The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [170]
Mrs. May sat looking at him coldly.
“That’s O. T. and E. T.’s bull,” he said. “I collected from their nigger yesterday and he told me they were missing it,” and he showed her an exaggerated expanse of teeth and disappeared silently.
Wesley looked up and laughed.
Mrs. May turned her head forward again, her expression unaltered. “I am the only adult on this place,” she said. She leaned across the table and pulled the paper from the side of his plate. “Do you see how it’s going to be when I die and you boys have to handle him?” she began. “Do you see why he didn’t know whose bull that was? Because it was theirs. Do you see what I have to put up with? Do you see that if I hadn’t kept my foot on his neck all these years, you boys might be milking cows every morning at four o’clock?”
Wesley pulled the paper back toward his plate and staring at her full in the face, he murmured, “I wouldn’t milk a cow to save your soul from hell.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” she said in a brittle voice. She sat back and began rapidly turning her knife over at the side of her plate. “O. T. and E. T. are fine boys,” she said. “They ought to have been my sons.” The thought of this was so horrible that her vision of Wesley was blurred at once by a wall of tears. All she saw was his dark shape, rising quickly from the table. “And you two,” she cried, “you two should have belonged to that woman!”
He was heading for the door.
“When I die,” she said in a thin voice, “I don’t know what’s going to become of you.”
“You’re always yapping about when-you-die,” he growled as he rushed out, “but you look pretty healthy to me.”
For some time she sat where she was, looking straight ahead through the window across the room into a scene of indistinct greys and greens. She stretched her face and her neck muscles and drew in a long breath but the scene in front of her flowed together anyway into a watery grey mass. “They needn’t think I’m going to die any time soon,” she muttered, and some more defiant voice in her added: I’ll die when I get good and ready.
She wiped her eyes with the table napkin and got up and went to the window and gazed at the scene in front of her. The cows were grazing on two pale green pastures across the road and behind them, fencing them in, was a black wall of trees with a sharp sawtooth edge that held off the indifferent sky. The pastures were enough to calm her. When she looked out any window in her house, she saw the reflection of her own character. Her city friends said she was the most remarkable woman they knew, to go, practically penniless and with no experience, out to a rundown farm and make a success of it. “Everything is against you,” she would say, “the weather is against you and the dirt is against you and the help is against you. They’re all in league against you. There’s nothing for it but an iron hand!”
“Look at Mamma’s iron hand!” Scofield would yell and grab her arm and hold it up so that her delicate blue-veined little hand would dangle from her wrist like the head of a broken lily. The company always laughed.
The sun, moving over the black and white grazing cows, was just a little brighter than the rest of the sky. Looking down, she saw a darker shape that might have been its shadow cast at an angle, moving among them. She uttered a sharp cry and turned and marched out of the house.
Mr. Greenleaf was in the trench silo, filling a wheelbarrow. She stood on the edge and looked down at him. “I told you to get up that bull. Now he’s in with the milk herd.”
“You can’t do two thangs at oncet,” Mr. Greenleaf remarked.
“I told you to do that first.”
He wheeled the barrow out of the open end of the trench toward the barn and she followed close behind him. “And you needn’t think, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, “that I don’t know exactly whose bull that is or why you haven’t been in any hurry to notify me he was here. I might as well feed O. T. and E. T.’s bull as long as I’m going to have him here ruining my herd.”
Mr. Greenleaf paused with the wheelbarrow and looked behind him. “Is that them boys’ bull?” he asked