A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“This preacher is name Bevel and there’s no better preacher around,” Mrs. Connin said. “And furthermore,” she added in a defiant tone, “he Baptized this child this morning!”

His mother sat straight up. “Well the nerve!” she muttered.

“Furthermore,” Mrs. Connin said, “he’s a healer and he prayed for you to be healed.”

“Healed!” she almost shouted. “Healed of what for Christ’s sake?”

“Of your affliction,” Mrs. Connin said icily.

The father had returned with the money and was standing near Mrs. Connin waiting to give it to her. His eyes were lined with red threads. “Go on, go on,” he said, “I want to hear more about her affliction. The exact nature of it has escaped…” He waved the bill and his voice trailed off. “Healing by prayer is mighty inexpensive,” he murmured.

Mrs. Connin stood a second, staring into the room, with a skeleton’s appearance of seeing everything. Then, without taking the money, she turned and shut the door behind her. The father swung around, smiling vaguely, and shrugged. The rest of them were looking at Harry. The little boy began to shamble toward the bedroom.

“Come here, Harry,” his mother said. He automatically shifted his direction toward her without opening his eye any farther. “Tell me what happened today,” she said when he reached her. She began to pull off his coat.

“I don’t know,” he muttered.

“Yes you do know,” she said, feeling the coat heavier on one side. She unzipped the innerlining and caught the book and a dirty handkerchief as they fell out. “Where did you get these?”

“I don’t know,” he said and grabbed for them. “They’re mine. She gave them to me.”

She threw the handkerchief down and held the book too high for him to reach and began to read it, her face after a second assuming an exaggerated comical expression. The others moved around and looked at it over her shoulder. “My God,” somebody said.

One of the men peered at it sharply from behind a thick pair of glasses. “That’s valuable,” he said. “That’s a collector’s item,” and he took it away from the rest of them and retired to another chair.

“Don’t let George go off with that,” his girl said.

“I tell you it’s valuable,” George said. “1832.”

Bevel shifted his direction again toward the room where he slept. He shut the door behind him and moved slowly in the darkness to the bed and sat down and took off his shoes and got under the cover. After a minute a shaft of light let in the tall silhouette of his mother. She tiptoed lightly across the room and sat down on the edge of his bed. “What did that dolt of a preacher say about me?” she whispered. “What lies have you been telling today, honey?”

He shut his eye and heard her voice from a long way away, as if he were under the river and she on top of it. She shook his shoulder. “Harry,” she said, leaning down and putting her mouth to his ear, “tell me what he said.” She pulled him into a sitting position and he felt as if he had been drawn up from under the river. “Tell me,” she whispered and her bitter breath covered his face.

He saw the pale oval close to him in the dark. “He said I’m not the same now,” he muttered. “I count.”

After a second, she lowered him by his shirt front onto the pillow. She hung over him an instant and brushed her lips against his forehead. Then she got up and moved away, swaying her hips lightly through the shaft of light.

He didn’t wake up early but the apartment was still dark and close when he did. For a while he lay there, picking his nose and eyes. Then he sat up in bed and looked out the window. The sun came in palely, stained gray by the glass. Across the street at the Empire Hotel, a colored cleaning woman was looking down from an upper window, resting her face on her folded arms. He got up and put on his shoes and went to the bathroom and then into the front room. He ate two crackers spread with anchovy paste, that he found on the coffee table, and drank some ginger ale left in a bottle and looked around for his book but it was not there.

The apartment was silent except for the faint humming of the refrigerator. He went into the kitchen and found some raisin bread heels and spread a half jar of peanut butter between them and climbed up on the tall kitchen stool and sat chewing the sandwich slowly, wiping his nose every now and then on his shoulder. When he finished he found some chocolate milk and drank that. He would rather have had the ginger ale he saw but they left the bottle openers where he couldn’t reach them. He studied what was left in the refrigerator for a while—some shriveled vegetables that she had forgot were there and a lot of brown oranges that she bought and didn’t squeeze; there were three or four kinds of cheese and something fishy in a paper bag; the rest was a pork bone. He left the refrigerator door open and wandered back into the dark living room and sat down on the sofa.