SOUTHERN LITERATURE


William Faulkner


A Rose for Emily


I


When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of
respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of
her house, which no one save an old manservant–a combined gardener and cook–had seen in at least
ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and
scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seven-ties, set on what had once been our
most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august
names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish
decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps–an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily
had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused
cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the
battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon
the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor–he who fathered the edict
that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron–remitted her taxes, the
dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have
accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father
had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of
repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a
woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors arid aldermen, this arrangement
created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice.
February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her

a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff’s office at her convenience. A week later the
mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note
on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowery calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she
no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at
the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight
or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway
mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse–a close, dank smell. The Negro led
them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened
the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down; a
faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a
tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father.

They rose when she entered–a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her
waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her
skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another
was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that
pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal
pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their
errand. She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the
spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of
the gold chain.

Her voice was dry and cold. “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me.
Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.”

“But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn’t you get a notice from the sheriff,
signed by him?”

“I received a paper, yes,” Miss Emily said. “Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff... I have no
taxes in Jefferson.”

“But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see. We must go by the–”

“See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.”

“But, Miss Emily–”

“See Colonel Sartoris.” (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) “I have no taxes in
Jefferson. Tobe!” The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out.”


II


So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years
before about the smell. That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her
sweetheart–the one we believed would marry her–had deserted her. After her father’s death she went
out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies
had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the
Negro man–a young man then–going in and out with a market basket.

“Just as if a man–any man–could keep a kitchen properly,” the ladies said. So they were not
surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the
high and mighty Griersons.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, judge Stevens, eighty years old. “But what will you
have me do about it, madam?” he said.

“Why, send her word to stop it,” the woman said. “Isn’t there a law?”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Judge. Stevens said. “It’s probably just a snake or a rat that
nigger of hers killed in the yard. I’ll speak to him about it.”

The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. “We
really must do something about it, judge. I’d be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily,
but we’ve got to do something.” That night the Board of Aldermen met–three graybeards and one
younger man, a member of the rising generation.

“It’s simple enough,” he said. “Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time
to do it in, and if she don’t. . .”

“Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?”

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house
like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of
them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They
broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed
the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her,
and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into
the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how
old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held
themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good
enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender
figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to
her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got
to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity
in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way,
people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had
become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or
less.

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer

condolence and aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no
trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three
days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them
dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they
buried her father quickly.

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men
her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that
which had robbed her, as people will.


III


She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a
girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows–sort of tragic and serene.

The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father’s
death they began the work. The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and
a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee–a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter
than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the niggers, and the niggers
singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you
heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the
group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the
yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.

At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, “Of
course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.” But there were still
others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse
oblige–without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to
her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the
estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families.
They had not even been represented at the funeral.
And as soon as the old people said, “Poor Emily,” the whispering began. “Do you suppose it’s really
so?” they said to one another. “Of course it is. What else could. . .” This behind their hands;
rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the
thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched passed: “Poor Emily.!”

She carried her head high enough–even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she
demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted
that touch of earthliness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the
arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say “Poor Emily,” and while the two female
cousins were visiting her.

“I want some poison,” she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman,
though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained
across the temples and about the eye-sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to
look. “I want some poison,” she said.

 “Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I’d recom–”

 “I want the best you have. I don’t care what kind.”

The druggist named several. “They’ll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is–”

“Arsenic,” Miss Emily said. “Is that a good one?”

“Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma’am. But what you want–”

“I want arsenic.”

The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag.
“Why, of course,” the druggist said. “If that’s what you want. But the law requires you to tell
what you are going to use it for.”

Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he
looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the
package; the druggist didn’t come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on
the box, under the skull and bones: “For rats.”


IV


So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we said it would be the best thing. When
she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, “She will marry him.” Then we said,
“She will persuade him yet,” because Homer himself had remarked–he liked men, and it was known that
he drank with the younger men at the Elks’ Club–that he was not a marrying man. Later we said,
“Poor Emily” behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss
Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and
whip in a yellow glove.

Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the
young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist
minister–Miss Emily’s people were Episcopal–to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened
during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the
streets, and the following day the minister’s wife wrote to Miss Emily’s relations in Alabama.

So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing
happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to
the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two
days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a
nightshirt, and we said, “They are married.” We were really glad. We were glad because the two
female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.

