The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [162]
“A man, seventy years of age, to bring a baby out into the backwoods to raise him right! Suppose he had died when you were four years old? Could you have toted mash to the still then and supported yourself? I never heard of no four-year-old running a still.
“Never did I hear of that,” he continued. “You weren’t anything to him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when the time came, and now that he’s dead, he’s shut of you but you got two hundred pounds of him to carry below the face of the earth. And don’t think he wouldn’t heat up like a coal stove to see you take a drop of liquor,” he added. “He might say it would hurt you but what he would mean was you might get so much you wouldn’t be in no fit condition to bury him. He said he brought you out here to raise you according to principle and that was the principle: that you should be fit when the time came to bury him so he would have a cross to mark where he was at.
“Well,” he said in a softer tone, when the boy had taken a long swallow from the black jug, “a little won’t interfere. Moderation never hurt no one.”
A burning arm slid down Tarwater’s throat as if the devil were already reaching inside him to finger his soul. He squinted at the angry sun creeping behind the topmost fringe of the trees.
“Take it easy,” his friend said. “Do you remember them nigger gospel singers you saw one time, all drunk, all singing, all dancing around that black Ford automobile? Jesus, they wouldn’t have been near so glad they were redeemed if they hadn’t had that liquor in them. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to my Redemption if I was you,” he said. “Some people take everything too hard.”
Tarwater drank more slowly. He had been drunk only one time before and that time his uncle had beat him with a board for it, saying liquor would dissolve a child’s gut; another of his lies because his gut had not dissolved.
“It should be clear to you,” his kind friend said, “how all your life you been tricked by that old man. You could have been a city slicker for the last ten years. Instead, you been deprived of any company but his, you been living in a two-story barn in the middle of this earth’s bald patch, following behind a mule and plow since you were seven. And how do you know the education he give you is true to the fact? Maybe he taught you a system of figures nobody else uses? How do you know that two added to two makes four? Four added to four makes eight? Maybe other people don’t use that system. How do you know if there was an Adam or if Jesus eased your situation any when He redeemed you? Or how you know if He actually done it? Nothing but that old man’s word and it ought to be obvious to you by now that he was crazy. And as for Judgment Day,” the stranger said, “every day is Judgment Day.
“Ain’t you old enough to have learnt that yet for yourself? Don’t everything you do, everything you have ever done, work itself out right or wrong before your eye and usually before the sun has set? Have you ever got by with anything) No you ain’t nor ever thought you would,” he said. “You might as well drink all that liquor since you’ve already drunk so much. Once you pass the moderation mark you’ve passed it, and that gyration