A Good Man Is Hard to Find
THE GRANDMOTHER didn’t want to go
to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her
connections in east Tennessee and
she was seizing at every chance to change
Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son
she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on
the edge of his chair at the
table, bent over the orange sports section of the
Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,”
she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood
with one hand on her thin hip and
the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head.
“Here this fellow that calls
himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and
headed toward Florida and you
read here what it says he did to these people. Just
you read it. I wouldn’t take my
children in any direction with a criminal like that
aloose in it. I couldn’t answer
to my conscience if I did.”
Bailey didn’t look up from his
reading so she wheeled around then and faced
the children’s mother, a young
woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and
innocent as a cabbage and was
tied around with a green head-kerchief that had
two points on the top like a
rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the
baby his apricots out of a jar.
“The children have been to Florida before,” the old
lady said. “You all ought to take
them somewhere else for a change so they would
see different parts of the world
and be broad. They never have been to east
Tennessee.”
The children’s mother didn’t seem
to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John
Wesley, a stocky child with
glasses, said, “If you don’t want to go to Florida, why
dontcha stay at home?” He and the
little girl, June Star, were reading the funny
papers on the floor.
“She wouldn’t stay at home to be
queen for a day,” June Star said without
raising her yellow head.
“Yes and what would you do if
this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?” the
grandmother asked.
“I’d smack his face,” John Wesley
said.
“She wouldn’t stay at home for a
million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d
miss something. She has to go
everywhere we go.”
“All right, Miss,” the
grandmother said. “Just remember that the next time you
want me to curl your hair.”
June Star said her hair was
naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother
was the first one in the car, ready to go. She
had her big black valise that
looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner,
and underneath it she was hiding
a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn’t
intend for the cat to be left
alone in the house for three days because he would
miss her too much and she was
afraid he might brush against one of the gas
burners and accidentally
asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive
at a motel with a cat.
She sat in the middle of the back
seat with John Wesley and June Star on either
side of her. Bailey and the
children’s mother and the baby sat in front and they left
Atlanta at eight forty-five with
the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother
wrote this down because she
thought it would be interesting to say how many
miles they had been when they got
back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the
outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself
comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves
and putting them up with her
purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The
children’s mother still had on
slacks and still had her head tied up in a green
kerchief, but the grandmother had
on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of
white violets on the brimand a
navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print.
Her collars and cuffs were white
organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline
she had pinned a purple spray of
cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an
accident, anyone seeing her dead
on the highway would know at once that she was
a lady.
She said she thought it was going
to be a good day for driving, neither too hot
nor too cold, and she cautioned
Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an
hour and that the patrolmen hid
themselves behind billboards and small clumps of
trees and sped out after you
before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed
out interesting details of the
scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some
places came up to both sides of
the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly
streaked with purple; and the
various crops that made rows of green lace-work on
the ground. The trees were full of
silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them
sparkled. The children were
reading comic magazines and their mother had gone
back to sleep.
“Let’s go through Georgia fast so
we won’t have to look at it much,” John
Wesley said.
“If I were a little boy,” said
the grandmother, “I wouldn’t talk about my native
state that way. Tennessee has the
mountains and Georgia has the hills.”
“Tennessee is just a hillbilly
dumping ground,” John Wesley said, “and
Georgia is a lousy state too.”
“You said it,” June Star said.
“In my time,” said the
grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children
were more respectful of their
native states and their parents and everything else.
People did right then. Oh look at
the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed
to a Negro child standing in the
door of a shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture,
now?” she asked and they all
turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back
window. He waved.
“He didn’t have any britches on,”
June Star said.
“He probably didn’t have any,”
the grandmother explained. “Little niggers in
the country don’t have things
like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,”
she said.
The children exchanged comic
books.
The grandmother offered to hold
the baby and the children’s mother passed
him over the front seat to her.
She set him on her knee and bounced him and told
him about the things they were
passing. She rolled her eyes and screwe
When the children finished all
the comic books they had brought, they opened
the lunch and ate it. The
grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive
and would not let the children
throw the box and the paper napkins out the
window. When there was nothing
else to do they played a game by choosing a
cloud and making the other two guess
what shape it suggested. John Wesley took
one the shape of a cow and June
Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an
automobile, and June Star said he
didn’t play fair, and they began to slap each
other over the grandmother.
