“Stop this,” Sheppard said in a dry, burnt-out voice. “Stop it.”
The boy raised the Bible and tore out a page with his teeth and began grinding it in his mouth, his eyes burning.
Sheppard reached across the table and knocked the book out of his hand. “Leave the table,” he said coldly.
Johnson swallowed what was in his mouth. His eyes widened as if a vision of splendor were opening up before him. “I’ve eaten it!” he breathed. “I’ve eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth!”
“Leave this table,” Sheppard said. His hands were clenched beside his plate.
“I’ve eaten it!” the boy cried. Wonder transformed his face. “I’ve eaten it like Ezekiel and I don’t want none of your food after it nor no more ever.”
“Go then,” Sheppard said softly. “Go. Go.”
The boy rose and picked up the Bible and started toward the hall with it. At the door he paused, a small black figure on the threshold of some dark apocalypse. “The devil has you in his power,” he said in a jubilant voice and disappeared.
After supper Sheppard sat in the living room alone. Johnson had left the house but he could not believe that the boy had simply gone. The first feeling of release had passed. He felt dull and cold as at the onset of an illness and dread had settled in him like a fog. Just to leave would be too anticlimactic an end for Johnson’s taste; he would return and try to prove something. He might come back a week later and set fire to the place. Nothing seemed too outrageous now.
He picked up the paper and tried to read. In a moment he threw it down and got up and went into the hall and listened. He might be hiding in the attic. He went to the attic door and opened it.
The lantern was lit, casting a dim light on the stairs. He didn’t hear anything. “Norton,” he called, “are you up there?” There was no answer. He mounted the narrow stairs to see.
Amid the strange vine-like shadows cast by the lantern, Norton sat with his eye to the telescope. “Norton,” Sheppard said, “do you know where Rufus went?”
The child’s back was to him. He was sitting hunched, intent, his large ears directly above his shoulders. Suddenly he waved his hand and crouched closer to the telescope as if he could not get near enough to what he saw.
“Norton!” Sheppard said in a loud voice.
The child didn’t move.
“Norton!” Sheppard shouted.
Norton started. He turned around. There was an unnatural brightness about his eyes. After a moment he seemed to see that it was Sheppard. “I’ve found her!” he said breathlessly.
“Found who?” Sheppard said.
“Mamma!”
Sheppard steadied himself in the door way. The jungle of shadows around the child thickened.
“Come and look!” he cried. He wiped his sweaty face on the tail of his plaid shirt and then put his eye back to the telescope. His back became fixed in a rigid intensity. All at once he waved again.
“Norton,” Sheppard said, “you don’t see anything in the telescope but star clusters. Now you’ve had enough of that for one night. You’d better go to bed. Do you know where Rufus is?”
“She’s there!” he cried, not turning around from the telescope. “She waved at me!”
“I want you in bed in fifteen minutes,” Sheppard said. After a moment he said, “Do you hear me, Norton?”
The child began to wave frantically.
“I mean what I say,” Sheppard said. “I’m going to call in fifteen minutes and see if you’re in bed.”
He went down the steps again and returned to the parlor. He went to the front door and cast a cursory glance out. The sky was crowded with the stars he had been fool enough to think Johnson could reach. Somewhere in the small wood behind the house, a bullfrog sounded a low hollow note. He went back to his chair and sat a few minutes. He decided to go to bed. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and leaned forward and heard, like the first shrill note of a disaster warning, the siren of a police car, moving slowly into the neighborhood and nearer until it subsided with a moan outside the house.
He felt a cold weight on his shoulders as if an icy cloak had been thrown about him. He went to the door and opened it.
Two policemen were coming up the walk with a dark snarling Johnson between them, handcuffed to each. A reporter jogged alongside and another policeman waited in the patrol car.
“Here’s your boy,” the dourest of the policemen said. “Didn’t I tell you we’d get him?”
