A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

The child watched the boys’ solemn faces turn with perplexed frowning stares at each other as if they were uncertain whether they were being made fun of.

“Praestet fides supplementum

Sensuum defectui.

Genitori, Genitoque

Laus et jubilatio

Salus, honor, virtus quoque…”

The boys’ faces were dark red in the gray-purple light. They looked fierce and startled.

“Sit et benedictio;

Procedenti ab utroque

Compar sit laudatio.

Amen.”

The girls dragged out the Amen and then there was a silence.

“That must be Jew singing,” Wendell said and began to tune the guitar.

The girls giggled idiotically but the child stamped her foot on the barrel. “You big dumb ox!” she shouted. “You big dumb Church of God ox!” she roared and fell off the barrel and scrambled up and shot around the corner of the house as they jumped from the banister to see who was shouting.

Her mother had arranged for them to have supper in the back yard and she had a table laid out there under some Japanese lanterns that she pulled out for garden parties. “I ain’t eating with them,” the child said and snatched her plate off the table and carried it to the kitchen and sat down with the thin blue-gummed cook and ate her supper.

“Howcome you be so ugly sometime?” the cook asked.

“Those stupid idiots,” the child said.

The lanterns gilded the leaves of the trees orange on the level where they hung and above them was black-green and below them were different dim muted colors that made the girls sitting at the table look prettier than they were. From time to time, the child turned her head and glared out the kitchen window at the scene below.

“God could strike you deaf dumb and blind,” the cook said, “and then you wouldn’t be as smart as you is.”

“I would still be smarter than some,” the child said.

After supper they left for the fair. She wanted to go to the fair but not with them so even if they had asked her she wouldn’t have gone. She went upstairs and paced the long bedroom with her hands locked together behind her back and her head thrust forward and an expression, fierce and dreamy both, on her face. She didn’t turn on the electric light but let the darkness collect and make the room smaller and more private. At regular intervals a light crossed the open window and threw shadows on the wall. She stopped and stood looking out over the dark slopes, past where the pond glinted silver, past the wall of woods to the speckled sky where a long finger of light was revolving up and around and away, searching the air as if it were hunting for the lost sun. It was the beacon light from the fair.

She could hear the distant sound of the calliope and she saw in her head all the tents raised up in a kind of gold sawdust light and the diamond ring of the ferris wheel going around and around up in the air and down again and the screeking merry-go-round going around and around on the ground. A fair lasted five or six days and there was a special afternoon for school children and a special night for niggers. She had gone last year on the afternoon for school children and had seen the monkeys and the fat man and had ridden on the ferris wheel. Certain tents were closed then because they contained things that would be known only to grown people but she had looked with interest at the advertising on the closed tents, at the faded-looking pictures on the canvas of people in tights, with stiff stretched composed faces like the faces of the martyrs waiting to have their tongues cut out by the Roman soldier. She had imagined that what was inside these tents concerned medicine and she had made up her mind to be a doctor when she grew up.

She had since changed and decided to be an engineer but as she looked out the window and followed the revolving searchlight as it widened and shortened and wheeled in its arc, she felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint. She did not steal or murder but she was a born liar and slothful and she sassed her mother and was deliberately ugly to almost everybody. She was eaten up also with the sin of Pride, the worst one. She made fun of the Baptist preacher who came to the school at commencement to give the devotional. She would pull down her mouth and hold her forehead as if she were in agony and groan, “Fawther, we thank Thee,” exactly the way he did and she had been told many times not to do it. She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.