The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [109]
“It is no man,” Mrs. Shortley said emphatically, “that works as hard as Chancey, or is as easy with a cow, or is more of a Christian,” and she folded her arms and her gaze pierced the distance. The noise of the tractor and cutter increased and Mr. Guizac appeared coming around the other side of the cane row. “Which can not be said about everybody,” she muttered. She wondered whether, if the Pole found Chancey’s still, he would know what it was. The trouble with these people was, you couldn’t tell what they knew. Every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley’s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiment station.
The tractor, the cutter, the wagon passed, rattling and rumbling and grinding before them. “Think how long that would have taken with men and mules to do it,” Mrs. McIntyre shouted. “We’ll get this whole bottom cut within two days at this rate.”
“Maybe,” Mrs. Shortley muttered, “if don’t no terrible accident occur.” She thought how the tractor had made mules worthless. Nowadays you couldn’t give away a mule. The next thing to go, she reminded herself, will be niggers.
In the afternoon she explained what was going to happen to them to Astor and Sulk who were in the cow lot, filling the manure spreader. She sat down next to the block of salt under a small shed, her stomach in her lap, her arms on top of it. “All you colored people better look out,” she said. “You know how much you can get for a mule.”
“Nothing, no indeed,” the old man said, “not one thing.”
“Before it was a tractor,” she said, “it could be a mule. And before it was a Displaced Person, it could be a nigger. The time is going to come,” she prophesied, “when it won’t be no more occasion to speak of a nigger.”
The old man laughed politely. “Yes indeed” he said. “Ha ha.”
The young one didn’t say anything. He only looked sullen but when she had gone in the house, he said, “Big Belly act like she know everything.”
“Never mind,” the old man said, “your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it.”
She didn’t tell her fears about the still to Mr. Shortley until he was back on the job in the dairy. Then one night after they were in bed, she said, “That man prowls.”
Mr. Shortley folded his hands on his bony chest and pretended he was a corpse.
“Prowls,” she continued and gave him a sharp kick in the side with her knee. “Who’s to say what they know and don’t know? Who’s to say if he found it he wouldn’t go right to her and tell? How you know they don’t make liquor in Europe? They drive tractors. They got them all kinds of machinery. Answer me.”
“Don’t worry me now,” Mr. Shortlev said. “I’m a dead man.”
“It’s them little eyes of his that’s foreign.” She muttered. “And that way he’s got of shrugging.” She drew her shoulders up and shrugged several times. “How come he’s got everything to shrug about?” she asked.
“If everybody was as dead as I am, nobody would have no trouble,” Mr. Shortley said.
“That priest,” she muttered and was silent or a minute. Then she said, “In Europe they probably got some different way to make liquor but I reckon they know all the ways. They’re full of crooked ways. They never have advanced or reformed. They got the same religion as a thousand years ago. It could only be the devil responsible for that. Always fighting amongst each other. Disputing. And then get us into it. Ain’t they got us into it twict already and we ain’t got no more sense than to go over there and settle it for them and then they come on back over here and snoop around and find your still and go straight to her. And liable to kiss her hand any minute. Do you hear me?”
“No,” Mr. Shortley said.
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” she said. ‘ I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he don’t know everything you say. whether it be in English or not.”
“I don’t speak no other language,” Mr. Shortley murmured.
“I suspect,” she said, “that before long there won’t be no more niggers on this place. And I tell you what. I’d rather have niggers than them Poles. And what’s furthermore, I aim to take up for the niggers when the