The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [248]
If I was going to send anybody back to Africa, Mrs. Turpin thought, it would be your kind, woman. “Yes, indeed,” she said aloud, but looking up at the ceiling, “it’s a heap of things worse than a nigger.” And dirtier than a hog, she added to herself.
“I think people with bad dispositions are more to be pitied than anyone on earth,” the pleasant lady said in a voice that was decidedly thin.
“I thank the Lord he has blessed me with a good one,” Mrs. Turpin said. “The day has never dawned that I couldn’t find something to laugh at.”
“Not since she married me anyways,” Claud said with a comical straight face.
Everybody laughed except the girl and the white-trash.
Mrs. Turpin’s stomach shook. “He’s such a caution,” she said, “that I can’t help but laugh at him.”
The girl made a loud ugly noise through her teeth.
Her mother’s mouth grew thin and tight. “I think the worst thing in the world,” she said, “is an ungrateful person. To have everything and not appreciate it. I know a girl,” she said, “who has parents who would give her anything, a little brother who loves her dearly, who is getting a good education, who wears the best clothes, but who can never say a kind word to anyone, who never smiles, who just criticizes and complains all day long.”
“Is she too old to paddle?” Claud asked.
The girl’s face was almost purple.
“Yes,”the lady said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing to do but leave her to her folly. Some day she’ll wake up and it’ll be too late.”
“It never hurt anyone to smile,” Mrs. Turpin said. “It just makes you feel better all over.”
“Of course,” the lady said sadly, “but there are just some people you can’t tell anything to. They can’t take criticism.”
“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!” For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” she cried aloud.
The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling. The girl’s fingers sank like clamps into the soft flesh of her neck. She heard the mother cry out and Claud shout, “Whoa!” There was an instant when she was certain that she was about to be in an earthquake.
All at once her vision narrowed and she saw everything as if it were happening in a small room far away, or as if she were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. Claud’s face crumpled and fell out of Sight. The nurse ran in, then out, then in again. Then the gangling figure of the doctor rushed out of the inner door. Magazines flew this way and that as the table turned over. The girl fell with a thud and Mrs. Turpin’s vision suddenly reversed itself and she saw everything large instead of small. The eyes of the whitetrashy woman were staring hugely at the floor. There the girl, held down on one side by the nurse and on the other by her mother, was wrenching and turning in their grasp. The doctor was kneeling astride her, trying to hold her arm down. He managed after a second to sink a long needle into it.
Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh.
“Somebody that’s not busy call for the ambulance,” the doctor said in the off-hand voice young doctors adopt for terrible occasions.
Mrs. Turpin could not have moved a finger. The old man who had been sitting next to her skipped nimbly into the office and made the call, for the secretary still seemed