Johnson jerked his arm down savagely. “I was waitin for you!” he said. “You wouldn’t have got me if I hadn’t of wanted to get caught. It was my idea.” He was addressing the policemen but leering at Sheppard.
Sheppard looked at him coldly.
“Why did you want to get caught?” the reporter asked, running around to get beside Johnson. “Why did you deliberately want to get caught?”
The question and the sight of Sheppard seemed to throw the boy into a fury. “To show up that big tin Jesus!” he hissed and kicked his leg out at Sheppard. “He thinks he’s God. I’d rather be in the reformatory than in his house, I’d rather be in the pen! The devil has him in his power. He don’t know his left hand from his right, he don’t have as much sense as his crazy kid!” He paused and then swept on to his fantastic conclusion. “He made suggestions to me!”
Sheppard’s face blanched. He caught hold of the door facing.
“Suggestions?” the reporter said eagerly, “what kind of suggestion?”
“Immor’l suggestions!” Johnson said. “What kind of suggestions do you think? But I ain’t having none of it, I’m a Christian, I’m . . .”
Sheppard’s face was tight with pain. “He knows that’s not true,” he said in a shaken voice. “He knows he’s lying. I did everything I knew how for him. I did more for him than I did for my own child. I hoped to save him and I failed, but it was an honorable failure. I have nothing to reproach myself with. I made no suggestions to him.”
“Do you remember the suggestions?” the reporter asked. “Can you tell us exactly what he said?”
“He’s a dirty atheist,” Johnson said. “He said there wasn’t no hell.”
“Well, they seen each other now,” one of the policemen said with a knowing sigh. “Let’s us go.”
“Wait,” Sheppard said. He came down one step and fixed his eyes on Johnson’s eyes in a last desperate effort to save himself. “Tell the truth, Rufus,” he said. “You don’t want to perpetrate this lie. You’re not evil, you’re mortally confused. You don’t have to make up for that foot, you don’t have to . . .”
Johnson hurled himself forward. “Listen at him!” he screamed. “I lie and steal because I’m good at it! My foot don’t have a thing to do with it! The lame shall enter first! The halt’ll be gathered together. When I get ready to be saved, Jesus’ll save me, not that lying stinking atheist, not that . . .”
“That’ll be enough out of you,” the policeman said and yanked him back. “We just wanted you to see we got him,” he said to Sheppard, and the two of them turned around and dragged Johnson away, half turned and screaming back at Sheppard.
“The lame’ll carry off the prey!” he screeched, but his voice was muffled inside the car. The reporter scrambled into the front seat with the driver and slammed the door and the siren wailed into the darkness.
Sheppard remained there, bent slightly like a man who has been shot but continues to stand. After a minute he turned and went back in the house and sat down in the chair he had left. He closed his eyes on a picture of Johnson in a circle of reporters at the police station, elaborating his lies. “I have nothing to reproach myself with,” he murmured. His every action had been selfless, his one aim had been to save Johnson for some decent kind of service, he had not spared himself, he had sacrificed his reputation, he had done more for Johnson than he had done for h
is own child. Foulness hung about him like an odor in the air, so close that it seemed to come from his own breath. “I have nothing to reproach myself with,” he repeated. His voice sounded dry and harsh. “I did more for him than I did for my own child.” He was swept with a sudden panic. He heard the boy’s jubilant voice. Satan has you in his power.
“I have nothing to reproach myself with,” he began again. “I did more for him than I did for my own child.” He heard his voice as if it were the voice of his accuser. He repeated the sentence silently.
Slowly his face drained of color. It became almost gray beneath the white halo of his hair. The sentence echoed in his mind, each syllable like a dull blow. His mouth twisted and he closed his eyes against the revelation. Norton’s face rose before him, empty, forlorn, his left eye listing almost imperceptibly toward the outer rim as if it could not bear a full view of grief. His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself. He saw the clear-eyed devil, the sounder of hearts, leering at him from the eyes of Johnson. His image of himself shrivelled until everything was black before him. He sat there paralyzed, aghast.
