Side by Side 33 Good
Country People

Monday,
November 10, 2008

7:06 PM

Good Country People

by
Flannery O'Connor

Besides
the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two
others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her
forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck.
Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if
they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other
expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement,
but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost
imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be
receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might
stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no
longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was
the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs.
Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would
stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was something
like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or
letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an
assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of
them figs you put up last summer.”

They
carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast. Every
morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and
Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonds girl who had an artificial leg.
Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old
and highly educated. Joy would get up while her mother was eating and lumber
into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs. Freeman would
arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on in,” and
then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in
the bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather
report and were on one or the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae.
Joy called them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had
many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and
pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs.
Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last
report.

Mrs.
Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest
girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed
to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she
would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and
how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason
for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good
country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as
reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his
wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be into
everything,” the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles,
you can bet she’s dead, that’s all. She’ll want to know all your business. I
can stand him real good,” he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have
stood that woman one more minute on this place.” That had put Mrs. Hopewell
off for a few days.

She had
hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but she had made
up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was
the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she
would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was
into everything – she would give her the responsibility of everything, she
would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she
was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she had kept
them four years.

Nothing
is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was:
that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people
have their opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the
table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the
large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression
from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy
blue, with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will
and means to keep it.

When Mrs.
Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would say,
“I always said so myself.” Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not
first been arrived at by her. She was quicker than Mr. Freeman. When Mrs.
Hopewell said to her after they had been on the place for a while, “You know,
you’re the wheel behind the wheel,” and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know
it. I’ve always been quick. It’s some that are quicker than others.”

“Everybody
is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“Yes,
most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.

“It takes
all kinds to make the world.”

“I always
said it did myself.”

The girl
was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for dinner;
sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no guest they ate in the
kitchen because that was easier. Mrs. Freeman always managed to arrive at some
point during the meal and to watch them finish it. She would stand in the
doorway if it were summer but in the winter she would stand with one elbow on
top of the refrigerator and look down at them, or she would stand by the gas
heater, lifting the back of her skirt slightly. Occasionally she would stand
against the wall and roll her head from side to side. At no time was she in
any hurry to leave. All this was very trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she was a
woman of great patience. She realized that nothing is perfect and that in the
Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get
good country people, you had better hang onto them.

She had
had plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had averaged one
tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers were not the kind you would
want to be around you for very long. Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her
husband long ago, needed someone to walk over the fields with her; and when
Joy had to be impressed for these services, her remarks were usually so ugly
and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell would say, “If you can’t come
pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl, standing square and
rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply, “If you
want me, here I am – LIKE I AM.”

Mrs.
Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in
a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize
that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had
had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her
heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never
danced a step or had any normal good times. Her name was really Joy but as
soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed.
Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit
upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful
name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her
legal name was Hulga.

When Mrs.
Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank hull of a
battleship. She would not use it. She continued to call her Joy to which the
girl responded but in a purely mechanical way.

Hulga had
learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her from taking walks with her
mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were useful when they occupied attention
that might otherwise have been directed at her. At first she had thought she
could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had found it was not possible to be rude
to her. Mrs. Freeman would take on strange resentments and for days together
she would be sullen but the source of her displeasure was always obscure; a
direct attack, a positive leer, blatant ugliness to her face – these never
touched her. And without warning one day, she began calling her Hulga.

She did
not call her that in front of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been incensed but
when she and the girl happened to be out of the house together, she would say
something and add the name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled
Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon. She
considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on
the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck
her. She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who
stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when
called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major
triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but
the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga.
However, Mrs. Freeman’s relish for using the name only irritated her. It was
as if Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind
her face to reach some secret fact. Something about her seemed to fascinate
Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg.
Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections,
hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the
lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of
the hunting accident, how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had
never lost consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it
had happened an hour ago.

When
Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk without making
the awful noise but she made it – Mrs. Hopewell was certain – because it was
ugly-sounding), she glanced at them and did not speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be
in her red kimono with her hair tied around her head in rags. She would be
sitting at the table, finishing her breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would be
hanging by her elbow outward from the refrigerator, looking down at the table.
Hulga always put her eggs on the stove to boil and then stood over them with
her arms folded, and Mrs. Hopewell would look at her – a kind of indirect gaze
divided between her and Mrs. Freeman – and would think that if she would only
keep herself up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking. There was nothing
wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn’t help. Mrs. Hopewell
said that people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful
even if they were not.

Whenever
she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it would have
been better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It had certainly not brought
her out any and now that she had it, there was no more excuse for her to go to
school again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to school to
have a good time but Joy had “gone through.” Anyhow, she would not have been
strong enough to go again. The doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the
best of care, Joy might see forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it
plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these
red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to
people who knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could very well
picture here there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the
same. Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat
shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought this was
funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought it was idiotic and showed simply that she was
still a child. She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of sense. It
seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other people and
more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said such strange
things! To her own mother she had said – without warning, without excuse,
standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half
full – “Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what
you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate,
“Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!”
Mrs. Hopewell had no idea to this day what brought that on. She had only made
the remark, hoping Joy would take it in, that a smile never hurt anyone. The
girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a
complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a
school teacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not
say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with
the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading.
Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or
flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she
could smell their stupidity.