The grandmother said she would
tell them a story if they would keep quiet.
When she told a story, she rolled
her eyes and waved her head and was very
dramatic. She said once when she
was a maiden lady she had been courted by a
Mr. Edgar Atkins Tea-garden from
Jasper, Georgia. She said he was a very goodlooking man and a gentleman and
that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday
afternoon with his initials cut
in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr.
Teagarden brought the watermelon
and there was nobody at home and he left it on
the front porch and returned in
his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the
watermelon, she said, because a
nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A.
T.! This story tickled John
Wesley’s funny bone and he giggled and giggled but
June Star didn’t think it was any
good. She said she wouldn’t marry a man that just
brought her a watermelon on
Saturday. The grandmother said she would have
done well to marry Mr. Teagarden
because he was a gentleman and had bought
Coca-Cola stock when it first
came out and that he had died only a few years ago,
a very wealthy man.
They stopped at The Tower for
barbecued sandwiches. The Tower was a part
stucco and part wood filling
station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of
Timothy. A fat man named Red
Sammy Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here
and there on the building and for
miles up and down the highway saying, TRY
RED SAMMY’S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE
LIKE FAMOUS RED
SAMMY’S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY
WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH! A
VETERAN! RED SAMMY’S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare
ground outside The Tower with his head
under a truck while a gray monkey
about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry
tree, chattered nearby. The
monkey sprang back into the tree and got on the highest
limb as soon as he saw the
children jump out of the car and run toward him.
Inside, The Tower was a long dark
room with a counter at one end and tables
at the other and dancing space in
the middle. They all sat down at a board table
next to the nickelodeon and Red
Sam’s wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair
and eyes lighter than her skin,
came and took their order. The children’s mother
put a dime in the machine and
played “The Tennessee Waltz,” and the
grandmother said that tune always
made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he
would like to dance but he only
glared at her. He didn’t have a naturally sunny
disposition like she did and
trips made him nervous. The grandmother’s brown
eyes were very bright. She swayed
her head from side to side and pretended she
was dancing in her chair. June
Star said play something she could tap to so the
children’s mother put in another
dime and played a fast number and June Star
stepped out onto the dance floor
and did her tap routine.
“Ain’t she cute?” Red Sam’s wife
said, leaning over the counter. “Would you
like to come be my little girl?”
“No I certainly wouldn’t,” June
Star said. “I wouldn’t live in a broken-down
place like this for a million
bucks!” and she ran back to the table.
“Ain’t she cute?” the woman
repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” hissed the
grandmother.
Red Samcame in and told his wife
to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up
with these people’s order. His
khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his
stomach hung over themlike a sack
of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over
and sat down at a table nearby
and let out a combination sigh and yodel. “You
can’t win,” he said. “You can’t
win,” and he wiped his sweating red face off with
a gray handkerchief. “These days
you don’t know who to trust,” he said. “Ain’t
that the truth?”
“People are certainly not nice
like they used to be,” said the grandmother.
“Two fellers come in here last
week,” Red Sammy said, “driving a Chrysler.
It was a old beat-up car but it
was a good one and these boys looked all right to
me. Said they worked at the mill
and you know I let them fellers charge the
“Because you’re a good man!” the
grandmother said at once.
“Yes’m, I suppose so,” Red
Samsaid as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying
the five plates all at once without a tray,
two in each hand and one balanced
on her arm. “It isn’t a soul in this green world
of God’s that you can trust,” she
said. “And I don’t count nobody out of that, not
nobody,” she repeated, looking at
Red Sammy.
“Did you read about that
criminal, The Misfit, that’s escaped?” asked the
grandmother.
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if
he didn’t attact this place right here,” said the
woman. “If he hears about it
being here, I wouldn’t be none surprised to see him.
If he hears it’s two cent in the
cash register, I wouldn’t be a tall surprised if he…”
“That’ll do,” Red Sam said. “Go
bring these people their Co’-Colas,” and the
woman went off to get the rest of
the order.
“A good man is hard to find,” Red
Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible.
I remember the day you could go
off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no
more.”