He saw Norton at the telescope, all back and ears, saw his arm shoot up and wave frantically. A rush of agonizing love for the child rushed over him like a transfusion of life. The little boy’s face appeared to him transformed; the image of his salvation; all light. He groaned with joy. He would make everything up to him. He would never let him suffer again. He would be mother and father. He jumped up and ran to his room, to kiss him, to tell him that he loved him, that he would never fail him again.
The light was on in Norton’s room but the bed was empty. He turned and dashed up the attic stairs and at the top reeled back like a man on the edge of a pit. The tripod had fallen and the telescope lay on the floor. A few feet over it, the child hung in the jungle of shadows, just below the beam from which he had launched his flight into space.
Why Do the Heathen Rage?
Tilman had had his stroke in the state capital, where he had gone on business, and he had stayed two weeks in the hospital there. He did not remember his arrival home by ambulance but his wife did. She had sat for two hours on the jump seat at his feet, gazing fixedly at his face. Only his left eye, twisted inward, seemed to harbor his former personality. It burned with rage. The rest of his face was prepared for death. Justice was grim and she took satisfaction in it when she found it. It might take just this ruin to wake Walter up.
By accident both children were at home when they arrived. Mary Maud was driving in from school, not realizing that the ambulance was behind her. She got out—a large woman of thirty with a round childish face and a pile of carrot-colored hair that seeped about in an invisible net on top of her head—kissed her mother, glanced at Tilman and gasped; then, grim-faced but flustered, marched behind the rear attendant, giving him high-pitched instructions on how to get the stretcher around the curve of the front steps. Exactly like a schoolteacher, her mother thought. Schoolteacher all over. As the forward attendant reached the porch, Mary Maud said sharply in a voice used to controlling children, “Get up, Walter, and open the door!”
Walter was sitting on the edge of his chair, absorbed in the proceedings, his finger folded in the book he had been reading before the ambulance came. He got up and held open the screen door, and while the attendants carried the stretcher across the porch, he gazed, obviously fascinated, at his father’s face. “Glad to see you back, capt’n,” he said and raised his hand in a sloppy salute.
Tilman’s enraged left eye appeared to include him in its vision but he gave him no sign of recognition.
Roosevelt, who from now on would be nurse instead of yard man, stood inside the door, waiting. He had put on the white coat that he was supposed to wear for occasions. He peered forward at what was on the stretcher. The bloodshot veins in his eyes swelled. Then, all at once, tears glazed them and glistened on his black cheeks like sweat. Tilman made a weak rough motion with his good arm. It was the only gesture of affection he had given any of them. The Negro followed the stretcher to the back bedroom, snuffling as if someone had hit him.
Mary Maud went in to direct the stretcher bearers.
Walter and his mother remained on the porch. “Close the door,” she said. “You’re letting flies in.”
She had been watching him all along, searching for some sign in his big bland face that some sense of urgency had touched him, some sense that now he had to take hold, that now he had to do something, anything—she would have been glad to see him make a mistake, even make a mess of things if it meant that he was doing something—but she saw that nothing had happened. His eyes were on her, glittering just slightly behind his glasses. He had taken in every detail of Tilman’s face; he had registered Roosevelt’s tears, Mary Maud’s confusion, and now he was studying her to see how she was taking it. She yanked her hat straight, seeing by his eyes that it had slipped toward the back of her head.
“You ought to wear it that way,” he said. “It makes you look sort of relaxed-by-mistake.”
She made her face hard, as hard as she could make it. “The responsibility is yours now,” she said in a harsh, final voice.
He stood there with his half smile and said nothing. Like an absorbent lump, she thought, taking everything in, giving nothing out. She might have been looking at a stranger using the family face. He had the same noncommittal lawyer’s smile as her father and grandfather, set in the same heavy jaw, under the same Roman nose; he had the same eyes that were neither blue nor green nor gray; his skull would soon be bald like theirs. Her face became even harder. “You’ll have to take over and manage this place,” she said and folded her arms, “if you want to stay here.”
