The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [223]
“I feel sure you would,” Sheppard said. “Listen,” he said and lowered his voice to an almost pleading tone, “suppose by some chance you did win a thousand dollars. Wouldn’t you like to spend it on children less fortunate than yourself? Wouldn’t you like to give some swings and trapezes to the orphanage? Wouldn’t you like to buy poor Rufus Johnson a new shoe?”
The boy began to back away from the bar. Then suddenly he leaned forward and hung with his mouth open over his plate. Sheppard groaned again. Everything came up, the cake, the peanut butter, the ketchup—a limp sweet batter. He hung over it gagging, more came, and he waited with his mouth open over the plate as if he expected his heart to come up next.
“It’s all right,” Sheppard said, “it’s all right. You couldn’t help it. Wipe your mouth and go lie down.”
The child hung there a moment longer. Then he raised his face and looked blindly at his father.
“Go on,” Sheppard said. “Go on and lie down.”
The boy pulled up the end of his t-shirt and smeared his mouth with it. Then he climbed down off the stool and wandered out of the kitchen.
Sheppard sat there staring at the puddle of half-digested food. The sour odor reached him and he drew back. His gorge rose. He got up and carried the plate to the sink and turned the water on it and watched grimly as the mess ran down the drain. Johnson’s sad thin hand rooted in garbage cans for food while his own child, selfish, unresponsive, greedy, had so much that he threw it up. He cut off the faucet with a thrust of his fist. Johnson had a capacity for real response and had been deprived of everything from birth; Norton was average or below and had had every advantage.
He went back to the bar to finish his breakfast. The cereal was soggy in the cardboard box but he paid no attention to what he was eating. Johnson was worth any amount of effort because he had the potential. He had seen it from the time the boy had limped in for his first interview.
Sheppard’s office at the reformatory was a narrow closet with one window and a small table and two chairs in it. He had never been inside a confessional but he thought it must be the same kind of operation he had here, except that he explained, he did not absolve. His credentials were less dubious than a priest’s; he had been trained for what he was doing.
When Johnson came in for his first interview, he had been reading over the boy’s record—senseless destruction, windows smashed, city trash boxes set afire, tires slashed—the kind of thing he found where boys had been transplanted abruptly from the country to the city as this one had. He came to Johnson’s I. Q. score. It was 140. He raised his eyes eagerly.
The boy sat slumped on the edge of his chair, his arms hanging between his thighs. The light from the window fell on his face. His eyes, steel-colored and very still, were trained narrowly forward. His thin dark hair hung in a Hat forelock across the side of his forehead, not carelessly like a boy’s, but fiercely like an old man’s. A kind of fanatic intelligence was palpable in his face.
Sheppard smiled to diminish the distance between them.
The boy’s expression did not soften. He leaned back in his chair and lifted a monstrous club foot to his knee. The foot was in a heavy black battered shoe with a sale four or five inches thick. The leather parted from it in one place and the end of an empty sock protruded like a grey tongue from a severed head. The case was clear to Sheppard instantly. His mischief was compensation for the foot.
“Well Rufus,” he said, “I see by the record here that you don’t have but a year to serve. What do you plan to do when you get out?”
“I don’t make no plans,” the boy said. His eyes shifted indifferently to something outside the window behind Sheppard in the far distance.
“Maybe you ought to,” Sheppard said and smiled.
Johnson continued to gaze beyond him.
” I want to see you make the most of your intelligence,” Sheppard said. “What’s important to you? Let’s talk about what’s important to you.” His eyes dropped involuntarily