The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [58]
“That will make two!” Laverne said.
“You shut up talking like that!” Ruby shouted. “You shut up this minute. I ain’t going to have any baby!”
“Ha ha,” Laverne said.
“I don’t know how you think you know so much,” Ruby said, “single as you are. If I was so single I wouldn’t go around telling married people what their business is.”
“Not just your ankles,” Laverne said, “you’re swollen all over.”
“I ain’t going to stay here and be insulted,” Ruby said and walked carefully to the door, keeping herself erect and not looking down at her stomach the way she wanted to.
“Well I hope all of you feel better tomorrow,” Laverne said.
“I think my heart will be better tomorrow,” Ruby said. “But I hope we will be moving soon. I can’t climb these steps with this heart trouble and,” she added with a dignified glare, “Rufus don’t care nothing about your big feet.”
“You better put that gun up,” Laverne said, “before you shoot somebody.”
Ruby slammed the door shut and looked down at herself quickly. She was big there but she had always had a kind of big stomach. She did not stick out there different from the way she did any place else. It was natural when you took on some weight to take it on in the middle and Bill Hill didn’t mind her being fat, he was just more happy and didn’t know why. She saw Bill Hill’s long happy face, grinning at her from the eyes downward in a way he had as if his look got happier as it neared his teeth. He would never slip up. She rubbed her hand across her skirt and felt the tightness of it but hadn’t she felt that before? She had. It was the skirt—she had on the tight one that she didn’t wear often, she had… she didn’t have on the tight skirt. She had on the loose one. But it wasn’t very loose. But that didn’t make any difference, she was just fat.
She put her fingers on her stomach and pushed down and took them off quickly. She began walking toward the stairs, slowly, as if the floor were going to move under her. She began the steps. The pain came back at once. It came back with the first step. “No,” she whimpered, “no.” It was just a little feeling, just a little feeling like a piece of her inside rolling over but it made her breath tighten in her throat. Nothing in her was supposed to roll over. “Just one step,” she whispered, “Just one step and it did it.” It couldn’t be cancer. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in good fortune. She began crying and saying, “Just one step and it did it,” and going on up them absently as if she thought she were standing still. On the sixth one, she sat down suddenly, her hand slipping weakly down the banister spoke onto the floor.
“Noooo,” she said and leaned her round red face between the two nearest poles. She looked down into the stairwell and gave a long hollow wail that widened and echoed as it went down. The stair cavern was dark green and mole-colored and the wail sounded at the very bottom like a voice answering her. She gasped and shut her eyes. No. No. It couldn’t be any baby. She was not going to have something waiting in her to make her deader, she was not. Bill Hill couldn’t have slipped up. He said it was guaranteed and it had worked all this time and it could not be that, it could not. She shuddered and held her hand tightly over her mouth. She felt her face drawn puckered: two born dead one died the first year and one run under like a dried yellow apple no she was only thirtyfour years old, she was old. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in no drying up. Madam Zoleeda said oh but it will end in a stroke of good fortune! Moving. She had said it would end in a stroke of good moving.
She felt herself getting calmer. She felt herself, after a minute, getting almost calm and thought she got upset too easy; heck, it was gas. Madam Zoleeda hadn’t been wrong about anything yet, she knew more than…
She jumped: there was a bang at the bottom of