaten it like Ezekiel
and it was honey to my mouth!"
  "Leave this table," Sheppard said. His hands were
clenched beside his plate.
  "I've eaten it!" the boy cried. Wonder transformed his
face. "I've eaten it like Ezekiel and I don't want none of your
food after it nor no more ever."
  "Go then," Sheppard said softly. "Go. Go."
  The boy rose and picked up the Bible and started
toward the hall with it. At the door he paused, a small black
figure on the threshold of some dark apocalypse: "The devil
has you in his power," he said in a jubilant voice and disappeared.

  After supper Sheppard sat in the living room alone.
Johnson had left the house but he could not believe that the
boy had simply gone. The first feeling of release had passed.
He felt dull and cold as at the onset of an illness and dread
had settled in him like a fog. Just to leave would be too
anticlimactic an end for Johnson's taste; he would return and
try to prove something. He might come back a week later
and set fire to the place. Nothing seemed too outrageous
now.
  He picked up the paper and tried to read. In a moment
he threw it down and got up and went into the hall and
listened. He might be hiding in the attic. He went to the
attic door and opened it.
  The lantern was lit, casting a dim light on the stairs.
He didn't hear anything. "Norton," he called, "are you up
there?" There was no answer. He mounted the narrow stairs
to see.
  Amid the strange vine-like shadows cast by the lantern,
Norton sat with his eye to the telescope. "Norton," Sheppard
said, "do you know where Rufus went?"
  The child's back was to him. He was sitting hunched,
intent, his large ears directly above his shoulders. Suddenly
he waved his hand and crouched closer to the telescope
as if he could not get near enough to what he saw.
  "Norton!" Sheppard said in a loud voice.
  The child didn't move.
  "Norton!" Sheppard shouted.
  Norton started. He turned around. There was an unnatural
brightness about his eyes. After a moment he seemed
to see that it was Sheppard. "I've found her!" he said breathlessly.
  "Found who?" Sheppard said.
  "Mamma!"
  Sheppard steadied himself in the door way. The jungle
ol shadows around the child thickened.
  "Come and look!" he cried. He wiped his sweaty face on
the tail of his plaid shirt and then put his eye back to the
telescope. His back became fixed in a rigid intensity. All at
once he waved again.
  "Norton," Sheppard said, "you don't see anything in the
telescope but star clusters. Now you've had enough of that
for one night. You'd better go to bed. Do you know where
Rufus is?"
  "She's there!" he cried, not turning around from the
telescope. "She waved at me!"
  " I want you in bed in fifteen minutes," Sheppard said.
After a moment he said, "Do you hear me, Norton?"
The child began to wave frantically.
  " I mean what I say," Sheppard said. "I'm going to call
in fifteen minutes and see if you're in bed."
  He went down the steps again and returned to the
parlor. He went to the front door and cast a cursory glance
out. The sky was crowded with the stars he had been fool
enough to think Johnson could reach. Somewhere in the
small wood behind the house, a bull frog sounded a low
hollow note. He went back to his chair and sat a few minutes.
He decided to go to bed. He put his hands on the arms of
the chair and leaned forward and heard, like the first shrill
note of a disaster warning, the siren of a police car, moving
slowly into the neighborhood and nearer until it subsided
with a moan outside the house.
  He felt a cold weight on his shoulders as if an icy cloak
had been thrown about him. He went to the door and
opened it.
  Two policemen were coming up the walk with a dark
snarling Johnson between them, handcuffed to each. A reporter
jogged alongside and another policeman waited in the
patrol car.
  "Here's your boy," the dourest of the policemen said.
  "Didn't I tell you we'd get him?"
Johnson jerked his arm down savagely. " I was waitin
for you!" he said. "You wouldn't have got me if I hadn't of
wanted to get caught. It was my idea." He was addressing
the policemen but leering at Sheppard.
Sheppard looked at him coldly.
  "Why did you want to get caught?" the reporter asked,
running around to get beside Johnson. "Why did you deliberately
want to get caught?"
  The question and the sight of Sheppard seemed to throw
the boy into a fury. "To show up that big tin Jesus!" he
hissed and kicked his leg out at Sheppard. "He thinks he's
God. I'd rather be in the reformatory than in his house, I'd
rather be in the pen! The Devil has him in his power. He
don't know his left hand from his right, he don't have as
much sense as his crazy kid!" He paused and then swept on
to his fantastic conclusion. "He made suggestions to me!"
  Sheppard's face blanched. He caught hold of the door
facing.
  "Suggestions?"the reporter said eagerly, "what kind of
suggestions?"
  "Immoral suggestions!" Johnson said. "What kind of suggestions
do you think? But I ain't having none of it, I'm a
Christian, I'm ... "
  Sheppard's face was tight with pain. "He knows that's
not true," he said in a shaken voice. "He knows he's lying.
I did everything I knew how for him. I did more for him than
I did for my own child. I hoped to save him and I failed,
but it was an honorable failure. I have nothing to reproach
myself with. I made no suggestions to him."
  "Do you remember the suggestions?"the reporter asked.
  "Can you tell us exactly what he said?"
  "He's a dirty atheist," Johnson said. "He said there
wasn't no hell."
  "Well, they seen each other now," one of the policemen
said with a knowing sigh. "Let's us go."
  "Wait," Sheppard said. He came down one step and
fixed his eyes on Johnson's eyes in a last desperate effort
to save himself. "Tell the truth, Rufus," he said. "You don't
want to perpetrate this lie. You're not evil, you're mortally
confused. You don't have to make up for that foot, you don't
have to .. ."
  Johnson hurled himself forward. "Listen at him!" he
screamed. "I lie and steal because I'm good at it!  My foot
don't have a thing to do with it! The lame shall enter first!
The halt'll be gathered together. When I get ready to be
saved, Jesus'll save me, not that lying stinking atheist, not
that ... "
  "That'll be enough out of you," the policeman said and
yanked him back. 'We just wanted you to see we got him,"
he said to Sheppard, and the two of them turned around and
dragged Johnson away, half turned and screaming back at
Sheppard.
  "The lame'll carry off the prey!" he screeched, but his
voice was muffed inside the car. The reporter scrambled
into the front seat with the driver and slammed the door and
the siren wailed into the darkness.
  Sheppard remained there, bent slightly like a man who
has been shot but continues to stand. After a minute he
turned and went back in the house and sat down in the chair
he had left. He closed his eyes on a picture of Johnson in a
circle of reporters at the police station, elaborating his lies.
"I have nothing to reproach myself with," he murmured.
His every action had been selfless, his one aim had been to
save Johnson for some decent kind of service, he had not
spared himself, he had sacrificed his reputation, he had done
more for Johnson than he had done for his own child. Foulness
hung about him like an odor in the air, so close that
it seemed to come from his own breath. "I have nothing to
reproach myself with," he repeated. His voice sounded dry
and harsh. "I did more for him than I did for my own
child." He was swept with a sudden panic. He heard the
boy's jubilant voice. Satan has you in his power.
  "I have nothing to reproach myself with," he began
again. "I did more for him than I did for my own child."
He heard his voice as if it were the voice of his accuser. He
repeated the sentence silently.
  Slowly his face drained of color. It became almost grey
beneath the white halo of his hair. The sentence echoed in
his mind, each syllable like a dull blow. His mouth twisted
and he closed his eyes against the revelation. Norton's face
rose before him, empty, forlorn, his left eye listing almost
imperceptibly toward the outer rim as if it could not bear
a full view of grief. His heart constricted with a repulsion for
himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He
had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a
glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of
himself. He saw the clear-eyed Devil, the sounder of hearts,
leering at him from the eyes of Johnson. His image of himself
shriveled until everything was black before him. He
sat there paralyzed, aghast.
  He saw Norton at the telescope, all back and ears, saw
his arm shoot up and wave frantically. A rush of agonizing
love for the child rushed over him like a transfusion of life.
The little boy's face appeared to him transformed; the image
of his salvation; all light. He groaned with joy. He would
make everything up to him. He would never let him suffer
again. He would be mother and father. He jumped up and
ran to his room, to kiss him, to tell him that he loved him
that he would never fail him again. '
  The light was on in Norton's room but the bed was
empty. He turned and dashed up the attic stairs and at the
top reeled back like a man on the edge of a pit. The tripod
had fallen and the telescope lay on the floor. A few feet over
it, the child hung in the jungle of shadows, just below the
beam from which he had launched his flight into space.

End

Why Do the Heathen Rage?

1963

TILMAN had had his stroke in the state capital, where he had
gone on business, and he had stayed two weeks in the hospital
there. He did not remember his arrival home by ambulance
but his wife did. She had sat for two hours on the jump seat at his
feet, gazing fixedly at his face. Only his left eye, twisted inward,
seemed to harbor his former personality. It burned with rage. The
rest of his face was prepared for death. Justice was grim and she
took satisfaction in it when she found it. It might take just this ruin
to wake Walter up.
  By accident both children were at home when they arrived. Mary
Maud was driving in from school, not realizing that the ambulance
was behind her. She got out-a large woman of thirty with a round
childish face and a pile of carrot-colored hair that seeped about in
an invisible net on top of her head-kissed her mother, glanced at
Tilman and gasped; then, grim-faced but flustered, marched behind
the rear attendant, giving him high-pitched instructions on how to
get the stretcher around the curve of the front steps. Exactly like a
schoolteacher, her mother thought. Schoolteacher all over. As the
forward attendant reached the porch, Mary Maud said sharply in
a voice used to controlling children, "Get up, Walter, and open the
door!"
  Walter was sitting on the edge of his chair, absorbed in the proceedings,
his finger folded in the book he had been reading before
the ambulance came. He got up and held open the screen door,
and while the attendants carried the stretcher across the porch, he
gazed, obviously fascinated, at his father's face. "Glad to see you
back, capt'n," he said and raised his hand in a sloppy salute.
  Tilman's enraged left eye appeared to include him in its vision
but he gave him no sign of recognition.
  Roosevelt, who from now on would be nurse instead of yard man,
stood inside the door, waiting. He had put on the white coat that
he was supposed to wear for occasions. He peered forward at what
was on the stretcher. The bloodshot veins in his eyes swelled. Then,
all at once, tears glazed them and glistened on his black cheeks like
sweat. Tilman made a weak rough motion with his good arm. It
was the only gesture of affection he had given any of them. The
Negro followed the stretcher to the back bedroom, snuffling as if
someone had hit him.
  Mary Maud went in to direct the stretcher bearers.
  Walter and his mother remained on the porch. "Close the door,"
she said. "You're letting flies in."
  She had been watching him all along, searching for some sign in
his big bland face that some sense of urgency had touched him, some
sense that now he had to take hold, that now he had to do something,
anything-she would have been glad to see him make a
mistake, even make a mess of things if it meant that he was doing
something-but she saw that nothing had happened. His eyes were
on her, glittering just slightly behind his glasses. He had taken in
every detail of Tilman's face; he had registered Roosevelt's tears,
Mary Maud's confusion, and now he was studying her to see how
she was taking it. She yanked her hat straight, seeing by his eyes
that it had slipped toward the back of her head.
  "You ought to wear it that way," he said. "It makes you look
sort of relaxed-by-mistake."
  She made her face hard, as hard as she could make it. "The responsibility is yours now," she said in a harsh, final voice.
  He stood there with his half smile and said nothing. Like an
absorbent lump, she thought, taking everything in, giving nothing
out. She might have been looking at a stranger using the family face.
He had the same noncommittal lawyer's smile as her father and
grandfather, set in the same heavy jaw, under the same Roman
nose; he had the same eyes that were neither blue nor green nor
gray; his skull would soon be bald like theirs. Her face became
even harder. "You'll have to take over and manage this place," she
said and folded her arms, "if you want to stay here."
  The smile left him. He looked at her once hard, his expression
empty, and then beyond her out across the meadow, beyond the
four oaks and the black distant tree line, into the vacant afternoon
sky. "I thought it was home," he said, "but it don't do to presume."
  Her heart constricted. She had an instant's revelation that he was
homeless. Homeless here and homeless anywhere. "Of course it's
home," she said, "but somebody has to take over. Somebody has to
make these Negroes work."
  "I can't make Negroes work," he muttered. "That's about the last
thing I'm capable of."
  ''I'll tell you everything to do," she said.
  "Hal" he said. "That you would." He looked at her and his half
smile returned. "Lady," he said, "you're coming into your own. You
were born to take over. If the old man had had his stroke ten years
ago, we'd all be better off. You could have run a wagon train
through the Bad Lands. You could stop a mob. You're the last of the
nineteenth century, you're .... "
  "Walter," she said, "you're a man. I'm only a woman."
  "A woman of your generation," Walter said, "is better than a
man of mine."
  Her mouth drew into a tight line of outrage and her head
trembled almost imperceptibly. "I would be ashamed to say it!" she
whispered.
  Walter dropped into the chair he had been sitting in and opened
his book. A sluggish-looking flush settled on his face. "The only
virtue of my generation," he said, "is that it ain't ashamed to tell
the truth about itself." He was already reading. Her interview was
at an end.
  She remained standing there, rigid, her eyes on him in stunned
disgust. Her son. Her only son. His eyes and his skull and his smile
belonged to the family face but underneath them was a different
kind of man from any she had ever known. There was no innocence
in him, no rectitude, no conviction either of sin or election. The man
she saw courted good and evil impartially and saw so many sides
of every question that he could not move, he could not work, he
could not even make niggers work. Any evil could enter that
vacuum. God knows, she thought and caught her breath, God
knows what he might do!
  He had not done anything. He was twenty-eight now and, so far
as she could see, nothing occupied him but trivia. He had the air
of a person who is waiting for some big event and can't start any
work because it would only be interrupted. Since he was always idle,
she had thought that perhaps he wanted to be an artist or a philosopher
or something, but this was not the case. He did not want
to write anything with a name. He amused himself writing letters
to people he did not know and to the newspapers. Under different
names and using different personalities, he wrote to strangers. It was
a peculiar, small, contemptible vice. Her father and her grandfather
had been moral men but they would have scorned small vices more
than great ones. They knew who they were and what they owed to
themselves. It was impossible to tell what Walter knew or what his
views were on anything. He read books that had nothing to do with
anything that mattered now. Often she came behind him and found
some strange underlined passage in a book he had left lying somewhere
and she would puzzle over it for days. One passage she found
in a book he had left lying on the upstairs-bathroom floor stayed
with her ominously.
  "Love should be full of anger," it began, and she thought, well
mine is. She was furious all the time. It went on, "Since you have
already spurned my request, perhaps you will listen to admonishment.
What business have you in your father's house, 0 you effeminate
soldier? Where are your ramparts and trenches, where is the
winter spent at the front lines? Listen! the battle trumpet blares
from heaven and see how our General marches fully armed, coming
amid the clouds to conquer the whole world. Out of the mouth of
our King emerges a double-edged sword that cuts down everything
in he way. Arising finally from your nap, do you come to
the battlefield] Abandon the shade and seek the sun."
  She tuned back in the book to see what she was reading. It was
a letter from a St. Jerome to a Heliodorus, scolding him for having
abandoned the desert. A footnote said that Heliodorus was one of
the famous group that had centered around Jerome at Aquileia in
370. He had accompanied Jerome to the Near East with the intention
of cultivating a hermitic life. They had separated when Heliodorus
continued on to Jerusalem. Eventually he returned to Italy,
and in later years he became a distinguished churchman as the
bishop of Altinum.
  This was the kind of thing he read-something that made no
sense for now. Then it came to her, with an unpleasant little jolt,
that the General with the sword in his mouth, marching to do
violence, was Jesus.