He and the grandmother discussed
better times. The old lady said that in her
opinion Europe was entirely to
blame for the way things were now. She said the
way Europe acted you would think
we were made of money and Red Sam said it
was no use talking about it, she
was exactly right. The children ran outside into the
white sunlight and looked at the
monkey in the lacy china-berry tree. He was busy
catching fleas on himself and
biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it
were a delicacy.
They drove off again into the hot
afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and
woke up every few minutes with
her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she
woke up and recalled an old
plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood
once when she was a young lady.
She said the house had six white columns across
the front and that there was an
avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little
wooden trellis arbors on either
side in front where you sat down with your suitor
after a stroll in the garden. She
recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it.
She knew that Bailey would not be
willing to lose any time looking at an old
house, but the more she talked
about it, the more she wanted to see it once again
and find out if the little twin
arbors were still standing. “There was a secret panel
in this house,” she said
craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were,
“and the story went that all the
family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came
through but it was never found…”
“Hey!” John Wesley said. “Let’s
go see it! We’ll find it! We’ll poke all the
woodwork and find it! Who lives
there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can’t
we turn off there?”
“We never have seen a house with
a secret panel!” June Star shrieked. “Let’s
go to the house with the secret
panel! Hey Pop, can’t we go see the house with the
secret panel!”
“It’s not far from here, I know,”
the grandmother said. “It wouldn’t take over
twenty minutes.”
Bailey was looking straight ahead.
His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. “No,”
he said.
The children began to yell and
scream that they wanted to see the house with
the secret panel. John Wesley
kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung
over her mother’s shoulder and
whined desperately into her ear that they never
had any fun even on their
vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to
do. The baby began to screamand
John Wesley kicked the back of the seat so hard
that his father could feel the
blows in his kidney.
“All right!” he shouted and drew
the car to a stop at the side of the road. “Will
you all shut up? Will you all
just shut up for one second? If you don’t shut up, we
won’t go anywhere.”
“It would be very educational for
them,” the grandmother murmured.
“All right,” Bailey said, “but
get this: this is the only time we’re going to stop
for anything like this. This is
the one and only time.”
“The dirt road that you have to
turn down is about a mile back,” the
grandmother directed. “I marked
it when we passed.”
“A dirt road,” Bailey groaned.
After they had turned around and
were headed toward the dirt road, the
grandmother recalled other points
about the house, the beautiful glass over the
front doorway and the candle-lamp
in the hall. John Wesley said that the secret
panel was probably in the
fireplace.
“You can’t go inside this house,”
Bailey said. “You don’t know who lives
there.”
“While you all talk to the people
in front, I’ll run around behind and get in a
window,” John Wesley suggested.
“We’ll all stay in the car,” his
mother said.
They turned onto the dirt road
and the car raced roughly along in a swirl of
pink dust. The grandmother
recalled the times when there were no paved roads
and thirty miles was a day’s
journey. The dirt road was hilly and there were
sudden washes in it and sharp
curves on dangerous embankments. All at once they
would be on a hill, looking down
over the blue tops of trees for miles around, then
the next minute, they would be in
a red depression with the dust-coated trees
looking down on them.
“This place had better turn up in
a minute,” Bailey said, “or I’m going to turn
around.”
The road looked as if no one had
traveled on it in months.
“It’s not much farther,” the
grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible
thought came to her. The thought
was so embarrassing that she turned red in the
face and her eyes dilated and her
feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the
corner. The instant the valise
moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket
under it rose with a snarl and
Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey’s shoulder.
The children were thrown to the
floor and their mother, clutching the baby,
was thrown out the door onto the
ground; the old lady was thrown into the front
seat. The car turned over once
and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of
the road. Bailey remained in the
driver’s seat with the cat—gray-striped with a
broad white face and an orange
nose—clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.
As soon as the children saw they
could move their arms and legs, they
scrambled out of the car,
shouting, “We’ve had anACCIDENT!” The grandmother
was curled up under the
dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey’s wrath
would not come down on her all at
once. The horrible thought she had had before
the accident was that the house
she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia
but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his
neck with both hands and flung it out the
window against the side of a pine
tree. Then he got out of the car and started
looking for the children’s
mother. She was sitting against the side of the red gutted
ditch, holding the screaming
baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a
broken shoulder. “We’ve had an
ACCIDENT!” the children screamed in a frenzy
of delight.