So we were not surprised when Homer Barron–the streets had been finished some time since–was gone.
We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had
gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By
that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily’s allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure
enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days
Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk
one evening.

And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went
in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see
her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled lime, but for almost
six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if
that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent
and too furious to die.

When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few
years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepperand-salt iron-gray, when it ceased
turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the
hair of an active man.

From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she
was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of
the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris’ contemporaries
were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on
Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been
remitted.

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils
grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with  boxes of color and tedious
brushes and pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and
remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let
them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to
them.

Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the
market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a
week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows–she had
evidently shut up the top floor of the house–like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking
or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to
generation–dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro
man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any
information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown
harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head
propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.


V


The Negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed,
sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through
the house and out the back and was not seen again.

The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming
to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing
profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men–some in their
brushed Confederate uniforms–on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a
contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing
time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing
road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the
narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty
years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground
before they opened it.

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid
pall as of the tomb seemed to he everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal:
upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing
table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man’s toilet things backed with tarnished silver,
silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had
just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair
hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had
apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that
conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was
left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon
the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something
from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a
long strand of iron-gray hair.


[1930]



Flannery O´Connor


The Life You Save May Be Your Own

The old woman and her daughter were sitting on their porch when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for
the first time. The old woman slid to the edge of her chair and leaned forward, shading her eyes
from the piercing sunset with her hand. The daughter could not see far in front of her and
continued to play with her fingers. Although the old woman lived in this desolate spot with only
her daughter and she had never seen Mr. Shiftlet before, she could tell, even from a distance, that
he was a tramp and no one to be afraid of.  His left coat sleeve was folded up to show there was
only half an arm in it and his gaunt figure listed slightly to the side as if the breeze were
pushing him. He had on a black town suit and a brown felt hat that was turned up in the front and
down in the back and he carried a tin tool box by a handle. He came on, at an amble, up her road,
his face turned toward the sun which appeared to be balancing itself on the peak of a small
mountain.

The old woman didn’t change her position until he was almost into her yard; then she rose with one
hand fisted on her hip. The daughter, a large girl in a short blue organdy dress, saw him all at
once and jumped up and began to stamp and point and make excited speechless sounds.

Mr. Shiftlet stopped just inside the yard and set his box on the ground and tipped his hat at her
as if she were not in the least afflicted; then he turned toward the old woman and swung the hat
all the way off. He had long black slick hair that hung flat from a part in the middle to beyond
the tips of his ears on either side. His face descended in forehead for more than half its length
and ended suddenly with his features just balanced over a jutting steel‑trap jaw. He seemed to be a
young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.

“Good evening,” the old woman said. She was about the size of a cedar fence post and she had a
man’s gray hat pulled down low over her head.

The tramp stood looking at her and didn’t answer. He turned his back and faced the sunset. He swung
both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure
formed a crooked cross. The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she
were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless
hands hanging at the wrists. She had long pink‑gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.

He held the pose for almost fifty seconds and then he picked up his box and came on to the porch
and dropped down on the bottom step. “Lady,” he said in a firm nasal voice, “I’d give a fortune to
live where I could see me a sun do that every evening.”

“Does it every evening,” the old woman said and sat back down. The daughter sat down too and
watched him with a cautious sly look as if he were a bird that had come up very close. He leaned to
one side, rooting in his pants pocket, and in a second he brought out a package of chewing gum and
offered her a piece. She took it and unpeeled it and began to chew without taking her eyes off him.
He offered the old woman a piece but she only raised her upper lip to indicate she had no teeth.

Mr. Shiftlet’s pale sharp glance had already passed over everything in the yard–the pump near the
comer of the house and the big fig tree that three or four chickens were preparing to roost in–and
had moved to a shed where he saw the square rusted back of an automobile. “You ladies drive?” he
asked.

“That car ain’t run in fifteen year,” the old woman said. “The day my husband died, it quit
running.”

“Nothing is like it used to be, lady,” he said. “The world is almost rotten.”

“That’s right,” the old woman said. “You from around here?”

“Name Tom T. Shiftlet,” he murmured, looking at the tires.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” the old woman said. “Name Lucynell Crater and daughter Lucynell Crater.
What you doing around here, Mr. Shiftlet?”