End

Revelation

1964

The doctor's waiting room, which was very small, was almost
full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who
was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence.
She stood looming at the head of the magazine table set in
the center of it, a living demonstration that the room was
inadequate and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took
in all the patients as she sized up the seating situation. There
was one vacant chair and a place on the sofa occupied by
a blond child in a dirty blue romper who should have been
told to move over and make room for the lady. He was five or
six, but Mrs. Turpin saw at once that no one was going to
tell him to move over. He was slumped down in the seat, his
arms idle at his sides and his eyes idle in his head; his nose
ran unchecked.
  Mrs. Turpin put a firm hand on Claud's shoulder and
said in a voice that included anyone who wanted to listen,
"Claud, you sit in that chair there," and gave him a push
down into the vacant one. Claud was florid and bald and
sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin, but he sat
down as if he were accustomed to doing what she told
him to.
  Mrs. Turpin remained standing. The only man in the
room besides Claud was a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty
hand spread out on each knee, whose eyes were closed as
if he were asleep or dead or pretending to be so as not to
get up and offer her his seat. Her gaze settled agreeably on
a well-dressed grey-haired lady whose eyes met hers and
whose expression said: if that child belonged to me, he
would have some manners and move over-there's plenty of
room there for you and him too.
  Claud looked up with a sigh and made as if to rise.
  "Sit down," Mrs. Turpin said. "You know you're not supposed
to stand on that leg. He has an ulcer on his leg," she
explained.
  Claud lifted his foot onto the magazine table and rolled
his trouser leg up to reveal a purple swelling on a plump
marble-white calf.
  "My!" the pleasant lady said. "How did you do that?"
  "A cow kicked him," Mrs. Turpin said.
  "Goodness!" said the lady.
  Claud rolled his trouser leg down.
  "Maybe the little boy would move over," the lady suggested,
but the child did not stir.
  "Somebody will be leaving in a minute," Mrs. Turpin
said. She could not understand why a doctor--with as much
money as they made charging five dollars a day to just stick
their head in the hospital door and look at you-wouldn't
afford a decent-sized waiting room. This one was hardly
bigger than a garage. The table was cluttered with limp-
rooking magazines and at one end of it there was a big green
glass ash tray full of cigarette butts and cotton wads with little
blood spots on them. If she had had anything to do with the
running of the place, that would have been emptied every so
often. There were no chairs against the wall at the head of
the room. It had a rectangular-shaped panel in it that permitted
a view of the office where the nurse came and went
and the secretary listened to the radio. A plastic fern in a
gold pot sat in the opening and trailed its fronds down
almost to the floor. The radio was softly playing gospel music.
  Just then the inner door opened and a nurse with the
highest stack of yellow hair Mrs. Turpin had ever seen put
her face in the crack and called for the next patient. The
woman sitting beside Claud grasped the two arms of her
chair and hoisted herself up; she pulled her dress free from
her legs and lumbered through the door where the nurse had
disappeared.
  Mrs. Turpin eased into the vacant chair, which held her
tight as a corset. "I wish I could reduce," she said, and
rolled her eyes and gave a comic sigh.
  "Oh, you aren't fat," the stylish lady said.
  "00000 I am too," Mrs. Turpin said. "Claud he eats all
he wants to and never weighs over one hundred and seventy-five
pounds, but me I just look at something good to eat and
I gain some weight," and her stomach and shoulders shook
with laughter. "You can eat all you want to, can't you,
Claud?" she asked, turning to him.
  Claud only grinned.
  "Well, as long as you have such a good disposition," the
stylish lady said, "I don't think it makes a bit of difference
what size you are. You just can't beat a good disposition."
Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling
into a thick blue book which Mrs. Turpin saw was
entitled Human Development. The girl raised her head and
directed her scowl at Mrs. Turpin as if she did not like her
looks. She appeared annoyed that anyone should speak while
she tried to read. The poor girl's face was blue with acne
and Mrs. Turpin thought how pitiful it was to have a face
like that at that age. She gave the girl a friendly smile but
the girl only scowled the harder. Mrs. Turpin herself was fat
but she had always had good skin, and, though she was
forty-seven years old, there was not a wrinkle in her face
except around her eyes from laughing too much.
  Next to the ugly girl was the child, still in exactly the
same position, and next to him was a thin leathery old
woman in a cotton print dress. She and Claud had three sacks
of chicken feed in their pump house that was in the same
print. She had seen from the first that the child belonged
with the old woman. She could tell by the way they sat--kind
of vacant and white-trashy, as if they would sit there
until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get up.
And at right angles but next to the well-dressed pleasant
lady was a lank-faced woman who was certainly the child's
mother. She had on a yellow sweat shirt and wine-colored
slacks, both gritty-looking, and the rims of her lips were
stained with snuff. Her dirty yellow hair was tied behind
with a little piece of red paper ribbon. Worse than niggers
any day, Mrs. Turpin thought.
  The gospel hymn playing was, "When I looked up and
He looked down," and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied
the last line mentally, “And wona these days I know I’ll
wear a crown."
  Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed
people's feet. The well-dressed lady had on red and grey
suede shoes to match her dress. Mrs. Turpin had on her good
black patent leather pumps. The ugly girl had on Girl Scout
shoes and heavy socks. The old woman had on tennis shoes
and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be
bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded
through them-exactly what you would have expected her
to have on.
  Sometimes at night when she couldn't go to sleep, Mrs.
Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she
would have chosen to be if she couldn't have been herself.
If Jesus had said to her before he made her, "There's only
two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or
white-trash," what would she have said? "Please, Jesus.
please," she would have said, "just let me wait until there's
another place available," and he would have said, "No, you
have to go right now and I have only those two places so
make up your mind." She would have wiggled and squirmed
and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and
finally she would have said, "All right, make me a nigger
then--but that don't mean a trashy one." And he would
have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself
but black.
  Next to the child's mother was a red-headed youngish
woman, reading one of the magazines and working a piece of
chewing gum, hell for leather, as Claud would say. Mrs.
Turpin could not see the woman's feet. She was not whitetrash,
just common. Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself
at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the
heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have
been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to
them-not above, just away from--were the white-trash;
then above them were the home-owners, and above them
the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged.
Above she and Claud were people with a lot of
money and much bigger houses and much more land. But
here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for
some of the people with a lot of money were common and
ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who
had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and
then there were colored people who owned their homes and
land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had
two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with
registered white-face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had
fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling
around in her head, and she would dream they were all
crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put
in a gas oven.
  "That's a beautiful clock," she said and nodded to her
right. It was a big wall clock, the face encased in a brass
sunburst.
  "Yes, it's very pretty," the stylish lady said agreeably.
  "And right on the dot too," she added, glancing at her watch.
  The ugly girl beside her cast an eye upward at the clock,
smirked, then looked directly at Mrs. Turpin and smirked
again. Then she returned her eyes to her book. She was
obviously the lady's daughter because, although they didn't
look anything alike as to disposition, they both had the same
shape of face and the same blue eyes. On the lady they
sparkled pleasantly but in the girl's seared face they appeared
alternately to smolder and to blaze.
  What if Jesus had said, "All right, you can be whitetrash
or a nigger or ugly"!
  Mrs. Turpin felt an awful pity for the girl, though she
thought it was one thing to be ugly and another to act ugly.
The woman with the snuff-stained lips turned around
in her chair and looked up at the clock. Then she turned
back and appeared to look a little to the side of Mrs. Turpin.
There was a cast in one of her eyes. "You want to know where
you can get you one of themther clocks?" she asked in a loud
voice.
  "No, I already have a nice clock," Mrs. Turpin said.
Once somebody like her got a leg in the conversation, she
would be allover it.
  ''You can get you one with green stamps," the woman
said. "That's most likely wher he got hisn. Save you up
enough, you can get you most anythang. I got me some
joo'ry.'
  Ought to have got you a wash rag and some soap, Mrs.
Turpin thought.
  "I get contour sheets with mine," the pleasant lady said.
The daughter slammed her book shut. She looked
straight in front of her, directly through Mrs. Turpin and on
through the yellow curtain and the plate glass window
which made the wall behind her. The girl's eyes seemed lit
all of a sudden with a peculiar light, an unnatural light like
night road signs give. Mrs. Turpin turned her head to see if
there was anything going on outside that she should see, but
she could not see anything. Figures passing cast only a pale
shadow through the curtain. There was no reason the girl
should single her out for her ugly looks.
  "Miss Finley," the nurse said, cracking the door. The
gum-chewing woman got up and passed in front of her and
Claud and went into the office. She had on red high-heeled
shoes.
  Directly across the table, the ugly girl's eyes were fixed
on Mrs. Turpin as if she had some very special reason for
disliking her.
  "This is wonderful weather, isn't it?" the girl's mother
said.
  "It's good weather for cotton if you can get the niggers
to pick it," Mrs. Turpin said, ''but niggers don't want to
pick cotton any more. You can't get the white folks to pick
it and now you can't get the niggers--because they got to be
right up there with the white folks."
 "They gonna try anyways," the white-trash woman said,
leaning forward.
  "Do you have one of those cotton-picking machines?" the
pleasant lady asked.
  "No," Mrs. Turpin said, "they leave half the cotton in
the field. We don't have much cotton anyway. If you want
to make it farming now, you have to have a little of everything.
We got a couple of acres of cotton and a few hogs
and chickens and just enough white-face that Claud can
look after them himself."
  "One thang I don't want," the white-trash woman said,
wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "Hogs. Nasty
stinking things, a-gruntin and a-rootin all over the place."
  Mrs. Turpin gave her the merest edge of her attention.
"Our hogs are not dirty and they don't stink," she said.
"They're cleaner than some children I've seen. Their feet
never touch the ground. We have a pig-parlor--that's where
you rai!se them on concrete," she explained to the pleasant
lady, and Claud scoots them down with the hose every
afternoon and washes off the floor." Cleaner bv far than that
child right there, she thought. Poor nasty little  thing. He had
not moved except to put the thumb of his dirty hand into his
mouth.
  The woman turned her face away from Mrs. Turpin. " I
know I wouldn't scoot down no hog with no hose," she said
to the wall.
  You wouldn't have no hog to scoot down, Mrs. Turpin
said to herself.
  "A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin," the woman muttered
"We got a little of everything," Mrs. Turpin said to the
pleasant lady. "It's no use in having more than you can
handle yourself with help like it is. We found enough niggers
to pick our cotton this year but Claud he has to go after
them and take them home again in the evening. They can't
walk that half a mile. No they can't. I tell you," she said and
laughed merrily, " I sure am tired of buttering up niggers,
but you got to love em if you want em to work for you. When
they come in the morning, I run out and I say, 'Hi yawl this
morning?' and when Claud drives them off to the field I just
wave to beat the band and they just wave back." And she
waved her hand rapidly to illustrate.
  "Like you read out of the same book," the lady said,
showing she understood perfectly.
  "Child, yes," Mrs. Turpin said. "And when they come in
from the field, I run out with a bucket of icewater. That's the
way it's going to be from now on," she said. "You may as well
face it."
  "One thang I know," the white-trash woman said. "Two
thangs I ain't going to do: love no niggers or scoot down no
hog with no hose."And she let out a bark of contempt.
  The look that Mrs. Turpin and tile pleasant lady exchanged
indicated they both understood that you had to
have certain things before you could know certain things.
But every time Mrs. Turpin exchanged a look with the lady,
she was aware that the ugly girl's peculiar eyes were still
on her, and she had trouble bringing her attention back to
the conversation.
  "When you got something," she said, "you got to look
after it." And when you ain't got a thing but breath and
britches, she added to herself, you can afford to come to
town every morning and just sit on the Court House coping
and spit.
  A grotesque revolving shadow passed across the curtain
behind her and was thrown palely on the opposite wall.
Then a bicycle clattered down against the outside of the
building. The door opened and a colored boy glided in with
a tray from the drug store. It had two large red and white
paper cups on it with tops on them. He was a tall, very black
boy in discolored white pants and a green nylon shirt. He
was chewing gum slowly, as if to music. He set the tray down
in the office opening next to the fern and stuck his head
through to look for the secretary. She was not in there. He
rested his arms on the ledge and waited, his narrow bottom
stuck out, swaying slowly to the left and right. He raised a
hand over his head and scratched the base of his skull.
 "You see that button there, boy?" Mrs. Turpin said.
  "You can punch that and she'll come. She's probably in the
back somewhere."
  "Is thas right?" the boy said agreeably, as if he had
never seen the button before. He leaned to the right and put
his finger on it. "She sometime out," he said and twisted
around to face his audience, his elbows behind him on the
counter. The nurse appeared and he twisted back again.
She handed him a dollar and he rooted in his pocket and
made the change and counted it out to her. She gave him
fifteen cents for a tip and he went out with the empty tray.
The heavy door swung to slowly and closed at length with
the sound of suction. For a moment no one spoke.
  "They ought to send all them niggers back to Africa,"
the white-trash woman said. "That's wher they come from in
the first place."
  "Oh, I couldn't do without my good colored friends," the
pleasant lady said.
  "There's a heap of things worse than a nigger," Mrs.
Turpin agreed. "It's all kinds of them just like it's all kinds
of us."
  "Yes, and it takes all kinds to make the world go round,"
the lady said in her musical voice.
  As she said it, the raw-complexioned girl snapped her
teeth together. Her lower lip turned downwards and inside
out, revealing the pale pink inside of her mouth. After a
second it rolled back up. It was the ugliest face Mrs. Turpin
had ever seen anyone make and for a moment she was certain
that the girl had made it at her. She was looking at her
as if she had known and disliked her all her life--all of Mrs.
Turpin's life, it seemed too, not just all the girl's life. Why,
girl, I don't even know you, Mrs. Turpin said silently.
  She forced her attention back to the discussion. "It
wouldn't be practical to send them back to Africa," she said.
  "They wouldn't want to go. They got it too good here."
  "Wouldn't be what they wanted--if I had anythang to
do with it," the woman said.
  "It wouldn't be a way in the world you could get all
the niggers back over there," Mrs. Turpin said. "They'd be
hiding out and lying down and turning sick on you and
wailing and hollering and raring and pitching. It wouldn't
be a way in the world to get them over there."
  "They got over here," the trashy woman said. "Get back
like they got over."
  "It wasn't so many of them then," Mrs. Turpin explained.
  The woman looked at Mrs. Turpin as if here was an idiot
indeed but Mrs. Turpin was not bothered by the look, considering
where it came from.
  "Nooo,' she said, "they're going to stay here where they
can go to New York and marry white folks and improve
their color. That's what they all want to do, everyone of
them, improve their color."
  "You know what comes of that, don't you?" Claud asked.
"No, Claud, what?" Mrs. Turpin said.
  Claud's eyes twinkled. "White-faced niggers," he said
with never a smile.
  Everybody in the office laughed except the white-trash
and the ugly girl. The girl gripped the book in her lap with
white fingers. The trashy woman looked around her from
face to face as if she thought they were all idiots. The old
woman in the feed sack dress continued to gaze expressionless
across the floor at the high-top shoes of the man opposite
her, the one who had been pretending to be asleep when
the Turpins came in. He was laughing heartily, his hands
still spread out on his knees. The child had fallen to the
side and was lying now almost face down in the old woman's
lap.
  While they recovered from their laughter, the nasal
chorus on the radio kept the room from silence.
  "You go to blank blank
And I'll go to mine
But we'll all blank along
To-geth-ther,
And all along the blank
We'll hep eachother out
Smile-ling in any kind of
Weath-therf'

