The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor Read Free Book Online

ain’t rolled it quite far enough, of course. You got to finish up yourself but He’s done the main part. Praise Him.
    Tarwater had ceased to have any feeling in his legs. He dozed for a while, his head hanging to the side and his mouth open and the liquor trickling slowly down the side of his overalls where the jug had overturned in his lap. Eventually there was only a drip at the neck of the bottle, forming and filling and dropping, silent and measured and sun-colored. The bright even sky began to fade, coarsening with clouds until every shadow had gone in. He woke with a wrench forward, his eyes focussing and unfocussing on something that looked like a burnt rag hanging close to his face.
    Buford said, “This ain’t no way for you to act. Old man don’t deserve this. There’s no rest until the dead is buried.” He was squatting on his heels, one hand gripped around Tarwater’s arm. “I gone yonder to the door and seen him sitting there at the table, not even laid out on a cooling board. He ought to be laid out and have some salt on his bosom if you mean to keep him overnight.”
    The boy’s lids pinched together to hold the image steady and in a second he made out two small red blistered eyes.
    “He deserves to lie in a grave that fits him,” Buford said. “He was deep in this life, he was deep in Jesus’ misery.”
    “Nigger,” the child said, working his strange swollen tongue, “take your hand off me.”
    Buford lifted his hand. “He needs to be rested,” he said.
    “He’ll be rested all right when I get through with him,” Tarwater said vaguely. “Go on and lea’ me to my bidnis.”
    “Nobody going to bother you,” Buford said, standing up. He waited a minute, bent, looking down at the limp figure sprawled against the bank. The boy’s head was tilted backwards over a root that jutted out of the clay wall. His mouth hung open and his turned-up hat cut a straight line across his forehead, just over his half-open unseeing eyes. His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them had an ancient look as if the child’s skeleton beneath were as old as the world. “Nobody going to bother you,” the Negro muttered, pushing through the wall of honeysuckle without looking back. “That going to be your trouble.”
    Tarwater closed his eyes again.
    *   *   *
    Some night bird complaining close by woke him up. It was not a screeching noise, only an intermittent hump-hump as if the bird had to recall his grievance each time before he repeated it. Clouds were moving convulsively across a black sky and there was a pink unsteady moon that appeared to be jerked up a foot or so and then dropped and jerked up again. This was because, as he observed in an instant, the sky was lowering, coming down fast to smother him. The bird screeched and flew off in time and Tarwater lurched into the middle of the stream bed and crouched on his hands and knees. The moon was reflected like pale fire in the few spots of water in the sand. He sprang at the wall of honeysuckle and began to tear through it, confusing the sweet familiar odor with the weight coming down on him. When he stood up on the other side, the black ground swung slowly and threw him down again. A flare of pink lightning lit the woods and he saw the black shapes of trees pierce out of the ground all around him. The night bird began to hump again from a thicket where he had settled.
    He got up and began to move in the direction of the clearing, feeling his way from tree to tree, the trunks very cold and dry to his touch. There was distant thunder and a continuous flicker of pale lightning firing one section of woods and then another. Finally he saw the shack, standing gaunt-black and tall in the middle of the clearing, with the pink moon trembling directly over it. His eyes glittered like open pits of light as he moved across the sand, dragging his crushed shadow behind him. He didn’t turn his head to that