He judged the car to be about a 1928 or ‘29 Ford. “Lady,” he said, and turned and gave her his full
attention, “lemme tell you something. There’s one of these doctors in Atlanta that’s taken a knife
and cut the human heart–the human heart,” he repeated, leaning forward, “out of a man’s chest and
held it in his hand,” and he held his hand out, palm up, as if it were slightly weighted with the
human heart, “and studied it like it was a day‑old chicken, and lady,” he said, allowing a long
significant pause in which his head slid forward and his clay‑colored eyes brightened, “he don’t
know no more about it than you or me.”

“That’s right,” the old woman said.

“Why, if he was to take that knife and cut into every corner of it, he still wouldn’t know no more
than you or me. What you want to bet?”

“Nothing,” the old woman said wisely. “Where you come from, Mr. Shiftlet?”

He didn’t answer. He reached into his pocket and brought out a sack of tobacco and a package of
cigarette papers and rolled himself a cigarette, expertly with one hand, and attached it in a
hanging position to his upper lip. Then he took a box of wooden matches from his pocket and struck
one on his shoe. He held the burning match as if he were studying the mystery of flame while it
traveled dangerously toward his skin. The daughter began to make loud noises and to point to his
hand and shake her finger at him, but when the flame was just before touching him, he leaned down
with his hand cupped over it as if he were going to set fire to his nose and lit the cigarette.

He flipped away the dead match and blew a stream of gray into the evening. A sly look came over his
face. “Lady,” he said, “nowadays, people’ll do anything anyways. I can tell you my name is Tom T.
Shiftlet and I come from Tarwater, Tennessee, but you never have seen me before: how you know I
ain’t lying? How you know my name ain’t Aaron Sparks, lady, and I come from Singleberry, Georgia,
or how you know it’s not George Speeds and I come from Lucy, Alabama, or how you know I ain’t
Thompson Bright from Toolafalls, Mississippi?”

“I don’t know nothing about you,” the old woman muttered, irked.

“Lady,” he said, “people don’t care how they lie. Maybe the best I can tell you is, I’m a man; but
listen lady,” he said and paused and made his tone more ominous still, “what is a man?”

The old woman began to gum a seed. “What you carry in that tin box, Mr. Shiftlet?” she asked.

“Tools,” he said, put back. “I’m a carpenter.”

“Well, if you come out here to work, I’ll be able to feed you and give you a place to sleep but I
can’t pay. I’ll tell you that before you begin,” she said.

There was no answer at once and no particular expression on his face. He leaned back against the
two‑by‑four that helped support the porch roof. “Lady,” he said slowly, “there’s some men that some
things mean more to them than money.” The old woman rocked without comment and the daughter watched
the trigger that moved up and down in his neck. He told the old woman then that all most people
were interested in was money, but he asked what a man was made for. He asked her if a man was made
for money, or what. He asked her what she thought she was made for but she didn’t answer, she only
sat rocking and wondered if a one‑armed man could put a new roof on her garden house. He asked a
lot of questions that she didn’t answer. He told her that he was twenty‑eight years old and had
lived a varied life. He had been a gospel singer, a foreman on the railroad, an assistant in an
undertaking parlor, and he had come over the radio for three months with Uncle Roy and his Red
Creek Wranglers. He said he had fought and bled in the Arm Service of his country and visited every
foreign land and that everywhere he had seen people that didn’t care if they did a thing one way or
another. He said he hadn’t been raised thataway.

A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with
the chickens. He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he
wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like
God made it to do.

“Are you married or are you single?” the old woman asked.

There was a long silence. “Lady,” he asked finally, “where would you find you an innocent woman
today’? I wouldn’t have any of this trash I could just pick up.”

The daughter was leaning very far down, hanging her head almost between her knees, watching him
through a triangular door she had made in her overturned hair; and she suddenly fell in a heap on
the floor and began to whimper. Mr. Shiftlet straightened her out and helped her get back in the
chair.

“Is she your baby girl?” he asked.

“My only,” the old woman said, “and she’s the sweetest girl in the world. I wouldn’t give her up
for nothing on earth. She’s smart too. She can sweep the floor, cook, wash, feed the chickens, and
hoe. I wouldn’t give her up for a casket of jewels.”

“No,” he said kindly, “don’t ever let any man take her away from you.”

“Any man come after her,” the old woman said, “ ‘ll have to stay around the place.”

Mr. Shiftlet’s eye in the darkness was focused on a part of the automobile bumper that glittered in
the distance. “Lady,” he said, jerking his short arm up as if he could point with it to her house
and yard and pump, “there ain’t a broken thing on this plantation that I couldn’t fix for you,
one‑arm jackleg or not. I’m a man,” he said with a sullen dignity, “even if I ain’t a whole one. I
got,” he said, tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he was going to
say, “a moral intelligence!” and his face pierced out of the darkness into a shaft of doorlight and
he stared at her as if he were astonished himself at this impossible truth.

