The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [173]
“Hmp. I expect you just never heard them quarrel.”
“Nor nobody else heard them neither,” he said, looking away as if this insolence were addressed to some one else.
“Well,” she said, “I haven’t put up with their father for fifteen years not to know a few things about Greenleafs.”
The Negro looked at her suddenly with a gleam of recognition. “Is you my policy man’s mother?” he asked.
“I don’t know who your policy man is,” she said sharply. “You give them that note and tell them if they don’t come for that bull today, they’ll be making their father shoot it tomorrow,” and she drove off.
She stayed at home all afternoon waiting for the Greenleaf twins to come for the bull. They did not come. I might as well be working for them, she thought furiously. They are simply going to use me to the limit. At the supper table, she went over it again for the boys’ benefit because she wanted them to see exactly what O. T. and E. T. would do. “They don’t want that bull,” she said,”—pass the butter—so they simply turn him loose and let somebody else worry about getting rid of him for them. How do you like that? I’m the victim. I’ve always been the victim.”
“Pass the butter to the victim,” Wesley said. He was in a worse humor than usual because he had had a flat tire on the way home from the university.
Scofield handed her the butter and said, “Why Mamma, ain’t you ashamed to shoot an old bull that ain’t done nothing but give you a little scrub strain in your herd? I declare,” he said, “with the Mamma I got it’s a wonder I turned out to be such a nice boy!”
“You ain’t her boy, Son,” Wesley said.
She eased back in her chair, her fingertips on the edge of the table.
“All I know is,” Scofield said, “I done mighty well to be as nice as I am seeing what I come from.”
When they teased her they spoke Greenleaf English but Wesley made his own particular tone come through it like a knife edge. “Well lemme tell you one thang, Brother,” he said, leaning over the table, “that if you had half a mind you would already know.”
“What’s that, Brother?” Scofield asked, his broad face grinning into the constricted one across from him.
“That is,” Wesley said, “that neither you nor me is her boy…” but he stopped abruptly as she gave a kind of hoarse wheeze like an old horse lashed unexpectedly. She reared up and ran from the room.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Wesley growled, “What did you start her off for?”
“I never started her off,” Scofield said. “You started her off.”
“Hah.”
“She’s not as young as she used to be and she can’t take it.”
“She can only give it out,” Wesley said. “I’m the one that takes it.”
His brother’s pleasant face had changed so that an ugly family resemblance showed between them. “Nobody feels sorry for a lousy bastard like you,” he said and grabbed across the table for the other’s shirtfront.
From her room she heard a crash of dishes and she rushed back through the kitchen into the dining room. The hall door was open and Scofield was going out of it. Wesley was lying like a large bug on his back with the edge of the overturned table cutting him across the middle and broken dishes scattered on top of him. She pulled the table off him and caught his arm to help him rise but he scrambled up and pushed her off with a furious charge of energy and flung himself out of the door after his brother.
She would have collapsed but a knock on the back door stiffened her and she swung around. Across the kitchen and back porch, she could see Mr. Greenleaf peering eagerly through the screen wire. All her resources returned in full strength as if she had only needed to be challenged by the devil himself to regain them. “I heard a thump,” he called, “and I thought the plastering might have fell on you.”
If he had been wanted someone would have had to go on a horse to find him. She crossed the kitchen and the porch and stood inside the screen and s. iid, “No, nothing happened but the table turned over. One of the legs was weak,” and without pausing, “the boys didn’t come for the bull so tomorrow, you’ll have to shoot him.