The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [197]
Thomas rose woodenly and put on his hat and coat. “We will take her to the hospital,” he said, “and we will leave her there.”
“And drive her to despair again?” the old lady cried. “Thomas!”
Standing in the center of his room now, realizing that he had reached the point where action was inevitable, that he must pack, that he must leave, that he must go, Thomas remained immovable.
His fury was directed not at the little slut but at his mother. Even though the doctor had found that she had barely damaged herself and had raised the girl’s wrath by laughing at the tourniquet and putting only a streak of iodine on the cut, his mother could not get over the incident. Some new weight of sorrow seemed to have been thrown across her shoulders, and not only Thomas, but Sarah Ham was infuriated by this, for it appeared to be a general sorrow that would have found another object no matter what good fortune came to either of them. The experience of Sarah Ham had plunged the old lady into mourning for the world.
The morning after the attempted suicide, she had gone through the house and collected all the knives and scissors and locked them in a drawer. She emptied a bottle of rat poison down the toilet and took up the roach tablets from the kitchen floor. Then she came to Thomas’s study and said in a whisper, “Where is that gun of his? I want you to lock it up.”
“The gun is in my drawer,” Thomas roared, “and I will not lock it up. If she shoots herself, so much the better!”
“Thomas,” his mother said, “she’ll hear you!”
“Let her hear me!” Thomas yelled. “Don’t you know she has no intention of killing herself? Don’t you know her kind never kill themselves? Don’t you…”
His mother slipped out the door and closed it to silence him and Sarah Ham’s laugh, quite close in the hall, came rattling into his room. “Tomsee’ll find out. I’ll kill myself and then he’ll be sorry he wasn’t nice to me. I’ll use his own lil gun, his own lil or pearl-handled revol-Iervuh!” she shouted and let out a loud tormented-sounding laugh in imitation of a movie monster.
Thomas ground his teeth. He pulled out his desk drawer and felt for the pistol. It was an inheritance from the old man, whose opinion it had been that every house should contain a loaded gun. He had discharged two bullets one night into the side of a prowler, but Thomas had never shot anything. He had no fear that the girl would use the gun on herself and he closed the drawer. Her kind clung tenaciously to life and were able to wrest some histrionic advantage from every moment.
Several ideas for getting rid of her had entered his head but each of these had been suggestions whose moral tone indicated that they had come from a mind akin to his father’s, and Thomas had rejected them. He could not get the girl locked up again until she did something illegal. The old man would have been able with no qualms at all to get her drunk and send her out on the highway in his car, meanwhile notifying the highway patrol of her presence on the road, but Thomas considered this below his moral stature. Suggestions continued to come to him, each more outrageous than the last.
He had not the vaguest hope that the girl would get the gun and shoot herself, but that afternoon when he looked in the drawer, the gun was gone. His study locked from the inside, not the out. He cared nothing about the gun, but the thought of Sarah Ham’s hands sliding among his papers infuriated him. Now even his study was contaminated. The only place left untouched by her was his bedroom.
That night she entered it.
In the morning at breakfast, he did not eat and did not sit down. He stood beside his chair and delivered his ultimatum while his mother sipped her coffee as if she were both alone in the room and in great pain. “I have stood this,” he said, “for as long as I am able. Since I see plainly thaty ou care nothing about me, about my peace or comfort or working conditions, I am about to take the only step open to me. I will give you one more day. If you bring the girl back into this house this