Flannery O'Connor Complete Short Stories Page 26

  “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 goin 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. McIntyre 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 was 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 axe old man Herrin had used to break it off with had struck slightly too high. Mrs. McIntyre 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 woman 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. Shortley’s 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 man 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 to 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 on 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’ silver-green, glinting in the late afternoon sun.

  “Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. McIntyre 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 it 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 side 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 farmwork 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 back 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 Displaced Person had expected them to work as hard as he worked himself, whereas Mr. Shortley recognized their limitations. He had never been a very good worker himself with Mrs. Shortley 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.