Читаем A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories полностью

She could stand to be shot but not to be burned in oil. She didn’t know if she could stand to be torn to pieces by lions or not. She began to prepare her martyrdom, seeing herself in a pair of tights in a great arena, lit by the early Christians hanging in cages of fire, making a gold dusty light that fell on her and the lions. The first lion charged forward and fell at her feet, converted. A whole series of lions did the same. The lions liked her so much she even slept with them and finally the Romans were obliged to burn her but to their astonishment she would not burn down and finding she was so hard to kill, they finally cut off her head very quickly with a sword and she went immediately to heaven. She rehearsed this several times, returning each time at the entrance of Paradise to the lions.

Finally she got up from the window and got ready for bed and got in without saying her prayers. There were two heavy double beds in the room. The girls were occupying the other one and she tried to think of something cold and clammy that she could hide in their bed but her thought was fruitless. She didn’t have anything she could think of, like a chicken carcass or a piece of beef liver. The sound of the calliope coming through the window kept her awake and she remembered that she hadn’t said her prayers and got up and knelt down and began them. She took a running start and went through to the other side of the Apostle’s Creed and then hung by her chin on the side of the bed, empty-minded. Her prayers, when she remembered to say them, were usually perfunctory but sometimes when she had done something wrong or heard music or lost something, or sometimes for no reason at all, she would be moved to fervor and would think of Christ on the long journey to Calvary, crushed three times under the rough cross. Her mind would stay on this a while and then get empty and when something roused her, she would find that she was thinking of a different thing entirely, of some dog or some girl or something she was going to do some day. Tonight, remembering Wendell and Cory, she was filled with thanksgiving and almost weeping with delight, she said, “Lord, Lord, thank You that I’m not in the Church of God, thank You Lord, thank You!” and got back in bed and kept repeating it until she went to sleep.

The girls came in at a quarter to twelve and waked her up with their giggling. They turned on the small blue-shaded lamp to see to get undressed by and their skinny shadows climbed up the wall and broke and continued moving about softly on the ceiling. The child sat up to hear what all they had seen at the fair. Susan had a plastic pistol full of cheap candy and Joanne a pasteboard cat with red polka dots in it. “Did you see the monkeys dance?” the child asked. “Did you see that fat man and those midgets?”

“All kinds of freaks,” Joanne said. And then she said to Susan, “I enjoyed it all but the you-know-what,” and her face assumed a peculiar expression as if she had bit into something that she didn’t know if she liked or not.

The other stood still and shook her head once and nodded slightly at the child. “Little pitchers,” she said in a low voice but the child heard it and her heart began to beat very fast.

She got out of her bed and climbed onto the footboard of theirs. They turned off the light and got in but she didn’t move. She sat there, looking hard at them until their faces were well defined in the dark. “I’m not as old as you all,” she said, “but I’m about a million times smarter.”

“There are some things,” Susan said, “that a child of your age doesn’t know,” and they both began to giggle.

“Go back to your own bed,” Joanne said.

The child didn’t move. “One time,” she said, her voice hollow-sounding in the dark, “I saw this rabbit have rabbits.”

There was a silence. Then Susan said, “How?” in an indifferent tone and she knew that she had them. She said she wouldn’t tell until they told about the you-know-what. Actually she had never seen a rabbit have rabbits but she forgot this as they began to tell what they had seen in the tent.

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