The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [174]
The sky was crossed with thin red and purple bars and behind them the sun was moving down slowly as if it were descending a ladder. Mr. Greenleaf squatted down on the step, his back to her, the top of his hat on a level with her feet. “Tomorrow I’ll drive him home for you,” he said.
“Oh no, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said in a mocking voice, “you drive him home tomorrow and next week he’ll be back here. I know better than that.” Then in a mournful tone, she said, “I’m surprised at O. T. and E. T. to treat me this way. I thought they’d have more gratitude. Those boys spent some mighty happy days on this place, didn’t they, Mr. Greenleaf?”
Mr. Greenleaf didn’t say anything.
“I think they did,” she said. “I think thev did. But they’ve forgotten all the nice little things I did for them now. If I recall, they wore my boys’ old clothes and played with my boys’ old toys and hunted with my boys’ old guns. They swam in my pond and shot my birds and fished in my stream and I never forgot their birthday and Christmas seemed to roll around very often if I remember it right. And do they think of any of those things now?” she asked.
“Nooooo,” she said.
For a few seconds she looked at the disappearing sun and Mr. Greenleaf examined the palms of his hands. Presently as if it had just occurred to her, she asked, “Do you know the real reason they didn’t come for that bull?”
“Naw I don’t,” Mr. Greenleaf said in a surly voice.
“They didn’t come because I’m a woman,” she said. “You can get away with anything when you’re dealing with a woman. If there were a man running this place…”
Quick as a snake striking Mr. Greenleaf said, “You got two boys. They know you got two men on the place.”
The sun had disappeared behind the tree line. She looked down at the dark crafty face, upturned now, and at he wary eyes, bright under the shadow of the hatbrim. She waited long enough for him to see that she was hurt and then she said, “Some people learn gratitude too late, Mr. Greenleaf, and some never learn it at all,” and she turned and left him sitting on the steps.
Half the night in her sleep she heard a sound as if some large stone were grinding a hole on the outside wall of her brain. She was walking on the inside, over a succession of beautiful rolling hills, planting her stick in front of each step. She became aware after a time that the noise was the sun trying to burn through the tree line and she stopped to watch, sate in the knowledge that it couldn’t, that it had to sink the why it always did outside of her property. When she first stopped it was a swollen red ball, but as she stood watching it began to narrow and pale until it looked like a bullet. Then suddenly it burst through the tree line and raced down the hill toward her. She woke up with her hand over her mouth and the same noise, diminished but distant, in her ear. It was the bull munching under her window. Mr. Greenleaf had let him out.
She got up and made her way to the window in the dark and looked out through the slit blind, but the bull had moved away from the hedge and at first she didn’t see him. Then she saw a heavy form some distance away, paused as if observing her. This is the last night I am going to put up with this, she said, and watched until the iron shadow moved away in the darkness.
The next morning she waited until exactly eleven o’clock. Then she got in her car and drove to the barn. Mr. Greenleaf was cleaning milk cans. He had seven of them standing up outside the milk room to get the sun. She had been telling him to do this for weeks. “All right, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, “go get your gun. We’re going to shoot that bull.”
“I thought you wanted theseyer cans…”
“Go get your gun, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said. Her voice and face were expressionless.
“That gentleman torn out of there last night,” he murmured in a tone of regret and bent again to the can he had his arm in.
“Go get your gun, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said in the same triumphant toneless voice. “The bull is in the pasture with the dry cows. I saw him from my upstairs window. I’m going to drive you up to