A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. McIntyre continued, bearing down with a flat steady voice, “is very efficient. I’ll admit that. But he doesn’t understand how to get on with my niggers and they don’t like him. I can’t have my niggers run off. And I don’t like his attitude. He’s not in the least grateful for being here.”

The priest had his hand on the screen door and he opened it, ready to make his escape. “Arrrr, I must be off,” he murmured.

“I tell you if I had a white man who understood the Negroes, I’d have to let Mr. Guizac go,” she said and stood up again.

He turned then and looked her in the face. “He has nowhere to go,” he said. Then he said, “Dear lady, I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t turn him out for a trifle!” and without waiting for an answer, he raised his hand and gave her his blessing in a rumbling voice.

She smiled angrily and said, “I didn’t create his situation, of course.”

The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.

Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. “It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go,” she said. “I don’t find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world.”

The old man didn’t seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. “The Transfiguration,” he murmured.

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Guizac didn’t have to come here in the first place,” she said, giving him a hard look.

The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.

“He didn’t have to come in the first place,” she repeated, emphasizing each word.

The old man smiled absently. “He came to redeem us,” he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.

If Mr. Shortley had not returned a few weeks later, she would have gone out looking for a new man to hire. She had not wanted him back but when she saw the familiar black automobile drive up the road and stop by the side of the house, she had the feeling that she was the one returning, after a long miserable trip, to her own place. She realized all at once that it was Mrs. Shortley she had been missing. She had had no one to talk to since Mrs. Shortley left, and she ran to the door, expecting to see her heaving herself up the steps.

Mr. Shortley stood there alone. He had on a black felt hat and a shirt with red and blue palm trees designed in it but the hollows in his long bitten blistered face were deeper than they had been a month ago.

“Well!” she said. “Where is Mrs. Shortley?”

Mr. Shortley didn’t say anything. The change in his face seemed to have come from the inside; he looked like a man who had gone for a long time without water. “She was God’s own angel,” he said in a loud voice. “She was the sweetest woman in the world.”

“Where is she?” Mrs. McIntyre murmured.

“Daid,” he said. “She had herself a stroke on the day she left out of here.” There was a corpse-like composure about his face “I figure that Pole killed her,” he said. “She seen through him from the first. She known he come from the devil. She told me so.”

It took Mrs. McIntyre three days to get over Mrs. Shortley’s death. She told herself that anyone would have thought they were kin. She rehired Mr. Shortley to do farm work though actually she didn’t want him without his wife. She told him she was going to give thirty days’ notice to the Displaced Person at the end of the month and that then he could have his job back in the dairy. Mr. Shortley preferred the dairy job but he was willing to wait. He said it would give him some satisfaction to see the Pole leave the place, and Mrs. McIntyre said it would give her a great deal of satisfaction. She confessed that she should have been content with the help she had in the first place and not have been reaching into other parts of the world for it. Mr. Shortley said he never had cared for foreigners since he had been in the first world’s war and seen what they were like. He said he had seen all kinds then but that none of them were like us. He said he recalled the face of one man who had thrown a hand-grenade at him and that the man had had little round eye-glasses exactly like Mr. Guizac’s.

“But Mr. Guizac is a Pole, he’s not a German,” Mrs. McIntyre said.

“It ain’t a great deal of difference in them two kinds,” Mr. Shortley had explained.