A Good Man is Hard to Find
A
Good Man is Hard to Find
by Flannery O'Connor
From:Flannery
O'Connor: Collected Works the Library of America
Flannery
O'Connor 1925-1964
(c)1953, 1954
p137
THE
GRANDMOTHER didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her
connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change
Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting
on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of
the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read
this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling
the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The
Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read
here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my
children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't
answer to my conscience if I did."
Bailey didn't look up from his reading
so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in
slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around
with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears.
She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar.
"The children have been to Florida before," the old lady said.
"You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see
different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east
Tennessee."
The children's mother didn't seem to
hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses,
said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?"
He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be
queen for a day," June Star said without raising her yellow head.
"Yes and what would you do if this
fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother asked.
"I'd smack his face," John
Wesley said.
"She wouldn't stay at home for a
million bucks," June Star said. "Afraid she'd miss something. She has
to go everywhere we go."
138 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
"All right, Miss," the
grandmother said. "Just remember that the next time you want me to curl
your hair."
June Star said her hair was naturally
curly.
The next morning the grandmother was
the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked
like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding
a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be
left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and
she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally
asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a
cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat
with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her. Bailey and the children's
mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with
the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she
thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they
got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself
comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up with her
purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children's mother still had
on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the
grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets
on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her
collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she
had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an
accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was
a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be
a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned Bailey
that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid
themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you
before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of
the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to
both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with
purple; and the various crops
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND 139
that made rows of green lace-work on
the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of
them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had
gone back to sleep.
"Let's go through Georgia fast so
we won't have to look at it much," John Wesley said.
"If I were a little boy,"
said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way.
Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills."
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly
dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy state
too."
"You said it," June Star
said.
"In my time," said the
grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more
respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People
did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!" she said and
pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldn't that
make a picture, now?" she asked and they all turned and looked at the
little Negro out of the back window. He waved.
"He didn't have any britches
on," June Star said.
"He probably didn't have
any," the grandmother explained. "Little niggers in the country don't
have things like we do. If I could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
The grandmother offered to hold the
baby and the children's mother passed him over the front seat to her. She set
him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were
passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery
thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile.
They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle
of it, like a small island. "Look at the graveyard!" the grandmother
said, pointing it out. "That was the old family burying ground. That
belonged to the plantation."
"Where's the plantation?"
John Wesley asked.
"Gone With the Wind," said
the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."
When the children finished all the comic
books they had brought, they opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a
peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let
I40 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
the children throw the box and the
paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do they played a
game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess what shape it
suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow
and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June Star said he didn't play fair,
and they began to slap each other over the grandmother.
The grandmother said she would tell
them a story if they would keep quiet. When she told a story, she rolled her
eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a
maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper,
Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he
brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it,
E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the watermelon and
there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and returned in his
buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a nigger
boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T.! This story tickled John Wesley's
funny bone and he giggled and giggled but June Star didn't think it was any
good. She said she wouldn't marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on
Saturday. The grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden
because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came
out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.
They stopped at The Tower for barbecued
sandwiches. The Tower was a part stucco and part wood filling station and dance
hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red Sammy Butts ran
it and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up
and down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED
SAMMY'S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH. A VETERAN! RED SAMMY'S YOUR
MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground
outside The Tower with his head under a truck while a gray monkey about a foot
high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey sprang
back into the tree and got on the
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND 141 highest
limb as soon as he saw the children jump out of the car and run toward him.
Inside, The Tower was a long dark room
with a counter at one end and tables at the other and dancing space in the
middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red
Sam's wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin,
came and took their order. The children's mother put a dime in the machine and
played "The Tennessee Waltz," and the grandmother said that tune
always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would like to dance but
he only glared at her. He didn't have a naturally sunny disposition like she
did and trips made him nervous. The grandmother's brown eyes were very bright.
She swayed her head from side to side and pretended she was dancing in her
chair. June Star said play something she could tap to so the children's mother
put in another dime and played a fast number and June Star stepped out onto the
dance floor and did her tap routine.
"Ain't she cute?" Red Sam's
wife said, leaning over the counter. "Would you like to come be my little
girl?"
"No I certainly wouldn't,"
June Star said. "I wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this for a
minion bucks!" and she ran back to the table.
"Ain't she cute?" the woman
repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
"Arn't you ashamed?" hissed
the grandmother.