“But nobody’s killed,” June Star
said with disappointment as the grandmother
limped out of the car, her hat
still pinned to her head but the broken front brim
standing up at a jaunty angle and
the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat
down in the ditch, except the
children, to recover from the shock. They were all
shaking.
“Maybe a car will come along,”
said the children’s mother hoarsely.
“I believe I have injured an
organ,” said the grandmother, pressing her side,
but no one answered her. Bailey’s
teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport
shirt with bright blue parrots
designed in it and his face was as yellow as the shirt.
The grandmother decided that she
would not mention that the house was in
Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above
and they could see only the tops of the trees
on the other side of it. Behind
the ditch they were sitting in there were more
woods, tall and dark and deep. In
a few minutes they saw a car some distance
away on top of a hill, coming
slowly as if the occupants were watching them. The
grandmother stood up and waved
both arms dramatically to attract their attention.
The car continued to come on
slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared
again, moving even slower, on top
of the hill they had gone over. It was a big
black battered hearse-like
automobile. There were three men in it.
It came to a stop just over them
and for some minutes, the driver looked down
with a steady expressionless gaze
to where they were sitting, and didn’t speak.
Then he turned his head and
muttered something to the other two and they got out.
One was a fat boy in black
trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion
embossed on the front of it. He
moved around on the right side of them and stood
staring, his mouth partly open in
a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants
and a blue striped coat and a
gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his
face. He came around slowly on
the left side. Neither spoke.
The driver got out of the car and
stood by the side of it, looking down at them.
He was an older man than the
other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and
he wore silver-rimmed spectacles
that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long
creased face and didn’t have on
any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that
were too tight for him and was
holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys also
had guns.
“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the
children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar
feeling that the bespectacled man was
someone she knew. His face was as
familiar to her as if she had known himall her
life but she could not recall who
he was. He moved away from the car and began
to come down the embankment,
placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn’t slip.
He had on tan and white shoes and
no socks, and his ankles were red and thin.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “I see
you all had you a little spill.”
“We turned over twice!” said the
grandmother.
“Oncet,” he corrected. “We seen
it happen. Try their car and see will it run,
Hiram,” he said quietly to the
boy with the gray hat.
“What you got that gun for?” John
Wesley asked. “Whatcha gonna do with that
gun?”
“Lady,” the man said to the
children’s mother, “would you mind calling them
children to sit down by you?
Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit
Bailey turned his head sharply
and said something to his mother that shocked
even the children. The old lady
began to cry and The Misfit reddened.
“Lady,” he said, “don’t you get
upset. Sometimes a man says things he don’t
mean. I don’t reckon he meant to
talk to you thataway.”
“You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would
you?” the grandmother said and removed a
clean handkerchief fromher cuff
and began to slap at her eyes with it.
The Misfit pointed the toe of his
shoe into the ground and made a little hole
and then covered it up again. “I
would hate to have to,” he said.
“Listen,” the grandmother almost
screamed, “I know you’re a good man. You
don’t look a bit like you have
common blood. I know you must come from nice
people!”
“Yes mam,” he said, “finest
people in the world.” When he smiled he showed
a row of strong white teeth. “God
never made a finer woman than my mother and
my daddy’s heart was pure gold,”
he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had
come around behind them and was
standing with his gun at his hip. The Misfit
squatted down on the ground.
“Watch them children, Bobby Lee,” he said. “You
know they make me nervous.” He
looked at the six of them huddled together in
front of him and he seemed to be
embarrassed as if he couldn’t think of anything to
say. “Ain’t a cloud in the sky,”
he remarked, looking up at it. “Don’t see no sun
but don’t see no cloud neither.”
“Yes, it’s a beautiful day,” said
the grandmother. “Listen,” she said, “you
shouldn’t call yourself The
Misfit because I know you’re a good man at heart. I
can just look at you and tell.”
“Hush!” Bailey yelled. “Hush!
Everybody shut up and let me handle this!” He
was squatting in the position of
a runner about to sprint forward but he didn’t
move.
“I pre-chate that, lady,” The
Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground
with the butt of his gun.
“It’ll take a half a hour to fix
this here car,” Hiram called, looking over the
raised hood of it.