One day
Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and
opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its
soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with
what-is. Nothing – how can it be for science anything but a horror and a
phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to
know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to
Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had
been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some
evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out of the
room as if she were having a chill.

This
morning when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae. “She thrown up
four times after supper,” she said, “and was up twict in the night after three
o’clock. Yesterday she didn’t do nothing but ramble in the bureau drawer. All
she did. Stand up there and see what she could run up on.”

“She’s
got to eat,” Mrs. Hopewell muttered, sipping her coffee, while she watched
Joy’s back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the
Bible salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a conversation she could
possibly have had with him.

He was a
tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. He had
appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that weighted him so
heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against the door facing. He
seemed on the point of collapse but he said in a cheerful voice, “Good
morning, Mrs. Cedars!” and set the suitcase down on the mat. He was not a
bad-looking young man though he had on a bright blue suit and yellow socks
that were not pulled up far enough. He had prominent face bones and a streak
of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead.

“I’m Mrs.
Hopewell,” she said.

“Oh!” he
said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes sparkling, “I saw it said
‘The Cedars’ on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs. Cedars!” and he burst
out in a pleasant laugh. He picked up the satchel and under cover of a pant,
he fell forward into her hall. It was rather as if the suitcase had moved
first, jerking him after it. “Mrs. Hopewell!” he said and grabbed her hand. “I
hope you are well!” and he laughed again and then all at once his face sobered
completely. He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and said, “Lady,
I’ve come to speak of serious things.”

“Well,
come in,” she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was almost ready.
He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a straight chair and put
the suitcase between his feet and glanced around the room as if he were sizing
her up by it. Her silver gleamed on the two sideboards; she decided he had
never been in a room as elegant as this.

“Mrs.
Hopewell,” he began, using her name in a way that sounded almost intimate, “I
know you believe in Chrustian service.”

“Well,
yes,” she murmured.

“I know,”
he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked on one side, “that
you’re a good woman. Friends have told me.”

Mrs.
Hopewell never liked to be taken for a fool. “What are you selling?” she
asked.

“Bibles,”
the young man said and his eye raced around the room before he added, “I see
you have no family Bible in your parlor, I see that is the one lack you got!”

Mrs.
Hopewell could not say, “My daughter is an atheist and won’t let me keep the
Bible in the parlor.” She said, stiffening slightly, “I keep my Bible by my
bedside.” This was not the truth. It was in the attic somewhere.

“Lady,”
he said, “the word of God ought to be in the parlor.”

“Well, I
think that’s a matter of taste,” she began, “I think…”

“Lady,”
he said, “for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every room in the
house besides in his heart. I know you’re a Chrustian because I can see it in
every line of your face.”

She stood
up and said, “Well, young man, I don’t want to buy a Bible and I smell my
dinner burning.”

He didn’t
get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly,
“Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth – not many people want to buy one nowadays
and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to
say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face.
“People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”

“Why!”
she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all
have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round.
That’s life!”

“You said
a mouthful,” he said.

“Why, I
think there aren’t enough good country people in the world!” she said,
stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”

His face
had brightened. “I didn’t intraduce myself,” he said. “I’m Manley Pointer from
out in the country around Willohobie, not even from a place, just from near a
place.”

“You wait
a minute,” she said. “I have to see about my dinner.” She went out to the
kitchen and found Joy standing near the door where she had been listening.

“Get rid
of the salt of the earth,” she said, “and let’s eat.”

Mrs.
Hopewell gave her a pained look and turned the heat down under the vegetables.
“I can’t be rude to anybody,” she murmured and went back into the parlor.

He had
opened the suitcase and was sitting with a Bible on each knee.

“I
appreciate your honesty,” he said. “You don’t see any more real honest people
unless you go way out in the country.”

“I know,”
she said, “real genuine folks!” Through the crack in the door she heard a
groan.

“I guess
a lot of boys come telling you they’re working their way through college,” he
said, “but I’m not going to tell you that. Somehow,” he said, “I don’t want to
go to college. I want to devote my life to Chrustian service. See,” he said,
lowering his voice, “I got this heart condition. I may not live long. When you
know it’s something wrong with you and you may not live long, well then,
lady…” He paused, with his mouth open, and stared at her.

He and
Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were filling with tears but
she collected herself quickly and murmured, “Won’t you stay for dinner? We’d
love to have you!” and was sorry the instant she heard herself say it.

“Yes
mam,” he said in an abashed voice. “I would sher love to do that!”

