The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [228]
The child suddenly came to life. His face swelled with fury. “He went in her room and used her comb!” he screamed, yanking Sheppard’s arm. “He put on her corset and danced with Leola, he…”
“Stop’ this!” Sheppard said sharply. “Is tattling all you’re capable of? I’m not asking you for a report on Rufus’s conduct. I’m asking you to make him welcome here. Do you understand?
“You see how it is?” he asked, turning to Johnson.
Norton kicked the leg of the pink chair viciously, just missing Johnson’s swollen foot. Sheppard yanked him back.
“He said you weren’t nothing but gas!” the child shrieked.
A sly look of pleasure crossed Johnson’s face.
Sheppard was not put back. These insults were part of the boy’s defensive mechanism. “What about it, Rufus?” he said. “Will you stay with us for a while?”
Johnson looked straight in front of him and said nothing. He smiled slightly and appeared to gaze upon some vision of the future that pleased him.
“I don’t care,” he said and turned a page of the encyclopedia. “I can stand anywhere.”
“Wonderful.” Sheppard said. “Wonderful.”
“He said,” the child said in a throaty whisper, “you didn’t know your left hand from your right.”
There was a silence.
Johnson wet his finger and turned another page of the encyclopedia.
“I have something to say to both of you,” Sheppard said in a voice without inflection. His eyes moved from one to the other of them and he spoke slowly as if what he was saying he would say only once and it behooved them to listen. “If it made any difference to me what Rufus thinks of me,” he said, “then I wouldn’t be asking him here. Rufus is going to help me out and I’m going to help him out and we’re both going to help you out. I’d simply be selfish if I let what Rufus thinks of me interfere with what I can do for Rufus. If I can help a person, all I want is to do it. I’m above and beyond simple pettiness.”
Neither of them made a sound. Norton stared at the chair cushion. Johnson peered closer at some fine print in the encyclopedia. Sheppard was looking at the tops of their heads. He smiled. After all, he had won. The boy was staying. He reached out and ruffled Norton’s hair and slapped Johnson on the shoulder. “Now you fellows sit here and get acquainted,” he said gaily and started toward the door. “I’m going to see what Leola left us for supper.”
When he was gone, Johnson raised his head and looked at Norton. The child looked back at him bleakly. “God, kid,” Johnson said in a cracked voice, “how do you stand it?” His face was still with outrage. “He thinks he’s Jesus Christ!”
II
Sheppard’s attic was a large unfinished room with exposed beams and no electric light. They had set the telescope up on a tripod in one of the dormer windows. It pointed now toward the dark sky where a sliver of moon, as fragile as an egg shell, had just emerged from behind a cloud with a brilliant silver edge. Inside, a kerosene lantern set on a trunk cast their shadows upward and tangled them, wavering slightly, in the joists overhead. Sheppard was sitting on a packing box, looking through the telescope, and Johnson was at his elbow, waiting to get at it. Sheppard had bought it for fifteen dollars two days before at a pawn shop.
“Quit hoggin it,” Johnson said.
Sheppard got up and Johnson slid onto the box and put his eye to the instrument.
Sheppard sat down on a straight chair a few feet away. His face was flushed with pleasure. This much of his dream was a reality. Within a week he had made it possible for this boy’s vision to pass through a slender channel to the stars. He looked at Johnson’s bent back with complete satisfaction. The boy had on one of Norton’s plaid shirts and Some new khaki trousers he had bought him. The shoe would be ready next week. He had taken him to the brace shop the day after he came and had him fitted for a new shoe. Johnson was as touchy about the foot as if it were a sacred object. His face had been glum while the clerk, a young man with a bright pink bald head, measured the foot with his profane hands.