  Mrs. Turpin didn't catch every word but she caught
enough to agree with the spirit of the song and it turned her
thoughts sober. To help anybody out that needed it was her
philosophy of life. She never spared herself when she found
somebody in need, whether they were white or black, trash
or decent. And of all she had to be thankful for, she was most
thankful that this was so. If Jesus had said, "You can be
high society and have all the money you want and be thin
and svelte-like, but you can't be a good woman with it," she
would have had to say, "Well don't make me that then. Make
me a good woman and it don't matter what else, how fat or
how ugly or how poor!" Her heart rose. He had not made her
a nigger or white-trash or ugly! He had made her herself and
given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she said.
Thank you thank you thank you! Whenever she counted her
blessings she felt as buoyant as if she weighed one hundred
and twenty-five pounds instead of one hundred and eighty.
  'What's wrong with your little boy?" the pleasant lady
asked the white-trashy woman.
  "He has a ulcer," the woman said proudly. "He ain't
give me a minute's peace since he was born. Him and her
are just alike," she said, nodding at the old woman, who
was running her leathery fingers through the child's pale
hair. "Look like I can't get nothing down them two but
Co' Cola and candy."
  That's all you try to get down em, Mrs. Turpin said to
herself. Too lazy to light the fire. There was nothing you
could tell her about people like them that she didn't know
already. And it was not just that they didn't have anything.
Because if you gave them everything, in two weeks it would
all be broken or filthy or they would have chopped it up for
lightwood. She knew all this from her own experience. Help
them you must, but help them you couldn't.
  All at once the ugly girl turned her lips inside out again.
Her eyes were fixed like two drills on Mrs. Turpin. This
time there was no mistaking that there was something urgent
behind them.
  Girl, Mrs. Turpin exclaimed silently, I haven't done a
thing to you! The girl might be confusing her with somebody
else. There was no need to sit by and let herself be intimidated.
"You must be in college," she said boldly, looking
directly at the girl. "I see you reading a book there."
  The girl continued to stare and pointedly did not
answer.
  Her mother blushed at this rudeness. "The lady asked
you a question, Mary Grace," she said under her breath.
  "I have ears," Mary Grace said.
  The poor mother blushed again. "Mary Grace goes to
Wellesley College," she explained. She twisted one of the
buttons on her dress. "In Massachusetts," she added with a
grimace. "And in the summer she just keeps right on studying.
Just reads all the time, a real book worm. She's done
real well at Wellesley; she's taking English and Math and
History and Psychology and Social Studies," she rattled on,
"and I think it's too much. I think she ought to get out and
have fun."
  The girl looked as if she would like to hurl them all
through the plate glass window.
  "Way up north," Mrs. Turpin murmured and thought,
well, it hasn't done much for her manners.
  "I'd almost rather to have him sick," the white-trash
woman said, wrenching the attention back to herself. "He's
so mean when he ain't. Look like some children just take
natural to meanness. It's some gets bad when they get sick
but he was the opposite. Took sick and turned good. He don't
give me no trouble now. It's me waitin to see the doctor,"
she said.
  If I was going to send anybody back to Africa, Mrs.
Turpin thought, it would be your kind, woman. "Yes, indeed,"
she said aloud, but looking up at the ceiling, "it's a
heap of things worse than a nigger." And dirtier than a hog,
she added to herself.
  "I think people with bad dispositions are more to be
pitied than anyone on earth," the pleasant lady said in a
voice that was decidedly thin.
  "I thank the Lord he has blessed me with a good one,"
  Mrs. Turpin said. "The day has never dawned that I couldn't
find something to laugh at."
  "Not since she married me anyways,” Claud said with
a comical straight face.
  Everybody laughed except the girl and the white-trash.
Mrs. Turpin's stomach shook. "He's such a caution," she
said, "that I can't help but laugh at him."
  The girl made a loud ugly noise through her teeth.
  Her mother's mouth grew thin and tight. "I think the
worst thing in the world," she said, "is an ungrateful person.
To have everything and not appreciate it. I know a girl," she
said, "who has parents who would give her anything, a little
brother who loves her dearly, who is getting a good education,
who wears the best clothes, but who can never say a
kind word to anyone, who never smiles, who just criticizes
and complains all day long."
  "Is she too old to paddle?" Claud asked.
  The girl's face was almost purple.
  "Yes,"the lady said, "I'm afraid there's nothing to do but
leave her to her folly. Some day she'll wake up and it'll be
too late."
  "It never hurt anyone to smile," Mrs. Turpin said. "It just
makes you feel better all over."
  "Of course," the lady said sadly, "but there are just
some people you can't tell anything to. They can't take
criticism."
  "If it's one thing I am," Mrs. Turpin said with feeling,
"it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides
myself and what all 1 got, a little of everything, and a good
disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you,
Jesus, for making everything the way it is!' It could have
been different!" For one thing, somebody else could have
got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with
gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. "Oh
thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!" she cried aloud.
The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck
almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was
about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw
face came crashing across the table toward her, howling.
The girl's fingers sank like clamps into the soft flesh of her
neck. She heard the mother cry out and Claud shout,
"Whoa!" There was an instant when she was certain that she
was about to be in an earthquake.
  All at once her vision narrowed and she saw everything
as if it were happening in a small room far away, or as if she
were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.
Claud's face crumpled and fell out of Sight. The nurse ran
in, then out, then in again. Then the gangling figure of the
doctor rushed out of the inner door. Magazines flew this way
and that as the table turned over. The girl fell with a thud
and Mrs. Turpin's vision suddenly reversed itself and she
saw everything large instead of small. The eyes of the whitetrashy
woman were staring hugely at the floor. There the
girl, held down on one side by the nurse and on the other
by her mother, was wrenching and turning in their grasp.
The doctor was kneeling astride her, trying to hold her arm
down. He managed after a second to sink a long needle
into it.
  Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart
which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a
great empty drum of flesh.
  "Somebody that's not busy call for the ambulance," the
doctor said in the off-hand voice young doctors adopt for
terrible occasions.
  Mrs. Turpin could not have moved a finger. The old
man who had been sitting next to her skipped nimbly into
the office and made the call, for the secretary still seemed to
be gone.
  "Claud!" Mrs. Turpin called.
  He was not in his chair. She knew she must jump up and
find him but she felt like some one trying to catch a train
in a dream, when everything moves in slow motion and the
faster you try to run the slower you go.
  "Here I am," a suffocated voice, very unlike Claud's,
said.
  He was doubled up in the corner on the floor, pale as
paper, holding his leg. She wanted to get up and go to him
but she could not move. Instead, her gaze was drawn slowly
downward to the churning face on the floor, which she
could see over the doctor's shoulder.
  The girl's eyes stopped rolling and focused on her. They
seemed a much lighter blue than before, as if a door that
had been tightly closed behind them was now open to admit
light and air.
  Mrs. Turpin's head cleared and her power of motion
returned. She leaned forward until she was looking directly
into the fierce brilliant eyes. There was no doubt in her
mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some intense
and personal way, beyond time and place and condition.
  "What you got to say to me?" she asked hoarsely and held
her breath, waiting, as for a revelation.
  The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs.
Turpin's. "Go back to hell where you came from, you old
wart hog," she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her
eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that
her message had struck its target.
  Mrs. Turpin sank back in her chair.
  After a moment the girl's eyes closed and she turned her
head wearily to the side.
  The doctor rose and handed the nurse the empty syringe.
He leaned over and put both hands for a moment on the
mother's shoulders, which were shaking. She was sitting on
the floor, her lips pressed together, holding Mary Grace's
hand in her lap. The girl's fingers were gripped like a baby's
around her thumb. "Go on to the hospital," he said. "I'll call
and make the arrangements."
  "Now let's see that neck," he said in a jovial voice to
Mrs. Turpin. He began to inspect her neck with his first two
fingers. Two little moon-shaped lines like pink fish bones
were indented over her windpipe. There was the beginning
of an angry red swelling above her eye. His fingers passed
over this also.
  "Lea' me be," she said thickly and shook him off. "See
about Claud. She kicked him."
  “I’ll see about him in a minute," he said and felt her
pulse. He was a thin grey-haired man, given to pleasantries.
"Go home and have yourself a vacation the rest of the day,"
he said and patted her on the shoulder.
  Quit your pattin me, Mrs. Turpin growled to herself.
  "And put an ice pack over that eye," he said. Then he
went and squatted down beside Claud and looked at his
leg. After a moment he pulled him up and Claud limped
after him into the office.
  Until the ambulance came, the only sounds in the room
were the tremulous moans of the girl's mother, who continued
to sit on the floor, The white-trash woman did not
take her eyes off the girl. Mrs. Turpin looked straight ahead
at nothing. Presently the ambulance drew up, a long dark
shadow, behind the curtain. The attendants came in and set
the stretcher down beside the girl and lifted her expertly
onto it and carried her out. The nurse helped the mother
gather up her things. The shadow of the ambulance moved
silently away and the nurse came back in the office.
  "That ther girl is going to be a lunatic, ain't she?" the
white-trash woman asked the nurse, but the nurse kept on
to the back and never answered her.
  "Yes, she's going to be a lunatic," the white-trash woman
said to the rest of them.
  "Po' critter," the old woman murmured. The child's face
was still in her lap. His eyes looked idly out over her knees.
He had not moved during the disturbance except to draw
one leg up under him.
  "I thank Gawd," the white-trash woman said fervently,
  "I ain't a lunatic."
  Claud came limping out and the Turpins went home.
As their pick-up truck turned into their own dirt road
and made the crest of the hill, Mrs. Turpin gripped the
window ledge and looked out suspiciously. The land sloped
gracefully down through a field dotted with lavender weeds
and at the start of the rise their small yellow frame house,
with its little flower beds spread out around it like a fancy
apron, sat primly in its accustomed place between two giant
hickory trees. She would not have been startled to see a
burnt wound between two blackened chimneys.
  Neither of them felt like eating so they put on their
house clothes and lowered the shade in the bedroom and
lay down, Claud with his leg on a pillow and herself with a
damp washcloth over her eye. The instant she was Hat on her
back, the image of a razor-backed hog with warts on its face
and horns coming out behind its ears snorted into her head.
She moaned, a low quiet moan.
  "I am not," she said tearfully, "a wart hog. From hell,"
But the denial had no force. The girl's eyes and her words,
even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to
her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for
the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it
might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact
struck her only now. There was a woman there who was
neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The
message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable,
hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her
eyes began to burn instead with wrath.
  She rose on her elbow and the washcloth fell into her
hand. Claud was lying on his back, snoring. She wanted to
tell him what the girl had said. At the same time, she did not
wish to put the image of herself as a wart hog from hell into
his mind.
  "Hey, Claud," she muttered and pushed his shoulder.
  Claud opened one pale baby blue eye.
  She looked into it warily. He did not think about anything.
He just went his way.
  "Wha, whasit?" he said and closed the eye again.
  "Nothing," she said. "Does your leg pain you?"
  "Hurts like hell," Claud said.
  "It'll quit terreckly," she said and lay back down. In a
moment Claud was snoring again. For the rest of the afternoon
they lay there. Claud slept. She scowled at the ceiling.
Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stabbing
motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence
to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job,
reasonable-seeming but wrong.
  About five-thirty Claud stirred. "Got to go after those
niggers," he sighed, not moving.
  She was looking straight up as if there were unintelligible
handwriting on the ceiling. The protuberance over her
eye had turned a greenish-blue. "Listen here," she said.
  "What?"
  "Kiss me."
  Claud leaned over and kissed her loudly on the mouth.
He pinched her side and their hands interlocked. Her expression
of ferocious concentration did not change. Claud got
up, groaning and growling, and limped off. She continued to
study the ceiling.
   She did not get up until she heard the pick-up truck
coming back with the Negroes. Then she rose and thrust her
feet in her brown oxfords, which she did not bother to lace,
and stumped out onto the back porch and got her red plastic
bucket. She emptied a tray of ice cubes into in and filled it
half full of water and went out into the back yard. Every
afternoon after Claud brought the hands in, one of the boys
helped him put out hay and the rest waited in the back of the
truck until he was ready to take them home. The truck was
parked in the shade under one of the hickory trees.
  "Hi yawl this evening?" Mrs. Turpin asked grimly,
appearing with the bucket and the dipper. There were three
women and a boy in the truck.
  "Us doin nicely," the oldest woman said. "Hi you doin?"
and her gaze stuck immediately on the dark lump on Mrs.
Turpin's forehead. "You done fell down, ain't you?" she
asked in a solicitous voice. The old woman was dark and
almost toothless. She had on an old felt hat of Claud's set
back on her head. The other two women were younger and
lighter and they both had new bright green sun hats. One of
them had hers on her head; the other had taken hers off and
the boy was grinning beneath it.
  Mrs. Turpin set the bucket down on the floor of the
truck. "Yawl hep yourselves," she said. She looked around
to make sure Claud had gone. "No. I didn't fall down," she
said, folding her arms. "It was something worse than that."
  "Ain't nothing bad happen to you!" the old woman said.
She said it as if they all knew that Mrs. Turpin was protected
in some special way by Divine Providence. "You just had you
a little fall."
  “We were in town at the doctor's office for where the
cow kicked Mr. Turpin," Mrs. Turpin said in a Hat tone that
indicated they could leave off their foolishness. "And there
was this girl there. A big fat girl with her face all broke out.
I could look at that girl and tell she was peculiar but I
couldn't tell how. And me and her mama were just talking
and going along and all of a sudden WHAM! She throws
this big book she was reading at me and ... "
  "Naw!"the old woman cried out.
  "And then she jumps over the table and commences to
choke me."
  "Nawl" they all exclaimed, "naw!"
  "Hi come she do that?" the old woman asked. "What
ail her?"
  Mrs. Turpin only glared in front of her.
  "Somethin ail her," the old woman said.
  "They carried her off in an ambulance," Mrs. Turpin
continued, "but before she went she was rolling on the floor
and they were trying to hold her down to give her a shot and
she said something to me." She paused. "You know what she
said to me?"
  "What she say?"they asked.
  "She said," Mrs. Turpin began, and stopped, her face
very dark and heavy. The sun was getting whiter and whiter,
blanching the sky overhead so that the leaves of the hickory
tree were black in the 'face of it. She could not bring forth
the words. "Something real ugly," she muttered.
  "She sho shouldn't said nothin ugly to you," the old
woman said. "You so sweet. You the sweetest lady I know."
  "She pretty too," the one with the hat on said.
  "And stout," the other one said. "I never knowed no
sweeter white lady."
  "That's the truth befo' Jesus," the old woman said.
  "Amen! You des as sweet and pretty as you can be."
Mrs. Turpin knew just exactly how much Negro flattery
was worth and it added to her rage. "She said," she began
again and finished this time with a fierce rush of breath,
"that I was an old wart hog from hell."
  There was an astounded silence.
  "Where she at?" the youngest woman cried in a piercing
voice.
  "Lemme see her. I'll kill her!"
  "I'll kill her with you!" the other one cried.
  "She b'long in the sylum," the old woman said emphatically.
  "You the sweetest white lady I know."
  "She pretty too," the other two said. "Stout as she can
be and sweet. Jesus satisfiedwith her!"
  "Deed he is," the old woman declared.
  Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself. You could never
say anything intelligent to a nigger. You could talk at them
but not with them. "Yawl ain't drunk your water," she said
shortly. "Leave the bucket in the truck when you're finished
with it. I got more to do than just stand around and pass
the time of day," and she moved off and into the house.
  She stood for a moment in the middle of the kitchen.
The dark protuberance over her eye looked like a miniature
tornado cloud which might any moment sweep across the
horizon of her brow. Her lower lip protruded dangerously.
She squared her massive shoulders. Then she marched into
the front of the house and out the side door and started
down the road to the pig parlor. She had the look of a
woman going single-handed, weaponless, into battle.
  The sun was a deep yellow now like a harvest moon
and was riding westward very fast over the far tree line
as if it meant to reach the hogs before she did. The road
was rutted and she kicked several good-sized stones out of
her path as she strode along. The pig parlor was on a little
knoll at the end of a lane that ran off from the side of the
barn. It was a square of concrete as large as a small room,
with a board fence about four feet high around it. The
concrete floor sloped slightly so that the hog wash could
drain off into a trench where it was carried to the field
for fertilizer. Claud was standing on the outside, on the
edge of the concrete, hanging onto the top board, hosing
down the floor inside. The hose was connected to the faucet
of a water trough nearby.
  Mrs. Turpin climbed up beside him and glowered down
at the hogs inside. There were seven long-snouted bristly
shoats in it--tan with liver-colored spots--and an old sow
a few weeks off from farrowing. She was lying on her side
grunting. The shoats were running about shaking themselves
like idiot children, their little slit pig eyes searching the floor
for anything left. She had read that pigs were the most
intelligent animal. She doubted it. They were supposed to
be smarter than dogs. There had even been a pig astronaut.
He had performed his assignment perfectly but died of a
heart attack afterwards because they left him in his electric
suit, sitting upright throughout his examination when naturally
a hog should be on all fours.
A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin.
  "Gimme that hose," she said, yanking it away from
Claud. "Go on and carry them niggers home and then get
off that leg."
  "You look like you might have swallowed a mad dog,"
Claud observed, but he got down and limped off. He paid
no attention to her humors.
  Until he was out of earshot, Mrs. Turpin stood on the
side of the pen, holding the hose and pointing the stream
of water at the hind quarters of any shoat that looked as if
it might try to lie down. When he had had time to get over
the hill, she turned her head slightly and her wrathful eyes
scanned the path. He was nowhere in sight. She turned back
again and seemed to gather herself up. Her shoulders rose
and she drew in her breath.
  "What do you send me a message like that for?" she
said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with
the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. "How am I a
hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?" Her
free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the
hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the
eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.
  The pig parlor commanded a view of the back pasture
where their twenty beef cows were gathered around the
hay-bales Claud and the boy had put out. The freshly cut
pasture sloped down to the highway. Across it was their
cotton field and beyond that a dark green dusty wood which
they owned as well. The sun was behind the wood, very
red, looking over the paling of trees like a farmer inspecting
his own hogs.
  "Why me?" she rumbled. "It's no trash around here.
black or white, that I haven't given to. And break my back
to the bone every day working. And do for the church."
  She appeared to be the right size woman to command
the arena before her. "How am I a hog?" she demanded.
"Exactly how am I like them?" and she jabbed the stream
of water at the shoats. "There was plenty of trash there.
It didn't have to be me.
  "If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash
then," she railed. ''You could have made me trash. Or a
nigger. If trash is what you wanted why didn't you make
me trash?" She shook her fist with the hose in it and a
watery snake appeared momentarily in the air. "I could quit
working and take it easy and be filthy," she growled.
"Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer.
Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my
face. I could be nasty.
  "Or you could have made me a nigger. It's too late for
me to be a nigger," she said with deep sarcasm, "but I could
act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop
traffic. Roll on the ground."
  In the deepening light everything was taking on a mysterious
hue. The pasture was growing a peculiar glassy green
and the streak of highway had turned lavender. She braced
herself for a final assault and this time her voice rolled out
over the pasture. "Go on," she yelled, "call me a hog! Call
me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell.
Put that bottom rail on top. There'll still be a top and
bottom!"
  A garbled echo returned to her.
  A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, "Who
do you think you are?"
  The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned
for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question
carried over the pasture and across the highway and the
cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from
beyond the wood.
  She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.
A tiny truck, Claud's, appeared on the highway, heading
rapidly out of sight. Its gears scraped thinly. It looked
like a child's toy. At any moment a bigger truck might
smash into it and scatter Claud's and the niggers' brains all
over the road.
  Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway,
all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck
reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to
turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue
coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if
through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor
at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the
old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them.
They appeared to pant with a secret life.
  Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs.
Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if
she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At
last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in
the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like
an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She
raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture
hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes.
She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward
from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a
vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There
were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time
in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes,
and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping
and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the
procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at
once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had
a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.
She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were
marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable
as they had always been for good order and common sense
and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she
could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their
virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands
and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but
fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the
vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
  At length she got down and turned off the faucet and
made her slow way on the darkening path to the house.
In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had
struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls
climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.

