The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [156]
Tarwater felt the tremor transfer itself and run lightly over him. He knew the old man was dead without touching him and he continued to sit across the table from the corpse, finishing his breakfast in a kind of sullen embarrassment, as if he were in the presence of a new personality and couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally he said in a querulous tone, “Just hold your horses. I already told you I would do it right.” The voice sounded like a stranger’s voice, as if the death had changed him instead of the old man.
He got up and took his plate out the back door and set it down on the bottom step, and two long-legged black game roosters tore across the yard and finished what was on it. He sat down on a long pine box on the back porch, and his hands began absently to unravel a length of rope, while his long cross-shaped face stared ahead beyond the clearing over woods that ran in gray and purple folds until they touched the light-blue fortress line of trees set against the empty morning sky.
The clearing was not simply off the dirt road but off the wagon track and footpath, and the nearest neighbors, colored not white, still had to walk through the woods, pushing plum branches out of their way to get to it. The old man had started an acre of cotton to the left and had run it beyond the fence line almost up to the house on one side. The two strands of barbed wire ran through the middle of the patch. A line of fog, hump-shaped, was creeping toward it, ready like a white hound dog to crouch under and crawl across the yard.
“I’m going to move that fence,” Tarwater said. “I ain’t going to have my fence in the middle of a field.” The voice was loud and still strange and disagreeable and he finished the rest of his thought in his head: because this place is mine now whether I own it or not because I’m here and nobody can’t get me off. If any school teacher comes here to claim the property, I’ll kill him.
He had on a faded pair of overalls and a gray hat pulled down over his ears like a cap. He followed his uncle’s custom of never taking off his hat except in bed. He had always followed his uncle’s customs up to this date but: if I want to move that fence before I bury him, there wouldn’t be a soul to hinder me, he thought; no voice will be lifted.
“Bury him first and get it over with,” the loud stranger’s disagreeable voice said, and he got up and went to look for the shovel.
The pine box he had been sitting on was his uncle’s coffin but he didn’t intend to use it. The old man was too heavy for a thin boy to hoist over the side of a box, and though old Tarwater had built it himself a few years before, he had said that if it wasn’t feasible to get him into it when the time came, then just to put him in the hole as he was, only to be sure the hole was deep. He wanted it ten foot, he said, not just eight. He had worked on the box a long time, and when he finished it he had scratched on the top MASON TARWATER, WITH GOD, and had climbed into it where it stood on the back porch and had lain there for some time, nothing showing but his stomach which rose over the top like overleavened bread. The boy had stood at the side of the box, studying him. “This is the end of us all,” the old man said with satisfaction, his gravel voice hearty in the coffin.
“It’s too much of you for the box, ” Tarwater, aid. “I’ll have to sit on the lid or wait until you rot a little.”
“Don’t wait,” old Tarwater had said. “Listen. If it ain’t feasible to use the box when the time comes, if you can’t lift it or whatever, just get me in the hole, but I want it deep. I want it ten foot, not just eight-ten. You can roll me to it if nothing else. I’ll roll. Get two boards and set them down the steps and start me rolling and dig where I stop and don’t let me roll over into it until it’s deep enough. Prop me with some bricks so I won’t roll into it and don’t let the