The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [105]
The priest spoke in a foreign way himself, English but as if he had a throatful of hay. He had a big nose and a bald rectangular face and head. While she was observing him, his large mouth dropped open and with a stare behind her, he said, “Arrrrrrr!” and pointed.
Mrs. Shortley spun around. The peacock was standing a few feet behind her, with his head slightly cocked.
“What a beautiful birdrrrd!” the priest murmured.
“Another mouth to feed,” Mrs. Mcintyre said, glancing in the peafowl’s direction.
“And when does he raise his splendid tail?” Asked the priest.
“Just when it suits him,” she said. “There used to be twenty or thirty of those things on the place but I’ve let them die off. I don’t like to hear them scream in the middle of the night.”
“So beautiful,” the priest said. “A tail full of suns,” and he crept forward on tiptoe and looked down on the bird’s back where the polished gold and green design began. The peacock stood still as if he had just come down from some sun-drenched height to be a vision for them all. The priest’s homely red face hung over him, glowing with pleasure.
Mrs. Shortley’s mouth had drawn acidly to one side. “Nothing but a peachicken,” she muttered.
Mrs. Mcintyre raised her orange eyebrows and exchanged a look with her to indicate that the old man was in his second childhood. “Well, we must show the Guizacs their new home,” she said impatiently and she herded them into the car again. The peacock stepped off toward the mulberry tree where the two Negroes were hiding and the priest turned his absorbed face away and got in the car and drove the displaced people down to the shack they were to occupy.
Mrs. Shortley waited until the car was out of sight and then she made her way circuitously to the mulberry tree and stood about ten feet behind the two Negroes, one an old man holding a bucket half full of calf feed and the other a yellowish boy with a short woodchuck-like head pushed into a rounded felt hat. “Well,” she said slowly, “yawl have looked long enough. What you think about them?”
The old man, Astor, raised himself. “We been watching,” he said as if this would be news to her. “Who they now?”
“They come from over the water,” Mrs. Shortley said with a wave of her arm. “They’re what is called Displaced Persons.”
“Displaced Persons,” he said. “Well now. I declare. What do that mean?”
“It means they ain’t where they were born at and there’s nowhere for them to go—like if you was run out of here and wouldn’t nobody have you.”
“It seem like they here, though,” the old man said in a reflective voice. “If they here, they somewhere.”
“Sho is,” the other agreed. “They here.”
The illogic of Negro-thinking always irked Mrs. Shortley. “They ain’t where they belong to be at,” she said. “They belong to be back over yonder where everything is still like they been used to. Over here it’s more advanced than where they come from. But yawl better look out now,” she said and nodded her head. “There’s about ten million billion more just like them and I know what Mrs. McIntyre said.”
“Say what?” the young one asked.
“Places are not easy to get nowadays, for white or black, but I reckon I heard what she stated to me,” she said in a sing-song voice.
“You liable to hear most anything,” the old man remarked, leaning forward as if he were about to walk off but holding himself suspended.
“I heard her say, ‘This is going to put the Fear of the Lord into those shiftless niggers!’” Mrs. Shortley said in a ringing voice.
The old man started off. “She say something like that every now and then,” he said. “Ha, Ha. Yes indeed.”
“You better get on in that barn and help Mr. Shortley,” she said to the other one. “What you reckon she pays you for?”
“He the one sent me out,” the Negro muttered. “He the one gimme something else to do.”
“Well you better get to doing it then,