Flannery O'Connor Complete Short Stories (26 page)

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.

She meant to tell him that
her
moral obligation was to her own people, to Mr. Shortley, who had fought in the world war for his country and not to Mr. Guizac who had merely arrived here to take advantage of whatever he could. She felt she must have this out with the priest before she fired the Displaced Person. When the first of the month came and the priest hadn't called, she put off giving the Pole notice for a little longer.

Mr. Shortley told himself that he should have known all along that no woman was going to do what she said she was when she said she was. He didn't know how long he could afford to put up with her shillyshallying. He thought himself that she was going soft and was afraid to turn the Pole out for fear he would have a hard time getting another place. He could tell her the truth about this: that if she let him go, in three years he would own his own house and have a television aerial sitting on top of it. As a matter of policy, Mr. Shortley began to come to her back door every evening to put certain facts before her. “A white man sometimes don't get the consideration a nigger gets,” he said, “but that don't matter because he's still white, but sometimes,” and here he would pause and look off into the distance, “a man that's fought and bled and died in the service of his native land don't get the consideration of one of them like them he was fighting. I ast you: is that right?” When he asked her such questions he could watch her face and tell he was making an impression. She didn't look too well these days. He noticed lines around her eyes that hadn't been there when he and Mrs. Shortley had been the only white help on the place. Whenever he thought of Mrs. Shortley, he felt his heart go down like an old bucket into a dry well.

The old priest kept away as if he had been frightened by his last visit but finally, seeing that the Displaced Person had not been fired, he ventured to call again to take up giving Mrs. McIntyre instructions where he remembered leaving them off. She had not asked to be instructed but he instructed anyway, forcing a little definition of one of the sacraments or of some dogma into each conversation he had, no matter with whom. He sat on her porch, taking no notice of her partly mocking, partly outraged expression as she sat shaking her foot, waiting for an opportunity to drive a wedge into his talk. “For,” he was saying, as if he spoke of something that had happened yesterday in town, “when God sent his Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord”—he slightly bowed his head—“as a Redeemer to mankind, He . . .”

“Father Flynn!” she said in a voice that made him jump. “I want to talk to you about something serious!”

The skin under the old man's right eye flinched.

“As far as I'm concerned,” she said and glared at him fiercely, “Christ was just another D.P.”

He raised his hands slightly and let them drop on his knees. “Arrrrrr,” he murmured as if he were considering this.

“I'm going to let that man go,” she said. “I don't have any obligation to him. My obligation is to the people who've done something for their country, not to the ones who've just come over to take advantage of what they can get,” and she began to talk rapidly, remembering all her arguments. The priest's attention seemed to retire to some private oratory to wait until she got through. Once or twice his gaze roved out onto the lawn as if he were hunting some means of escape but she didn't stop. She told him how she had been hanging onto this place for thirty years, always just barely making it against people who came from nowhere and were going nowhere, who didn't want anything but an automobile. She said she had found out they were the same whether they came from Poland or Tennessee. When the Guizacs got ready, she said, they would not hesitate to leave her. She told him how the people who looked rich were the poorest of all because they had the most to keep up. She asked him how he thought she paid her feed bills. She told him she would like to have her house done over but she couldn't afford it. She couldn't even afford to have the monument restored over her husband's grave. She asked him if he would like to guess what her insurance amounted to for the year. Finally she asked him if he thought she was made of money and the old man suddenly let out a great ugly bellow as if this were a comical question.

When the visit was over, she felt let down, though she had clearly triumphed over him. She made up her mind now that on the first of the month, she would give the Displaced Person his thirty days' notice and she told Mr. Shortley so
.

Mr. Shortley didn't say anything. His wife had been the only woman he was ever acquainted with who was never scared off from doing what she said. She said the Pole had been sent by the devil and the priest. Mr. Shortley had no doubt that the priest had got some peculiar control over Mrs. McIntyre and that before long she would start attending his Masses. She looked as if something was wearing her down from the inside. She was thinner and more fidgety, and not as sharp as she used to be. She would look at a milk can now and not see how dirty it was and he had seen her lips move when she was not talking. The Pole never did anything the wrong way but all the same he was very irritating to her. Mr. Shortley himself did things as he pleased—not always her way—but she didn't seem to notice. She had noticed though that the Pole and all his family were getting fat; she pointed out to Mr. Shortley that the hollows had come out of their cheeks and that they saved every cent they made. “Yes'm, and one of these days he'll be able to buy and sell you out,” Mr. Shortley had ventured to say, and he could tell that the statement had shaken her.