End

Parker's Back

1965

Parker's wife was sitting on the front porch floor, snapping
beans. Parker was sitting on the step, some distance away,
watching her sullenly. She was plain, plain. The skin on her
face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion
and her eyes were grey and sharp like the points of two
icepicks. Parker understood why he had married her-he
couldn't have got her any other way-but he couldn't understand
why he stayed with her now. She was pregnant and
pregnant women were not his favorite kind. Nevertheless,
he stayed as if she had him conjured. He was puzzled and
ashamed of himself.
  The house they rented sat alone save for a single tall
pecan tree on a high embankment overlooking a highway.
At intervals a car would shoot past below and his wife's eyes
would swerve suspiciously after the sound of it and then
come back to rest on the newspaper full of beans in her
lap. One of the things she did not approve of was automobiles.
In addition to her other bad qualities, she was forever
sniffingup sin. She did not smoke or dip, drink whiskey,
use bad language or paint her face, and God knew some
paint would have improved it, Parker thought. Her being
against color, it was the more remarkable she had married
him. Sometimes he supposed that she had married him because
she meant to save him. At other times he had a
suspicion that she actually liked everything she said she
didn't. He could account for her one way or another; it was
himself he could not understand.
  She turned her head in his direction and said, "It's no
reason you can't work for a man. It don't have to be a
woman."
  "Aw shut your mouth for a change," Parker muttered.
  If he had been certain she was jealous of the woman
he worked for he would have been pleased but more likely
she was concerned with the sin that would result if he and
the woman took a liking to each other. He had told her that
the woman was a hefty young blonde; in fact she was nearly
seventy years old and too dried up to have an interest in
anything except getting as much work out of him as she
could. Not that an old woman didn't sometimes get an
interest in a young man, particularly if he was as attractive
as Parker felt he was, but this old woman looked at him
the same way she looked at her old tractor-as if she had
to put up with it because it was all she had. The tractor had
broken down the second day Parker was on it and she had
set him at once to cutting bushes, saying out of the side of
her mouth to the nigger, "Everything he touches, he breaks."
She also asked him to wear his shirt when he worked; Parker
had removed it even though the day was not sultry; he put
it back on reluctantly.
  This ugly woman Parker married was his first wife.
He had had other women but he had planned never to get
himself tied up legally. He had first seen her one morning
when his truck broke down on the highway. He had managed
to pull it off the road into a neatly swept yard on
which sat a peeling two-room house. He got out and
opened the hood of the truck and began to study the motor.
Parker had an extra sense that told him when there was a
woman nearby watching him. After he had leaned over the
motor a few minutes, his neck began to prickle. He cast his
eye over the empty yard and porch of the house. A woman
he could not see was either nearby beyond a clump of
honeysuckle or in the house, watching him out the window.
  Suddenly Parker began to jump up and down and fling
his hand about as if he had mashed it in the machinery. He
doubled over and held his hand close to his chest. "God
dammit!" he hollered, "Jesus Christ in hell! Jesus God Almighty
damm! God dammit to hell!" he went on, flinging out
the same few oaths over and over as loud as he could.
  Without warning a terrible bristly claw slammed the
side of his face and he fell backwards on the hood of the
truck. "You don't talk no filth here!" a voice close to him
shrilled.
  Parker's vision was so blurred that for an instant he
thought he had been attacked by some creature from above,
a giant hawk-eyed angel wielding a hoary weapon. As his
sight cleared, he saw before him a tall raw-boned girl with a
broom.
  "I hurt my hand," he said. "I HURT my hand." He was
so incensed that he forgot that he hadn't hurt his hand. "My
hand may be broke," he growled although his voice was still
unsteady.
  "Lemme see it," the girl demanded.
  Parker stuck out his hand and she came closer and
looked at it. There was no mark on the palm and she took
the hand and turned it over. Her own hand was dry and
hot and rough and Parker felt himself jolted back to life by
her touch. He looked more closely at her. I don't want
nothing to do with this one, he thought.
  The girl's sharp eyes peered at the back of the stubby
reddish hand she held. There emblazoned in red and blue
was a tattooed eagle perched on a cannon. Parker's sleeve
was rolled to the elbow. Above the eagle a serpent was
coiled about a shield and in the spaces between the eagle
and the serpent there were hearts, some with arrows through
them. Above the serpent there was a spread hand of cards.
Every space on the skin of Parker's arm, from wrist to
elbow, was covered in some loud design, The girl gazed
at this with an almost stupefied smile of shock, as if she had
accidentally grasped a poisonous snake; she dropped the
hand.
  "I got most of my other ones in foreign parts," Parker
said. "These here I mostly got in the United States. I got
my first one when I was only fifteen year old."
  "Don't tell me," the girl said, "I don't like it. I ain't got
any use for it."
  "You ought to see the ones you can't see," Parker said
and winked.
  Two circles of red appeared like apples on the girl's
cheeks and softened her appearance. Parker was intrigued.
He did not for a minute think that she didn't like the
tattoos. He had never yet met a woman who was not attracted
to them.
  Parker was fourteen when he saw a man in a fair,
tattooed from head to foot. Except for his loins which were
girded with a panther hide, the man's skin was patterned
in what seemed from Parker's distance-he was near the
back of the tent, standing on a bench-a single intricate
design of brilliant color. The man, who was small and
sturdy, moved about on the platform, flexing his muscles
so that the arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his
skin appeared to have a subtle motion of its own. Parker
was filled with emotion, lifted up as some people are when
the flag passes. He was a boy whose mouth habitually hung
open. He was heavy and earnest, as ordinary as a loaf of
bread. When the show was over, he had remained standing
on the bench, staring where the tattooed man had been,
until the tent was almost empty.
  Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder
in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter
his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about
the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head,
but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy
had been turned so gently in a different direction that he
did not know his destination had been changed.
  He had his first tattoo some time after-the eagle
perched on the cannon. It was done by a local artist. It
hurt very little, just enough to make it appear to Parker to
be worth doing. This was peculiar too for before he had
thought that only what did not hurt was worth doing. The
next year he quit school because he was sixteen and could.
He went to the trade school for a while, then he quit the
trade school and worked for six months in a garage. The
only reason he worked at all was to pay for more tattoos.
His mother worked in a laundry and could support him,
but she would not pay for any tattoo except her name on a
heart, which he had put on, grumbling. However, her name
was Betty Jean and nobody had to know it was his mother.
He found out that the tattoos were attractive to the kind of
girls he liked but who had never liked him before. He began
to drink beer and get in fights. His mother wept over what
was becoming of him. One night she dragged him off to a
revival with her, not telling him where they were going.
When he saw the big lighted church, he jerked out of her
grasp and ran. The next day he lied about his age and joined
the navy.
  Parker was large for the tight sailor's pants but the silly
white cap, sitting low on his forehead, made his face by
contrast look thoughtful and almost intense. After a month
or two in the navy, his mouth ceased to hang open. His
features hardened into the features of a man. He stayed
in the navy five years and seemed a natural part of the grey
mechanical ship, except for his eyes, which were the same
pale slate-color as the ocean and reflected the immense
spaces around him as if they were a microcosm of the
mysterious sea. In port Parker wandered about comparing
the run-down places he was in to Birmingham, Alabama.
Everywhere he went he picked up more tattoos.
He had stopped having lifeless ones like anchors and
crossed rifles. He had a tiger and a panther on each shoulder,
a cobra coiled about a torch on his chest, hawks on his
thighs, Elizabeth II and Philip over where his stomach and
liver were respectively. He did not care much what the
subject was so long as it was colorful; on his abdomen he
had a few obscenities but only because that seemed the
proper place for them. Parker would be satisfied with each
tattoo about a month, then something about it that had
attracted him would wear off. Whenever a decent-sized
mirror was available, he would get in front of it and study
his overall look. The effect was not of one intricate arabesque
of colors but of something haphazard and botched. A huge
dissatisfaction would come over him and he would go off
and find another tattooist and have another space filled up.
The front of Parker was almost completely covered but
there were no tattoos on his back. He had no desire for
one anywhere he could not readily see it himself. As the
space on the front of him for tattoos decreased, his dissatisfaction
grew and became general.
  After one of his furloughs, he didn't go back to the
navy but remained away without official leave, drunk, in a
rooming house in a city he did not know. His dissatisfaction,
from being chronic and latent, had suddenly become acute
and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and
the serpents and the eagles and the hawks had penetrated
his skin and lived inside him in a raging warfare. The navy
caught up with him, put him in the brig for nine months
and then gave him a dishonorable discharge.
  After that Parker decided that country air was the only
kind fit to breathe. He rented the shack on the embankment
and bought the old truck and took various jobs which he
kept as long as it suited him. At the time he met his future
wife, he WilS lmying apples by the- bushel and selling them
for the same price by the pound to isolated homesteaders on
back country roads.
  "All that there," the woman said, pointing to his arm,
"is no better than what a fool Indian would do. It's a heap
of vanity." She seemed to have found the word she wanted.
"Vanity of vanities," she said.
  Well what the hell do I care what she thinks of it?
Parker asked himself, but he was plainly bewildered. "I
reckon you like one of these better than another anyway,"
he said, dallying until he thought of something that would
impress her. He thrust the arm back at her. "Which you
like best?"
  "None of them," she said, "but the chicken is not as bad
as the rest."
  "What chicken?" Parker almost yelled.
  She pointed to the eagle.
 "That's an eagle," Parker said. ''What fool would waste
their time having a chicken put on themself?"
  "What fool would have any of it?" the girl said and
turned away. She went slowly back to the house and left
him there to get going. Parker remained for almost five
minutes, looking agape at the dark door she had entered.
  The next day he returned with a bushel of apples. He
was not one to be outdone by anything that looked like
her. He liked women with meat on them, so you didn't feel
their muscles, much less their old bones. When he arrived
she was sitting on the top step and the yard was full of
children, all as thin and poor as herself; Parker remembered
it was Saturday. He hated to be making up to a woman
when there were children around, but it was fortunate he
had brought the bushel of apples off the truck. As the
children approached him to see what he carried, he gave
each child an apple and told it to get lost; in that way he
cleared out the whole crowd.
  The girl did nothing to acknowledge his presence. He
might have been a stray pig or goat that had wandered into
the yard and she too tired to take up the broom and send
it off. He set the bushel of apples down next to her on the
step. He sat down on a lower step.
  "Hep yourself," he said, nodding at the basket; then he
lapsed into silence.
  She took an apple quickly as if the basket might disappear
if she didn't make haste. Hungry people made Parker
nervous. He had always had plenty to eat himself. He grew
very uncomfortable. He reasoned he had nothing to say so
why should he say it? He could not think now why he had
come or why he didn't go before he wasted another bushel
of apples on the crowd of children. He supposed they were
her brothers and sisters.
  She chewed the apple slowly but with a kind of relish
of concentration, bent slightly but looking out ahead. The
view from the porch stretched off across a long incline
studded with iron weed and across the highway to a vast
vista of hills and one small mountain. Long views depressed
Parker. You look out into space like that and you begin to
feel as if someone were after you, the navy or the government
or religion.
  "Who them children belong to, you?" he said at
length.
  "I ain't married yet," she said. "They belong to momma."
She said it as if it were only a matter of time before she
would be married.
  Who in God's name would marry her? Parker thought.
  A large barefooted woman with a wide gap-toothed
face appeared in the door behind Parker. She had apparently
been there for several minutes.
  "Good evening," Parker said.
  The woman crossed the porch and picked up what was
left of the bushel of apples. "We thank you," she said and
returned with it into the house.
  "That your old woman?" Parker muttered.
