The head of the stairs was ten or twelve feet from where he stood and he bent his attention to getting there without creeping around the long way with a hand on the wall. He held his arms a little way out from his sides and pushed forward directly. He was halfway there when all at once his legs disappeared, or felt as if they had. He looked down, bewildered, for they were still there. He fell forward and grasped the banister post with both hands. Hanging there, he gazed for what seemed the longest time he had ever looked at anything down the steep unlighted steps; then he closed his eyes and pitched forward. He landed upside down in the middle of the flight.
He felt presently the tilt of the box as they took it off the train and got it on the baggage wagon. He made no noise yet. The train jarred and slid away. In a moment the baggage wagon was rumbling under him, carrying him back to the station side. He heard footsteps rattling closer and closer to him and he supposed that a crowd was gathering. Wait until they see this, he thought.
“That him,” Coleman said, “one of his tricks.”
“It’s a damn rat in there,” Hooten said.
“It’s him. Git the crowbar.”
In a moment a shaft of greenish light fell on him. He pushed through it and cried in a weak voice, “Judgment Day! Judgment Day! You idiots didn’t know it was Judgment Day, did you?”
“Coleman?” he murmured.
The Negro bending over him had a large surly mouth and sullen eyes.
“Ain’t any coal man, either,” he said. This must be the wrong station, Tanner thought. Those fools put me off too soon. Who is this nigger? It ain’t even daylight here.
At the Negro’s side was another face, a woman’s—pale, topped with a pile of copper-glinting hair and twisted as if she had just stepped in a pile of dung.
“Oh,” Tanner said, “it’s you.”
The actor leaned closer and grasped him by the front of his shirt. “Judgment day,” he said in a mocking voice. “Ain’t no judgment day, old man. Cept this. Maybe this here judgment day for you.”
Tanner tried to catch hold of a banister-spoke to raise himself but his hand grasped air. The two faces, the black one and the pale one, appeared to be wavering. By an effort of will he kept them focused before him while he lifted his hand, as light as a breath, and said in his jauntiest voice, “Hep me up, Preacher. I’m on my way home!”
His daughter found him when she came in from the grocery store. His hat had been pulled down over his face and his head and arms thrust between the spokes of the banister; his feet dangled over the stairwell like those of a man in the stocks. She tugged at him frantically and then flew for the police. They cut him out with a saw and said he had been dead about an hour.
She buried him in New York City, but after she had done it she could not sleep at night. Night after night she turned and tossed and very definite lines began to appear in her face, so she had him dug up and shipped the body to Corinth. Now she rests well at night and her good looks have mostly returned.
About the Author
Flannery O’Connor was an American novelist and short-story writer, who over the course of her short career produced two novels and more than thirty short stories, including the critically acclaimed Wise Blood, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”
Set primarily in the rural South, O’Connor’s Southern Gothic stories, strongly influenced by her Catholic faith, often portrayed the spiritual transformation—often violent, always painful—of a flawed individual. In 1972, she was posthumously awarded a National Book Award for Collected Stories, and was the first twentieth-century fiction writer to be collected and published by the Library of America. The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, given annually by the University of Georgia Press, was named in her honour. O’Connor died in 1964 of complication from lupus.
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Copyright
HarperPerennial Classics
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EPub Edition January 2015 ISBN: 9781443440264
This title is in Canada’s public domain and is not subject to any licence or copyright.
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Flannery O'Connor Complete Short Stories Page 64