Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor Read Free Book Online Page A

woman, he had not
     been very successful with Mrs. Watts. When he finished, he was like something washed
     ashore on her, and she had made obscene comments about him, which he remembered off
     and on during the day. He was uneasy in the thought of going to her again. He didn’t
     know what she would say when he opened the door and she saw him there.
    When he opened the door and she saw him there, she said, “Ha ha.”
    The black hat sat on his head squarely. He came in with it on and when it knocked
     the electric light bulb that hung down from the middle of the ceiling, he took it
     off. Mrs. Watts was in bed, applying a grease to her face. She rested her chin on
     her hand and watched him. He began to move around the room, examining this and that.
     His throat got dryer and his heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching the
     bars of its cage. He sat down on the edge of her bed, with his hat in his hand.
    Mrs. Watts’s grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle. It was plain that
     she was so well-adjusted that she didn’t have to think any more. Her eyes took everything
     in whole, like quicksand. “That Jesus-seeing hat!” she said. She sat up and pulled
     her nightgown from under her and took it off. She reached for his hat and put it on
     her head and sat with her hands on her hips, walling her eyes in a comical way. Haze
     stared for a minute, then he made three quick noises that were laughs. He jumped for
     the electric light cord and took off his clothes in the dark.
    Once when he was small, his father took him to a carnival that stopped in Melsy. There
     was one tent that cost more money a little off to one side. A dried-up man with a
     horn voice was barking it. He didn’t say what was inside. He said it was so SINsational
     that it would cost any man that wanted to see it thirty-five cents, and it was so
     EXclusive, only fifteen could get in at a time. His father sent him to a tent where
     two monkeys danced, and then he made for it, moving close to the walls of things like
     he moved. Haze left the monkeys and followed him, but he didn’t have thirty-five cents.
     He asked the barker what was inside.
    “Beat it,” the man said. “There ain’t no pop and there ain’t no monkeys.”
    “I already seen them,” he said.
    “That’s fine,” the man said, “beat it.”
    “I got fifteen cents,” he said. “Whyn’t you lemme in and I could see half of it?”
     It’s something about a privy, he was thinking. It’s some men in a privy. Then he thought,
     maybe it’s a man and a woman in a privy. She wouldn’t want me in there. “I got fifteen
     cents,” he said.
    “It’s more than half over,” the man said, fanning with his straw hat. “You run along.”
    “That’ll be fifteen cents worth then,” Haze said.
    “Scram,” the man said.
    “Is it a nigger?” Haze asked. “Are they doing something to a nigger?”
    The man leaned off his platform and his dried-up face drew into a glare. “Where’d
     you get that idear?” he said.
    “I don’t know,” Haze said.
    “How old are you?” the man asked.
    “Twelve,” Haze said. He was ten.
    “Gimme that fifteen cents,” the man said, “and get in there.”
    He slid the money on the platform and scrambled to get in before it was over. He went
     through the flap of the tent and inside there was another tent and he went through
     that. All he could see were the backs of the men. He climbed up’on a bench and looked
     over their heads. They were looking down into a lowered place where something white
     was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he thought
     it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman. She was fat and she had a
     face like an ordinary woman except there was a mole on the corner of her lip, that
     moved when she grinned, and one on her side.
    “Had one of themther built into ever’ casket,” his father, up toward the front, said,
     “be a heap ready to go