The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [265]
“Yah? Niggers is what he had working for him,” the son-in-law said. “That’s all. I’ve worked a nigger or two myself.”
“Those were just nawthun niggers you worked,” she said, her voice suddenly going lower so that Tanner had to lean forward to catch the words. “It takes brains to work a real nigger. You got to know how to handle them.”
“Yah so I don’t have brains,” the son-in-law said.
One of the sudden, very occasional, feelings of warmth for the daughter came over Tanner. Every now and then she said something that might make you think she had a little sense stored away somewhere for safe keeping.
“You got them,” she said. “You don’t always use them.”
“He has a stroke when he sees a nigger in the building,” the son-in-law said, “and she tells me,,,”
“Shut up talking so loud,” she said. “That’s not why he had the stroke.”
There was a silence. “Where you going to bury him?” the son-in- law asked, taking a different tack.
“Bury who?”
“Him in there.”
“Right here in New York,” she said. “Where do you think? We got a lot. I’m not taking that trip down there again with nobody.”
“Yah. Well I just wanted to make sure,” he said.
When she returned to the room, Tanner had both hands gripped on the chair arms. His eyes were trained on her like the eyes of an angry corpse. “You promised you’d bury me there,” he said. “Your promise ain’t any good. Your promise ain’t any good. Your promise ain’t any good.” His voice was so dry it was barely audible. He began to shake, his hands, his head, his feet, “Bury me here and burn in hell!” he cried and fell back into his chair.
The daughter shuddered to attention. “You ain’t dead yet!” She threw out a ponderous sigh. “You got a long time to be worrying about that.” She turned and began to pick up parts of the newspaper scattered on the floor. She had gray hair that hung to her shoulders and a round face, beginning to wear. “I do every last living thing for you,” she muttered, “and this is the way you carryon.” She stuck the papers under her arm and said, “And don’t throw hell at me. I don’t believe in it. That’s a lot of hardshell Baptist hooey.” Then she went into the kitchen.
He kept his mouth stretched taut, his top plate gripped between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Still the tears flooded down his cheeks; he wiped each one furtively on his shoulder.
Her voice rose from the kitchen. “As bad as having a child. He wanted to come and now he’s here, he don’t like it.”
He had not wanted to come.
“Pretended he didn’t but I could tell. I said if you don’t want to come I can’t make you. If you don’t want to live like decent people there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“As for me,” her higher voice said, “when I die that ain’t the time I’m going to start getting choosey. They can lay me in the nearest spot. When I pass from this world I’ll be considerate of them that stay in it. I won’t be thinking of just myself.”
“Certainly not,” the other voice said, “You never been that selfish.
You’re the kind that looks out for other people.”
“Well I try,” she said, “I try.”
He laid his head on the back of the chair for a moment and the hat tilted down over his eyes. He had raised three boys and her. The three boys were gone, two in the war and one to the devil and there was nobody left who felt a duty toward him but her, married and childless, in New York City like Mrs. Big; and ready when she came back and found him living the way he was to take him back with her. She had put her face in the door of the shack and had stared, expressionless, for a second. Then all at once she had screamed and jumped back.
“What’s that on the floor?”
“Coleman,” he said.
The old Negro was curled up on a pallet asleep at the foot of Tanner’s bed, a stinking skin full of bones, arranged in what seemed vaguely human form. When Coleman was young, he had looked like a bear; now that he was old he looked like a monkey. With Tanner it was the opposite; when he was young he had looked like a monkey but when he got old. he looked