The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [123]
“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 load 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 everyone 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.”
“I never felt no need to travel,” the Negro said.
“Well,” Mr. Shortley said, “if I was going to travel again, it would be to either China or Africa. You go to either of them two places and you can tell right away what the difference is between you and them. You go to these other places and the only way you can tell is if they say something. And then you can’t always tell because about half of them know the English language. That’s where we make our mistake,” he said,“—letting all them people onto English. There’d be a heap less trouble if everybody only knew his own