“Well, first you and Bobby Lee
get him and that little boy to step over yonder
with you,” The Misfit said,
pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. “The boys want
to ast you something,” he said to
Bailey. “Would you mind stepping back in them
woods there with them?”
“Listen,” Bailey began, “we’re in
a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes
what this is,” and his voice
cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the
parrots in his shirt and he
remained perfectly still.
The grandmother reached up to
adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the
woods with him but it came off in
her hand. She stood staring at it and after a
second she let it fall on the
ground. Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he
were assisting an old man. John
Wesley caught hold of his father’s hand and
Bobby Lee followed. They went off
toward the woods and just as they reached the
dark edge, Bailey turned and
supporting himself against a gray naked pine trunk,
he shouted, “I’ll be back in a
minute, Mamma, wait on me!”
“Come back this instant!” his
mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the
woods.
“Bailey Boy!” the grandmother
called in a tragic voice but she found she was
looking at The Misfit squatting
on the ground in front of her. “I just know you’re a
good man,” she said desperately.
“You’re not a bit common!”
“Nome, I ain’t a good man,” The
Misfit said after a second as if he had
considered her statement
carefully, “but I ain’t the worst in the world neither. My
daddy said I was a different
breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘You
know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some
that can live their whole life out without asking
about it and it’s others has to
know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters.
He’s going to be into
everything!’” He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly
and then away deep into the woods
as if he were embarrassed again. “I’m sorry I
don’t have on a shirt before you
ladies,” he said, hunching his shoulders slightly.
“We buried our clothes that we
had on when we escaped and we’re just making
do until we can get better. We
borrowed these from some folks we met,” he
explained.
“That’s perfectly all right,” the
grandmother said. “Maybe Bailey has an extra
shirt in his suitcase.”
“I’ll look and see terrectly,”
The Misfit said.
“Where are they taking him?” the
children’s mother screamed.
“Daddy was a card himself,” The
Misfit said. “You couldn’t put anything over
on him. He never got in trouble
with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of
handling them.”
“You could be honest too if you’d
only try,” said the grandmother. “Think how
wonderful it would be to settle
down and live a comfortable life and not have to
think about somebody chasing you
all the time.”
The Misfit kept scratching in the
ground with the butt of his gun as if he were
thinking about it. “Yes’m,
somebody is always after you,” he murmured.
The grandmother noticed how thin
his shoulder blades were just behind his hat
because she was standing up
looking down on him. “Do you ever pray?” she
asked.
He shook his head. All she saw
was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder
blades. “Nome,” he said.
There was a pistol shot from the
woods, followed closely by another. Then
silence. The old lady’s head
jerked around. She could hear the wind move through
the tree tops like a long
satisfied insuck of breath. “Bailey Boy!” she called.
“I was a gospel singer for a
while,” The Misfit said. “I been most everything.
Been in the arm service, both
land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict
married, been an undertaker, been
with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been
in a tornado, seen a man burnt
alive oncet,” and looked up at the children’s mother
and the little girl who were
sitting close together, their faces white and their eyes
glassy; “I even seen a woman
flogged,” he said.
“Pray, pray,” the grandmother
began, “pray, pray…”
“I never was a bad boy that I
remember of,” The Misfit said in an almost
dreamy voice, “but somewheres
along the line I done something wrong and got
sent to the penitentiary. I was
buried alive,” and he looked up and held her
attention to himby a steady
stare.
“That’s when you should have
started to pray,” she said. “What did you do to
get sent to the penitentiary that
first time?”
“Turn to the right, it was a
wall,” The Misfit said, looking up again at the
cloudless sky. “Turn to the left,
it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down
it was a floor. I forget what I
done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to
remember what it was I done and I
ain’t recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I
would think it was coming to me,
but it never come.”
“Maybe they put you in by
mistake,” the old lady said vaguely.
“Nome,” he said. “It wasn’t no
mistake. They had the papers on me.”
“You must have stolen something,”
she said.
The Misfit sneered slightly.
“Nobody had nothing I wanted,” he said. “It was a
head-doctor at the penitentiary
said what I had done was kill my daddy but I
known that for a lie. My daddy
died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu
and I never had a thing to do
with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell
Baptist churchyard and you can go
there and see for yourself.”
“If you would pray,” the old lady
said, “Jesus would help you.”
