The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [236]
He caught the boy’s shoulder and gripped it fiercely as if to keep himself from falling. “Listen,” he said, “you looked in that window to embarrass me. That was all you wanted—to shake my resolve to help you, but my resolve isn’t shaken. I’m stronger than you are. I’m stronger than you are and I’m going to save you. The good will triumph.”
“Not when it ain’t true,” the boy said. “Not when it ain’t right.”
“My resolve isn’t shaken,” Sheppard repeated. “I’m going to save you.”
Johnson’s look became sly again. “You ain’t going to save me,” he said. “You’re going to tell me to leave this house. I did those other two jobs too—the first one as well as the one I done when I was supposed to be in the picture show.”
“I’m not going to tell you to leave,” Sheppard said. His voice was toneless, mechanical, “I’m going to save you.”
Johnson thrust his head forward. “Save yourself,” he hissed. “Nobody can save me but Jesus.”
Sheppard laughed curtly. “You don’t deceive me” he said. “I hushed that out of your head in the reformatory. I saved you from that, at least.”
The muscles in Johnson’s face stiffened. A look of such repulsion hardened on his face that Sheppard drew back. The boy’s eyes were like distorting mirrors in which he saw himself made hideous and grotesque. “I’ll show you,” John son whispered. He rose abruptly and started headlong for the door as if he could not get out of Sheppard’s sight quick enough, but it was the door to the back hall he went through, not the front door. Sheppard turned on the sofa and looked behind him where the boy had disappeared. He heard the door to his room slam. He was not leaving. The intensity had gone out of Sheppard’s eyes. They looked flat and lifeless as if the shock of the boy’s revelation were only now reaching the center of his consciousness. “If he would only leave,” he murmured. “If he would only leave now of his own accord.”
The next morning Johnson appeared at the breakfast table in the grandfather’s suit he had come in. Sheppard pretended not to notice but one look told him what he already knew, that he was trapped, that there could be nothing now but a battle of nerves and that Johnson would win it. He wished he had never laid eyes on the boy. The failure of his compassion numbed him. He got out of the house as soon as he could and all day he dreaded to go home in the evening. He had a faint hope that the boy might be gone when he returned. The grandfather’s suit might have meant he was leaving. The hope grew in the afternoon. When he came home and opened the front door, his heart was pounding.
He stopped in the hall and looked silently into the living room. His expectant expression faded. His face seemed suddenly as old as his white hair. The two boys were sitting close together on the sofa, reading the same book. Norton’s cheek rested against the sleeve of Johnson’s black suit. Johnson’s finger moved under the lines they were reading. The elder brother and the younger. Sheppard looked woodenly at this scene for almost a minute. Then he walked into the room and took off his coat and dropped it on a chair. Neither boy noticed him. He went on to the kitchen.
Leola left the supper on the stove every afternoon before she left and he put it on the table. His head ached and his nerves were taut. He sat down on the kitchen stool and remained there, sunk in his depression. He wondered if he could infuriate Johnson enough to make him leave of his own accord. Last night what had enraged him was the Jesus business. It might enrage Johnson, but it depressed him. Why not simply tell the boy to go? Admit defeat. The thought