  The girl nodded. Parker knew a lot of sharp things he
could have said like "You got my sympathy," but he was
gloomily silent. He just sat there, looking at the view. He
thought he must be coming down with something.
  "If I pick up some peaches tomorrow I'll bring you
some," he said.
  ''I'll be much obliged to you," the girl said.
  Parker had no intention of taking any basket of peaches
back there but the next day he found himself doing it. He
and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One
thing he did say was, "I ain't got any tattoo on my back."
  "What you got on it?" the girl said.
  "My shirt," Parker said. "Haw."
  "Haw, haw," the girl said politely.
Parker thought he was losing his mind. He could not
believe for a minute that he was attracted to a woman like
this. She showed not the least interest in anything but what
he brought until he appeared the third time with two
cantaloups. "What's your name?" she asked.
   "0. E. Parker," he said.
  "What does the O.E. stand for?"
  "You can just call me O.E.," Parker said. "Or Parker.
  Don't nobody call me by my name."
  "What's it stand for?" she persisted.
  "Never mind," Parker said. "What's yours?"
  "I'll tell you when you tell me what them letters are the
short of," she said. There was just a hint of flirtatiousness
in her tone and it went rapidly to Parker's head. He had
never revealed the name to any man or woman, only to the
files of the navy and the government, and it was on his
baptismal record which he got at the age of a month; his
mother was a Methodist. When the name leaked out of the
navy files, Parker narrowly missed killing the man who used
it.
  "You'll  go blab it around," he said.
  'TIl swear I'll never tell nobody," she said. "On God's
holy word I swear it."
Parker sat for a few minutes in silence. Then he reached
for the girl's neck, drew her ear close to his mouth and
revealed the name in a low voice.
  "Obadiah," she whispered. Her face slowly brightened
as if the name came as a sign to her. "Obadiah," she said.
  The name still stank in Parker's estimation.
  "Obadiah Elihue," she said in a reverent voice.
  "If you call me that aloud, I'll bust your head open,"
  Parker said. "What's yours?"
  "Sarah Ruth Cates," she said.
  "Glad to meet you, Sarah Ruth," Parker said.
  Sarah Ruth's father was a Straight Gospel preacher
but he was away, spreading it in Florida. Her mother did
not seem to mind his attention to the girl so long as he
brought a basket of something with him when he came.
As for Sarah Ruth herself, it was plain to Parker after he
had visited three times that she was crazy about him. She
liked him even though she insisted that pictures on the skin
were vanity of vanities and even after hearing him curse,
and even after she had asked him if he was saved and he
had replied that he didn't see it was anything in particular
to save him from. After that, inspired, Parker had said,
"I'd be saved enough if you was to kiss me."
  She scowled. "That ain't being saved," she said.
  Not long after that she agreed to take a ride in his
truck. Parker parked it on a deserted road and suggested
to her that they lie down together in the back of it.
  "Not until after we're married," she said-just like that.
  "Oh that ain't necessary," Parker said and as he reached
for her, she thrust him away with such force that the door
of the truck came off and he found himself flat on his back
on the ground. He made up his mind then and there to have
nothing further to do with her.
  They were married in the County Ordinary's office because
Sarah Ruth thought churches were idolatrous. Parker
had no opinion about that one way or the other. The Ordi-
nary's office was lined with cardboard file boxes and record
books with dusty yellow slips of paper hanging on out of
them. The Ordinary was an old woman with red hair who
had held office for forty years and looked as dusty as her
books. She married them from behind the iron-grill of a
stand-up desk and when she finished, she said with a
flourish, "Three dollars and fifty cents and till death do you
part!" and yanked some forms out of a machine.
  Marriage did not change Sarah Ruth a jot and it made
Parker gloomier than ever. Every morning he decided he
had had enough and would not return that night; every
night he returned. Whenever Parker couldn't stand the way
he felt, he would have another tattoo, but the only surface
left on him now was his back. To see a tattoo on his own
back he would have to get two mirrors and stand between
them in just the correct position and this seemed to Parker
a good way to make an idiot of himself. Sarah Ruth who,
if she had had better sense, could have enjoyed a tattoo on
his back, would not even look at the ones he had elsewhere.
When he attempted to point out especial details of them,
she would shut her eyes tight and tum her back as well.
Except in total darkness, she preferred Parker dressed and
with his sleeves rolled down.
  "At the judgement seat of God, Jesus is going to say to
you, 'What you been doing all your life besides have pictures
drawn all over you?'" she said.
  "You don't fool me none," Parker said, "you're just
afraid that hefty girl I work for'll like me so much shell
say,' Come on, Mr. Parker, let's you and me .. .'''
  "You're tempting sin," she said, "and at the judgement
seat of God you'll have to answer for that too. You ought
to go back to selling the fruits of the earth."
  Parker did nothing much when he was at home but
listen to what the judgement seat of God would be like for
him if he didn't change his ways. When he could, he broke
in with tales of the hefty girl he worked for. "'Mr. Parker,'''
he said she said, 'I hired you for your brains.'" (She had
added, "So why don't you use them?")
  "And you should have seen her face the first time she
saw me without my shirt," he said. "'Mr. Parker,' she said,
'you're a walking panner-rammer!''' This had, in fact, been
her remark but it had been delivered out of one side of her
mouth.
  Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker that
there was no containing it outside of a tattoo. It had to be
his back. There was no help for it. A dim half-formed
inspiration began to work in his mind. He visualized having
a tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to
resist-a religious subject. He thought of an open book with
HOLY BIBLE tattooed under it and an actual verse printed on
the page. This seemed just the thing for a while; then he
began to hear her say, "Ain't I already got a real Bible?
What you think I want to read the same verse over and
over for when I can read it all?" He needed something
better even than the Bible! He thought about it so much
that he began to lose sleep. He was already losing flesh-
Sarah Ruth just threw food in the pot and let it boil. Not
knowing for certain why he continued to stay with a
woman who was both ugly and pregnant and no cook made
him generally nervous and irritable, and he developed a
little tic in the side of his face.
  Once or twice he found himself turning around abruptly
as if someone were trailing him. He had had a granddaddy
who had ended in the state mental hospital, although not
until he was seventy-five, but as urgent as it might be for
him to get a tattoo, it was just as urgent that he get exactly
the right one to bring Sarah Ruth to heel. As he continued
to worry over it, his eyes took on a hollow preoccupied
expression. The old woman he worked for told him that if
he couldn't keep his mind on what he was doing, she knew
where she could find a fourteen-year-old colored boy who
could. Parker was too preoccupied even to be offended. At
any time previous, he would have left her then and there,
saying drily, "Well, you go ahead on and get him then."
  Two or three mornings later he was baling hay with
the old woman's sorry baler and her broken down tractor
in a large field, cleared save for one enormous old tree
standing in the middle of it. The old woman was the kind
who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a
large old tree. She had pointed it out to Parker as if he
didn't have eyes and told him to be careful not to hit it as
the machine picked up hay near it. Parker began at the outside
of the field and made circles inward toward it. He had
to get off the tractor every now and then and untangle the
baling cord or kick a rock out of the way. The old woman
had told him to carry the rocks to the edge of the field,
which he did when she was there watching. When he
thought he could make it, he ran over them. As he circled
the field his mind was on a suitable design for his back. The
sun, the size of a golf ball, began to switch regularly from
in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it both
places as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once
he saw the tree reaching out to grasp him. A ferocious thud
propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling
in an unbelievably loud voice, "GOD ABOVE!"
  He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upsidedown
into the tree and burst into flame. The first thing
Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire;
one was caught under the tractor, the other was some
distance away, burning by itself. He was not in them. He
could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face.
He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous,
and if he had known how to cross himself he would have
done it.
  His truck was on a dirt road at the edge of the field. He
moved toward it, still sitting, still backwards, but faster and
faster; halfway to it he got up and began a kind of forward bent
run from which he collapsed on his knees twice. His
legs felt like two old rusted rain gutters. He reached the
truck finally and took off in it, zigzagging up the road. He
drove past his house on the embankment and straight for
the city, fifty miles distant.
   Parker did not allow himself to think on the way to the
city. He only knew that there had been a great change in his
life, a leap forward into a worse unknown, and that there
was nothing he could do about it. It was for all intents
accomplished.
  The artist had two large cluttered rooms over a
chiropodist's office on a back street. Parker, still barefooted,
burst silently in on him at a little after three in the afternoon.
The artist, who was about Parker's own age--twenty-eight-
but thin and bald, was behind a small drawing table,
tracing a design in green ink. He looked up with an annoyed
glance and did not seem to recognize Parker in the holloweyed
creature before him.
  "Let me see the book you got with all the pictures of God
in it," Parker said breathlessly. "The religious one."
  The artist continued to look at him with his intellectual,
superior stare. "I don't put tattoos on drunks," he said.
  "You know me!" Parker cried indignantly. "I'm O. E.
Parker! You done work for me before and I always paid!"
The artist looked at him another moment as if he were
not altogether sure. "You've fallen off some," he said. "You
must have been in jail."
  "Married," Parker said.
  "Oh," said the artist. With the aid of mirrors the artist
had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl, perfect
in every detail. It was about the size of a half-dollar and
served him as a show piece. There were cheaper artists in
town but Parker had never wanted anything but the best.
The artist went over to a cabinet at the back of the room
and began to look over some art books. "Who are you interested
in?" he said, "saints, angels, Christs or what?"
  "God," Parker said.
  "Father, Son or Spirit?"
  "Just God," Parker said impatiently. "Christ. I don't
care. Just so it's God."
  The artist returned with a book. He moved some papers
off another table and put the book down on it and told
Parker to sit down and see what he liked. "The up-to-date
ones are in the back," he said.
  Parker sat down with the book and wet his thumb.
He began to go through it, beginning at the back where the
up-to-date pictures were. Some of them he recognized--The
Good Shepherd, Forbid Them Not, The Smiling Jesus,
Jesus the Physician's Friend, but he kept turning rapidly
backwards and the pictures became less and less reassuring.
One showed a gaunt green dead face streaked with blood.
One was yellow with sagging purple eyes. Parker's heart
began to beat faster and faster until it appeared to be roaring
inside him like a great generator. He flipped the pages
quickly, feeling that when he reached the one ordained, a
sign would come. He continued to flip through until he had
almost reached the front of the book. On one of the pages a
pair of eyes glanced at him swiftly. Parker sped on, then
stopped. His heart too appeared to cut off; there was
absolute silence. It said as plainly as if silence were a
language itself, GO BACK.
  Parker returned to the picture--the haloed head of a
flat stem Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes. He sat
there trembling; his heart began slowly to beat again as if
it were being brought to life by a subtle power.
  "You found what you want?" the artist asked.
  Parker's throat was too dry to speak. He got up and
thrust the book at the artist, opened at the picture.
  "That'll cost you plenty," the artist said. "You don't want
all those little blocks though, just the outline and some better
features."
  "Just like it is," Parker said, "just like it is or nothing."
  "It's your funeral," the artist said, "but I don't do that
kind of work for nothing."
  "How much?" Parker asked.
  "It'll take maybe two days work."
  "How much?" Parker said.
  "On time or cash?" the artist asked. Parker's other jobs
had been on time, but he had paid.
  "Ten down and ten for every day it takes," the artist
said.
  Parker drew ten dollar bills out of his wallet; he had
three left in.
  "You come back in the morning," the artist said, putting
the money in his own pocket. "First I'll have to trace that
out of the book."
  "No no!" Parker said. "Trace it now or gimme my money
back," and his eyes blared as if he were ready for a fight.
The artist agreed. Anyone stupid enough to want a
Christ on his back, he reasoned, would be just as likely as
not to change his mind the next minute, but once the work
was begun he could hardly do so.
  While he worked on the tracing, he told Parker to go
