The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [73]
This was not the same uniform he had worn in the War between the States. He had not actually been a general in that war. He had probably been a foot soldier; he didn’t remember what he had been; in fact, he didn’t remember that war at all. It was like his feet, which hung down now shriveled at the very end of him, without feeling, covered with a blue-gray afghan that Sally Poker had crocheted when she was a little girl. He didn’t remember the Spanish-American War in which he had lost a son; he didn’t even remember the son. He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades. People were always asking him if he remembered this or thata dreary black procession of questions about the past. There was only one event in the past that had any significance for him and that he cared to talk about: that was twelve years ago when he had received the general’s uniform and had been in the premiere.
“I was in that preemy they had in Atlanta,” he would tell visitors sitting on his front porch. “Surrounded by beautiful guls. It wasn’t a thing local about it. It was nothing local about it. Listen here. It was a nashnul event and they had me in it—up onto the stage. There was no bob-tails at it. Every person at it had paid ten dollars to get in and had to wear his tuxseeder. I was in this uniform. A beautiful gul presented me with it that afternoon in a hotel room.”
“It was in a suite in the hotel and I was in it too, Papa,” Sally Poker would say, winking at the visitors. “You weren’t alone with any young lady in a hotel room.”
“Was, I’d a known what to do,” the old General would say with a sharp look and the visitors would scream with laughter. “This was a Hollywood, California, gul,” he’d continue. “She was from Hollywood, California, and didn’t have any part in the pitcher. Out there they have so many beautiful guls that they don’t need that they call them a extra and they don’t use them for nothing but presenting people with things and having their pitchers taken. They took my pitcher with her. No, it was two of them. One on either side and me in the middle with my arms around each of them’s waist and their waist ain’t any bigger than a half a dollar.”
Sally Poker would interrupt again. “It was Mr. Govisky that gave you the uniform, Papa, and he gave me the most exquisite corsage. Really, I wish you could have seen it. It was made with gladiola petals taken off and painted gold and put back together to look like a rose. It was exquisite. I wish you could have seen it, it was…”
“It was as big as her head,” the General would snarl. “I was tellin it. They gimme this uniform and they gimme this seward and they say, “‘Now General, we don’t want you to start a war on us. All we want you to do is march right up on that stage when you’re innerduced tonight and answer a few questions. Think you can do that?’ ‘Think I can do it!’ I say. ‘Listen here. I was doing things before you were born,’ and they hollered.”
“He was the hit of the show,” Sally Poker would say, but she didn’t much like to remember the premiere on account of what had happened to her feet at it. She had bought a new dress for the occasiona long black crepe dinner dress with a rhinestone buckle and a bolero—and a pair of silver slippers to wear with it, because she was supposed to go up on the stage with him to keep him from falling. Everything was arranged for them. A real limousine came at ten minutes to eight and took them to the theater. It drew up under the marquee at exactly the right time, after the big stars and the director and the author and the governor and the mayor and some less important stars. The