Red Sam came in and told his wife to
quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these people's order. His khaki
trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a
sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table
nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel. "You can't win," he
said. "You can't win," and he wiped his sweating red face off with a
gray handkerchief. "These days you don't know who to trust," he said.
"Ain't that the truth?"
"People are certainly not nice
like they used to be," said the grandmother.
"Two fellers come in here last
week," Red Sammy said, "driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car
but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked
142 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
at the mill and you know I let them
fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?"
"Because you're a good man!"
the grandmother said at once.
"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red
Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying
the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand and one balanced
on her arm. "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can
trust," she said. "And I don't count nobody out of that, not
nobody," she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
"Did you read about that criminal,
The Misfit, that's escaped?" asked the grandmother.
"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if
he didn't attact this place right here," said the woman. "If he hears
about it being here,I wouldn't be none surprised to see him. If he hears it's
two cent in the cash register, I wouldn't be a tall surprised if he . . ."
"That'll do," Red Sam said.
"Go bring these people their Co'-Colas," and the woman went off to
get the rest of the order.
"A good man is hard to find,"
Red Sammy said. "Every- thing is getting terrible. I remember the day you
could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."
He and the grandmother discussed better
times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for
the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were
made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly
right. The children ran outside into the white sunlight and looked at the
monkey in the lacy chinaberry tree. He was busy catching fleas on himself and
biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.
They drove off again into the hot
afternoon. The grand- mother took cat naps and woke up every few minutes with
her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old
plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young
lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there
was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND 143
arbors on either side in front where
you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled
exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey would not be
willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about
it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin
arbors were still standing. "There was a secret panel in this house,"
she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, "and
the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came
through but it was never found . . ."
"Hey!" John Wesley said.
"Let's go see it! We'll find it! We'll poke all the woodwork and find it!
Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off
there?"
"We never have seen a house with a
secret panel!" June Star shrieked. "Let's go to the house with the
secret panel! Hey Pop, can't we go see the house with the secret panel!"
"It's not far from here, I
know," the grandmother said. "It wouldn't take over twenty
minutes."
Bailey was looking straight ahead. His
jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. "No," he said.
The children began to yell and scream
that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel. John Wesley kicked the
back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother's shoulder and whined
desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation,
that they could never do what THEY wanted to do. The baby began to scream and
John Wesley kicked the back of the seat so hard that his father could feel the
blows in his kidney.
"All right!" he shouted and
drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. "Will you all shut up?
Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don't shut up, we won't go
anywhere.
"It would be very educational for
them," the grandmother murmured.
"All right," Bailey said,
"but get this: this is the only time we're going to stop for anything like
this. This is the one and only time."
"The dirt road that you have to
turn down is about a mile back," the grandmother directed. "I marked
it when we passed."
144 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
"A dirt road," Bailey
groaned.
After they had turned around and were
headed toward the dirt road, the grandmother recalled other points about the
house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in the
hall. John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.
"You can't go inside this house,"
Bailey said. "You don't know who lives there."
"While you all talk to the people
in front, I'll run around behind and get in a window," John Wesley
suggested.
"We'll all stay in the car,"
his mother said. They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along
in a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when there were no
paved roads and thirty miles was a day's journey. The dirt road was hilly and
there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All at
once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for
miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the
dust-coated trees looking down on them.
"This place had better turn up in
a minute," Bailey said, "or I'm going to turn around."
The road looked as if no one had
traveled on it in months.
"It's not much farther," the
grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The
thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes
dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant
the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with
a snarl and Pitty Sing,the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder.
The children were thrown to the floor
and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground;
the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and
landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in
the driver's seat with the cat-gray-striped with a broad white face and an
orange nose-clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.
As soon as the children saw they could
move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, "We've
had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND 145
dashboard, hoping she was injured so
that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible
thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered
so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his neck with
both hands and flung it out the window against the side of a pine tree. Then he
got out of the car and started looking for the children's mother. She was
sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby,
but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. "We've had an
ACCIDENT!" the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.
"But nobody's killed," June
Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car, her hat
still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty
angle and the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the
ditch, except the children, to recover from the shock. They were all shaking.
"Maybe a car will come
along," said the children's mother hoarsely.
"I believe I have injured an
organ," said the grandmother, pressing her side, but no one answered her.