Joy had
given him one look on being introduced to him and then throughout the meal had
not glanced at him again. He had addressed several remarks to her, which she
had pretended not to hear. Mrs. Hopewell could not understand deliberate
rudeness, although she lived with it, and she felt she had always to overflow
with hospitality to make up for Joy’s lack of courtesy. She urged him to talk
about himself and he did. He said he was the seventh child of twelve and that
his father had been crushed under a tree when he himself was eight years old.
He had been crushed very badly, in fact, almost cut in two and was practically
not recognizable. His mother had got along the best she could by hard working
and she had always seen that her children went to Sunday School and that they
read the Bible every evening. He was now nineteen years old and he had been
selling Bibles for four months. In that time he had sold seventy-seven Bibles
and had the promise of two more sales. He wanted to become a missionary because
he thought that was the way you could do most for people. “He who losest his
life shall find it,” he said simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and
earnest that Mrs. Hopewell would not for the world have smiled. He prevented
his peas from sliding onto the table by blocking them with a piece of bread
which he later cleaned his plate with. She could see Joy observing sidewise
how he handled his knife and fork and she saw too that every few minutes, the
boy would dart a keen appraising glance at the girl as if he were trying to
attract her attention.

After
dinner Joy cleared the dishes off the table and disappeared and Mrs. Hopewell
was left to talk with him. He told her again about his childhood and his
father’s accident and about various things that had happened to him. Every
five minutes or so she would stifle a yawn. He sat for two hours until finally
she told him she must go because she had an appointment in town. He packed his
Bibles and thanked her and prepared to leave, but in the doorway he stopped
and wring her hand and said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady as
nice as her and he asked if he could come again. She had said she would always
be happy to see him.

Joy had
been standing in the road, apparently looking at something in the distance,
when he came down the steps toward her, bent to the side with his heavy
valise. He stopped where she was standing and confronted her directly. Mrs.
Hopewell could not hear what he said but she trembled to think what Joy would
say to him. She could see that after a minute Joy said something and that then
the boy began to speak again, making an excited gesture with his free hand.
After a minute Joy said something else at which the boy began to speak once
more. Then to her amazement, Mrs. Hopewell saw the two of them walk off
together, toward the gate. Joy had walked all the way to the gate with him and
Mrs. Hopewell could not imagine what they had said to each other, and she had
not yet dared to ask.

Mrs.
Freeman was insisting upon her attention. She had moved from the refrigerator
to the heater so that Mrs. Hopewell had to turn and face her in order to seem
to be listening. “Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again last night,” she
said. “She had this sty.”

“Hill,”
Mrs. Hopewell said absently, “is that the one who works in the garage?”

“Nome,
he’s the one that goes to chiropractor school,” Mrs. Freeman said. “She had
this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her in the other
night he says, ‘Lemme get rid of that sty for you,’ and she says, ‘How?’ and
he says, ‘You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of that car and I’ll show
you.’ So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several
times until she made him quit. This morning,” Mrs. Freeman said, “she ain’t
got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty.”

“I never
heard of that before,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“He ast
her to marry him before the Ordinary,” Mrs. Freeman went on, “and she told him
she wasn’t going to be married in no office.”

“Well,
Glynese is a fine girl,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Glynese and Carramae are both
fine girls.”

“Carramae
said when her and Lyman was married Lyman said it sure felt sacred to him. She
said he said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars for being married by a
preacher.”

“How much
would he take?” the girl asked from the stove.

“He said
he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars,” Mrs. Freeman repeated.

“Well we
all have work to do,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“Lyman
said it just felt more sacred to him,” Mrs. Freeman said. “The doctor wants
Carramae to eat prunes. Says instead of medicine. Says them cramps is coming
from pressure. You know where I think it is?”

“She’ll
be better in a few weeks,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“In the
tube,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Else she wouldn’t be as sick as she is.”

Hulga had
cracked her two eggs into a saucer and was bringing them to the table along
with a cup of coffee that she had filled too full. She sat down carefully and
began to eat, meaning to keep Mrs. Freeman there by questions if for any
reason she showed an inclination to leave. She could perceive her mother’s eye
on her. The first round-about question would be about the Bible salesman and
she did not wish to bring it on. “How did he pop her neck?” she asked.

Mrs.
Freeman went into a description of how he had popped her neck. She said he
owned a ’55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather marry a man with
only a ’36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher. The girl asked what if
he had a ’32 Plymouth and Mrs. Freeman said what Glynese had said was a ’36
Plymouth.

Mrs.
Hopewell said there were not many girls with Glynese’s common sense. She said
what she admired in those girls was their common sense. She said that reminded
her that they had had a nice visitor yesterday, a young man selling Bibles.
“Lord,” she said, “he bored me to death but he was so sincere and genuine I
couldn’t be rude to him. He was just good country people, you know,” she said,
“—just the salt of the earth.”

“I seen
him walk up,” Mrs. Freeman said, “and then later – I seen him walk off,” and
Hulga could feel the slight shift in her voice, the slight insinuation, that
he had not walked off alone, had he? Her face remained expressionless but the
color rose into her neck and she seemed to swallow it down with the next
spoonful of egg. Mrs. Freeman was looking at her as if they had a secret
together.

“Well, it
takes all kinds of people to make the world go ‘round,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“It’s very good we aren’t all alike.”

“Some
people are more alike than others,” Mrs. Freeman said.

