The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [213]
“Six men was shot here,” an odd muffled voice close by said.
The boy jumped.
A small white girl whose tongue was curled in the mouth of a Coca-Cola bottle was sitting in a patch of sand at his feet, watching him with a detached gaze. Her eyes were the same green as the bottle. She was barefooted and had straight white hair. She withdrew her tongue from the bottle with an explosive sound. “A bad man did it,” she said.
The boy felt the kind of frustration that accompanies contact with the certainty of children. “No,” he said, “he was not a bad man.”
The child put her tongue back in the bottle and withdrew it silently, her eyes on him.
“People were not good to him,” he explained. “They were mean to him. They were cruel. What would you do if someone were cruel to you?”
“Shoot them,” she said.
“Well, that’s what he did,” Calhoun said, frowning.
She continued to sit there and did not take her eyes off him. Her gaze might have been the depthless gaze of Partridge itself.
“You people persecuted him and finally drove him mad,” the boy said. “He wouldn’t buy a badge. Was that a crime? He was the Outsider here and you couldn’t stand that. One of the fundamental rights of man,” he said, glaring through the child’s transparent stare, “is the right not to behave like a fool. The right to be different,” he said hoarsely, “My God. The right to be yourself.”
Without taking her eyes off him, she lifted one of her feet and set it on her knee.
“He was a bad bad bad man,” she said.
Calhoun got up and walked off, glaring In front of him. His indignation swathed his vision in a kind of haze. He saw none of the activity around him distinctly. Two high school girls in bright skirts and jackets swung into his path and shrilled, “Buy a ticket for the beauty contest tonight. See who’ll be Miss Partridge Azalea!” He swerved sharply to the side and did not throw them so much as a glance. Their giggles followed him until he was past the courthouse and onto the block behind it. He stood there a moment, undecided what he would do next. He faced a barber shop which looked empty and cool. After a moment he entered it.
The barber, alone in the shop, raised his head from behind the paper he was reading. Calhoun asked for a haircut and sat down gratefully in the chair. The barber was a tall emaciated fellow with eyes that might have faded from some deeper color. He looked to be a man who had suffered himself. He put the bib on the boy and stood staring at his round head as if it were a pumpkin he was wondering how to slice. Then he twirled the chair so that Calhoun faced the mirror. He was confronted with an image that was round-faced, unremarkablelooking and innocent. The boy’s expression turned fierce. “Are you eating up this slop like the rest of them?” he asked belligerently.
“Come again?” the barber said.
“Do the tribal rites going on here improve the barber trade? All these doings, all these doings,” he said impatiently.
“Well,” the barber said, “last year it was a thousand extra people here and this year it looks to be more—on account,” he said, “of the tragedy.”
“The tragedy,” the boy repeated and stretched his mouth.
“The six that was shot,” the barber said.
“That tragedy,” the boy said. “And what about the other tragedy—the man who was persecuted by these idiots until he shot six of them?”
“Oh him,” the barber said.
“Singleton,” the