GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE
Flannery O’Connor
Gothic Digital Series @ UFSC
FREE FOR EDUCATION
Good Country People
(A good man is hard to find, 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 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 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 twostory 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, facedown, 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 freezingblue 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 evilsmelling onion shoot she
was lifting from the ground. “Some can‖t be that simple,” she said. “I know I never
could.”
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