The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [258]
They were married in the County Ordinary’s office because Sarah Ruth thought churches were idolatrous. Parker had no opinion about that one way or the other. The Ordinary’s office was lined with cardboard file boxes and record books with dusty yellow slips of paper hanging on out of them. The Ordinary was an old woman with red hair who had held office for forty years and looked as dusty as her books. She married them from behind the iron-grill of a stand-up desk and when she finished, she said with a flourish, “Three dollars and fifty cents and till death do you part!” and yanked some forms out of a machine.
Marriage did not change Sarah Ruth a jot and it made Parker gloomier than ever. Every morning he decided he had had enough and would not return that night; every night he returned. Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo, but the only surface left on him now was his back. To see a tattoo on his own back he would have to get two mirrors and stand between them in just the correct position and this seemed to Parker a good way to make an idiot of himself. Sarah Ruth who, if she had had better sense, could have enjoyed a tattoo on his back, would not even look at the ones he had elsewhere. When he attempted to point out especial details of them, she would shut her eyes tight and tum her back as well. Except in total darkness, she preferred Parker dressed and with his sleeves rolled down.
“At the judgement seat of God, Jesus is going to say to you, ‘What you been doing all your life besides have pictures drawn all over you?’ ” she said.
“You don’t fool me none,” Parker said, “you’re just afraid that hefty girl I work for’ll like me so much shell say, ’Come on, Mr. Parker, let’s you and me…’”
“You’re tempting sin,” she said, “and at the judgement seat of God you’ll have to answer for that too. You ought to go back to selling the fruits of the earth.”
Parker did nothing much when he was at home but listen to what the judgement seat of God would be like for him if he didn’t change his ways. When he could, he broke in with tales of the hefty girl he worked for. “’Mr. Parker’”, he said she said, ” ‘I hired you for your brains.’ ” (She had added, “So why don’t you use them?”)
“And you should have seen her face the first time she saw me without my shirt,” he said. “‘Mr. Parker,’” she said, “‘you’re a walking panner-rammer!’” This had, in fact, been her remark but it had been delivered out of one side of her mouth.
Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker that there was no containing it outside of a tattoo. It had to be his back. There was no help for it. A dim half-formed inspiration began to work in his mind. He visualized having a tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to resista religious subject. He thought of an open book with HOLY BIBLE tattooed under it and an actual verse printed on the page. This seemed just the thing for a while; then he began to hear her say, “Ain’t I already got a real Bible? “What you think I want to read the same verse over and over for when I can read it all?” He needed something better even than the Bible! He thought about it so much that he began to lose sleep. He was already losing flesh—Sarah Ruth just threw food in the pot and let it boil. Not knowing for certain why he continued to stay with a woman who was both ugly and pregnant and no cook made him generally nervous and irritable, and he developed a little tic in the side of his face.
Once or twice he found himself turning around abruptly as if someone were trailing him. He had had a granddaddy who had ended in the state mental hospital, although not until he was seventy-five, but as urgent as it might be for him to get a tattoo, it was just as urgent that he get exactly the right one to bring Sarah Ruth to heel. As he continued to worry over it, his eyes took on a hollow preoccupied expression. The old woman he worked for told him that