A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“I cannot have this,” Mrs. Cope said and stood at the sink with both fists knotted at her sides. “I cannot have this,” and her expression was the same as when she tore at the nut grass.

“There ain’t a thing you can do about it,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “What I expect is you’ll have them for a week or so until school begins. They just figure to have themselves a vacation in the country and there ain’t nothing you can do but fold your hands.”

“I do not fold my hands,” Mrs. Cope said. “Tell Mr. Pritchard to put the horses up in the stalls.”

“He’s already did that. You take a boy thirteen year old is equal in meanness to a man twict his age. It’s no telling what he’ll think up to do. You never know where he’ll strike next. This morning Hollis seen them behind the bull pen and that big one ast if it wasn’t some place they could wash at and Hollis said no it wasn’t and that you didn’t want no boys dropping cigarette butts in your woods and he said, ‘She don’t own them woods,’ and Hollis said, ‘She does too,’ and that there little one he said, ‘Man, Gawd owns them woods and her too,’ and that there one with the glasses said, ‘I reckon she owns the sky over this place too,’ and that there littlest one says, ‘Owns the sky and can’t no airplane go over here without she says so,’ and then the big one says, ‘I never seen a place with so many damm women on it, how do you stand it here?’ and Hollis said he had done had enough of their big talk by then and he turned and walked off without giving no reply one way or the other.”

“I’m going out there and tell those boys they can get a ride away from here on the milk truck,” Mrs. Cope said and she went out the back door, leaving Mrs. Pritchard and the child together in the kitchen.

“Listen,” the child said. “I could handle them quicker than that.”

“Yeah?” Mrs. Pritchard murmured, giving her a long leering look. “How’d you handle them?”

The child gripped both hands together and made a contorted face as if she were strangling someone.

“They’d handle you,” Mrs. Pritchard said with satisfaction.

The child retired to the upstairs window to get out of her way and looked down where her mother was walking off from the three boys who were squatting under the water tower, eating something out of a cracker box. She heard her come in the kitchen door and say, “They say they’ll go on the milk truck, and no wonder they aren’t hungry—they have that suitcase half full of food.”

“Likely stole every bit of it too,” Mrs. Pritchard said.

When the milk truck came, the three boys were nowhere in sight, but as soon as it left without them their three faces appeared, looking out of the opening in the top of the calf barn. “Can you beat this?” Mrs. Cope said, standing at one of the upstairs windows with her hands at her hips. “It’s not that I wouldn’t be glad to have them—it’s their attitude.”

“You never like nobody’s attitude,” the child said. “I’ll go tell them they got five minutes to leave here in.”

“You are not to go anywhere near those boys, do you hear me?” Mrs. Cope said.

“Why?” the child asked.

“I’m going out there and give them a piece of my mind,” Mrs. Cope said.

The child took over the position in the window and in a few minutes she saw the stiff green hat catching the glint of the sun as her mother crossed the road toward the calf barn. The three faces immediately disappeared from the opening, and in a second the large boy dashed across the lot, followed an instant later by the other two. Mrs. Pritchard came out and the two women started for the grove of trees the boys had vanished into. Presently the two sunhats disappeared in the woods and the three boys came out at the left side of it and ambled across the field and into another patch of woods. By the time Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard reached the field, it was empty and there was nothing for them to do but come home again.

Mrs. Cope had not been inside long before Mrs. Pritchard came running toward the house, shouting something. “They’ve let out the bull!” she hollered. “Let out the bull!” And in a second she was followed by the bull himself, ambling, black and leisurely, with four geese hissing at his heels. He was not mean until hurried and it took Mr. Pritchard and the two Negroes a half-hour to ease him back to his pen. While the men were engaged in this, the boys let the oil out of the three tractors and then disappeared again into the woods.

Two blue veins had come out on either side of Mrs. Cope’s forehead and Mrs. Pritchard observed them with satisfaction. “Like I toljer,” she said, “there ain’t a thing you can do about it.”

Mrs. Cope ate her dinner hastily, not conscious that she had her sunhat on. Every time she heard a noise, she jumped up. Mrs. Pritchard came over immediately after dinner and said, “Well, you want to know where they are now?” and smiled in an omniscient rewarded way.

“I want to know at once,” Mrs. Cope said, coming to an almost military attention.