wash his back at the sink with the special soap he used
there. Parker did it and returned to pace back and forth
across the room, nervously flexing his shoulders. He wanted
to go look at the picture again but at the same time he did
not want to. The artist got up finally and had Parker lie
down on the table. He swabbed his back with ethyl chloride
and then began to outline the head on it with his iodine
pencil. Another hour passed before he took up his electric
instrument. Parker felt no particular pain. In Japan he had
had a tattoo of the Buddha done on his upper arm with ivory
needles; in Burma, a little brown root of a man had made a
peacock on each of his knees using thin pointed sticks, two
feet long; amateurs had worked on him with pins and soot.
Parker was usually so relaxed and easy under the hand of
the artist that he often went to sleep, but this time he remained
awake, every muscle taut.
  At midnight the artist said he was ready to quit. He
propped one mirror, four feet square, on a table by the
wall and took a smaller mirror off the lavatory wall and put
it in Parker's hands. Parker stood with his back to the one
on the table and moved the other until he saw a flashing
burst of color reflected from his back. It was almost completely
covered with little red and blue and ivory and
saffron squares; from them he made out the lineaments of
the face-a mouth, the beginning of heavy brows, a straight
nose, but the face was empty; the eyes had not yet been put
in. The impression for the moment was almost as if the
artist had tricked him and done the Physician's Friend.
  "It don't have eyes,"  Parker cried out.
  'That'll come," the artist said, "in due time. We have
another day to go on it yet."
  Parker spent the night on a cot at the Haven of Light
Christian Mission. He found these the best places to stay in
the city because they were free and included a meal of sorts.
He got the last available cot and because he was still barefooted,
he accepted a pair of second-hand shoes which, in
his confusion, he put on to go to bed; he was still shocked
from all that had happened to him. All night he lay awake
in the long dormitory of cots with lumpy figures on them.
The only light was from a phosphorescent cross glowing at
the end of the room. The tree reached out to grasp him
again, then burst into flame; the shoe burned quietly by
itself; the eyes in the book said to him distinctly GO BACK
and at the same time did not utter a sound. He wished that
he were not in this city, not in this Haven of Light Mission,
not in a bed by himself. He longed miserably for Sarah
Ruth. Her sharp tongue and icepick eyes were the only comfort
he could bring to mind. He decided he was losing it.
Her eyes appeared soft and dilatory compared with the eyes
in the book, for even though he could not summon up the
exact look of those eyes, he could still feel their penetration.
He felt as though, under their gaze, he was as transparent
as the wing of a fly.
  The tattooist had told him not to come until ten in the
morning, but when he arrived at that hour, Parker was
sitting in the dark hallway on the floor, waiting for him. He
had decided upon getting up that, once the tattoo was on
him, he would not look at it, that all his sensations of the
day and night before were those of a crazy man and that
he would return to doing things according to his own sound
judgement.
  The artist began where he left off. "One thing I want
to know," he said presently as he worked over Parker's back,
"why do you want this on you? Have you gone and got
religion? Are you saved?" he asked in a mocking voice.
  Parker's throat felt salty and dry. "Naw," he said, "I
ain't got no use for none of that. A man can't save his self
from whatever it is he don't deserve none of my sympathy."
These words seemed to leave his mouth like wraiths and to
evaporate at once as if he had never uttered them.
  "Then why . . ."
 "I married this woman that's saved," Parker said. "I
never should have done it. I ought to leave her. She's done
gone and got pregnant."
  "That's too bad," the artist said. "Then it's her making
you have this tattoo."
  "Naw," Parker said, "she don't know nothing about it.
It's a surprise for her."
  "You think she'll like it and layoff you a while?"
  "She can't hep herself," Parker said. "She can't say she
don't like the looks of God." He decided he had told the
artist enough of his business. Artists were all right in their
place but he didn't like them poking their noses into the
affairs of regular people. "I didn't get no sleep last night,"
he said. "I think I'll get some now."
  That closed the mouth of the artist but it did not bring
him any sleep. He lay there, imagining how Sarah Ruth
would be struck speechless by the face on his back and every
now and then this would be interrupted by a vision of the
tree of fire and his empty shoe burning beneath it.
The artist worked steadily until nearly four o'clock, not
stopping to have lunch, hardly pausing with the electric
instrument except to wipe the dripping dye off Parker's back
as he went along. Finally he finished. "You can get up and
look at it now," he said.
  Parker sat up but he remained on the edge of the table.
  The artist was pleased with his work and wanted Parker
to look at it at once. Instead Parker continued to sit on the
edge of the table, bent forward slightly but with a vacant
look. "What ails you?" the artist said. "Go look at it."
  "Ain't nothing ail me," Parker said in a sudden belligerent
voice. "That tattoo ain't going nowhere. It’ll be there
when I get there." He reached for his shirt and began gingerly to put it on.
  The artist took him roughly by the arm and propelled
him between the two mirrors. "Now look," he said, angry at
having his work ignored.
  Parker looked, turned white and moved away. The eyes
in the reflected face continued to look at him-still, straight,
all-demanding, enclosed in silence.
  "It was your idea, remember," the artist said. "I would
have advised something else."
  Parker said nothing. He put on his shirt and went out
the door while the artist shouted, "I’ll expect all of my
money!"
  Parker headed toward a package shop on the corner.
He bought a pint of whiskey and took it into a nearby alley
and drank it all in five minutes. Then he moved on to a pool
hall nearby which he frequented when he came to the city.
It was a well-lighted barn-like place with a bar up one side
and gambling machines on the other and pool tables in the
back. As soon as Parker entered, a large man in a red and
black checkered shirt hailed him by slapping him on the
back and yelling, "Yeyyyyyyboyl O. E. Parker!"
  Parker was not yet ready to be struck on the back. "Lay
off," he said, "I got a fresh tattoo there."
  "What you got this time?" the man asked and then
yelled to a few at the machines. "O.E.'s got him another
tattoo."
  "Nothing special this time," Parker said and slunk over
to a machine that was not being used.
  "Come on," the big man said, "let's have a look at O.E.'s
tattoo," and while Parker squirmed in their hands, they
pulled up his shirt. Parker felt all the hands drop away
instantly and his shirt fell again like a veil over the face.
There was a silence in the pool room which seemed to Parker
to grow from the circle around him until it extended to the
foundations under the building and upward through the
beams in the roof.
  Finally some one said, "Christ!" Then they all broke into
noise at once. Parker turned around, an uncertain grin on
his face.
  "Leave it to O.E.!" the man in the checkered shirt said.
  "That boy's a real card!"
  "Maybe he's gone and got religion," some one yelled.
  "Not on your life," Parker said.
  "O.E:s got religion and is witnessing for Jesus, ain't
you, O.E.?" a little man with a piece of cigar in his mouth
said wryly. "An o-riginal way to do it if I ever saw one:'
  "Leave it to Parker to think of a new one!" the fat man
said.
  "Yyeeeeeeyyyyyyyboy!" someone yelled and they all
began to whistle and curse in compliment until Parker said,
  "Aaa shut up:'
  "What'd you do it for?" somebody asked.
  "For laughs," Parker said. "What's it to you?"
  "Why ain't you laughing then?" somebody yelled. Parker
lunged into the midst of them and like a whirlwind on a
summer's day there began a fight that raged amid overturned
tables and swinging fists until two of them grabbed
him and ran to the door with him and threw him out. Then
a calm descended on the pool hall as nerve shattering as if
the long barn-like room were the ship from which Jonah
had been cast into the sea.
  Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley
behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a
spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important
to him but which appeared to be necessary in spite of his
opinion. The eyes that were now forever on his back were
eyes to be obeyed. He was as certain of it as he had ever
been of anything. Throughout his life, grumbling and sometimes
cursing, often afraid, once in rapture, Parker had
obeyed whatever instinct of this kind had come to him-in
rapture when his spirit had lifted at the sight of the tattooed
man at the fair, afraid when he had joined the navy, grumbling
when he had married Sarah Ruth.
  The thought of her brought him slowly to his feet. She
would know what he had to do. She would clear up the rest
of it, and she would at least be pleased. It seemed to him
that, all along, that was what he wanted, to please her. His
truck was still parked in front of the building where the
artist had his place, but it was not far away. He got in it
and drove out of the city and into the country night. His
head was almost clear of liquor and he observed that his
dissatisfaction was gone, but he felt not quite like himself.
It was as if he were himself but a stranger to himself, driving
into a new country though everything he saw was familiar
to him, even at night.
  He arrived finally at the house on the embankment,
pulled the truck under the pecan tree and got out. He made
as much noise as possible to assert that he was still in charge
here, that his leaving her for a night without word meant
nothing except it was the way he did things. He slammed
the car door, stamped up the two steps and across the porch
and rattled the door knob. It did not respond to his touch.
"Sarah Ruth!" he yelled, "let me in."
  There was no lock on the door and she had evidently.
placed the back of a chair against the knob. He began to
beat on the door and rattle the knob at the same time.
  He heard the bed springs screak and bent down and
put his head to the keyhole, but it was stopped up with
paper. "Let me inl" he hollered, bamming on the door again.
"What you got me locked out for?"
  A sharp voice close to the door said, "Who's there?"
  "Me," Parker said, "O.E."
  He waited a moment.
  "Me," he said impatiently, "O.E."
  Still no sound from inside.
  He tried once more. "O.E.," he said, bamming the door
two or three more times. "0. E. Parker. You know me."
There was a silence. Then the voice said slowly, "I don't
knowno O.E."
  "Quit fooling," Parker pleaded. "You ain't got any business
doing me this way. It's me, old O.E., I'm back. You
ain't afraid of me."
  "Who's there?" the same unfeeling voice said.
  Parker turned his head as if he expected someone behind
him to give him the answer. The sky had lightened
slightly and there were two or three streaks of yellow floating
above the horizon. Then as he stood there, a tree of light
burst over the skyline.
  Parker fell back against the door as if he had been
pinned there by a lance.
  "Who's there?" the voice from inside said and there was
a quality about it now that seemed final. The knob rattled
and the voice said peremptorily, 'Who's there, I ast you?"
  Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed
keyhole. "Obadiah," he whispered and all at once he felt the
light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into
a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds
and beasts.
  "Obadiah Elihuel" he whispered.
  The door opened and he stumbled in. Sarah Ruth
loomed there, hands on her hips. She began at once, "That
was no hefty blonde woman you was working for and you'll
have to pay her every penny on her tractor you busted up.
She don't keep insurance on it. She came here and her and
me had us a long talk and I .. ."
  Trembling, Parker set about lighting the kerosene lamp.
  "What's the matter with you, wasting that keresene this
near daylight?" she demanded. "I ain't got to look at you."
  A yellow glow enveloped them. Parker put the match
down and began to unbutton his shirt.
  "And you ain't going to have none of me this near
morning," she said.
  "Shut your mouth," he said quietly. "Look at this and
then I don't want to hear no more out of you." He removed
the shirt and turned his back to her.
  "Another picture," Sarah Ruth growled. "I might have
known you was off after putting some more trash on yourself."
  Parker's knees went hollow under him. He wheeled
around and cried, "Look at it! Don't just say that! Look at
itl"
  "I done looked," she said.
  "Don't you know who it is?" he cried in anguish.
   "No, who is it?" Sarah Ruth said. "It ain't anybody I
know."
  “It's him," Parker said.
  "Him who?"
  "God!" Parker cried.
  "God? God don't look like that!"
  ''What do you know how he looks?" Parker moaned.
  "You ain't seen him."
  "He don't look," Sarah Ruth said. "He's a spirit. No man
shall see his face."
  "Aw listen," Parker groaned, "this is just a picture of
him."
  "Idolatry!" Sarah Ruth screamed. "Idolatry! Enflaming
yourself with idols under every green tree!  I can put up
with lies and vanity but I don't want no idolator in this
house!" and she grabbed up the broom and began to thrash
him across the shoulders with it.
  Parker was too stunned to resist. He sat there and let her
beat him until she had nearly knocked him senseless and
large welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ.
Then he staggered up and made for the door.
She stamped the broom two or three times on the floor
and went to the window and shook it out to get the taint of
him off it, Still gripping it, she looked toward the pecan tree
and her eyes hardened still more. There he was--who called
himself Obadiah Elihue--leaning against the tree, crying
like a baby.

