The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [195]
The old lady stiffened. “You,” she said, “are not like him.”
Thomas opened his mouth silently.
“However,” his mother said, in a tone of such subtle accusation that she might have been taking back the compliment, “I won’t invite her back again since you’re so dead set against her.”
“I am not set against her,” Thomas said. “I am set against your making a fool of yourself.”
As soon as he left the table and closed the door of his study on himself, his father took up a squatting position in his mind. The old man had had the countryman’s ability to converse squatting, though he was no countryman but had been born and brought up in the city and only moved to a smaller place later to exploit his talents. With steady skill he had made them think him one of them. In the midst of a conversation on the courthouse lawn, he would squat and his two or three companions would squat with him with no break in the surface of the talk. By gesture he had lived his lie; he had never deigned to tell one.
Let her run over you, he said. You ain’t like me. Not enough to be a man.
Thomas began vigorously to read and presently the image faded. The girl had caused a disturbance in the depths of his being, somewhere out of the reach of his power of analysis. He felt as if he had seen a tornado pass a hundred yards away and had an intimation that it would turn again and head directly for him. He did not get his mind firmly on his work until mid-morning.
Two nights later, his mother and he were sitting in the den after their supper, each reading a section of the evening paper, when the telephone began to ring with the brassy intensity of a fire alarm. Thomas reached for it. As soon as the receiver was in his hand, a shrill female voice screamed into the room, “Come get this girl! Come get her! Drunk! Drunk in my parlor and I won’t have it! Lost her job and come back here drunk! I won’t have it!”
His mother leapt up and snatched the receiver.
The ghost of Thomas’s father rose before him. Call the sheriff, the old man prompted. “Call the sheriff,” Thomas said in a loud voice. “Call the sheriff to go there and pick her up.”
“We’ll be right there,” his mother was saying. “We’ll come and get her right away. Tell her to get her things together.”
“She ain’t in no condition to get nothing together,” the voice screamed. “You shouldn’t have put something like her off on me! My house is respectable!”
“Tell her to call the sheriff,” Thomas shouted.
His mother put the receiver down and looked at him. “I wouldn’t turn a dog over to that man,” she said.
Thomas sat in the chair with his arms folded and looked fixedly at the wall.
“Think of the poor girl, Thomas,” his mother said, “with nothing. Nothing. And we have everything.”
When they arrived, Sarah Ham was slumped spraddlelegged against the banister on the boarding house front steps. Her tam was down on her forehead where the old woman had slammed it and her clothes were bulging out of her suitcase where the old woman had thrown them in. She was carrying on a drunken conversation with herself in a low personal tone. A streak of lipstick ran up one side of her face. She allowed herself to be guided by his mother to the car and put in the back seat without seeming to know who the rescuer was. “Nothing to talk to all day but a pack of goddamned parakeets,” she said in a furious whisper.
Thomas, who had not got out of the car at all, or looked at her after the first revolted glance, said, “I’m telling you, once and for all, the place to take her is the jail.”
His mother, sitting on the back seat, holding the girl’s hand, did not answer.
“All right, take her to the hotel,” he said.
“I cannot take a drunk girl to a hotel, Thomas,” she said. “You know that.”
“Then take her to a hospital.”
“She doesn’t need a jail or a hotel or a hospital,” his mother said, “she needs a home.”
“She does not need mine,” Thomas said.
“Only for tonight, Thomas,” the old lady sighed. “Only for tonight.”
Since then eight days had passed. The little