The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [133]
He was awakened at three-thirty by the smell of fatback frying and he leaped off his cot. The pallet was empty and the clothes boxes had been thrown open. He put on his trousers and ran into the other room. The boy had a corn pone on cooking and had fried the meat. He was sitting in the half-dark at the table, drinking cold coffee out of a can. He had on his new suit and his new gray hat pulled low over his eyes. It was too big for him but they had ordered it a size large because they expected his head to grow. He didn’t say anything but his entire figure suggested satisfaction at having arisen before Mr. Head.
Mr. Head went to the stove and brought the meat to the table in the skillet.”It’s no hurry,” he said. “You’ll get there soon enough and it’s no guarantee you’lllike it when you do neither,” and he sat down across from the boy whose hatteetered back slowly to reveal a fiercely expressionless face, very much the sameshape as the old man’s. They were grandfather and grandson but they looked enough alike to be brothers and brothers not too far apart in age, for Mr. Head had ayouthful expression by daylight, while the boy’s look was ancient, as if he kneweverything already and would be pleased to forget it.
Mr. Head had once had a wife and daughter and when the wife died, the daughter ran away and returned after an interval with Nelson. Then one morning, without getting out of bed, she died and left Mr. Head with sole care of the year-old child. He had made the mistake of telling Nelson that he had been born in Atlanta. If he hadn’t told him that, Nelson couldn’t have insisted that this was going to be his second trip.
“You may not like it a bit,” Mr. Head continued. “It’ll be full of niggers.”
The boy made a face as if he could handle a nigger.
“All right,” Mr. Head said. “You ain’t ever seen a nigger.”
“You wasn’t up very early,” Nelson said.
“You ain’t ever seen a nigger,” Mr. Head repeated. “There hasn’t been a nigger in this county since we run that one out twelve years ago and that was before you were born.” He looked at the boy as if he were daring him to say he had ever seen a Negro.
“How you know I never saw a nigger when I lived there before?” Nelson asked. “I probably saw a lot of niggers.”
“If you seen one you didn’t know what he was,” Mr. Head said, completely exasperated. “A six-month-old child don’t know a nigger from anybody else.”
“I reckon I’ll know a nigger if I see one,” the boy said and got up and straightened his slick sharply creased gray hat and went outside to the privy.
They reached the junction some time before the train was due to arrive and stood about two feet from the first set of tracks. Mr. Head carried a paper sack with some biscuits and a can of sardines in it for their lunch. A coarse-looking orange-colored sun coming up behind the east range of mountains was making the sky a dull red behind them, but in front of them it was still gray and they faced a gray transparent moon, hardly stronger than a thumbprint and completely without light. A small tin switch box and a black fuel tank were all there was to mark the place as a junction; the tracks were double and did not converge again until they were hidden behind the bends at either end of the clearing. Trains passing appeared to emerge from a tunnel of trees and, hit for a second by the cold sky, vanish terrified into the woods again. Mr. Head had had to make special arrangements with the ticket agent to have this train stop and he was secretly afraid it would not, in which case, he knew Nelson would say, “I never thought no train was going to stopfor you.” Under the useless morning moon the tracks looked white and fragile. Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.
Then suddenly, before Mr. Head could make up his mind to turn back, there was