End

Judgement Day

1965

TANNER was conserving all his strength for the trip home. He
meant to walk as far as he could get and trust to the Almighty
to get him the rest of the way. That morning and the morning
before, he had allowed his daughter to dress him and had conserved
that much more energy. Now he sat in the chair by the window his
blue shirt buttoned at the collar, his coat on the back of the
chair, and his hat on his head-waiting for her to leave. He couldn't
escape until she got out of the way. The window looked out on a
brick wall and down into an alley full of New York air, the kind
fit for cats and garbage. A few snow flakes drifted past the window
but they were too thin and scattered for his failing vision.
  The daughter was in the kitchen washing dishes. She dawdled
over everything, talking to herself. When he had first come, he had
answered her, but that had not been wanted. She glowered at him
as if, old fool that he was, he should still have had sense enough
not to answer a woman talking to herself. She questioned herself in
one voice and answered herself in another. With the energy he had
conserved yesterday letting her dress him, he had written a note
and pinned it in his pocket. IF FOUND DEAD SHIP EXPRESS COLLECT TO COLEMAN PARRUM, CORINTH, GEORGIA. Under this he had continued: COLEMAN SELL MY BELONGINGS AND PAY THE FREIGHT ON ME & THE UNDERTAKER. ANYTHING LEFT OVER YOU CAN KEEP. YOURS TRULY T. C.TANNER. 
P.S. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. DON'T LET THEM TALK YOU INTO
COMING UP HERE. ITS NO KIND OF PLACE. It had taken him the better
part of thirty minutes to write the paper; the script was wavery
but decipherable with patience. He controlled one hand by holding
the other on top of it. By the time he had got it written, she was
back in the apartment from getting her groceries.
  Today he was ready. All he had to do was push one foot in front
of the other until he got to the door and down the steps. Once down
the steps, he would get out of the neighborhood. Once out of it,
he would hail a taxi cab and go to the freight yards. Some bum
would help him onto a car. Once he got in the freight car, he would
lie down and rest. During the night the train would start South,
and the next day or the morning after, dead or alive, he would be
home. Dead or alive. It was being there that mattered; the dead
or alive did not.
  He had had good sense he would have gone the day after he
arrived; better sense and he would not have arrived. He had not
got desperate until two days ago when he had heard his daughter
and son-in-law taking leave of each other after breakfast. They were
standing in the front door, she seeing him off for a three-day trip.
He drove a long distance moving van. She must have handed him
his leather headgear. "You ought to get you a hat," she said, "a
real one."
  "And sit all day in it," the son-in-law said, "like him in there.
Yah! All he does is sit all day with that hat on. Sits all day with that
damn black hat on his head. Inside!"
  "Well you don't even have you a hat," she said. "Nothing but
that leather cap with flaps. People that are somebody wear hats.
Other kinds wear those leather caps like you got on."
  "People that are somebody!" he cried. "People that arc somebody!
That kills me! That really kills me!" The son-in-law had a stupid
muscular face and a yankee voice to go with it.
  "My daddy is here to stay," his daughter said. "He ain't going to
last long. He was somebody when he was somebody. He never
worked for nobody in his life but himself and had people--other
people--working for him."
  "Yah? Niggers is what he had working for him," the son-in-law
said. "That's all. I've worked a nigger or two myself."
  "Those were just nawthun niggers you worked," she said, her
voice suddenly going lower so that Tanner had to lean forward to
catch the words. "It takes brains to work a real nigger. You got to
know how to handle them."
  "Yah so I don't have brains," the son-in-law said.
  One of the sudden, very occasional, feelings of warmth for the
daughter came over Tanner. Every now and then she said something
that might make you think she had a little sense stored
away somewhere for safe keeping.
  "You got them," she said. "You don't always use them."
  "He has a stroke when he sees a nigger in the building," the
son-in-law said, "and she tells me ... "
  "Shut up talking so loud," she said. "That's not why he had the
stroke."
  There was a silence. "Where you going to bury him?" the son-in-
law asked, taking a different tack.
  "Bury who?"
  "Him in there."
  "Right here in New York," she said. "Where do you think? We
got a lot. I'm not taking that trip down there again with nobody."
  "Yah. Well I just wanted to make sure," he said.
  When she returned to the room, Tanner had both hands gripped
on the chair arms. His eyes were trained on her like the eyes of
an angry corpse. "You promised you'd bury me there," he said.
"Your promise ain't any good. Your promise ain’t any good. Your
promise ain't any good." His voice was so dry it was barely audible.
He began to shake, his hands, his head, his feet, "Bury me here
and burn in hell!" he cried and fell back into his chair.
  The daughter shuddered to attention. "You ain't dead yet!" She
threw out a ponderous sigh. "You got a long time to be worrying
about that." She turned and began to pick up parts of the newspaper
scattered on the floor. She had gray hair that hung to her shoulders
and a round face, beginning to wear. "I do every last living thing
for you," she muttered, "and this is the way you carryon." She
stuck the papers under her arm and said, "And don't throw hell at
me. I don't believe in it. That's a lot of hardshell Baptist hooey."
Then she went into the kitchen.
  He kept his mouth stretched taut, his top plate gripped between
his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Still the tears flooded down his
cheeks; he wiped each one furtively on his shoulder.
  Her voice rose from the kitchen. "As bad as having a child. He
wanted to come and now he's here, he don't like it."
  He had not wanted to come.
  "Pretended he didn't but I could tell. I said if you don't want to
come I can't make you. If you don't want to live like decent people
there's nothing I can do about it."
  "As for me," her higher voice said, "when I die that ain't the
time I'm going to start getting choosey. They can lay me in the
nearest spot. When I pass from this world I’ll be considerate of
them that stay in it. I won't be thinking of just myself."
  "Certainly not," the other voice said, "You never been that selfish.
  You're the kind that looks out for other people."
  "Well I try," she said, "I try."
  He laid his head on the back of the chair for a moment and the
hat tilted down over his eyes. He had raised three boys and her.
The three boys were gone, two in the war and one to the devil and
there was nobody left who felt a duty toward him but her, married
and childless, in New York City like Mrs. Big ; and ready when she
came back and found him living the way he was to take him back
with her. She had put her face in the door of the shack and had
stared, expressionless, for a second. Then all at once she had screamed
and jumped back.
  "What's that on the floor?"
  "Coleman," he said.
  The old Negro was curled up on a pallet asleep at the foot of
Tanner's bed, a stinking skin full of bones, arranged in what
seemed vaguely human form. When Coleman was young, he had
looked like a bear; now that he was old he looked like a monkey.
With Tanner it was the opposite; when he was young he had
looked like a monkey but when he got old. he looked like a bear.
The daughter stepped back onto the porch. There were the bottoms
of two cane chairs tilted against the clapboard but she declined
to take a seat. She stepped out about ten feet from the house as if
it took that much space to clear the odor. Then she had spoken her
piece.
  "If you don't have any pride I have and I know my duty and I
was raised to do it. My mother raised me to do it if you didn't. She
was from plain people but not the kind that likes to settle in with
niggers."
  At that point the old Negro roused up and slid out the door, a
doubled-up shadow which Tanner just caught sight of gliding
away.
  She had shamed him. He shouted so they both could hear. "Who
you think cooks? Who you think cuts my firewood and empties
my slops? He's paroled to me. That no-good scoundrel has been on
my hands for thirty years. He ain't a bad nigger."
  She was unimpressed. "Whose shack is this anyway?" she had
asked. "Yours or his?"
  "Him and me built it," he said. "You go on back up there. I
wouldn't come with you for no million dollars or no sack of salt."
  "It looks like him and you built it. Whose land is it on?"
  "Some people that live in Florida," he said evasively. He had
known then that it was land up for sale but he thought it was too
sorry for anyone to buy. That same afternoon he had found out
different. He had found out in time to go back with her. If he had
found out a day later, he might still be there, squatting on the
doctor's land.
  When he saw the brown porpoise-shaped figure striding across the
field that afternoon, he had known at once what had happened; no
one had to tell him. If that nigger had owned the whole world
except for one runty rutted peafield and he acquired it, he would
walk across it that way, beating the weeds aside, his thick neck
swelled, his stomach a throne for his gold watch and chain. Doctor
Foley. He was only part black. The rest was Indian and white.
He was everything to the niggers--druggist and undertaker and
general counsel and real estate man and sometimes he got the evil
eye off them and sometimes he put it on. Be prepared, he said to
himself, watching him approach, to take something off him, nigger
though he be. Be prepared, because you ain't got a thing to hold
up to him but the skin you come in, and that's no more use to you
now than what a snake would shed. You don't have a chance with
the government against you.
  He was sitting on the porch in the piece of straight chair tilted
against the shack. "Good evening, Foley," he said and nodded as
the doctor came up and stopped short at the edge of the clearing,
as if he had only just that minute seen him though it was plain he
had sighted him as he crossed the field.
  "I be out here to look at my property," the doctor said. "Good
evening." His voice was quick and high.
  Ain't been your property long, he said to himself. "I seen you coming,"
he said.
  "I acquired this here recently," the doctor said and proceeded
without looking at him again to walk around to one side of the
shack. In a moment he came back and stopped in front of him. Then
he stepped boldly to the door of the shack and put his head in.
Coleman was in there that time too, asleep. He looked for a moment
and then turned aside. "I know that nigger," he said. "Coleman
Parrum--how long does it take him to sleep off that stump liquor
you all make?"
  Tanner took hold of the knobs on the chair bottom and held them
hard. "This shack ain't in your property. Only on it, by my mistake,"
he said.
  The doctor removed his cigar momentarily from his mouth. "It
ain't my mistake," he said and smiled.
  He had only sat there, looking ahead.
  "It don't pay to make this kind of mistake," the doctor said.
  "I never found nothing that paid yet," he muttered.
  "Everything pays," the Negro said, "if you knows how to make
it," and he remained there smiling, looking the squatter up and
down. Then he turned and went around the other side of the shack.
There was a silence. He was looking for the still.
  Then would have been the time to kill him. There was a gun
inside the shack and he could have done it as easy as not, but, from
childhood, he had been weakened for that kind of violence by the
fear of hell. He had never killed one, he had always handled them
with his wits and with luck. He was known to have a way with
niggers. There was an art to handling them. The secret of handling
a nigger was to show him his brains didn't have a chance
against yours; then he would jump on your back and know he had
a good thing there for life. He had had Coleman on his back for
thirty years.
  Tanner had first seen Coleman when he was working six of them
at a saw mill in the middle of a pine forest fifteen miles from
nowhere. They were as sorry a crew as he had worked, the kind
that on Monday they didn't show up. What was in the air had
reached them. They thought there was a new Lincoln elected who
was going to abolish work. He managed them with a very sharp
penknife. He had had something wrong with his kidney then that
made his hands shake and he had taken to whittling to force that
waste motion out of sight. He did not intend them to see that his
hands shook of their own accord and he did not intend to see it
himself or to Countenance it. The knife had moved constantly,
violently, in his quaking hands and here and there small crude
figures-that he never looked at again and could not have said what
they were if he had-dropped to the ground. The Negroes picked
them up and took them home; there was not much time between
them and darkest Africa. The knife glittered constantly in his
hands. More than once he had stopped short and said in an off-hand
voice to some half-reclining, head-averted Negro, "Nigger, this knife
is in my hand now but if you don't quit wasting my time and
money, it'll be in your gut shortly." And the Negro would begin
to rise-slowly, but he would be in the act-before the sentence was
completed.
  A large black loose-jointed Negro, twice his own size, had begun
hanging around the edge of the saw mill, watching the others work
and when he was not watching, sleeping, in full view of them,
sprawled like a gigantic bear on his back. "Who is that?" he had
asked. "If he wants to work, tell him to come here. If he don't,
tell him to go. No idlers are going to hang around here."
  None of them knew who he was. They knew he didn't want to
work. They knew nothing else, not where he had come from, nor
why, though he was probably brother to one, cousin to all of them.
He had ignored him for a day; against the six of them he was one
yellow-faced scrawny white man with shaky hands. He was willing
to wait for trouble, but not forever. The next day the stranger
came again. After the six Tanner worked had seen the idler there
for half the morning, they quit and began to eat, a full thirty minutes
before noon. He had not risked ordering them up. He had gone to
the source of the trouble.
  The stranger was leaning against a tree on the edge of the clearing,
watching with half-closed eyes. The insolence on his face barely
covered the wariness behind it. His look said, this ain't much of
a white man so why he come on so big, what he fixing to do?
  He had meant to say, "Nigger, this knife is in my hand now but
if you ain't out of my sight ... " but as he drew closer he changed
his mind. The Negro's eyes were small and bloodshot. Tanner
supposed there was a knife on him somewhere that he would as
soon use as not. His own penknife moved, directed solely by some
intruding intelligence that worked in his hands. He had no idea
what he was carving, but when he reached the Negro, he had
already made two holes the size of half dollars in the piece of
bark.
  The Negro's gaze fell on his hands and was held. His jaw
slackened. His eyes did not move from the knife tearing recklessly
around the bark. He watched as if he saw an invisible power working
on the wood.
  He looked himself then and, astonished, saw the connected rims
of a pair of spectacles.
  He held them away from him and looked through the holes past
a pile of shavings and on into the woods to the edge of the pen
where they kept their mules.
  "You can't see so good, can you, boy?" he said and began scraping
the ground with his foot to turn up a piece of wire. He picked
up a small piece of haywire; in a minute he found another, shorter
piece and picked that up. He began to attach these to the bark. He
was in no hurry now that he knew what he was doing. When the
spectacles were finished, he handed them to the Negro. "Put these
on," he said. "I hate to see anybody can't see good."
  There was an instant when the Negro might have done one
thing or another, might have taken the glasses and crushed them
in his hand or grabbed the knife and turned it on him. He saw the
exact instant in the muddy liquor-swollen eyes when the pleasure
of having a knife in this white man's gut was balanced against something
else, he could not tell what.
  The Negro reached for the glasses. He attached the bows carefully
behind his ears and looked forth. He peered this way and that
with exaggerated solemnity. And then he looked directly at Tanner
and grinned, or grimaced, Tanner could not tell which, but he had
an instant's sensation of seeing before him a negative image of
himself, as if clownishness and captivity had been their common
lot. The vision failed him before he could decipher it.
  "Preacher," he said, "what you hanging around here for?" He
picked up another piece of bark and began, without looking at it,
to carve again. "This ain't Sunday."
  "This here ain't Sunday?" the Negro said.
  "This is Friday," he said. "That's the way it is with you preachers
--drunk all week so you don't know when Sunday is. What you
see through those glasses?"
  "See a man."
  "What kind of a man?"
  "See the man make theseyer glasses."
  "Is he white or black?"
  "He white!" the Negro said as if only at that moment was his
vision sufficiently improved to detect it. "Yessuh. he white!" he
said.
  "Well, you treat him like he was white," Tanner said. "What's
your name?"
  "Name Coleman," the Negro said.
  And he had not got rid of Coleman since. You make a monkey
out of one of them and he jumps on your back ;and stays there for
life, but let one make a monkey out of you and ail you can do is
kill him or disappear. And he was not going to hell for killing a
nigger. Behind the shack he heard the doctor kick over a bucket.
He sat and waited.
  In a moment the doctor appeared again, beating his way around
the other side of the house, whacking at scarred clumps of
Johnson grass with his cane. He stopped in the middle of the yard,
about where that morning the daughter had delivered her ultimatum.
  "You don't belong here," he began. "I could have you prosecuted."
  Tanner remained there, dumb, staring across the field.
  "Where's your still?" the doctor asked.
  "If it's a still around here, it don't belong to me,' he said and shut
his mouth tight.
  The Negro laughed softly. "Down on your luck, ain't you?" he
murmured. "Didn't you used to own a little piece of land over
acrost the river and lost it?"
  He had continued to study the woods ahead.
  "If you want to run the still for me, that's one thing," the doctor
said. "If you don't, you might as well had be packing up."
  "I don't have to work for you," he said. "The governmint ain't
got around yet to forcing the white folks to work for the colored."
  The doctor polished the stone in his ring with the ball of his
thumb. "I don't like the governmint no bettern you," he said.
  "Where you going instead? You going to the city and get you a
soot of rooms at the Biltmo' Hotel?"
  Tanner said nothing.
 "The day coming," the doctor said, "when the white folks IS
going to be working for the colored and you mights well to git
ahead of the crowd."
  "That day ain't coming for me," Tanner said shortly.
  "Done come for you," the doctor said. "Ain't come for the rest
of them."
  Tanner's gaze drove on past the farthest blue edge of the tree line
into the pale empty afternoon sky. "I got a daughter in the north,"
he said. "I don't have to work for you."
  The doctor took his watch from his watch pocket and looked at
it and put it back. He gazed for a moment at the back of his
hands. He appeared to have measured and to know secretly the
time it would take everything to change finally upside down. "She
don't want no old daddy like you," he said. "Maybe she say she
do, but that ain't likely. Even if you rich," he said, "they don't want
you. They got they own ideas. The black ones they rares and they
pitches. I made mine," he said, "and I ain't done none of that." He
looked again at Tanner. "I be back here next week," he said, "and
if you still here, I know you going to work for me." He remained
there a moment, rocking on his heels, waiting for some answer.
