The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [238]
Sheppard reached across the table and knocked the book out of his hand. “Leave the table,” he said coldly.
Johnson swallowed what was in his mouth. His eyes widened as if a vision of splendor were opening up before him. “I’ve eaten it!” he breathed. “I’ve eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth!”
“Leave this table,” Sheppard said. His hands were clenched beside his plate.
“I’ve eaten it!” the boy cried. Wonder transformed his face. “I’ve eaten it like Ezekiel and I don’t want none of your food after it nor no more ever.”
“Go then,” Sheppard said softly. “Go. Go.”
The boy rose and picked up the Bible and started toward the hall with it. At the door he paused, a small black figure on the threshold of some dark apocalypse: “The devil has you in his power,” he said in a jubilant voice and disappeared.
After supper Sheppard sat in the living room alone. Johnson had left the house but he could not believe that the boy had simply gone. The first feeling of release had passed. He felt dull and cold as at the onset of an illness and dread had settled in him like a fog. Just to leave would be too anticlimactic an end for Johnson’s taste; he would return and try to prove something. He might come back a week later and set fire to the place. Nothing seemed too outrageous now.
He picked up the paper and tried to read. In a moment he threw it down and got up and went into the hall and listened. He might be hiding in the attic. He went to the attic door and opened it.
The lantern was lit, casting a dim light on the stairs. He didn’t hear anything. “Norton,” he called, “are you up there?” There was no answer. He mounted the narrow stairs to see.
Amid the strange vine-like shadows cast by the lantern, Norton sat with his eye to the telescope. “Norton,” Sheppard said, “do you know where Rufus went?”
The child’s back was to him. He was sitting hunched, intent, his large ears directly above his shoulders. Suddenly he waved his hand and crouched closer to the telescope as if he could not get near enough to what he saw.
“Norton!” Sheppard said in a loud voice.
The child didn’t move.
“Norton!” Sheppard shouted.
Norton started. He turned around. There was an unnatural brightness about his eyes. After a moment he seemed to see that it was Sheppard. “I’ve found her!” he said breathlessly.
“Found who?” Sheppard said.
“Mamma!”
Sheppard steadied himself in the door way. The jungle ol shadows around the child thickened.
“Come and look!” he cried. He wiped his sweaty face on the tail of his plaid shirt and then put his eye back to the telescope. His back became fixed in a rigid intensity. All at once he waved again.
“Norton,” Sheppard said, “you don’t see anything in the telescope but star clusters. Now you’ve had enough of that for one night. You’d better go to bed. Do you know where Rufus is?”
“She’s there!” he cried, not turning around from the telescope. “She waved at me!”
” I want you in bed in fifteen minutes,” Sheppard said.
After a moment he said, “Do you hear me, Norton?”
The child began to wave frantically.
” I mean what I say,” Sheppard said. “I’m going to call in fifteen minutes and see if you’re in bed.”
He went down the steps again and returned to the parlor. He went to the front door and cast a cursory glance out. The sky was crowded with the stars he had been fool enough to think Johnson could reach. Somewhere in the small wood behind the house, a bull frog sounded a low hollow note. He went back to his chair and sat a few minutes. He decided to go to bed. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and leaned forward and heard, like the first shrill note of a disaster warning, the siren of a police car, moving slowly into the neighborhood and nearer until it subsided with a moan outside the house.
He felt a cold weight on his shoulders as if an icy cloak had been thrown about him. He went to the door and opened it.
Two policemen were coming up the walk with a dark snarling Johnson between them, handcuffed to each. A reporter jogged alongside