The old woman was not impressed with the phrase. “I told you you could hang around and work for
food,” she said, “if you don’t mind sleeping in that car yonder.”

“Why listen, Lady,” he said with a grin of delight, “the monks of old slept in their coffins!”

“They wasn’t as advanced as we are,” the old woman said.


The next morning he began on the roof of the garden house while Lucynell, the daughter, sat on a
rock and watched him work. He had not been around a week before the change he had made in the place
was apparent. He had patched the front and back steps, built a new hog pen, restored a fence, and
taught Lucynell, who was completely deaf and had never said a word in her life, to say the word
“bird.” The big rosy‑faced girl followed him everywhere, saying “Burrttddt ddbirrrttdt,” and
clapping her hands. The old woman watched from a distance, secretly pleased. She was ravenous for a
son‑in‑law.

Mr. Shiftlet slept on the hard narrow back seat of the car with his feet out the side window. He
had his razor and a can of water on a crate that served him as a bedside table and he put up a
piece of mirror against the back glass and kept his coat neatly on a hanger that he hung over one
of the windows.

In the evenings he sat on the steps and talked while the old woman and Lucynell rocked violently in
their chairs on either side of him. The old woman’s three mountains were black against the dark
blue sky and were visited off and on by various planets and by the moon after it had left the
chickens. Mr. Shiftlet pointed out that the reason he had improved this plantation was because he
had taken a personal interest in it. He said he was even going to make the automobile run.

He had raised the hood and studied the mechanism and he said he could tell that the car had been
built in the days when cars were really built. “You take now,” he said, “one man puts in one bolt
and another man puts in another bolt and another man puts in another bolt so that it’s a man for a
bolt. That’s why you have to ‘pay so much for a car: you’re paying all those men. Now if you didn’t
have to pay but one man, you could get you a cheaper car and one that had had a personal interest
taken in it, and it would be a better car.” The old woman agreed with him that this was so.

Mr. Shiftlet said that the trouble with the world was that nobody cared, or stopped and took any
trouble. He said he never would have been able to teach Lucynell to say a word if he hadn’t cared
and stopped long enough.

“Teach her to say something else,” the old woman said.

“What you want her to say next?” Mr. Shiftlet asked.

The old woman’s smile was broad and toothless and suggestive. “Teach her to say ‘sugarpie,’” she
said.

Mr. Shiftlet already knew what was on her mind.

The next day he began to tinker with the automobile and that evening he told her that if she would
buy a fan belt, he would be able to make the car run.

The old woman said she would give him the money. “You see that girl yonder?” she asked, pointing to
Lucynell who was sitting on the floor a foot away, watching him, her eyes blue even in the dark.
“If it was ever a man wanted to take her away, I would say, ‘No man on earth is going to take that
sweet girl of mine away from me!’ but if he was to say, ‘Lady, I don’t want to take her away, I
want her right here,’ I would say, ‘Mister, I don’t blame you none. I wouldn’t pass up a chance to
live in a permanent place and get the sweetest girl in the world myself. You ain’t no fool,’ I
would say.”

“How old is she?” Mr. Shiftlet asked casually.

“Fifteen, sixteen,” the old woman said. The girl was nearly thirty but because of her innocence it
was impossible to guess.

“It would be a good idea to paint it too,” Mr. Shiftlet remarked. “You don’t want it to rust out.”

“We’ll see about that later,” the old woman said.

The next day he walked into town and returned with the parts he needed and a can of gasoline. Late
in the afternoon, terrible noises issued from the shed and the old woman rushed out of the house,
thinking Lucynell was somewhere having a fit. Lucynell was sitting on a chicken crate, stamping her
feet and screaming, “Burrddttt! bddurrddtttt!” but her fuss was drowned out by the car. With a
volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce and stately way. Mr. Shiftlet was in
the driver’s seat, sitting very erect. He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he
had just raised the dead.

That night, rocking on the porch, the old woman began her business at once. “You want you an
innocent woman, don’t you?” she asked sympathetically. “You don’t want none of this trash.”

“No’m, I don’t,” Mr. Shiftlet said.

