English Literature
“Good Country People”
By Flannery O'Connor
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 blonds 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.”
25