Hulga got
up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was necessary, into her room
and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at ten o’clock at the
gate. She had thought about it half the night. She had started thinking of it
as a great joke and then she had begun to see profound implications in it. She
had lain in bed imagining dialogues for them that were insane on the surface
but that reached below the depths that no Bible salesman would be aware of.
Their conversation yesterday had been of this kind.

He had
stopped in front of her and had simply stood there. His face was bony and
sweaty and bright, with a little pointed nose in the center of it, and his
look was different from what it had been at the dinner table. He was gazing at
her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a new
fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he had run a great
distance to reach her. His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she could not
think where she had been regarded with it before. For almost a minute he
didn’t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck of breath, he whispered,
“You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?”

The girl
looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up for
consideration at the meeting of a philosophical association. “Yes,” she
presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.

“It must
have been mighty small!” he said triumphantly and shook all over with little
nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsiding finally into his
gaze of complete admiration, while the girl’s expression remained exactly the
same.

“How old
are you?” he asked softly.

She
waited some time before she answered. Then in a flat voice she said,
“Seventeen.”

His
smiles came in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a little lake.
“I see you got a wooden leg,” he said. “I think you’re real brave. I think
you’re real sweet.”

The girl
stood blank and solid and silent.

“Walk to
the gate with me,” he said. “You’re a brave sweet little thing and I liked you
the minute I seen you walk in the door.”

Hulga
began to move forward.

“What’s
your name?” he asked, smiling down on the top of her head.

“Hulga,”
she said.

“Hulga,”
he murmured, “Hulga. Hulga. I never heard of anybody name Hulga before. You’re
shy, aren’t you, Hulga?” he asked.

She
nodded, watching his large red hand on the handle of the giant valise.

“I like
girls that wear glasses,” he said. “I think a lot. I’m not like these people
that a serious thought don’t ever enter their heads. It’s because I may die.”

“I may
die too,” she said suddenly and looked up at him. His eyes were very small and
brown, glittering feverishly.

“Listen,”
he said, “don’t you think some people was meant to meet on account of what all
they got in common and all? Like they both think serious thoughts and all?” He
shifted the valise to his other hand so that the hand nearest her was free. He
caught hold of her elbow and shook it a little. “I don’t work on Saturday,” he
said. “I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O’er
the hills and far away. Picnics and things. Couldn’t we go on a picnic
tomorrow? Say yes, Hulga,” he said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his
insides about to drop out of him. He had even seemed to sway slightly toward
her.

During
the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined that the two of
them walked on the place until they came to the storage barn beyond the two
back fields and there, she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she
very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his
remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind. She
imagined that she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper
understanding of life. She took all his shame away and turned it into
something useful.

She set
off for the gate at exactly ten o’clock, escaping without drawing Mrs.
Hopewell’s attention. She didn’t take anything to eat, forgetting that food is
usually taken on a picnic. She wore a pair of slacks and a dirty white shirt,
and as an afterthought, she had put some Vapex on the collar of it since she
did not own any perfume. When she reached the gate no one was there.

She
looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feeling that she had
been tricked, that he only meant to make her walk to the gate after the idea
of him. Then suddenly he stood up, very tall, from behind a bush on the
opposite embankment. Smiling, he lifted his hat which was new and
wide-brimmed. He had not worn it yesterday and she wondered if he had bought
it for the occasion. It was toast-colored with a red and white band around it
and was slightly too large for him. He stepped from behind the bush still
carrying the black valise. He had on the same suit and the same yellow socks
sucked down in his shoes from walking. He crossed the highway and said, “I
knew you’d come!”

The girl
wondered acidly how he had known this. She pointed to the valise and asked,
“Why did you bring your Bibles?”

He took
her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. “You can never tell
when you’ll need the word of God, Hulga,” he said. She had a moment in which
she doubted that this was actually happening and then they began to climb the
embankment. They went down into the pasture toward the woods. The boy walked
lightly by her side, bouncing on his toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy
today; he even swung it. They crossed half the pasture without saying anything
and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly,
“Where does your wooden leg join on?”

She
turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked
abashed. “I didn’t mean you no harm,” he said. “I only meant you’re so brave
and all. I guess God takes care of you.”

“No,” she
said, looking forward and walking fast, “I don’t even believe in God.”

At this
he stopped and whistled. “No!” he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to
say anything else.

She
walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with his hat.
“That’s very unusual for a girl,” he remarked, watching her out of the corner
of his eye. When they reached the edge of the wood, he put his hand on her
back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily.

The kiss,
which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of
adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a
burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he
released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding
him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been
kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional
experience and all a matter of the mind’s control. Some people might enjoy
drain water if they were told it was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant
but uncertain, pushed her gently away, she turned and walked on, saying
nothing as if such business, for her, were common enough.

He came
along panting at her side, trying to help her when he saw a root that she
might trip over. He caught and held back the long swaying blades of thorn vine
until she had passed beyond them. She led the way and he came breathing
heavily behind her. Then they came out on a sunlit hillside, sloping softly
into another one a little smaller. Beyond, they could see the rusted top of
the old barn where the extra hay was stored.