“That’s right,” The Misfit said.
“Well then, why don’t you pray?”
she asked trembling with delight suddenly.
“I don’t want no hep,” he said.
“I’mdoing all right by myself.”
Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling
back from the woods. Bobby Lee was
dragging a yellow shirt with
bright blue parrots in it.
“Thow me that shirt, Bobby Lee,”
The Misfit said. The shirt came flying at him
and landed on his shoulder and he
put it on. The grandmother couldn’t name what
the shirt reminded her of. “No,
lady,” The Misfit said while he was buttoning it
up, “I found out the crime don’t
matter. You can do one thing or you can do
another, kill a man or take a
tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going
to forget what it was you done
and just be punished for it.”
The children’s mother had begun
to make heaving noises as if she couldn’t get
her breath. “Lady,” he asked,
“would you and that little girl like to step off yonder
with Bobby Lee and Hiramand join
your husband?”
“Yes, thank you,” the mother said
faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and
she was holding the baby, who had
gone to sleep, in the other. “Hep that lady up,
Hiram,” The Misfit said as she
struggled to climb out of the ditch, “and Bobby
Lee, you hold onto that little
girl’s hand.”
“I don’t want to hold hands with
him,” June Star said. “He reminds me of a
pig.”
The fat boy blushed and laughed
and caught her by the arm and pulled her off
into the woods after Hiramand her
mother.
Alone with The Misfit, the
grandmother found that she had lost her voice.
There was not a cloud in the sky
nor any sun. There was nothing around her but
woods. She wanted to tell himthat
he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth
several times before anything
came out. Finally she found herself saying, “Jesus,
Jesus,” meaning, Jesus will help
you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as
if she might be cursing.
“Yes’m,” The Misfit said as if he
agreed. “Jesus thown everything off balance.
It was the same case with Him as
with me except He hadn’t committed any crime
and they could prove I had
committed one because they had the papers on me. Of
course,” he said, “they never
shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now.
I said long ago, you get you a
signature and sign everything you do and keep a
copy of it. Then you’ll know what
you done and you can hold up the crime to the
punishment and see do they match
and in the end you’ll have something to prove
you ain’t been treated right. I
call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t
make what all I done wrong fit
what all I gone through in punishment.”
There was a piercing scream from
the woods, followed closely by a pistol
report. “Does it seem right to
you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another
ain’t punished at all?”
“Jesus!” the old lady cried.
“You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t
shoot a lady! I know you come
from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to
shoot a lady. I’ll give you all
the money I’ve got!”
“Lady,” The Misfit said, looking
beyond her far into the woods, “there never
was a body that give the
undertaker a tip.”
There were two more pistol
reports and the grandmother raised her head like a
parched old turkey hen crying for
water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as
if her heart would break.
“Jesus was the only One that ever
raised the dead.” The Misfit continued, “and
He shouldn’t have done it. He
thrown everything off balance. If He did what He
said, then it’s nothing for you
to do but throw away everything and follow Him,
and if He didn’t, then it’s
nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got
left the best way you can—by
killing somebody or burning down his house or
doing some other meanness to him.
No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his
voice had become almost a snarl.
“Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,”
the old lady mumbled, not knowing what
she was saying and feeling so
dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs
twisted under her.
“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He
didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of
been there,” he said, hitting the
ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there
because if I had of been there I
would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high
voice, “if I had of been there I
would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.”
His voice seemed about to crack
and the grandmother’s head cleared for an
instant. She saw the man’s face
twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry
and she murmured, “Why you’re one
of my babies. You’re one of my own
children!” She reached out and
touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang
back as if a snake had bitten him
and shot her three times through the chest. Then
he put his gun down on the ground
and took off his glasses and began to clean
them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from
the woods and stood over the ditch,
looking down at the grandmother
who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood
with her legs crossed under her
like a child’s and her face smiling up at the
cloudless sky.
Without his glasses, The Misfit’s
eyes were red-rimmed and pale and
defenseless-looking. “Take her
off and throw her where you thrown the others,”
he said, picking up the cat that
was rubbing itself against his leg.
“She was a talker, wasn’t she?”
Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a
yodel.
“She would of been a good woman,”
The Misfit said, “if it had been
somebody there to shoot her every
minute of her life.”
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit
said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”