The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [161]
“Well now,” the stranger said, “don’t you think any cross you set up in the year 1954 or 5 or 6 would be rotted out by the year the Day of Judgment comes in? Rotted to as much dust as his ashes if you reduced him to ashes? And lemme ast you this: what’s God going to do with sailors drowned at sea that the fish have et and the fish that et them et by other fish and they et by yet others? And what about people that get burned up naturally in house fires? Burnt up one way or another or lost in machines until they’re a pulp? And all these sojers blasted to nothing? What about all these naturally left without a piece to fit a piece?”
“If I burnt him,” Tarwater said, “it wouldn’t be natural, it would be deliberate.”
“Oh, I see,” the stranger said. “It ain’t the Day of Judgment for him you’re worried about, it’s the Day of Judgement for you.”
“That’s my bidnis,” Tarwater said.
“I ain’t buttin into your bidnis,” the stranger said. “It don’t mean a thing to me. You’re left by yourself in this empty place. Forever by yourself in the empty place with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in. You don’t mean a thing to a soul as far as I can see.”
“Redeemed,” Tarwater muttered.
“Do you smoke?” the stranger asked.
“Smoke if I want to and don’t if I don’t,” Tarwater said. “Bury if need be and don’t if don’t.”
“Go take a look at him and see if he’s fell off his chair,” his friend suggested.
Tarwater let the shovel drop in the grave and returned to the house. He opened the front door a crack and put his face to it. His uncle glared slightly to the side of him, like a judge intent upon some terrible evidence. The child shut the door quickly and went back to the grave. He was cold in spite of the sweat that stuck his shirt to his back.
The sun was directly overhead, apparently dead still, holding its breath waiting out the noontime. The grave was about two feet deep. “Ten foot now, remember,” the stranger said and laughed. “Old men are selfish. You got to expect the least from them. The least from everybody,” he added, and let out a flat sigh that was like a gust of sand raised and dropped suddenly by the wind.
Tarwater looked up and saw two figures cutting across the field, a colored man and woman, each dangling an empty vinegar jug by a finger. The woman, tall and Indian-like, had on a green sunhat. She stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the yard toward the grave; the man held the wire down and swung his leg over and followed at her elbow. They kept their eyes on the hole and stopped at the edge of it, looking down into the raw ground with shocked satisfied expressions. The man, Buford, had a crinkled, burnt-rag face, darker than his hat. “Old man passed,” he said.
The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail, piercing and formal. She set her jug down on the’ ground and crossed her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again.
“Tell her to shut up that,” Tarwater said, “I’m in charge here now and I don’t want no nigger-mourning.”
“I seen his spirit for two nights,” she said, “Seen him two nights and he was unrested.”
“He ain’t been dead hut since this morning,’ Tarwater said. “If you all want your jugs filled, give them to me and dig while I’m gone.”
“He’d been perdicting his passing for many years,” Buford said. “She seen him in her dream several nights and he wasn’t rested. I known him well. I known him very well indeed.”
“Poor sweet sugar boy,” the woman said to Tarwater, “what you going to do here now by yourself in this lonesome place?”
“Mind by bidnis,” the boy growled, jerking the jug out of her hand, and started off so quick lv that he almost fell. He stalked across the back field toward the rim of trees that surrounded the clearmg.
The birds had gone into the deep woods to escape the noon sun and one thrush, hidden some distance ahead of him, called the same four notes again and again, stopping each time after them to make a silence. Tarwater began to waslk faster, then he began to lope, and in a second he was running like something