A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“I’m going to let that man go,” she said. “I don’t have any obligation to him. My obligation is to the people who’ve done something for their country, not to the ones who’ve just come over to take advantage of what they can get,” and she began to talk rapidly, remembering all her arguments. The priest’s attention seemed to retire to some private oratory to wait until she got through. Once or twice his gaze roved out onto the lawn as if he were hunting some means of escape but she didn’t stop. She told him how she had been hanging onto this place for thirty years, always just barely making it against people who came from nowhere and were going nowhere, who didn’t want anything but an automobile. She said she had found out they were the same whether they came from Poland or Tennessee. When the Guizacs got ready, she said, they would not hesitate to leave her. She told him how the people who looked rich were the poorest of all because they had the most to keep up. She asked him how he thought she paid her feed bills. She told him she would like to have her house done over but she couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t even afford to have the monument restored over her husband’s grave. She asked him if he would like to guess what her insurance amounted to for the year. Finally she asked him if he thought she was made of money and the old man suddenly let out a great ugly bellow as if this were a comical question.

When the visit was over, she felt let down, though she had clearly triumphed over him. She made up her mind now that on the first of the month, she would give the Displaced Person his thirty days’ notice and she told Mr. Shortley so.

Mr. Shortley didn’t say anything. His wife had been the only woman he was ever acquainted with who was never scared off from doing what she said. She said the Pole had been sent by the devil and the priest. Mr. Shortley had no doubt that the priest had got some peculiar control over Mrs. McIntyre and that before long she would start attending his Masses. She looked as if something was wearing her down from the inside. She was thinner and more fidgety and not as sharp as she used to be. She would look at a milk can now and not see how dirty it was and he had seen her lips move when she was not talking. The Pole never did anything the wrong way but all the same he was very irritating to her. Mr. Shortley himself did things as he pleased—not always her way—but she didn’t seem to notice. She had noticed though that the Pole and all his family were getting fat; she pointed out to Mr. Shortley that the hollows had come out of their cheeks and that they saved every cent they made. “Yes’m, and one of these days he’ll be able to buy and sell you out,” Mr. Shortley had ventured to say, and he could tell that the statement had shaken her.

“I’m just waiting for the first,” she had said.

Mr. Shortley waited too and the first came and went and she didn’t fire him. He could have told anybody how it would be. He was not a violent man but he hated to see a woman done in by a foreigner. He felt that that was one thing a man couldn’t stand by and see happen.

There was no reason Mrs. McIntyre should not fire Mr. Guizac at once but she put it off from day to day. She was worried about her bills and about her health. She didn’t sleep at night or when she did she dreamed about the Displaced Person. She had never discharged any one before; they had all left her. One night she dreamed that Mr. Guizac and his family were moving into her house and that she was moving in with Mr. Shortley. This was too much for her and she woke up and didn’t sleep again for several nights; and one night she dreamed that the priest came to call and droned on and on, saying, “Dear lady, I know your tender heart won’t suffer you to turn the porrrrr man out. Think of the thousands of them, think of the ovens and the boxcars and the camps and the sick children and Christ Our Lord.”

“He’s extra and he’s upset the balance around here,” she said, “and I’m a logical practical woman and there are no ovens here and no camps and no Christ Our Lord and when he leaves, he’ll make more money. He’ll work at the mill and buy a car and don’t talk to me—all they want is a car.”

“The ovens and the boxcars and the sick children,” droned the priest, “and our dear Lord.”

“Just one too many,” she said.

The next morning, she made up her mind while she was eating her breakfast that she would give him his notice at once, and she stood up and walked out of the kitchen and down the road with her table napkin still in her hand. Mr. Guizac was spraying the barn, standing in his sway-backed way with one hand on his hip. He turned off the hose and gave her an impatient kind of attention as if she were interfering with his work. She had not thought of what she would say to him, she had merely come. She stood in the barn door, looking severely at the wet spotless floor and the dripping stanchions. “Ya goot?” he said.