The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [155]
Eventually Rayber, the school teacher, had discovered where they were and had come out to the clearing to get the boy back. He had had to leave his car on the dirt road and walk a mile through the woods, on a path that appeared and disappeared, before he came to the corn patch with the gaunt two-story shack standing in the middle of it. The old man had been fond of recalling for Tarwater the red, sweating, bitten face of his nephew bobbing up and down through the corn and behind it the pink, flowered hat of a welfare woman he had brought along with him. The corn was planted up to two feet from the porch step, and as the nephew came out of it, the old man appeared in the door with his shotgun and said that he would shoot any foot that touched his step, and the two stood facing each other while the welfare woman bristled out of the corn like a peahen upset on the nest. The old man said if it hadn’t been for the welfare woman his nephew wouldn’t have taken a step, but she stood there waiting, pushing back the wisps of dyed red hair that were plastered on her long forehead. Both their faces were scratched and bleeding from thorn bushes, and the old man recalled a switch of blackberry bush hanging from the sleeve of the welfare woman’s blouse. She only had to let out her breath slowly as if she were releasing the last patience on earth and the nephew lifted his foot and set it down on the step and the old man shot him in the leg. The two of them had scuttled off, making a disappearing rattle in the corn, and the woman had screamed, “You knew he was crazy!”; but when they came out of the corn on the other side, old Tarwater had noted from the upstairs window where he had run that she had her arm around him and was holding him up while he hopped into the woods; and later he learned that he had married her though she was twice his age and he could only possibly get one child out of her. She had never let him come back again.
The morning the old man died, he came down and cooked the breakfast as usual and died before he got the first spoonful to his mouth. The downstairs of their shack was all kitchen, large and dark, with a wood tove in the center of it and a board table drawn up to the stove. Sacks of feed and mash were stacked in the corners, and scrap metal, wood shavings, old rope, ladders, and other tinder were wherever he or Tarwater had let them fall. They had slept in the kitchen until a wild cat sprang in the window one night and frightened him into carrying the bed upstairs where there were two empty rooms. He prophesied at the time that the stairsteps would take ten years off his life. At the moment of his death, he had sat down to his breakfast and lifted his knife in one square red hand halfway to his mouth and then, with a look of complete astonishment, he had lowered it until the hand rested on the edge of the plate and tilted it up off the table.
He was a bull-like old man with a short head set directly into his shoulders and silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining to get out of a net of red threads. He had on a putty-colored hat with the brim turned up all around and over his undershirt a gray coat that had once been black. Tarwater, sitting across the table from him, saw red ropes appear in his face and a tremor pass over him. It was like the tremor of a quake that had begun at his heart and run outward and was just reaching the surface. His mouth twisted down sharply on one side and he remained exactly as