The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [31]
She was a tall, long-faced old woman in an antique black cloak. Her face was the color of a dead chicken’s skin. When she saw him, she looked as if she suddenly smelled something bad. He darted at her and thrust the dime into her hand and dashed on without looking back.
Slowly his heart calmed and he began to feel full of a new feeling-like being happy and embarrassed at the same time. Maybe, he thought, blushing, he would give all his money to her. He felt as if the ground did not need to be under him any longer. He noticed suddenly that the country boys’ feet were shuffling just behind him, and almost without thinking, he turned and asked graciously, “You all wanta see this turkey?”
They stopped where they were and stared at him. One in front spit. Ruller looked down at it quickly. There was real tobacco juice in it! “Wheered you git that turkey?” the spitter asked.
“I found it in the woods,” Ruller said. “I chased it dead. See, it’s been shot under the wing.” He took the turkey off his shoulder and held it down where they could see. “I think it was shot twice,” he went on excitedly, pulling the wing up.
“Lemme see it here,” the spitter said.
Ruller handed him the turkey. “You see down there where the bullet hole is?” he asked. “Well, I think it was shot twice in the same hole, I think it was …. ” The turkey’s head flew in his face as the spitter slung it up in the air and over his own shoulder and turned. The others turned with him and together they sauntered off in the direction they had come, the turkey sticking stiff out on the spitter’s back and its head swinging slowly in a circle as he walked away.
They were in the next block before Ruller moved. Finally, he realized that he could not even see them any longer, they were so far away. He turned toward home, almost creeping. He walked four blocks and then suddenly, noticing that it was dark, he began to run. He ran faster and faster, and as he turned up the road to his house, his heart was running as fast as his legs and he was certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its fingers ready to clutch.
The Train (1947)
THINKING about the porter, he had almost forgotten the berth.
He had an upper one. The man in the station had said he could give him a lower and Haze had asked didn’t he have no upper ones; the man said sure if that was what he wanted, and gave him an upper one. Leaning back on the seat, Haze had seen how the ceiling was rounded over him. It was in there. They pulled the ceiling down and it was in there, and you climbed up to it on a ladder. He hadn’t seen any ladders around; he reckoned they kept them in the closet. The closet was up where you came in. When he first got on the train, he had seen the porter standing in front of the closet, putting on his porter’s jacket. Haze had stopped right then—right where he was.
The turn of his head was like and the back of his neck was like and the short reach of his arm. He turned away from the closet and looked at Haze and Haze saw his eyes and they were like; they were the same-same as old Cash’s for the first instant, and then different. They turned different while he was looking at them; hardened flat. “Whu… what time do you pull down the beds?” Haze mumbled.
“Long time yet,” the porter said, reaching into the closet again.
Haze didn’t know what else to say to him. He went on to his section.
Now the train was greyflying past instants of trees and quick spaces of field and a motionless sky that sped darkening away in the opposite direction. Haze leaned his head back on the seat and looked out the window, the yellow light of the train lukewarm on him. The porter had passed twice, twice back and twice forward, and the second time forward