The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [35]
He stood staring while the porter put the ladder up to the berth and then he started up it, still looking at the porter, seeing Cash there, only different, not in the eyes, and halfway up the ladder he said, still looking at the porter, “Cash is dead. He got the cholera from a pig.” The porter’s mouth perked down and he muttered, looking at Haze with his eyes thin, “I’m from Chicago. My father was a railroad man.” And Haze stared at him and then laughed: a nigger being a railroad “man”: and laughed again, and the porter jerked the ladder off suddenly with a wrench of his arm that sent Haze clutching at the blanket into the berth.
He lay on his stomach in the berth, trembling from the way he had got in. Cash’s son. From Eastrod. But not wanting Eastrod; hating it. He lay there for a while on his stomach, not moving. It seemed a year since he had fallen over the porter in the aisle.
After a while he remembered that he was actually in the berth and he turned and found the light and looked around him. There was no window.
The side wall did not have a window in it. It didn’t push up to be a window. There was no window concealed in it. There was a fish-net thing stretched across the side wall; but no windows. For a second it flashed through his mind that the porter had done this given him this berth that there were no windows to and had just a fish net strung the length of—because he hated him. But they must all be like this.
The top of the berth was low and curved over. He lay down. The curved top looked like it was not quite closed; it looked like it was closing. He lay there for a while not moving. There was something in his throat like a sponge with an egg taste. He had eggs for supper. They were in the sponge in his throat. They were right in his throat. He didn’t want to turn over for fear they would move; he wanted the light off; he wanted it dark. He reached up without turning and felt for the button and snapped it and the darkness sank down on him and then faded a little with light from the aisle that came in through the foot of space not closed. He wanted it all dark, he didn’t want it diluted. He heard the porter’s footsteps coming down the aisle, soft into the rug, coming steadily down, brushing against the green curtains and fading up the other way out of hearing. He was from Eastrod. From Eastrod but he hated it. Cash wouldn’t have put any claim on him. He wouldn’t have wanted him. He wouldn’t have wanted anything that wore a monkey white coat and toted a whisk broom in his pocket. Cash’s clothes had looked like they’d set a while under a rock; and they smelled like nigger. He thought how Cash smelled, but he smelled the train. No more gulch niggers in Easirod. In Eastrod. Turning in the road, he saw in the dark, half dark, the store boarded and the barn open with the dark free in it, and the smaller house half carted away, the porch gone and no floor in the hall. He had been supposed to go to his sister’s in Taulkinham all his last furlough when he came up from the camp in Georgia but he didn’t want to go to Taulkinham and he had gone back to Eastrod even though he knew how it was: the two families scattered in towns and even the niggers from up and down the road gone into Memphis and Murfreesboro and other places. He had gone back and slept in the house on the floor in the kitchen and a board had fallen on his head out of the roof and cut his face. He jumped, feeling the board, and the train jolted and unjolted and went again. He went looking through the house to see they hadn’t left nothing in it ought to been taken.
His ma always slept in the kitchen and had her walnut shiffer-robe in there. Wasn’t another shiffer-robe nowhere around. She was a Jackson. She had paid thirty dollars for it and hadn’t bought herself nothing else big again. And they had left it. He reckoned they hadn’t had room on the truck for it. He opened all the drawers. There were two lengths of wrapping cord