“I'm just waiting for the first,” she had said.

Mr. Shortley waited too and the first came and went and she didn't fire him. He could have told anybody how it would be. He was not a violent man but he hated to see a woman done in by a foreigner. He felt that that was one thing a man couldn't stand by and see happen.

There was no reason Mrs. McIntyre should
not fire Mr. Guizac at once but she put it off from day to day. She was worried about her bills
and about her health. She didn't sleep
at night or when she did she dreamed about the Displaced
Person. She had never discharged anyone before; they had all left
her. One night she dreamed that Mr. Guizac and his family
were moving into her house and that she was moving in with Mr. Shortley. This was too much for her and she woke up and didn't sleep again for several nights; and one night she dreamed that the priest came to call
and droned on and on saying, “Dear lady,
I know your tender heart won't suffer you to turn the porrrrr man out. Think of the thousands of them, think of the ovens and the boxcars and the camps and the sick children
and Christ Our Lord.”

“He's extra and he's upset the balance around here,” she said, “and I'm a logical practical
woman and there are no ovens here and no camps and no Christ Our Lord and when he leaves, he'll make more money. He'll
work at the mill
and buy a car and don't talk to me—all they want is a car.”

“The ovens and the boxcars and the sick children,” droned the priest, “and our dear Lord.”

“Just one too many,” she said.

The next morning, she made up her mind while she was eating her breakfast that she would give him his notice at once, and she stood up and walked
out of the kitchen and down the road with her table napkin still
in her hand. Mr. Guizac was spraying the barn, standing in his swaybacked way with one hand on his hip. He turned off the hose and gave her an impatient kind of attention as if she were interfering with his work. She had not thought of what she would say to him, she had merely come. She stood in the barn door, looking severely
at the wet spotless
floor and the dripping stanchions. “Ya goot?” he said.

“Mr. Guizac,” she said, “I can barely meet my obligations now.” Then she said in a louder,
stronger voice, emphasizing each word, “I have bills
to pay.”

“I too,” Mr. Guizac said. “Much bills, little money,” and he shrugged.

At the other end of the barn, she saw a long
beak-nosed shadow glide
like
a snake halfway up the sunlit open door and stop; and somewhere behind her, she was aware of a silence where the sound of the Negroes shoveling had come a minute before. “This is my place,” she said angrily. “All of you are extra. Each and every one of you are extra!”

“Ya,” Mr. Guizac said and turned on the hose again.

She wiped her mouth with the napkin she had in her hand and walked off, as if she had accomplished what she came for.

Mr. Shortley's shadow withdrew from the door and he leaned against the side of the barn and lit half of a cigarette that he took out of his pocket. There was nothing for him to do now but wait on the hand of God to strike, but he knew one thing: he was not going to wait with his mouth shut.

Starting that morning, he began to complain and to state his side of the case to every person he saw, black or white. He complained in the grocery store and at the courthouse and on the street corner and directly to Mrs. McIntyre herself, for there was nothing underhanded about him. If the Pole could have understood what he had to say, he would have said it to him too. “All men was created free and equal,” he said to Mrs. McIntyre, “and I risked my life and limb to prove it. Gone over there and fought and bled and died and come back on over here and find out who's got my job—just exactly who I been fighting. It was a hand grenade come that near to killing me and I seen who throwed it—little man with eyeglasses just like his. Might have bought them at the same store. Small world,” and he gave a bitter little laugh. Since he didn't have Mrs. Shortley to do the talking any more, he had started doing it himself and had found that he had a gift for it. He had the power of making other people see his logic. He talked a good deal to the Negroes.

“Whyn't you go back to Africa?” he asked Sulk one morning as they were cleaning out the silo. “That's your country, ain't it?”

“I ain't gain there,” the boy said. “They might eat me up.”

“Well, if you behave yourself it isn't any reason you can't stay here,” Mr. Shortley said kindly. “Because you didn't run away from nowhere. Your granddaddy was bought. He didn't have a thing to do with coming. It's the people that run away from where they come from that I ain't got any use for.”