The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [131]
Mount St. Scholastica was a red brick house set back in a garden in the center of town. There was a filling station on one side of and a firehouse on the other. It had a high black grillework fence around it and narrow bricked walks between old trees and japonica bushes that were heavy with blooms. A big moon-faced nun came bustling to the door to let them in and embraced her mother and would have done the same to her but that she stuck out her hand and preserved a frigid frown, looking just past the sister’s shoes at the wainscoting. They had a tendency to kiss even homely children, but the nun shook her hand vigorously and even cracked her knuckles a little and said she must come to the chapel, that benediction was just beginning. You put your foot in their door and they got you praying, the child thought as they hurried down the polished corridor.
You’d think she had to catch a train, she continued in the same ugly vein as they entered the chapel when the sisters were kneeling on one side and the girls, all in brown uniforms, on the other. The chapel smelled of incense. It was light green and gold, a series of springing arches that ended with the one over the altar where the priest was kneeling in front of the monstrance, bowed low. A small boy in a surplice was standing behind him, swinging the censer. The child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were well into the “Tantum Ergo” before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God. Help me not to be so mean, she began mechanically. Help me not to give her so much sass. Help me not to talk like I do. Her mind began to get quiet and then empty but when the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it, she was thinking of the tent at the fair that had the freak in it. The freak was saying, “I don’t dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be.”
As they were leaving the convent door, the big nun swooped down on her mischievously and nearly smothered her in the black habit, mashing the side of her face into the crucifix hitched onto her belt and then holding her off and looking at her with little periwinkle eyes.
On the way home she and her mother sat in the back and Alonzo drove by himself in the front. The child observed three folds of fat in the back of his neck and noted that his ears were pointed almost like a pig’s. Her mother, making conversation, asked him if he had gone to the fair.
“Gone,” he said, “and never missed a thing and it was good I gone when I did because they ain’t going to have it next week like they said they was.”
“Why?” asked her mother.
“They shut it on down,” he said. “Some of the preachers from town gone out and inspected it and got the police to shut it on down.”
Her mother let the conversation drop and the child’s round face was lost in thought. She turned it toward the window and looked out over a stretch of pasture land that rose and fell with a gathering greenness until it touched the dark woods. The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.
The Artificial Nigger (1955)
Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards the color of silver and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade,