Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor [1]
"Well," Mrs. Hitchcock said, "there's no place like home."
He gave her a glance and saw the flat of her face, reddish under a cap of fox-colored hair. She had got on two stops back. He had never seen her before that. "I got to go see the porter," he said. He got up and went toward the end of the car where the porter had begun making up a berth. He stopped beside him and leaned on a seat arm but the porter didn't look at him. He was pulling a wall of the section farther out.
"How long does it take you to make one up?"
"Seven minutes," the porter said, not looking at him.
Haze sat down on the seat arm. He said, "I'm from Eastrod."
"That isn't on this line," the porter said. "You on the wrong train."
"Going to the city," Haze said. "I said I was raised in Eastrod."
The porter didn't say anything.
"Eastrod," Haze said, louder.
The porter jerked the shade down. "You want your berth made up now, or what you standing there for?" he asked.
"Eastrod," Haze said. "Near Melsy."
The porter wrenched one side of the seat flat. "I'm from Chicago," he said. He wrenched the other side down. When he bent over, the back of his neck came out in three bulges.
"Yeah, I bet you are," Haze said with a leer.
"Your feet in the middle of the aisle. Somebody going to want to get by you," the porter said, turning suddenly and brushing past.
Haze got up and hung there a few seconds. He looked as if he were held by a rope caught in the middle of his back and attached to the train ceiling. He watched the porter move in a fine controlled lurch down the aisle and disappear at the other end of the car. He knew him to be a Parrum nigger from Eastrod. He went back to his section and folded into a slouched position and settled one foot on a pipe that ran under the window. Eastrod filled his head and then went out beyond and filled the space that stretched from the train across the empty darkening fields. He saw the two houses and the rust-colored road and the few Negro shacks and the one barn and the stall with the red and white CCC snuff ad peeling across the side of it.
"Are you going home?" Mrs. Hitchcock asked.
He looked at her sourly and gripped the black hat by the brim. "No, I ain't" he said in a sharp high nasal Tennessee voice.
Mrs. Hitchcock said neither was she. She told him she had been a Miss Weatherman before she married and that she was going to Florida to visit her married daughter, Sarah Lucile. She said it seemed like she had never had time to take a trip that far off. The way things happened, one thing after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn't tell if you were young or old.
He thought he could tell her she was old if she asked him. He stopped listening to her after a while. The porter passed back up the aisle and didn't look at him. Mrs. Hitchcock lost her train of talk. "I guess you're on your way to visit somebody?" she asked.
"Going to Taulkinham," he said and ground himself into the seat and looked at the window. "Don't know nobody there, but I'm going to do some things.
"I'm going to do some things I never have done before," he said and gave her a sidelong glance and curled his mouth slightly.
She said she knew an Albert Sparks from Taulkinham. She said he was her sister-in-law's brother-in-law and that he...
"I ain't from Taulkinham," he said. "I said I'm going there, that's all." Mrs. Hitchcock began to talk again but he cut her short and said, "That porter was raised in the same place where I was raised but he says he's from Chicago."
Mrs. Hitchcock said she knew a man who lived in Chi...
"You might as well go one place as another," he said. "That's all I know."
Mrs. Hitchcock said well that time flies. She said she hadn't seen her sister's children in five years and she didn't know if she'd know them if she saw them. There were three of them, Roy, Bubber, and John Wesley. John Wesley was six years