The smile left him. He looked at her once hard, his expression empty, and then beyond her out across the meadow, beyond the four oaks and the black distant tree line, into the vacant afternoon sky. “I thought it was home,” he said, “but it don’t do to presume.”
Her heart constricted. She had an instant’s revelation that he was homeless. Homeless here and homeless anywhere. “Of course it’s home,” she said, “but somebody has to take over. Somebody has to make these Negroes work.”
“I can’t make Negroes work,” he muttered. “That’s about the last thing I’m capable of.”
“I’ll tell you everything to do,” she said.
“Ha!” he said. “That you would.” He looked at her and his half smile returned. “Lady,” he said, “you’re coming into your own. You were born to take over. If the old man had had his stroke ten years ago, we’d all be better off. You could have run a wagon train through the Bad Lands. You could stop a mob. You’re the last of the nineteenth century, you’re. . . .”
“Walter,” she said, “you’re a man. I’m only a woman.”
“A woman of your generation,” Walter said, “is better than a man of mine.”
Her mouth drew into a tight line of outrage and her head trembled almost imperceptibly. “I would be ashamed to say it!” she whispered.
Walter dropped into the chair he had been sitting in and opened his book. A sluggish-looking flush settled on his face. “The only virtue of my generation,” he said, “is that it ain’t ashamed to tell the truth about itself.” He was already reading. Her interview was at an end.
She remained standing there, rigid, her eyes on him in stunned disgust. Her son. Her only son. His eyes and his skull and his smile belonged to the family face but underneath them was a different kind of man from any she had ever known. There was no innocence in him, no rectitude, no conviction either of sin or election. The man she saw courted good and evil impartially and saw so many sides of every question that he could not move, he could not work, he could not even make niggers work. Any evil could enter that vacuum. God knows, she thought and
caught her breath, God knows what he might do!
He had not done anything. He was twenty-eight now and, so far as she could see, nothing occupied him but trivia. He had the air of a person who is waiting for some big event and can’t start any work because it would only be interrupted. Since he was always idle, she had thought that perhaps he wanted to be an artist or a philosopher or something, but this was not the case. He did not want to write anything with a name. He amused himself writing letters to people he did not know and to the newspapers. Under different names and using different personalities, he wrote to strangers. It was a peculiar, small, contemptible vice. Her father and her grandfather had been moral men but they would have scorned small vices more than great ones. They knew who they were and what they owed to themselves. It was impossible to tell what Walter knew or what his views were on anything. He read books that had nothing to do with anything that mattered now. Often she came behind him and found some strange underlined passage in a book he had left lying somewhere and she would puzzle over it for days. One passage she found in a book he had left lying on the upstairs-bathroom floor stayed with her ominously.
“Love should be full of anger,” it began, and she thought, well mine is. She was furious all the time. It went on, “Since you have already spurned my request, perhaps you will listen to admonishment. What business have you in your father’s house, O you effeminate soldier? Where are your ramparts and trenches, where is the winter spent at the front lines? Listen! the battle trumpet blares from heaven and see how our general marches fully armed, coming amid the clouds to conquer the whole world. Out of the mouth of our king emerges a double-edged sword that cuts down everything in the way. Arising finally from your nap, do you come to the battlefield! Abandon the shade and seek the sun.”
She turned back in the book to see what she was reading. It was a letter from a St. Jerome to a Heliodorus, scolding him for having abandoned the desert. A footnote said that Heliodorus was one of the famous group that had centered around Jerome at Aquileia in 370. He had accompanied Jerome to the Near East with the intention of cultivating a hermitic life. They had separated when Heliodorus continued on to Jerusalem. Eventually he returned to Italy, and in later years he became a distinguished churchman as the bishop of Altinum.
Flannery O'Connor Complete Short Stories Page 56
