The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [225]
He got up and threw the cereal box in the garbage. Before he left the house, he looked into Norton’s room to be sure he was not stilI sick. The child was sitting crosslegged on his bed. He had emptied the quart jars of change into one large pile in front of him, and was sorting it out by nickels and dimes and quarters.
That afternoon Norton was alone in the house, squatting on the floor of his room arranging packages of flower seeds in rows around himself. Rain slashed against the window panes and rattled in the gutters. The room had grown dark but every few minutes it was lit by silent lightning and the seed packages showed up gaily on the floor. He squatted motionless like a large pale frog in the midst of this potential garden. All at once his eyes became alert. Without warning the rain had stopped. The silence was heavy as if the downpour had been hushed by violence. He remained motionless, only his eyes turning.
Into the silence came the distinct click of a key turning in the front door lock. The sound was a very deliberate one. It drew attention to itself and held it as if it were controlled more by a mind than by a hand. The child leapt up and got into the closet.
The footsteps began to move in the hall. They were deliberate and irregular, a light and then a heavy one, then a silence as if the visitor had paused to listen himself or to examine something. In a minute the kitchen door screeked. The footsteps crossed the kitchen to the refrigerator. The closet wall and the kitchen wall were the same. Norton stood with his ear pressed against it. The refrigerator door opened. There was a prolonged silence.
He took off his shoes and then tiptoed out of the closet and stepped over the seed packages. In the middle of the room, he stopped and remained where he was, rigid. A thin bony-faced boy in a wet black suit stood in his door, blocking his escape. His hair was flattened to his skull by the rain. He stood there like an irate drenched crow. His look went through the child like a pin and paralyzed him. Then his eyes began to move over everything in the room—the unmade bed, the dirty curtains on the one large window, a photograph of a wide-faced young woman that stood up in the clutter on top of the dresser.
The child’s tongue suddenly went wild. “He’s been expecting you, he’s going to give you a new shoe because you have to eat out of garbage cans!” he said in a kind of mouselike shriek.
“I eat out of garbage cans,” the boy said slowly with a beady stare, ‘because I like to eat out of garbage cans. See?”
The child nodded.
“And I got ways of getting my own shoe. See?”
The child nodded, mesmerized.
The boy limped in and sat down on the bed. He arranged a pillow behind him and stretched his short leg out so that the big black shoe rested conspicuously on a fold of the sheet.
Norton’s gaze settled on it and remained immobile. The sole was as thick as a brick.
Johnson wiggled it slightly and smiled. “If I kick somebody once with this,” he said, “it learns them not to mess with me.”
The child nodded.
“Go in the kitchen,” Johnson said, “and make me a sandwich with some of that rye bread and ham and bring me a glass of milk.”
Norton went off like a mechanical toy, pushed in the right direction. He made a large greasy sandwich with ham hanging out the sides of it and poured out a glass of milk. Then he returned to the room with the glass of milk in one hand and the sandwich in the other.
Johnson was leaning back regally against the pillow. “Thanks, waiter,” he said and took the sandwich.
Norton stood by the side of the bed, holding the glass.
The boy tore into the sandwich and ate steadily until he finished it. Then he took the glass of milk. He held it with both