Finally he turned and started beating his way back through the
overgrown path.
  Tanner had continued to look across the field as  if his spirit had
been sucked out of him into the woods and nothing was left on
the chair but a shell. If he had known it was a question of this sitting
here looking out of this window all day ill this no-place, or
just running a still for a nigger, he would ha, c run the still for
the nigger. He would have been a nigger's white nigger any day.
Behind him he heard the daughter come in from the kitchen. His
heart accelerated but after a second he heard her plump herself down
on the sofa. She was not yet ready to go. He did not turn and look
at her.
  She sat there silently a few moments. Then she began. "The
trouble with you is," she said, "you sit in front of that window all
the time where there's nothing to look out at. You need some
inspiration and an out-let. If you would let me pull your chair
around to look at the TV, you would quit thinking about morbid
stuff, death and hell and judgement. My Lord."
  "The Judgement is coming," he muttered. "The sheep'll be
separated from the goats. Them that kept their promises from them
that didn't. Them that did the best they could with what they had
from them that didn't. Them that honored their father and their
mother from them that cursed them. Them that ... "
  She heaved a mammoth sigh that all but drowned him out.
"What's the use in me wasting my good breath?" she asked. She
rose and went back in the kitchen and began knocking things
about.
  She was so high and mighty! At home he had been living in a
shack but there was at least air around it. He could put his feet
on the ground. Here she didn't even live in a house. She lived in a
pigeon-hutch of a building, with all stripes of foreigner, all of
them twisted in the tongue. It was no place for a sane man. The
first morning here she had taken him sightseeing and he had
seen in fifteen minutes exactly how it was. He had not been out of
the apartment since. He never wanted to set foot again on the
underground railroad or the steps that moved under you while
you stood still or any elevator to the thirty-fourth floor. When he
was safely back in the apartment again, he had imagined going over
it with Coleman. He had to turn his head even few seconds to make
sure Coleman was behind him. Keep to the inside or these people'I1
knock you down, keep right behind me or you 'II get left, keep your
hat on, you damn idiot, he had said, and Coleman had come on with
his bent running shamble, panting and muttering, What we doing
here? Where you get this fool idea coming herc?
  I come to show you it was no kind of place. Now you know you
were well off where you were.
  I knowed it before, Coleman said. Was you didn't know it.
  When he had been here a week, he had got a postcard from
Coleman that had been written for him by Hooten at the railroad
station. It was written in green ink and said, "This is Coleman-X
-howyou boss." Under it Hooten had written from himself, "Quit
frequenting all those nitespots and come on home, you scoundrel,
yours truly. W. P. Hooten." He had sent Coleman a card in return,
care of Hooten, that said, "This place is alrite if you like it. Yours
truly, W. T. Tanner." Since the daughter had to mail the card,
he had not put on it that he was returning as soon as his pension
check came. He had not intended to tell her but to leave her a note.
When the check came, he would hire himself a taxi to the bus
station and be on his way. And it would have nude her as happy
as it made him. She had found his company dour and her duty
irksome. If he had sneaked out, she would have had the pleasure of
having tried to do it and to top that off, the pleasure of his
ingratitude.
  As for him, he would have returned to squat on the doctor's land
and to take his orders from a nigger who chewed ten-cent cigars.
And to think less about it than formerly. Instead he had been done
in by a nigger actor, or one who called himself an actor. He didn't
believe the nigger was any actor.
  There were two apartments on each floor of the building, He had
been with the daughter three weeks when the people in the next
hutch moved out. He had stood in the hall and watched the movingout
and the next day he had watched a moving-In. The hall was
narrow and dark and he stood in the corner out of the way, offering
only a suggestion every now and then to the mover s that would
have made their work easier for them if they had paid any attention.
The furniture was new and cheap so he decided the people
moving in might be a newly married couple and he would just wait
around until they came and wish them well. After a while a large
Negro in a light blue suit came lunging up the stairs, carrying
two canvas suitcases, his head lowered against the strain. Behind
him stepped a young tan-skinned woman with bright coppercolored
hair. The Negro dropped the suitcases with a thud in front
of the door of the next apartment.
  "Be careful, Sweetie," the woman said. "My make-up is in there."
It broke upon him then just what was happening.
  The Negro was grinning. He took a swipe at one of her hips.
  "Quit it," she said, "there's an old guy watching."
  They both turned and looked at him.
  "Had-do," he said and nodded. Then he turned quickly into his
own door.
  His daughter was in the kitchen. "Who you think's rented that
apartment over there?" he asked, his face alight.
  She looked at him suspiciously. "Who?" she muttered.
  "A niggerl" he said in a gleeful voice. "A South Alabama nigger
if I ever saw one. And got him this high-yeller, high-stepping
woman with red hair and they two are going to live next door to
you!" He slapped his knee. "Yes siree!" he said. "Damn if they
ain't!" It was the first time since coming up here that he had had
occasion to laugh.
  Her face squared up instantly. "All right now you listen to me,"
she said. "You keep away from them. Don't you go over there
trying to get friendly with him. They ain't the same around here
and I don't want any trouble with niggers, you hear me? If you
have to live next to them, just you mind your business and they'll
mind theirs. That's the way people were meant to get along in this
world. Everybody can get along if they just mind their business.
Live and let live." She began to wrinkle her nose like a rabbit, a
stupid way she had. "Up here everybody minds their own business
and everybody gets along. That's all you have to do."
  "I was getting along with niggers before you were born," he
said. He went back out into the hall and waited. He was willing to
bet the nigger would like to talk to someone who understood him.
Twice while he waited, he forgot and in his excitement, spit his
tobacco juice against the baseboard. In about twenty minutes, the
door of the apartment opened again and the Negro came out. He
had put on a tie and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and Tanner
noticed for the first time that he had a small almost invisible goatee.
A real swell. He came on without appearing to see there was anyone
else in the hall.
  "Haddy, John," Tanner said and nodded, but the Negro brushed
past without hearing and went rattling rapidly down the stairs.
  Could be deaf and dumb, Tanner thought. He went back into
the apartment and sat down but each time he heard a noise in the
hall, he got up and went to the door and stuck his head out to see
if it might be the Negro. Once in the middle of the afternoon, he
caught the Negro's eye just as he was rounding the bend of the
stairs again but before he could get out a word, the man was in his
own apartment and had slammed the door. He had never known
one to move that fast unless the police were after him.
  He was standing in the hall early the next morning when the
woman came out of her door alone, walking on high gold-painted
heels. He wished to bid her good morning or simply to nod but
instinct told him to beware. She didn't look like any kind of woman,
black or white, he had ever seen before and he remained pressed
against the wall, frightened more than anything else, and feigning
invisibility.
  The woman gave him a flat stare, then turned her head away
and stepped wide of him as if she were skirting an open garbage
can. He held his breath until she was out of sight. Then he waited
patiently for the man.
  The Negro came out about eight o'clock.
  This time Tanner advanced squarely in his path. "Good morning,
Preacher," he said. It had been his experience that if a Negro tended
to be sullen, this title usually cleared up his expression.
  The Negro stopped abruptly.
  "I seen you move in," Tanner said. "I ain't been up here long myself.
  It ain't much of a place if you ask me. I reckon you wish you
were back in South Alabama."
  The Negro did not take a step or answer. His eyes began to move.
They moved from the top of the black hat, down to the collarless
blue shirt, neatly buttoned at the neck, down the faded galluses to
the gray trousers and the high-top shoes and up again, very slowly,
while some unfathomable dead-cold rage seemed to stiffen and
shrink him.
  "I thought you might know somewhere around here we could
find us a pond, Preacher," Tanner said in a voice growing thinner
but still with considerable hope in it.
  A seething noise came out of the Negro before he spoke. "I'm
not from South Alabama," he said in a breathless wheezing voice.
"I'm from New York City. And I'm not no preacher] I'm an actor."
  Tanner chortled. "It's a little actor in most preachers, ain't it?" he
said and winked. "I reckon you just preach on the side."
  "I don't preach!" the Negro cried and rushed past him as if a
swarm of bees had suddenly come down on him out of nowhere. He
dashed down the stairs and was gone.
  Tanner stood here for some time before he went back in the apartment.
The rest of the day he sat in his chair and debated whether
he would have one more try at making friends with him. Every
time he heard a noise on the stairs he went to the door and looked
out, but the Negro did not return until late in the afternoon. Tanner
was standing in the hall waiting for him when he reached the top
of the stairs. "Good evening, preacher," he said, forgetting that the
Negro called himself an actor.
  The Negro stopped and gripped the banister rail. A tremor racked
him from his head to his crotch. Then he began to come forward
slowly. When he was close enough he lunged and grasped Tanner
by both shoulders. "I don't take no crap," he whispered, "off no
wool-hat red-neck son-of-a-bitch peckerwood old bastard like you."
He caught his breath. And then his voice came out in the sound
of an exasperation so profound that it rocked on the verge of a
laugh. It was high and piercing and weak, "And I'm not no
preacher! I'm not even no Christian. I don't believe that crap. There
ain't no Jesus and there ain't no God."
  The old man felt his heart inside him hard and tough as an oak
knot. "And you ain't black," he said. "And I ain't white!"
  The Negro slammed him against the wall. He yanked the black
hat down over his eyes. Then he grabbed his shirt front and shoved
him backwards to his open door and knocked him through it. From
the kitchen the daughter saw him blindly hit the edge of the inside
hall door and fall reeling into the living room.
  For days his tongue appeared to be frozen in his mouth. When
it unthawed it was twice its normal size and he could not make
her understand him. What he wanted to know was if the government
check had come because he meant to buy a bus ticket with
it and go home. After a few days, he made her understand. "It
came," she said, "and it'll just pay the first two weeks' doctor-bill
and please tell me how you're going home when you can't talk or
walk or think straight and you got one eye crossed yet? Just please
tell me that?"
  It had come to him then slowly just what his present situation was.
At least he would have to make her understand that he must be
sent home to be buried. They could have him shipped back in a
refrigerated car so that he would keep for the trip. He didn't want
any undertaker up here messing with him. Let them get him off
at once and he would come in on the early morning train and they
could wire Hooten to get Coleman and Coleman would do the rest;
she would not even have to go herself. After a lot of argument, he
wrung the promise from her. She would ship him back.
  After that he slept peacefully and improved a little. In his dreams
he could feel the cold early morning air of home coming in through
the cracks of the pine box. He could see Coleman waiting, red-eyed,
on the station platform and Hooten standing there with his green
eyeshade and black alpaca sleeves. If the old fool had stayed at home
where he belonged, Hooten would be thinking, he wouldn't be
arriving on the 6:03 in no box. Coleman had turned the borrowed
mule and cart so that they could slide the box off the platform onto
the open end of the wagon. Everything was ready and the two
of them, shut-mouthed, inched the loaded coffin toward the wagon.
From inside he began to scratch on the wood. They let go as if
it had caught fire.
   They stood looking at each other, then at the box.
  "That him," Coleman said. "He in there his self."
  "Naw," Hooten said, "must be a rat got in there with him."
  "That him. This here one of his tricks."
  "If it's a rat he might as well stay."
  "That him. Git a crowbar."
  Hooten went grumbling off and got the crowbar and came back
and began to pry open the lid. Even before he had the upper end
pried open, Coleman was jumping up and down, wheezing and
panting from excitement. Tanner gave a thrust upward with both
hands and sprang up in the box. "Judgement Day! Judgement
Day!" he cried. "Don't you two fools know it's Judgement Day?"
  Now he knew exactly what her promises were worth. He would
do as well to trust to the note pinned in his coat and to any stranger
who found him dead in the street or in the boxcar or wherever.
There was nothing to be looked for from her except that she would
do things her way. She came out of the kitchen again, holding her
hat and coat and rubber boots.
  "Now listen," she said, "I have to go to the store, Don't you try
to get up and walk around while I'm gone. You've been to the
bathroom and you shouldn't have to go again. I don't want to find
you on the floor when I get back."
  You won't find me atall when you get back, he said to himself.
This was the last time he would see her Hat dumb face. He felt
guilty. She had been good to him and he had been nothing but a
nuisance to her.
  "Do you want you a glass of milk before I go)" she asked.
  "No," he said. Then he drew breath and said, "You got a nice
place here. It's a nice part of the country. I'm sorry if I've give
you a lot of trouble getting sick. It was my fault trying to be friendly
with that nigger." And I'm a damned liar besides, he said to himself
to kill the outrageous taste such a statement made in his mouth.
For a moment she stared as if he were losing his mind. Then she
seemed to think better of it. "Now don't saying something pleasant
like that once in a while make you feel better?" ,he asked and sat
down on the sofa.
  His knees itched to unbend. Git on, git on, he fumed silently. Make
haste and go.
  "It's great to have you here," she said. "I  wouldn't have you any
other place. My own daddy." She gave him a big smile and hoisted
her right leg up and began to pull on her boot. "I wouldn't wish
a dog out on a day like this," she said, "but I got to go. You can
sit here and hope I don't slip and break my neck." She stamped the
booted foot on the floor and then began to tackle the other one.
He turned his eyes to the window. The snow was beginning to
stick and freeze to the outside pane. When he looked at her again,
she was standing there like a big doll stuffed in its hat and coat.
She drew on a pair of green knitted glaves. "Okay," she said, ''I'm
gone. You sure you don't want anything?"
  "No," he said, "go ahead on."
  "Well so long then," she said.
  He raised the hat enough to reveal a bald palely speckled head.
The hall door closed behind her. He began to tremble with excitement.
He reached behind him and drew the coat into his lap.
When he got it on, he waited until he had stopped panting, then
he gripped the arms of the chair and pulled himself up. His body
felt like a great heavy bell whose clapper swung from side to side but
made no noise. Once up, he remained standing a moment, swaying
until he got his balance. A sensation of terror and defeat swept
over him. He would never make it. He would never get there dead
or alive. He pushed one foot forward and did not fall and his
confidence returned. "The Lord is my shepherd," he muttered, "I
shall not want." He began moving toward the sofa where he would
have support. He reached it. He was on his way.
  By the time he got to the door, she would be down the four
flights of steps and out of the building. He got past the sofa and
crept along by the wall, keeping his hand on it for support. Nobody
was going to bury him here. He was as confident as if the woods of
home lay at the bottom of the stairs. He reached the front door of
the apartment and opened it and peered into the hall. This was the
first time he had looked into it since the actor had knocked him
down. It was dank-smelling and empty. The thin piece of linoleum
stretched its moldy length to the door of the other apartment, which
was closed. "Nigger actor," he said.
  The head of the stairs was ten or twelve feet from where he stood
and he bent his attention to getting there without creeping around
the long way with a hand on the wall. He held his arms a little way
out from his sides and pushed forward directly. He was halfway
there when all at once his legs disappeared, or felt as if they had.
He looked down, bewildered, for they were still there. He fell
forward and grasped the banister post with both hands. Hanging
there, he gazed for what seemed the longest time he had ever looked
at anything down the steep unlighted steps; then he closed his
eyes and pitched forward. He landed upside down in the middle of
the flight.
  He felt presently the tilt of the box as they took it off the train
and got it on the baggage wagon. He made no noise yet. The train
jarred and slid away. In a moment the baggage wagon was rumbling
under him, carrying him back to the station side. He heard footsteps
rattling closer and closer to him and he supposed that a crowd
was gathering. Wait until they see this, he thought.
  "That him," Coleman said, "one of his tricks."
  "It's a damm rat in there," Hooten said.
  "It's him. Git the crowbar."
  In a moment a shaft of greenish light fell on him. He pushed
through it and cried in a weak voice, "Judgement Day! Judgement
Day! You idiots didn't know it was Judgement Day, did you?"
"Coleman?" he murmured.
  The Negro bending over him had a large surly mouth and sullen
eyes.
  "Ain't any coal man, either," he said. This must be the wrong
station, Tanner thought. Those fools put me off too soon. Who is
this nigger? It ain't even daylight here.
  At the Negro's side was another face, a woman's --pale, topped
with a pile of copper-glinting hair and twisted as if she had just
stepped in a pile of dung.
  "Oh," Tanner said, "it's you."
  The actor leaned closer and grasped him by the front of his
shirt. "Judgement day," he said in a mocking voice. "Ain't no judgement
day, old man. Cept this. Maybe this here judgement day for
you."
  Tanner tried to catch hold of a banister-spoke to raise himself
but his hand grasped air. The two faces, the black one and the pale
one, appeared to be wavering. By an effort of will he kept them
focused before him while he lifted his hand, as light as a breath, and
said in his jauntiest voice, "Hep me up, Preacher. I'm on my way
home!"
  His daughter found him when she came in from the grocery store.
His hat had been pulled down over his face and his head and arms
thrust between the spokes of the banister; his feet dangled over the
stairwell like those of a man in the stocks. She tugged at him frantically
and then flew for the police. They cut him out with a saw and
said he had been dead about an hour.
  She buried him in New York City, but after she had done it she
could not sleep at night. Night after night she turned and tossed
and very definite lines began to appear in her face, so she had him
dug up and shipped the body to Corinth. Now she rests well at
night and her good looks have mostly returned.

End