The hill
was sprinkled with small pink weeds. “Then you ain’t saved?” he asked
suddenly, stopping.

The girl
smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at him at all. “In my economy,”
she said, “I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in
God.”

Nothing
seemed to destroy the boy’s look of admiration. He gazed at her now as if the
fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a
loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to kiss her again and she
walked on before he had the chance.

“Ain’t
there somewheres we can sit down sometime?” he murmured, his voice softening
toward the end of the sentence.

“In that
barn,” she said.

They made
for it rapidly as if it might slide away like a train. It was a large
two-story barn, cook and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder that led
into the loft and said, “It’s too bad we can’t go up there.”

“Why
can’t we?” she asked.

“Yer
leg,” he said reverently.

The girl
gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the ladder, she climbed
it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She pulled herself expertly
through the opening and then looked down at him and said, “Well, come on if
your coming,” and he began to climb the ladder, awkwardly bringing the
suitcase with him.

“We won’t
need the Bible,” she observed.

“You
never can tell,” he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he was a
few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of straw. A wide
sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over her. She lay back
against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the front opening of the
barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the loft. The two pink-speckled
hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and
cold blue. The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the
other over her and began methodically kissing her face, making little noises
like a fish. He did not remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not
to interfere. When her glasses got in his way, he took them off of her and
slipped them into his pocket.

The girl
at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after
she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there,
kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out
of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child’s and the kisses were
sticky like a child’s. He mumbled about loving her and about knowing when he
first seen her that he loved her, but the mumbling was like the sleepy
fretting of a child being put to sleep by his mother. Her mind, throughout
this, never stopped or lost itself for a second to her feelings. “You ain’t
said you loved me none,” he whispered finally, pulling back from her. “You got
to say that.”

She
looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a black ridge
and then down farther into what appeared to be two green swelling lakes. She
didn’t realize he had taken her glasses but this landscape could not seem
exceptional to her for she seldom paid any close attention to her
surroundings.

“You got
to say it,” he repeated. “You got to say you love me.”

She was
always careful how she committed herself. “In a sense,” she began, “if you use
the word loosely, you might say that. But it’s not a word I use. I don’t have
illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.”

The boy
was frowning. “You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it,” he said.

The girl
looked at him almost tenderly. “You poor baby,” she murmured. “It’s just as
well you don’t understand,” and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against
her. “We are all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our
blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”

The boy’s
astonished eyes looked blankly through the ends of her hair. “Okay,” he almost
whined, “but do you love me or don’tcher?”

“Yes,”
she said and added, “in a sense. But I must tell you something. There mustn’t
be anything dishonest between us.” She lifted his head and looked him in the
eye. “I am thirty years old,” she said. “I have a number of degrees.”

The boy’s
look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing
about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and
he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said,
“Yes, yes.”

“Okay
then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”

She
smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him
without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he
should be delayed a little.

He leaned
over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he
whispered.

The girl
uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The
obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had
sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last
traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have
felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But
she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No
one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his
soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away. “No,” she said.

“I known
it,” he muttered, sitting up. “You’re just playing me for a sucker.”

“On no
no!” she cried. “It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to
see it?”

The boy
gave her a long penetrating look. “Because,” he said, “it’s what makes you
different. You ain’t like anybody else.”

She sat
staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round freezing-blue
eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if her heart had
stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided that for the first
time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an
instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. When
after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice, “All right,” it was like
surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it
again, miraculously, in his.

Very
gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a white
sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended
in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy’s face and his
voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, “Now show me how to
take it off and on.”

She took
it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off himself,
handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. “See!” he said with a
delighted child’s face. “Now I can do it myself!”

“Put it
back on,” she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that
every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again.
“Put it back on,” she said.

“Not
yet,” he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. “Leave it off for
awhile. You got me instead.”

She gave
a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again.
Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have
stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was
not very good at. Different expressions raced back and forth over her face.
Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two steel spikes, would glance
behind him where the leg stood. Finally she pushed him off and said, “Put it
back on me now.”

“Wait,”
he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward him and opened
it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He
took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained
a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing
on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-spaced
row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a goddess. He put the blue
box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE,
she read, and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He
stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an
ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. “Take
a swig,” he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her,
but like one mesmerized, she did not move.

Her voice
when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,” she murmured,
“aren’t you just good
country people?”

The boy
cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she
might be trying to insult him. “Yeah,” he said, curling his lip slightly, “but
it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week.”

“Give me
my leg,” she said.

He pushed
it farther away with his foot. “Come on now, let’s begin to have us a good
time,” he said coaxingly. “We ain’t got to know one another good yet.”

“Give me
my leg!” she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.

“What’s
the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he screwed the top
on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. “You just a while ago
said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!”

Her face
was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a fine Christian!
You’re just like them all – say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect
Christian, you’re…”

The boy’s
mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant
tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is
up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”

“Give me
my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep
the cards and the blue box back into the Bible and throw the Bible into the
valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted
forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its
opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it
down the hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had passed but
his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any
admiration in it. “I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One
time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch
me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house
I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing,
Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t
so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” and then the
toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on
the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the
opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green
speckled lake.

