The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [157]
“What if you die in bed?” the boy asked. “How’m I going to get you down the stairs?”
“I ain’t going to die in bed,” the old man said. “As soon as I hear the summons, I’m going to run downstairs. I’ll get as close to the door as I can. If I should get stuck up there, you’ll have to roll me down the stairs, that’s all.”
“My Lord,” the child said.
The old man sat up in the box and brought his fist down on the edge of it. “Listen,” he said. “I never asked much of you. I taken you and raised you and saved you from that ass in town and now all I’m asking in return is when I die to get me in the ground where the dead belong and set up a cross over me to show I’m there. That’s all in the world I’m asking you to do.”
“I’ll be doing good if I get you in the ground,” Tarwater said. “I’ll be too wore out set up any cross. I ain’t bothering with trifles.”
“Trifles!” his uncle hissed. “You’ll learn what a trifle is on the day those crosses are gathered! Burying the dead right may be the only honor you ever do yourself. I brought you out here to raise you a Christian,” he hollered, “and I’m damned if you won’t be one!”
“If I don’t have the strength to do it,” the child said, watching him with a careful detachment, “I’ll notify my uncle in town and he can come out and take care of you. The school teacher,” he drawled, observing that the pockmarks in his uncle’s face had already turned pale against the purple, “he’ll ‘tend to you.”
The threads that restrained the old man’s eyes thickened. He gripped both sides of the coffin and pushed forward as if he were going to drive it off the porch. “He’d burn me,” he said hoarsely. “He’d have me cremated in an oven and scatter my ashes. ‘Uncle,’ he said to me, ‘you’re a type that’s almost extinct!’ He’d be willing to pay the undertaker to burn me to be able to scatter my ashes,” he said. “He don’t believe in the Resurrection. He don’t believe in the Last Day. He don’t believe in…”
“The dead don’t bother with particulars,” the boy interrupted.
The old man grabbed the front of his overalls and pulled him up against the side of the box so that their faces were not two inches apart. “The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are,” he said and then, as if he had conceived the answer for all insolence, he said, “There’s a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive!” and he released him with a laugh.
The boy had shown only by a slight quiver in the eyes that he was shaken by this, and after a minute he had said, ‘The school teacher is my uncle. The only blood connection I’ll have and a living man and if I wanted to go to him, I’d go, now.”
The old man looked at him silently for what seemed a full minute. Then he slammed his hands on the sides of the box and roared, “Whom the plague beckons, to the plague! Whom the sword, to the sword! Whom fire, to fire!” and the child trembled visibly.
A living man, he thought as he went to get the shovel, but he better not come out here and try to get me off this property because I’ll kill him. Go to him and be dammed, his uncle had said. I’ve saved you from him this far and if you go to him the minute I’m in the ground, there’s nothing I can do about it.
The shovel lay against the side of the hen house. “I’ll never set my foot in the city again,” Tarwater said. “I’ll never go to him. Him nor nobody else will ever get me off this place.” He decided to dig the grave under the fig tree because the old man would be good for the figs. The ground was sandy on top and solid brick underneath and the shovel made a clanging sound when he struck it in the sand. Two hundred pounds of dead mountain to bury, he thought, and stood with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, studying the white sky through the leaves of the tree. It would take all day to get a hole big enough out of this rock and the school teacher would burn him in a minute.
Tarwater had never seen the school teacher but he had seen