The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [224]
“Study it and git your fill,” the boy drawled.
Sheppard reddened. The black deformed mass swelled before his eyes. He ignored the remark and the leer the boy was giving him. “Rufus,” he said, “you’ve got into a lot of senseless trouble but I think when you understand why you do these things, you’ll be less inclined to do them.” He smiled. They had so few friends, saw so few pleasant faces, that half his effectiveness came from nothing more than smiling at them. “There are a lot of things about yourself that I think I can explain to you,” he said.
Johnson looked at him stonily. “I ain’t asked for no explanation,” he said. “I already know why I do what I do.”
“Well good!” Sheppard said. “Suppose you tell me what’s made you do the things you’ve done?”
A black sheen appeared in the boy’s eyes. “Satan,” he said. “He has me in his power.”
Sheppard looked at him steadily. There was no indication on the boy’s face that he had said this to be funny.
The line of his thin mouth was set with pride. Sheppard’s eyes hardened. He felt a momentary dull despair as if he were faced with some elemental warping of nature that had happened too long ago to be corrected now. This boy’s questions about life had been answered by signs nailed on pine trees: DOES SATAN HAVE YOU IN HIS POWER? REPENT OR BURN IN HELL. JESUS SAVES He would know the Bible with or without reading it. His despair gave way to outrage. “Rubbish!” he snorted. ‘We’re living in the space age! You’re too smart to give me an answer like that.”
Johnson’s mouth twisted slightly. His look was contemptuous but amused. There was a glint of challenge in his eyes.
Sheppard scrutinized his face. Where there was intelligence anything was possible. He smiled again, a smile that was like an invitation to the boy to come into a school room with all its windows thrown open to the light. “Rufus,” he said, “I’m going to arrange for you to have a conference with me once a week. Maybe there’s an explanation for your explanation. Maybe I can explain your devil to you.”
After that he had talked to Johnson every Saturday for the rest of the year. He talked at random, the kind of talk the boy would never have heard before. He talked a little above him to give him something to reach for. He roamed from simple psychology and the dodges of the human mind to astronomy and the space capsules that were whirling around the earth faster than the speed of sound and would soon encircle the stars. Instinctively he concentrated on the stars. He wanted to give the boy something to reach for besides his neighbor’s goods. He wanted to stretch his horizons. He wanted him to see the universe, to see that the darkest parts of it could be penetrated. He would have given anything to be able to put a telescope in Johnson’s hands.
Johnson said little and what he did say, for the sake of his pride, was in dissent or senseless contradiction, with the clubfoot raised always to his knee like a weapon ready for use, but Sheppard was not deceived. He watched his eyes and every week he saw something in them crumble. From the boy’s face, hard but shocked, braced against the light that was ravaging him, he could see that he was hitting dead center.
Johnson was free now to live out of garbage cans and rediscover his old ignorance. The injustice of it was infuriating. He had been sent back to the grandfather; the old man’s imbecility could only be imagined. Perhaps the boy had by now run away from him. The idea of getting custody of Johnson had occurred to Sheppard before, but the fact of the grandfather had stood in the way. Nothing excited him so much as thinking what he could do for such a boy. First he would have him fitted for a new orthopedic shoe. His back was thrown out of line every time he took a step. Then he would encourage him in some particular intellectual interest. He thought of the telescope. He could buy a second-hand one and they could set it up in the attic window. He sat for almost ten minutes thinking what he could do if he had Johnson here with him. What was wasted on Norton would cause