“One that can’t talk,” she continued, “can’t sass you back or use foul language. That’s the kind
for you to have. Right there,” and she pointed to Lucynell sitting cross‑legged in her chair,
holding both feet in her hands.

“That’s right,” he admitted. “She wouldn’t give me any trouble.”

“Saturday,” the old woman said, “you and her and me can drive into town and get married.”

Mr. Shiftlet eased his position on the steps.

“I can’t get married right now,” he said. “Everything you want to do takes money and I ain’t got
any.”

“What you need with money?” she asked.

“It takes money,” he said. “Some people’ll do anything anyhow these days, but the way I think, I
wouldn’t marry no woman that I couldn’t take on a trip like she was somebody. I mean take her to a
hotel and treat her. I wouldn’t marry the Duchesser Windsor,” he said firmly, “unless I could take
her to a hotel and give her something good to eat.”

“I was raised thataway and there ain’t a thing I can do about it. My old mother taught me how to
do.”

“Lucynell don’t even know what a hotel is,” the old woman muttered. “Listen here, Mr. Shiftlet,”
she said, sliding forward in her chair, “you’d be getting a permanent house and a deep well and the
most innocent girl in the world. You don’t need no money. Lemme tell you something: there ain’t any
place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man.”

The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet’s head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree. He
didn’t answer at once. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it and then he said in an even voice,
“Lady, a man is divided into two parts, body and spirit.”

The old woman clamped her gums together.

“A body and a spirit,” he repeated. “The body, lady, is like a house: it don’t go anywhere; but the
spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always . . .”

“Listen, Mr. Shiftlet,” she said, “my well never goes dry and my house is always warm in the winter
and there’s no mortgage on a thing about this place. You can go to the courthouse and see for
yourself And yonder under that shed is a fine automobile.” She laid the bait carefully. “You can
have it painted by Saturday. I’ll pay for the paint.”

In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire. After a
second he recalled himself and said, “I’m only saying a man’s spirit means more to  him than
anything else. I would have to take my wife off for the week end without no regards at all for
cost. I got to follow where my spirit says to go.”

“I’ll give you fifteen dollars for a week‑end trip,” the old woman said in a crabbed voice. “That’s
the best I can do.”

“That wouldn’t hardly pay for more than the gas and the hotel,” he said. “It wouldn’t feed her.”

“Seventeen‑fifty,” the old woman said. “That’s all I got so it isn’t any use you trying to milk me.
You can take a lunch.”

Mr. Shiftlet was deeply hurt by the word “milk.” He didn’t doubt that she had more money sewed up
in her mattress but he had already told her he was not interested in her money. “I’ll make that
do,” he said and rose and walked off without treating with her further.

On Saturday the three of them drove into town in the car that the paint had barely dried on and Mr.
Shiftlet and Lucynell were married in the Ordinary’s office while the old woman witnessed. As they
came out of the courthouse, Mr. Shiftlet began twisting his neck in his collar. He looked morose
and bitter as if he had been insulted while someone held him. “That didn’t satisfy me none,” he
said. “That was just something a woman in an office did, nothing but paper work and blood tests.
What do they know about my blood? If they was to take my heart and cut it out,” he said, “they
wouldn’t know a thing about me. It didn’t satisfy me at all.”

“It satisfied the law,” the old woman said sharply.

“The law,” Mr. Shiftlet said and spit. “It’s the law that don’t satisfy me.”

He had painted the car dark green with a yellow band around it just under the windows. The three of
them climbed in the front seat and the old woman said, “Don’t Lucynell look pretty? Looks like a
baby doll.” Lucynell was dressed up in a white dress that her mother had uprooted from a trunk and
there was a Panama hat on her head with a bunch of red wooden cherries on the brim. Every now and
then her placid expression was changed by a sly isolated little thought like a shoot of green in
the desert. “You got a prize!” the old woman said.

Mr. Shiftlet didn’t even look at her.

They drove back to the house to let the old woman off and pick up the lunch. When they were ready
to leave, she stood staring in the window of the car, with her fingers clenched around the glass.
Tears began to seep sideways out of her eyes and run along the dirty creases in her face. “I ain’t
ever been parted with her for two days before,” she said.

Mr. Shiftlet started the motor.

“And I wouldn’t let no man have her but you because I seen you would do right. Good‑by, Sugarbaby,”
she said, clutching at the sleeve of the white dress. Lucynell looked straight at her and didn’t
seem to see her there at all. Mr. Shiftlet eased the car forward so that she had to move her hands.

