The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [6]
His daughter came in. “Don’t you want to go for a walk?” she asked. She looked provoked.
He didn’t answer her.
“Well?”
“No.” He wondered how long she was going to stand there. She made his. eves feel like his throat. They’d get watery and she’d see. She had seen before and had looked sorry for him. She’d looked sorry for herself too; but she could er saved herself, Old Dudley thought, if she’d just have let him alone—let him stay where he was back home and not be so taken up with her damn duty. She moved out of the room, leaving an audible sigh, to crawl over him and remind him again of that one minute—that wasn’t her fault at all—when suddenly he had wanted to go to New York to live with her.
He could have got out of going. He could have been stubborn and told her he’d spend his life where he’d always spent it, send him or not send him the money every month, he’d get along with his pension and odd jobs. Keep her damn money—she needed it worse than he did. She would have been glad to have had her duty disposed of like that. Then she could have said if he died without his children near him, it was his own fault; if he got sick and there wasn’t anybody to take care of him, well, he’d asked for it, she could have said. But there was that thing inside him that had wanted to see New York. He had been to Atlanta once when he was a boy and he had seen New York in a picture show. Big Town Rhythm it was. Big towns were important places. The thing inside him had sneaked up on him for just one instant. The ‘place like he’d seen in the picture show had room for him! It was an important place and it had room for him! He’d said yes, he’d go.
He must have been sick when he said it. He couldn’t have been well and said it. He had been sick and she had been so taken up with her damn duty, she had wangled it out of him. Why did she ha ve to come down there in the first place to pester him? He had been doing all right. There was his pension that could feed him and odd jobs that kept him his room in the boarding house. The window in that room showed him the river-thick and red as it struggled over rocks and around curves. He tried to think how it was besides red and slow. He added green brotches for trees on either side of it and a brown spot for trash somewhere upstream. He and Rabie had fished it in a flat-bottom boat every Wednesday. Rabie knew the river up and. down for twenty miles. There wasn’t another nigger in Coa County that knew it like he did. He loved the river, but it hadn’t meant any’thing to Old Dudley. The fish were what he was after. He liked to come in at night with a long string of them and slap them down in the sink. “Few fish I got,” he’d say. It took a man to get those fish, the old girls at the boarding house always said. He and Rabie would start out early Wednesday morning and fish all day. Rabiewould find the spots and row; Old Dudley always caught them. Rabie didn’t care much about catching them—he just loved—the river. “Ain’t no use settin’ yo’ line down dere, boss,” he’d say. “Ain’t no fish dere. Dis ol’ riber ain’t hidin’ none nowhere ‘round hyar, nawsuh.” And he would giggle and shift the boat downstream. That was Rabie. He could steal cleaner than a weasel but he knew where the fish were. Old Dudley always gave him the little ones.
Old Dudley had lived upstairs in the corner room of the boarding house ever since his wife died in ‘22. He protected the old ladies. He was the man in the house and he did the things a man in the house was supposed to do. It was a dull occupation at night when the old girls crabbed and crocheted in the parlor and the rran in the house had to listen and judge the sparrow-like wars that rasped and twittered intermittently. But in the daytime there was Rabie. Rabie