The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [160]
The old man strode on with his head thrust forward as if he were smelling out an enemy.
“Where we going?” Tarwater asked after they had walked out of the business streets and were passing between rows of gray bulbous houses with sooty porches that overhung the sidewalks. “Listen,” he said, hitting his uncle’s hip, “I never ast to come.”
“You would have asked to come soon enough,” the old man muttered. “Get your fill now.”
“I never ast for no fill. I never ast to come at all. I’m here before I knew this here was here.”
“Just remember,” the old man said, “just remember that I told you to remember when you ast to come that you never liked it when you were here,” and they kept on going, crossing one length of sidewalk after another, row after row of overhanging houses with halfopen doors that let a little dried light fall on the stained passageways inside. Finally they came out into another section where the houses were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass in front of it like a dog gripping a stolen steak. After a few blocks, Tarwater dropped down on the sidewalk and said, “I ain’t going a step further.”
“I don’t even know where I’m going and I ain’t going no further!” he shouted at his uncle’s heavy figure which didn’t stop or look back. In a second he jumped up and followed him again, thinking: If anything happened to him, I would be lost here.
The old man kept straining forward as if his blood scent were leading him closer and closer to the place where his enemy was hiding. He suddenly turned up the short walk of a pale-yellow house and moved rigidly to the white door, his heavy shoulders hunched as if he were going to crash through like a bulldozer. He struck the wood with his fist, ignoring a polished brass knocker. By the time Tarwater came up behind him, the door had opened and a small pink-faced fat boy stood in it. He was a white-haired child and wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had pale-silver eyes like the old man’s. The two stood staring at each other, old Tarwater with his fist raised and his mouth open and his tongue lolling idiotically from side to side. For a second the little fat boy seemed shocked still with astonishment. Then he guffawed. He raised his fist and opened his mouth and let his tongue roll out as far as it would go. The old man’s eyes seemed about to strain out of their sockets.
“Tell your father,” he roared, “that I’m not extinct!”
The little boy shook as if a blast had hit him and pushed the door almost shut, hiding himself all but one spectacled eye. The old man grabbed Tarwater by the shoulder and swung him around and pushed him down the path away from the place.
He had never been back there again, never seen his cousin again, never seen the school teacher at all, and he hoped to God, he told the stranger digging the grave along with him now, that he would never see him, though he had nothing against him and he would dislike to kill him, but if he came out here, messing with what was none of his business except by law, then he would be obliged to.
“Listen,” the stranger said, “what would he want to come out here for—where there’s nothing?”
Tarwater began to dig again and didn’t answer. He didn’t search out the stranger’s face, but he knew by now it was sharp and friendly and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed hat. He had lost his dislike for the sound of the voice. Only, every now and then it sounded like a stranger’s voice to him. He began to feel that he was only just now meeting himself, as if, as long as his uncle had lived, he had been deprived of his own acquaintance.
“I ain’t denying the old man was a good one,” his new friend said, “but like you said: you can’t be an y poorer than dead. They have to take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his body is not going to feel the pinch of fire or anything else.”
“It was the last day he was thinking