The early afternoon was clear and open and surrounded by pale blue sky. Although the car would go
only thirty miles an hour, Mr. Shiftlet imagined a terrific climb and dip and swerve that went
entirely to his head so that he forgot his morning bitterness. He had always wanted an automobile
but he had never been able to afford one before. He drove very fast because he wanted to make
Mobile by nightfall.

Occasionally he stopped his thoughts long enough to look at Lucynell in the seat beside him. She
had eaten the lunch as soon as they were out of the yard and now she was pulling the cherries off
the hat one by one and throwing them out the window. He became depressed in spite of the car. He
had driven about a hundred miles when he decided that she must be hungry again and at the next
small town they came to, he stopped in front of an aluminum‑painted eating place called The Hot
Spot and took her in and ordered her a plate of ham and grits. The ride had made her sleepy and as
soon as she got up on the stool, she rested her head on the counter and shut her eyes. There was no
one in The Hot Spot but Mr. Shiftlet and the boy behind the counter, a pale youth with a greasy rag
hung over his shoulder. Before he could dish up the food, she was snoring gently.

“Give it to her when she wakes up,” Mr. Shiftlet said. “I’ll pay for it now.”

The boy bent over her and stared at the long pink‑gold hair and the half‑shut sleeping eyes. Then
he looked up and stared at Mr. Shiftlet. “She looks like an angel of Gawd,” he murmured.

“Hitch‑hiker,” Mr. Shiftlet explained. “I can’t wait. I got to make Tuscaloosa.”

The boy bent over again and very carefully touched his finger to a strand of the golden hair and
Mr. Shiftlet left.

He was more depressed than ever as he drove on by himself. The late afternoon had grown hot and
sultry and the country had flattened out. Deep in the sky a storm was preparing very slowly and
without thunder as if it meant to drain every drop of air from the earth before it broke. There
were times when Mr. Shiftlet preferred not to be alone. He felt too that a man with a car had a
responsibility to others and he kept his eye out for a hitch‑hiker. Occasionally he saw a sign that
warned: “Drive carefully. The life you save may be your own.”

The narrow road dropped off on either side into dry fields and here and there a shack or a filling
station stood in a clearing. The sun began to set directly in front of the automobile. It was a
reddening ball that through his windshield was slightly flat on the bottom and top. He saw a boy in
overalls and a gray hat standing on the edge of the road and he slowed the car down and stopped in
front of him. The boy didn’t have his hand raised to thumb the ride, he was only standing there,
but he had a small cardboard suitcase and his hat was set on his head in a way to indicate that he
had left somewhere for good. “Son,” Mr. Shiftlet said, “I see you want a ride.”

The boy didn’t say he did or he didn’t but he opened the door of the car and got in, and Mr.
Shiftlet started driving again. The child held the suitcase on his lap and folded his arms on top
of it. He turned his head and looked out the window away from Mr. Shiftlet. Mr. Shiftlet felt
oppressed. “Son,” he said after a minute, “I got the best old mother in the world so I reckon you
only got the second best.”

The boy gave him a quick dark glance and then turned his face back out the window.

“It’s nothing so sweet,” Mr. Shiftlet continued, “as a boy’s mother. She taught him his first
prayers at her knee, she give him love when no other would, she told him what was right and what
wasn’t, and she seen that he done the right thing. Son,” he said, “I never rued a day in my life
like the one I rued when I left that old mother of mine.”

The boy shifted in his seat but he didn’t look at Mr. Shiftlet. He unfolded his arms and put one
hand on the door handle.

“My mother was a angel of Gawd,” Mr. Shiftlet said in a very strained voice. “He took her from
heaven and giver to me and I left her.” His eyes were instantly clouded over with a mist of tears.
The car was barely moving.

The boy turned angrily in the seat. “You go to the devil!” he cried. “My old woman is a flea bag
and yours is a stinking pole cat!” and with that he flung the door open and jumped out with his
suitcase into the ditch.

Mr. Shiftlet was so shocked that for about a hundred feet he drove along slowly with the door stiff
open. A cloud, the exact color of the boy’s hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the
sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of
the world was about to engulf him. He raised his arm and let it fall again to his breast. “Oh
Lord!” he prayed. “Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!”

The turnip continued slowly to descend. After a few minutes there was a guffawing peal of thunder
from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin‑can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet’s
car. Very quickly he stepped on the gas and with his stump sticking out the window he raced the
galloping shower into Mobile.


[1955]