Mrs.
Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging up onions,
saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward
the highway. “Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell
me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. “He must have been
selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple,” she said, “but I
guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.”

Mrs.
Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under
the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she
was lifting from the ground. “Some can’t be that simple,” she said. “I know I
never could.”

Deception

Ripping
off

Hiding
under the cause of God

Why dies
he rip people off??

“Real
Americans”

One of Flannery O’Connor’s most successful and frequently
anthologized stories, “Good Country People” was published in her first
collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in 1955. As with many
of her works, “Good Country People” addresses themes of good versus evil, the possibility of redemption achieved through an encounter
with violence ???, and the foolishness of intellectual pretensions. The
protagonist, Joy, has changed her name to Hulga because that is the ugliest
name she could think of. Maimed as a child in a hunting accident, Hulga has a
wooden leg—her most valuable possession because it is a mark of her
difference. She prizes this because she
considers herself more intellectual than all of the “good country people” around her—especially her mother, their neighbors, and finally Manley
Pointer, a Bible salesman. Manley steals her leg after seducing her in the
loft of a barn, although it is Joy/Hulga who intends to seduce Manley. In
losing her leg, she learns about evil, which undermines her previous conviction that
“Nothing” is the only meaning in the universe.
The story hinges on this powerful irony: in the long run, what
Joy loses is her faith but it is a faith in Nothing, which means that she
finally gains a knowledge of evil.

http://www.enotes.com/good-country-people

Through O'Connor's use of symbolism, we discover Hulga's belief in nothing
and intellect only veil her true faith and pride that she hides in her sacred leg.

“Good Country People,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor,
tells of Hulga Hopewell and how her wooden leg is stolen. Throughout the
story, Hulga feels sorry for herself because she has lost her leg, wears
glasses, and has a heart condition; however, she seems to place herself above
the rest of society because of her education. Hulga searches for ways to be
misunderstood by her family and claims to believe in nothing. (Can’t put bible in parlor) She even thinks she is too ugly to be called the happy
name of Joy, so she legally changes it to Hulga.

While the surface level of “Good Country People” conveys the story
of how Hulga’s wooden leg was stolen by Manley, if we penetrate deeper, we discover that the wooden leg
represents Hulga’s faith and pride.

Hulga’s Faith

Throughout the story Hulga claims to believe in nothing, but
Hulga’s faith is actually embedded in her prosthetic leg. Even though Hulga
considers faith in her wooden leg to be no faith at all, a belief in nothing is truly impossible.
Every person has beliefs
based on background, environment, and situations: even an atheist decides
certain things to believe in. Out of fear of the unknown, Hulga
subconsciously chooses an object she thinks of as unchanging and permanent: her wooden leg.

When Hulga was younger, she felt differently about her leg:
ashamed of it. But as she grew older, Hulga placed faith in her education and
wooden leg instead of feeling embarrassed of it. After Hulga’s reliance on her
leg, she panics when she can no longer trust her sacred leg. She has never
depended upon anything other than her education and leg, and Manley deprives
Hulga of both. After being left in the loft, Hulga has lost her intelligence
and faith, and because of this humiliating lesson, she must decide what is most important and
dependable in her life.

Hulga’s Pride

Hulga also bases her pride in her artificial leg. She wraps her
entire self into the leg and allows it to become a private obsession, never
allowing anyone to touch it, taking care of it in private. The leg that used
to cause Hulga shame ironically becomes a source of self-assurance. While Hulga seems superior
and appears to place all self-importance solely on her intelligence, on closer
examination, Hulga actually hides her pride in her leg.

Although Hulga holds herself back because of her wooden leg,
Hulga’s pride is still outsized. Hulga places herself above others, and when
Manley Pointer comes along appearing so simple, she thinks she can easily
outsmart him. Manley, however, knows he can just as easily outsmart the
prideful Hulga.

To determine how to steal Hulga’s leg, Manley must figure out how
Hulga views herself, so he takes a stab at her ego, asking questions to determine the size of her ego.
Later into the story when Manley has realized how highly Hulga views herself,
he pretends to be polite by not suggesting they go into the hayloft. This
flusters Hulga into proving herself to him, and she blindly falls into
Manley’s clever trap.

Once abandoned in the hayloft, Hulga is left without her faith,
pride, and intelligence, and she must humble herself by asking for help. Hulga
has discovered she is not
as intelligent or independent as she thought. Hulga’s pride has been
twisted into humility, and she must decide what to place her faith in now that
it has been snatched away. Left in the loneliness of the hayloft, Hulga must learn how to deal
with only one leg. Through O’Connor’s use of symbolism, we find that
Hulga’s belief in nothing is only veiling her true faith and pride that lay in
her sacred leg.

http://modern-american-fiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/symbolism_in_good_country_people

33: Treachery

To Country and
Hosts

Count and
Archbishop knawling from hunger

To guests
(hospitality)

Manley was enjoying
hospitality – broke it

Both are “godless”
– they are in the vestibule

In Good Country People, Manley Pointer breaks
the sacred ties of hospitality and takes advantage of Hulga’s trust in him.
Dante puts breach of trust as the second most important infraction in hell,
after pride.

