The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [221]
Mary Elizabeth was already dashing out the room and Calhoun ran behind her and thrust open the door just in time to prevent her crashing into it. They scrambled into the car and the boy drove it away as if his heart were the motor and would never go fast enough. The sky was bone-white and the slick highway stretched before them like a piece of the earth’s exposed nerve. After five miles Calhoun pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped from exhaustion. They sat silently, looking at nothing until finally they turned and looked at each other. There each was at once the likeness of their kinsman and flinched. They looked away and then back, as if with concentration they might find a more tolerable image. To Calhoun, the girl’s face seemed to mirror the nakedness of the sky. In despair he leaned closer until he was stopped by a miniature visage which rose incorrigibly in her spectacles and fixed him where he was. Round, innocent, undistinguished as an iron link, it was the face whose gift of life had pushed straight forward to the future to raise festival after festival. Like a master salesman, it seemed to have been waiting there from all time to claim him.
The Lame Shall Enter First (1962)
Sheppard sat on a stool at the bar that divided the kitchen in half, eating his cereal out of the individual pasteboard box it came in. He ate mechanically, his eyes on the child, who was wandering from cabinet to cabinet in the panelled kitchen, collecting the ingredients for his breakfast. He was a stocky blond boy of ten. Sheppard kept his intense blue eyes fixed on him. The boy’s future was written in his face. He would be a banker. No, worse. He would operate a small loan company. All he wanted for the child was that he be good and unselfish and neither seemed likely. Sheppard was a young man whose hair was already white. It stood up like a narrow brush halo over his pink sensitive face.
The boy approached the bar with the jar of peanut butter under his arm, a plate with a quarter of a small chocolate cake on it in one hand and the ketchup bottle in the other. He did not appear to notice his father. He climbed up on the stool and began to spread peanut butter on the cake. He had very large round ears that leaned away from his head and seemed to pull his eyes slightly too far apart. His shirt was green but so faded that the cowboy charging across the front of it was only a shadow.
“Norton,” Sheppard said, “I saw Rufus Johnson yesterday.
Do you know what he was doing?”
The child looked at him with a kind of half attention, his eyes forward but not yet engaged. They were a paler blue than his father’s as if they might have faded like the shirt, one of them listed, almost imperceptibly, toward the outer rim.
“He was in an alley,” Sheppard said, “and he had his hand in a garbage can. He was trying to get something to eat out of it.” He paused to let this soak in. “He was hungry,” he finished, and tried to pierce the child’s conscience with his gaze.
The boy picked up the piece of chocolate cake and began to gnaw it from one comer.
“Norton,” Sheppard said, “do you have any idea what it means to share?”
A flicker of attention. “Some of it’s yours,” Norton said.
“Some of it’s his,” Sheppard said heavily. It was hopeless. Almost any fault would have been preferable to selfishness—a violent temper, even a tendency to lie.
The child turned the bottle of ketchup upsidedown and began thumping ketchup onto the cake.
Sheppard’s look of pain increased. “You are ten and Rufus Johnson is fourteen,” he said. “Yet I’m sure your shirts would fit Rufus.” Rufus Johnson was a boy he had been trying to help at the reformatory for the past year. He had been released two months ago. “When he was in the reformatory, he looked pretty good, but when I saw him yesterday, he was skin and bones. He hasn’t been eating cake with peanut butter on it for breakfast.”
The child paused. “It’s stale,” he said. “That’s why I