Flannery O’Connor - A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

He looked old too. He looked older than she did and he was fourteen years younger. She was extremely young looking for her age. Not that thirty-four is any age and anyway she was married. She had to smile, thinking about that, because she had done so much better than her sisters—they had married from around. “This breathlessness,” she muttered, stopping again. She decided she would have to sit down.

There were twenty-eight steps in each flight—twenty-eight.

She sat down and jumped quickly, feeling something under her. She caught her breath and then pulled the thing out: it was Hartley Gilfeet’s pistol. Nine inches of treacherous tin! He was a six-year-old boy who lived on the fifth floor. If he had been hers, she’d have worn him out so hard so many times he wouldn’t know how to leave his mess on a public stair. She could have fallen down those stairs as easy as not and ruined herself! But his stupid mother wasn’t going to do anything to him even if she told her. All she did was scream at him and tell people how smart he was. “Little Mister Good Fortune!” she called him. “All his poor daddy left me!” His daddy had said on his death bed, “There’s nothing but him I ever given you,” and she had said, “Rodman, you given me a fortune!” and so she called him Little Mister Good Fortune. “I’d wear the seat of his good fortune out!” Ruby muttered.

The steps were going up and down like a seesaw with her in the middle of it. She did not want to get nauseated. Not that again. Now no. No. She was not. She sat tightly to the steps with her eyes shut until the dizziness stopped a little and the nausea subsided. No, I’m not going to no doctor, she said. No. No. She was not. They would have to carry her there knocked out before she would go. She had done all right doctoring herself all these years—no bad sick spells, no teeth out, no children, all that by herself. She would have had five children right now if she hadn’t been careful.

She had wondered more than once if this breathlessness could be heart trouble. Once in a while, going up the steps, there’d be a pain in her chest along with it. That was what she wanted it to be—heart trouble. They couldn’t very well remove your heart. They’d have to knock her in the head before they’d get her near a hospital, they’d have to—suppose she would die if they didn’t?

She wouldn’t.

Suppose she would?

She made herself stop this gory thinking. She was only thirty-four. There was nothing permanent wrong with her. She was fat and her color was good. She thought of herself again in comparison with her mother at thirty-four and she pinched her arm and smiled. Seeing that her mother or father neither had been much to look at, she had done very well. They had been the dried-up type, dried up and Pitman dried into them, them and Pitman shrunk down into something all dried and puckered up. And she had come out of that! A somebody as alive as her! She got up, gripping the banister rail but smiling to herself. She was warm and fat and beautiful and not too fat because Bill Hill liked her that way. She had gained some weight but he hadn’t noticed except that he was maybe more happy lately and didn’t know why. She felt the wholeness of herself, a whole thing climbing the stairs. She was up the first flight now and she looked back, pleased. As soon as Bill Hill fell down those steps once, maybe they would move. But they would move before thatl Madam Zoleeda had known. She laughed aloud and moved on down the hall. Mr. Jerger’s door grated and startled her. Oh Lord, she thought, him . He was a second-floor resident who was peculiar.

He peered at her coming down the hall. “Good morning!” he said, bowing the upper part of his body out the door. “Good morning to you!” He looked like a goat. He had little raisin eyes and a string beard and his jacket was a green that was almost black or a black that was almost green.

“Morning,” she said. “Hower you?”

“Well!” he screamed. “Well indeed on this glorious day!” He was seventy-eight years old and his face looked as if it had mildew on it. In the mornings he studied and in the afternoons, he walked up and down the sidewalks, stopping children and asking them questions. Whenever he heard anyone in the hall, he opened his door and looked out.

“Yeah, it’s a nice day,” she said languidly.

“Do you know what great birthday this is?” he asked.

“Uh-uh,” Ruby said. He always had a question like that. A history question that nobody knew; he would ask it and then make a speech on it. He used to teach in a high school.

“Guess,” he urged her.

“Abraham Lincoln,” she muttered.

“Hah! You are not trying,” he said. “Try.”

“George Washington,” she said, starting up the stairs.

“Shame on you!” he cried. “And your husband from there! Florida! Florida! Florida’s birthday,” he shouted. “Come in here.” He disappeared into his room, beckoning a long finger at her.

She came down the two steps and said, “I gotta be going,” and stuck her head inside the door. The room was the size of a large closet and the walls were completely covered with picture postcards of local buildings; this gave an illusion of space. A single transparent bulb hung down on Mr. Jerger and a small table.

“Now examine this,” he said. He was bending over a book, running his finger under the lines: “ ‘On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1516, he arrived on the tip of this continent.’ Do you know who this he was?” he demanded.

“Yeah, Christopher Columbus,” Ruby said.

“Ponce de Leon!” he screamed. “Ponce de Leon! You should know something about Florida,” he said. “Your husband is from Florida.”

“Yeah, he was born in Miami,” Ruby said. “He’s not from Tennessee.”

“Florida is not a noble state,” Mr. Jerger said, “but it is an important one.”

“It’s important alrighto,” Ruby said.

“Do you know who Ponce de Leon was?”

“He was the founder of Florida,” Ruby said brightly.

“He was a Spaniard,” Mr. Jerger said. “Do you know what he was looking for?”

“Florida,” Ruby said.

“Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth,” Mr. Jerger said, closing his eyes.

“Oh,” Ruby muttered.

“A certain spring,” Mr. Jerger went on, “whose water gave perpetual youth to those who drank it. In other words,” he said, “he was trying to be young always.”

“Did he find it?” Ruby asked.

Mr. Jerger paused with his eyes still closed. After a minute he said, “Do you think he found it? Do you think he found it? Do you think nobody else would have got to it if he had found it? Do you think there would be one person living on this earth who hadn’t drunk it?”

“I hadn’t thought,” Ruby said.

“Nobody thinks any more,” Mr. Jerger complained.

“I got to be going.”

“Yes, it’s been found,” Mr. Jerger said.

“Where at?” Ruby asked.

“I have drunk of it.”

“Where’d you have to go to?” she asked. She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard’s wing.

“Into my heart,” he said, placing his hand over it.

“Oh.” Ruby moved back. “I gotta be going. I think my brother’s home.” She got over the door sill.

“Ask your husband if he knows what great birthday this is,” Mr. Jerger said, looking at her coyly.

“Yeah, I will.” She turned and waited until she heard his door click. She looked back to see that it was shut and then she blew out her breath and stood facing the dark remaining steep of steps. “God Almighty,” she commented. They got darker and steeper as you went up.

By the time she had climbed five steps her breath was gone. She continued up a few more, blowing. Then she stopped. There was a pain in her stomach. It was a pain like a piece of something pushing something else. She had felt it before, a few days ago. It was the one that frightened her most. She had thought the word cancer once and dropped it instantly because no horror like that was coming to her because it couldn’t. The word came back to her immediately with the pain but she slashed it in two with Madam Zolccda. It will end in good fortune. She slashed it twice through and then again until there were only pieces of it that couldn’t be recognized. She was going to stop on the next floor—God, if she ever got up there—and talk to Laverne Watts. Laverne Watts was a third-floor resident, the secretary to a chiropodist, and an especial friend of hers.