The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [32]
The train had come to Evansville. A lady got on and sat opposite Haze. That meant she would have the berth under him. She said she thought it was going to snow. She said her husband had driven her down to the station and he said if it didn’t snow before he got home, he’d be surprised. He had ten miles to go; they lived in the suburbs. She was going to Florida to visit her daughter. She had never had time to take a trip that far off. The way things happened, one thing right after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn’t tell if you were old or young. She looked as if it had been cheating her, going double quick when she was asleep and couldn’t watch it. Haze was glad to have someone there talking.
He remembered when he was a little boy, him and his mother and the other children would go into Chattanooga on the Tennessee Railroad. His mother had always started up a conversation with the other people on the train. She was like an old bird dog just unpenned that raced, sniffing up every rock and stick and sucking in the air around everything she stopped at. There wasn’t a person she hadn’t spoken to by the time they were ready to get off. She remembered them too. Long years after, she would say she wondered where the lady was who was going to Fort West, or she wondered if the man who was selling Bibles had ever got his wife out the hospital. She had a hankering for people—as if what happened to the ones she talked to happened to her then. She was a Jackson. Annie Lou Jackson.
My mother was a Jackson, Haze said to himself. He had stopped listening to the lady although he was still looking at her and she thought he was listening. My name is Hazel Wickers, he said. I’m nineteen. My mother was a Jackson. I was raised in Eastrod, Eastrod, Tennessee; he thought about the porter again. He was going to ask the porter. It struck him suddenly that the porter might even be Cash’s son. Cash had a son run away. It happened before Haze’s time. Even so, the porter would know Eastrod.
Haze glanced out the window at the shapes black—spinning past him. He could shut his eyes and make Eastrod at night out of any of them—he could find the two houses with the road between and the store and the nigger houses and the one barn and the piece of fence that started out into the pasture, gray-white when the moon was on it. He could put the mule face, solid, over the fence and let it hang there, feeling how the night was. He felt it himself. He felt it light-touching around him. He seen his ma coming up the path, wiping her hands on an apron she had taken off, looking like the night change was on her, and then standing in the doorway: Haaazzzzeeeee, Ha. rzzzeee, come in here. The train said it for him. He wanted to get up and go find the porter.
“Are you going home?” Mrs. Hosen asked him. Her name was Mrs. Wallace Ben Hasen; she had been a Miss Hitchcock before she married.
“Oh!” Haze said, startled—“I get off at, I get off at Taulkinham.”
Mrs. Hasen knew some people in Evansville who had a cousin in Taulkinham—a Mr. Henrys, she thought. Being from Taulkinham, Haze might know him. Had he ever heard the….
“Taulkinham ain’t where I’m from,” Haze muttered. “I don’t know nothin ‘ about Taulkinham.” He didn’t look at Mrs. Hasen. He knew what she was going to ask next and he felt it coming and it came, “Well, where do you live?”
He wanted to get away from her. “It was there,” he mumbled, squirming in the seat. Then he said, “I don’t rightly know, I was there but… this is just the third time I been at Taulkinham,” he said