The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [54]
Thirty-four wasn’t old, wasn’t any age at all. She remembered her mother at thirty-four-she had looked like a puckered-up old yellow apple, sour, she had always looked sour, she had always looked like she wasn’t satisfied with anything. She compared herself at thirtyfour with her mother at that age. Her mother’s hair had been gray—hers wouldn’t be gray now even if she hadn’t touched it up. All those children were what did her mother in—eight of them: two born dead, one died the first year, one crushed under a mowing machine. Her mother had got deader with everyone of them. And all of for what? Because she hadn’t known any better. Pure ignorance. The purest of downright ignorance!
And there her two sisters were, both married four years with four children apiece. She didn’t see how they stood it, always going to the doctor to be jabbed at with instruments. She remembered when her mother had had Rufus. She was the only one of the children who couldn’t stand it and she walked all the way in to Melsy, in the hot sun ten miles, to the picture show to get clear of the screaming, and had sat through two westerns and a horror picture and a serial and then had walked all the way back and found it was just beginning, and she had had to listen all night. All that misery for Rufus! And him turned out now to have no more charge than a dish rag. She saw him waiting out nowhere before he was born, just waiting, waiting to make his mother, only thirtyfour, into an old woman. She gripped the banister rail fiercely and heaved herself up another step, shaking her head. Lord, she was disappointed in him! After she had told all her friends her brother was back from the European Theater, here he comes—sounding like he’d never been out of a hog lot.
He looked old too. He looked older than she did and he was fourteen years younger. She was extremely young looking for her age. Not that thirtyfour is any age and anyway she was married. She had to smile, thinking about that, because she had done so much better than her sisters—they had married from around. “This breathlessness,” she muttered, stopping again. She decided she would have to sit down.
There were twenty-eight steps in each flight—twenty-eight.
She sat down and jumped quickly, feeling something under her. She caught her breath and then pulled the thing out: it was Hartley Gilfeet’s pistol. Nine inches of treacherous tin! He was a six-year old boy who lived on the fifth floor. If he had been hers, she’d have worn him out so hard so many times he wouldn’t know how to leave his mess on a public stair. She could have fallen down those stairs as easy as not and ruined herself! But his stupid mother wasn’t going to do anything to him even if she told her. All she did was scream at him and tell people how smart he was. “Little Mister Good Fortune!” she called him. “All his poor daddy left me!” His daddy had said on his death bed, “There’s nothing but him I ever given you,” and she had said, “Rodman, you given me a fortune!” and so she called him Little Mister Good Fortune. “I’d wear the seat of his good fortune out!” Ruby muttered.
The steps were going up and down like a seesaw with her in the middle of it. She did not want to get nauseated. Not that again. Now no. No. She was not. She sat tightly to the steps with her eyes shut until the dizziness stopped a little and the nausea subsided. No, I’m not going to no doctor, she said. No. No. She was not. They would have to carry her there knocked out before she would go. She had done all