The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [269]
Tanner had continued to look across the field as if his spirit had been sucked out of him into the woods and nothing was left on the chair but a shell. If he had known it was a question of this—sitting here looking out of this window all day in this no-place, or just running a still for a nigger, he would have run the still for the nigger. He would have been a nigger’s white nigger any day. Behind him he heard the daughter come in from the kitchen. His heart accelerated but after a second he heard her plump herself down on the sofa. She was not yet ready to go. He did not turn and look at her.
She sat there silently a few moments. Then she began. “The trouble with you is,” she said, “you sit in front of that window all the time where there’s nothing to look out at. You need some inspiration and an out-let. If you would let me pull your chair around to look at the TV, you would quit thinking about morbid stuff, death and hell and judgement. My Lord.”
“The Judgement is coming,” he muttered. “The sheep’ll be separated from the goats. Them that kept their promises from them that didn’t. Them that did the best they could with what they had from them that didn’t. Them that honored their father and their mother from them that cursed them. Them that…”
She heaved a mammoth sigh that all but drowned him out. “What’s the use in me wasting my good breath?” she asked. She rose and went back in the kitchen and began knocking things about.
She was so high and mighty! At home he had been living in a shack but there was at least air around it. He could put his feet on the ground. Here she didn’t even live in a house. She lived in a pigeon-hutch of a building, with all stripes of foreigner, all of them twisted in the tongue. It was no place for a sane man. The first morning here she had taken him sightseeing and he had seen in fifteen minutes exactly how it was. He had not been out of the apartment since. He never wanted to set foot again on the underground railroad or the steps that moved under you while you stood still or any elevator to the thirty-fourth floor. When he was safely back in the apartment again, he had imagined going over it with Coleman. He had to turn his head even few seconds to make sure Coleman was behind him. Keep to the inside or these people’I knock you down, keep right behind me or you ‘II get left, keep your hat on, you damn idiot, he had said, and Coleman had come on with his bent running shamble, panting and muttering, What we doing here? Where you get this fool idea coming here?
I come to show you it was no kind of place. Now you know you were well off where you were.
I knowed it before, Coleman said. Was you didn’t know it.
When he had been here a week, he had got a postcard from Coleman that had been written for him by Hooten at the railroad station. It was written in green ink and said, “This is Coleman-X—how you boss.” Under it Hooten had written from himself, “Quit frequenting all those nitespots and come on home, you scoundrel, yours truly. W. P. Hooten.” He had sent Coleman a card in return, care of Hooten, that said, “This place is alrite if you like it. Yours truly, W. T. Tanner.” Since the daughter had to mail the card, he had not put on it that he was returning as soon as his pension check came. He had not intended to tell her but to leave her a note. When the check came, he would hire himself a taxi to the bus station and be on his way. And it would have nude her as happy as it made him. She had found