Seems like a very
narrow con-man

What motivates a
man to collect these body parts?

What does it
suggest?

If he is just
insane – not worth writing about

What are the
ramifications?

Helpless

Irony: thought
Hulga was in control

Has little pride

Man said: “you
thought you were smart – but you’re not” Inferno style Punishment

You are not so
unique

Guards her leg
normally

Secret she has on
her sleeve

2
names

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Side by Side 33 Good
Country People

Monday,
November 10, 2008

7:06 PM

Good Country People

by
Flannery O'Connor

Besides
the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two
others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her
forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck.
Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if
they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other
expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement,
but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost
imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be
receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might
stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no
longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was
the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs.
Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would
stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was something
like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or
letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an
assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of
them figs you put up last summer.”

They
carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast. Every
morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and
Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonds girl who had an artificial leg.
Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old
and highly educated. Joy would get up while her mother was eating and lumber
into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs. Freeman would
arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on in,” and
then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in
the bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather
report and were on one or the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae.
Joy called them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had
many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and
pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs.
Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last
report.

Mrs.
Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest
girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed
to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she
would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and
how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason
for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good
country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as
reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his
wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be into
everything,” the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles,
you can bet she’s dead, that’s all. She’ll want to know all your business. I
can stand him real good,” he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have
stood that woman one more minute on this place.” That had put Mrs. Hopewell
off for a few days.

She had
hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but she had made
up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was
the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she
would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was
into everything – she would give her the responsibility of everything, she
would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she
was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she had kept
them four years.

Nothing
is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was:
that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people
have their opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the
table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the
large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression
from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy
blue, with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will
and means to keep it.

When Mrs.
Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would say,
“I always said so myself.” Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not
first been arrived at by her. She was quicker than Mr. Freeman. When Mrs.
Hopewell said to her after they had been on the place for a while, “You know,
you’re the wheel behind the wheel,” and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know
it. I’ve always been quick. It’s some that are quicker than others.”

“Everybody
is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“Yes,
most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.

“It takes
all kinds to make the world.”

“I always
said it did myself.”

The girl
was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for dinner;
sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no guest they ate in the
kitchen because that was easier. Mrs. Freeman always managed to arrive at some
point during the meal and to watch them finish it. She would stand in the
doorway if it were summer but in the winter she would stand with one elbow on
top of the refrigerator and look down at them, or she would stand by the gas
heater, lifting the back of her skirt slightly. Occasionally she would stand
against the wall and roll her head from side to side. At no time was she in
any hurry to leave. All this was very trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she was a
woman of great patience. She realized that nothing is perfect and that in the
Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get
good country people, you had better hang onto them.

She had
had plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had averaged one
tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers were not the kind you would
want to be around you for very long. Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her
husband long ago, needed someone to walk over the fields with her; and when
Joy had to be impressed for these services, her remarks were usually so ugly
and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell would say, “If you can’t come
pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl, standing square and
rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply, “If you
want me, here I am – LIKE I AM.”

Mrs.
Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in
a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize
that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had
had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her
heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never
danced a step or had any normal good times. Her name was really Joy but as
soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed.
Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit
upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful
name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her
legal name was Hulga.

When Mrs.
Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank hull of a
battleship. She would not use it. She continued to call her Joy to which the
girl responded but in a purely mechanical way.

Hulga had
learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her from taking walks with her
mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were useful when they occupied attention
that might otherwise have been directed at her. At first she had thought she
could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had found it was not possible to be rude
to her. Mrs. Freeman would take on strange resentments and for days together
she would be sullen but the source of her displeasure was always obscure; a
direct attack, a positive leer, blatant ugliness to her face – these never
touched her. And without warning one day, she began calling her Hulga.

She did
not call her that in front of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been incensed but
when she and the girl happened to be out of the house together, she would say
something and add the name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled
Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon. She
considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on
the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck
her. She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who
stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when
called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major
triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but
the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga.
However, Mrs. Freeman’s relish for using the name only irritated her. It was
as if Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind
her face to reach some secret fact. Something about her seemed to fascinate
Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg.
Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections,
hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the
lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of
the hunting accident, how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had
never lost consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it
had happened an hour ago.

When
Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk without making
the awful noise but she made it – Mrs. Hopewell was certain – because it was
ugly-sounding), she glanced at them and did not speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be
in her red kimono with her hair tied around her head in rags. She would be
sitting at the table, finishing her breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would be
hanging by her elbow outward from the refrigerator, looking down at the table.
Hulga always put her eggs on the stove to boil and then stood over them with
her arms folded, and Mrs. Hopewell would look at her – a kind of indirect gaze
divided between her and Mrs. Freeman – and would think that if she would only
keep herself up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking. There was nothing
wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn’t help. Mrs. Hopewell
said that people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful
even if they were not.

