The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [164]
He stopped at the far back corner of the house and squatted down on the ground and looked underneath at the litter there, chicken crates and barrels and old rags and boxes. He had four matches in his pocket. He crawled under and began to set small fires, building one from another and working his way out at the front porch, leaving the fire behind him eating greedily at the dry tinder and the floor boards of the house. He crossed the front side of the clearing and went under the barbed-wire fence and through the rutted field without looking back until he reached the edge of the opposite woods. Then he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the pink moon had dropped through the roof of the shack and was bursting and he began to run, forced on through the woods by two bulging silver eyes that grew in immense astonishment in the center of the fire behind him.
Toward midnight he came out on the highway and caught a ride with a salesman who was a manufacturer’s representative selling copper flues throughout the Southeast and who gave the silent boy what he said was the best advice he could give any young fellow setting out to find himself a place in the world. While they sped forward on the black untwisting highway watched on either side by a dark wall of trees, the salesman said that it had been his personal experience that you couldn’t sell a copper flue to a man you didn’t love. He was a thin fellow with a narrow gorgelike face that appeared to have been worn down to the sharpest possible depressions. He wore a broad-brimmed stiff gray hat of the kind used by business men who would like to look like cowboys. He said love was the only policy that worked ninety-five per cent of the time. He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man’s wife’s health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customer’s families in and what was wrong with them. A man’s wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man’s hardware store until she died; then he scratched her name out and wrote dead there “And I say thank God when they’re dead,” the salesman said, “that’s one less to remember.”
“You don’t owe the dead anything,’ Tarwater said in a loud voice, speaking for almost the first time since he had got in the car.
“Nor they you,” said the stranger. “And that’s the way it ought to be in this world—nobody owing nobody nothing.”
“Look,” Tarwater said suddenly, sitting forward, his face close to the windshield, “we’re headed in the wrong direction. We’re going back where we came from. There’s the fire again. There’s the fire we left.” Ahead of them in the sky there was a faint glow, steady and not made by lightning. “That’s the same fire we come from!” the boy said in a high wild voice.
“Boy, you must be nuts,” the salesman said. “That’s the city we’re coming to. That’s the glow from the city lights. I reckon this is your first trip anywhere.”
“You’re turned around,” the child said. “It’s the same fire.”
The stranger twisted his rutted face sharply. “I’ve never been turned around in my life,” he said. “And I didn’t come from any fire. I come from Mobile. And I know where I’m going. What’s the matter with you?”
Tarwater sat staring at the glow in front of him. “I was asleep,” he muttered. “I’m just now waking up.”
“Well you should have been listening to me,” the salesman said. “I been telling you things you ought to know.”
Greenleaf (1956)
MRS. MAY’S bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened?—like some patient god come down to woo her—for a stir inside the room. The window was dark and the sound of her breathing too light to be carried outside. Clouds crossing the moon blackened him and in the dark he began to tear at the hedge. Presently they passed and he appeared again in the same spot, chewing steadily,