Bailey's teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue
parrots designed in it and his face was as yellow as the l shirt. The
grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above and
they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of it. Behind the
ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a
few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly
as if the occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both
arms dramatically to attract their attention. The car continued to come on slowly,
disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the
hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearse-like automobile.
There were three men in it.
It came to a stop just over them and
for some minutes, the driver looked down with a steady expressionless gaze to
where they were sitting, and didn't speak. Then he turned his
146 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
head and muttered something to the
other two and they got out. One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat
shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on
the right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of
loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat
pulled down very low, hiding most of his face. He came around slowly on the
left side. Neither spoke.
The driver got out of the car and stood
by the side of it, looking down at them. He was an older man than the other
two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver- rimmed spectacles
that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn't have on
any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and
was holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys also had guns.
"We've had an ACCIDENT!" the
children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar
feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was as
familiar to her as if she had known him au her life but she could not recall
who he was. He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment,
placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn't slip. He had on tan and white
shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. "Good
afternoon," he said. "I see you all had you a little spill."
"We turned over twice!" said
the grandmother.
"Once"," he corrected.
"We seen it happen. Try their car and see will it run, Hiram," he
said quietly to the boy with the gray hat.
"What you got that gun for?"
John Wesley asked. "Whatcha gonna do with that gun?"
"Lady," the man said to the
children's mother, "would you mind calling them children to sit down by
you? Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down right together
there where you're at."
"What are you telling US what to
do for?" June Star asked.
Behind them the line of woods gaped
like a dark open mouth. "Come here," said their mother.
"Look here now," Bailey began
suddenly, "we're in a predicament! We're in . . ."
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND 147
The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled
to her feet and stood staring. "You're The Misfit!" she said. "I
recognized you at once!"
"Yes'm," the man said,
smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known,
"but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of
reckernized me."
Bailey turned his head sharply and said
something to his mother that shocked even the children. The old lady began to
cry and The Misfit reddened.
"Lady," he said, "don't
you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don't mean. I don't reckon he meant
to talk to you thataway."
"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would
you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff
and began to slap at her eyes with it.
The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe
into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it up again. "I
would hate to have to," he said.
"Listen," the grandmother
almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like you
have com- mon blood. I know you must come from nice people!"
"Yes mam," he said,
"finest people in the world." When he smiled he showed a row of
strong white teeth. "God never made a finer woman than my mother and my
daddy's heart was pure gold," he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt
had come around behind them and was standing with his gun at his hip. The
Misfit squatted down on the ground. "Watch them children, Bobby Lee,"
he said. "You know they make me nervous." He looked at the six of them
huddled together in front of him and he seemed to be embarrassed as if he
couldn't think of anything to say. "Ain't a cloud in the sky," he
remarked, looking up at it. "Don't see no sun but don't see no cloud
neither."
"Yes, it's a beautiful day,"
said the grandmother. "Listen," she said, "you shouldn't call
yourself The Misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look
at you and tell "
"Hush!" Bailey yelled.
"Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!" He was squatting in
the position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn't move.
148 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
"I prechate that, lady," The
Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt of his gun.
"It'll take a half a hour to fix
this here car," Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of it.
"Well, first you and Bobby Lee get
him and that little boy to step over yonder with you," The Misfit said,
pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. "The boys want to ast you some-
thing," he said to Bailey. "Would you mind stepping back in them
woods there with them?"
"Listen," Bailey began,
"we're in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is," and
his voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his
shirt and he remained perfectly still.
The grandmother reached up to adjust
her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him but it came off in her
hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground.
Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John
Wesley caught hold of his father's hand and Bobby Lee followed. They went off
toward the woods and just as they reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and
supporting himself against a gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, "I'll be
back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!"
"Come back this instant!" his
mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.
"Bailey Boy!" the grandmother
called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at The Misfit squatting
on the ground in front of her. "I just know you're a good man," she
said desperately. "You're not a bit common!"
"Nome, I ain't a good man,"
The Misfit said after a second as if he had considered her statement carefully,
"but I ain't the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a
different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said,
'it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's
others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to
be into every- thing!'" He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly and
then away deep into the woods as if he were embarrassed again. "I'm sorry
I don't have on a shirt before you ladies," he said, hunching his
shoulders slightly. "We buried our clothes that we had on when we escaped
and we're just
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND I49
making do until we can get better. We
borrowed these from some folks we met," he explained.
"That's perfectly all right,"
the grandmother said. "Maybe Bailey has an extra shirt in his
suitcase."
"I'll look and see
terrectly," The Misfit said.
"Where are they taking him?"
the children's mother screamed.
"Daddy was a card himself,"
The Misfit said. "You couldn't put anything over on him. He never got in
trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them."
"You could be honest too if you'd
only try," said the grandmother. "Think how wonderful it would be to
settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about some- body
chasing you all the time."
The Misfit kept scratching in the
ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it. "Yes'm,
somebody is always after you," he murmured.
The grandmother noticed how thin his
shoulder blades were just behind-his hat because she was standing up looking
down on him. "Do you ever pray?" she asked.
He shook his head. All she saw was the
black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades. "Nome," he said.
There was a pistol shot from the woods,
followed closely by another. Then silence. The old lady's head jerked around.
She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck
of breath. "Bailey Boy!" she called.
"I was a gospel singer for a
while," The Misfit said. "I been most everything. Been in the arm
service, both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an
undertaker, been with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado,
seen a man burnt alive oncet," and he looked up at the children's mother
and the little girl who were sitting close together, their faces white and
their eyes glassy; "I even seen a woman flogged," he said.
"Pray, pray," the grandmother
began, "pray, pray . . ."
"I never was a bad boy that I
remember of," The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, "but
somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the
penitentiary. I was buried alive," and he looked up and held her attention
to him by a steady stare.
150 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
"That's when you should have
started to pray," she said "What did you do to get sent to the
penitentiary that first time?"
"Turn to the right, it was a
wall," The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. "Turn
to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor.
I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what
it was I done and I ain't recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would
think it was coming to me, but it never come."
"Maybe they put you in by
mistake," the old lady said vaguely.
"Nome," he said. "It
wasn't no mistake. They had the papers on me."
"You must have stolen
something," she said.
The Misfit sneered slightly.
"Nobody had nothing I wanted," he said. "It was a head-doctor at
the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a
lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never
had a thing to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist
churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself."
"If you would pray," the old
lady said, "Jesus would help you."
"That's right," The Misfit
said.
"Well then, why don't you
pray?" she asked trembling with delight suddenly.
"I don't want no hep," he
said. "I'm doing all right by myself."
Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back
from the woods. Bobby Lee was dragging a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots
in it.
"Thow me that shirt, Bobby
Lee," The Misfit said. The shirt came flying at him and landed on his
shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn't name what the shirt
reminded her of. "No, lady," The Misfit said while he was buttoning
it up, "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you
can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later
you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it."
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND 151
The children's mother had begun to make
heaving noises as if she couldn't get her breath. "Lady," he asked,
"would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and
Hiram and join your husband?"
"Yes, thank you," the mother
said faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was holding the baby, who
had gone to sleep, in the other. "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The
Misfit said as she struggled to climb out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee,
you hold onto that little girl's hand."
"I don't want to hold hands with
him," June Star said. "He reminds me of a pig."
The fat boy blushed and laughed and
caught her by the arm and pulled her off into the woods after Hiram and her
mother.
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother
found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any
sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he
must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came
out. Finally she found herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning, Jesus
will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be
cursing.
"Yes'm," The Misfit said as
if he agreed. "Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same case
with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I
had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said,
"they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long
ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it.
Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment
and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't
been treated right. I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I
can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in
punishment."
There was a piercing scream from the
woods, followed closely by a pistol report. "Does it seem right to you,
lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?"
"Jesus!" the old lady cried.
"You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you come
from nice
152 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND people!
Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money I've
got!"
"Lady," The Misfit said,
looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body that give
the undertaker a tip."
There were two more pistol reports and
the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water
and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would break.
"Jesus was the only One that ever
raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done
it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing
for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then
it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way
you can-by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other
meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had
become almost a snarl.
"Maybe He didn't raise the
dead," the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling
so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.
"I wasn't there so I can't say He
didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he
said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there
because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in
a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be
like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head
cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if
he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies.
You're one of my own children!" She reached out and touched him on the
shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her
three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took
off his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the
woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat
and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a
child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND 153
Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes
were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking. "Take her off and thow
her where you shown the others," he said, picking up the cat that was
rubbing itself against his leg.
"She was a talker, wasn't
she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
"She would of been a good
woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her
every minute of her life."
"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.
"Shut up, Bobby Lee" The
Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/goodman.html
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