Whenever
she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it would have
been better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It had certainly not brought
her out any and now that she had it, there was no more excuse for her to go to
school again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to school to
have a good time but Joy had “gone through.” Anyhow, she would not have been
strong enough to go again. The doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the
best of care, Joy might see forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it
plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these
red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to
people who knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could very well
picture here there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the
same. Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat
shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought this was
funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought it was idiotic and showed simply that she was
still a child. She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of sense. It
seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other people and
more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said such strange
things! To her own mother she had said – without warning, without excuse,
standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half
full – “Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what
you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate,
“Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!”
Mrs. Hopewell had no idea to this day what brought that on. She had only made
the remark, hoping Joy would take it in, that a smile never hurt anyone. The
girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a
complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a
school teacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not
say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with
the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading.
Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or
flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she
could smell their stupidity.

One day
Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and
opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its
soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with
what-is. Nothing – how can it be for science anything but a horror and a
phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to
know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to
Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had
been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some
evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out of the
room as if she were having a chill.

This
morning when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae. “She thrown up
four times after supper,” she said, “and was up twict in the night after three
o’clock. Yesterday she didn’t do nothing but ramble in the bureau drawer. All
she did. Stand up there and see what she could run up on.”

“She’s
got to eat,” Mrs. Hopewell muttered, sipping her coffee, while she watched
Joy’s back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the
Bible salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a conversation she could
possibly have had with him.

He was a
tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. He had
appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that weighted him so
heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against the door facing. He
seemed on the point of collapse but he said in a cheerful voice, “Good
morning, Mrs. Cedars!” and set the suitcase down on the mat. He was not a
bad-looking young man though he had on a bright blue suit and yellow socks
that were not pulled up far enough. He had prominent face bones and a streak
of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead.

“I’m Mrs.
Hopewell,” she said.

“Oh!” he
said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes sparkling, “I saw it said
‘The Cedars’ on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs. Cedars!” and he burst
out in a pleasant laugh. He picked up the satchel and under cover of a pant,
he fell forward into her hall. It was rather as if the suitcase had moved
first, jerking him after it. “Mrs. Hopewell!” he said and grabbed her hand. “I
hope you are well!” and he laughed again and then all at once his face sobered
completely. He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and said, “Lady,
I’ve come to speak of serious things.”

“Well,
come in,” she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was almost ready.
He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a straight chair and put
the suitcase between his feet and glanced around the room as if he were sizing
her up by it. Her silver gleamed on the two sideboards; she decided he had
never been in a room as elegant as this.

“Mrs.
Hopewell,” he began, using her name in a way that sounded almost intimate, “I
know you believe in Chrustian service.”

“Well,
yes,” she murmured.

“I know,”
he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked on one side, “that
you’re a good woman. Friends have told me.”

Mrs.
Hopewell never liked to be taken for a fool. “What are you selling?” she
asked.

“Bibles,”
the young man said and his eye raced around the room before he added, “I see
you have no family Bible in your parlor, I see that is the one lack you got!”

Mrs.
Hopewell could not say, “My daughter is an atheist and won’t let me keep the
Bible in the parlor.” She said, stiffening slightly, “I keep my Bible by my
bedside.” This was not the truth. It was in the attic somewhere.

“Lady,”
he said, “the word of God ought to be in the parlor.”

“Well, I
think that’s a matter of taste,” she began, “I think…”

“Lady,”
he said, “for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every room in the
house besides in his heart. I know you’re a Chrustian because I can see it in
every line of your face.”

She stood
up and said, “Well, young man, I don’t want to buy a Bible and I smell my
dinner burning.”

He didn’t
get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly,
“Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth – not many people want to buy one nowadays
and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to
say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face.
“People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”

“Why!”
she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all
have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round.
That’s life!”

“You said
a mouthful,” he said.

“Why, I
think there aren’t enough good country people in the world!” she said,
stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”

His face
had brightened. “I didn’t intraduce myself,” he said. “I’m Manley Pointer from
out in the country around Willohobie, not even from a place, just from near a
place.”

“You wait
a minute,” she said. “I have to see about my dinner.” She went out to the
kitchen and found Joy standing near the door where she had been listening.

“Get rid
of the salt of the earth,” she said, “and let’s eat.”

Mrs.
Hopewell gave her a pained look and turned the heat down under the vegetables.
“I can’t be rude to anybody,” she murmured and went back into the parlor.

He had
opened the suitcase and was sitting with a Bible on each knee.

“I
appreciate your honesty,” he said. “You don’t see any more real honest people
unless you go way out in the country.”

“I know,”
she said, “real genuine folks!” Through the crack in the door she heard a
groan.

“I guess
a lot of boys come telling you they’re working their way through college,” he
said, “but I’m not going to tell you that. Somehow,” he said, “I don’t want to
go to college. I want to devote my life to Chrustian service. See,” he said,
lowering his voice, “I got this heart condition. I may not live long. When you
know it’s something wrong with you and you may not live long, well then,
lady…” He paused, with his mouth open, and stared at her.

He and
Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were filling with tears but
she collected herself quickly and murmured, “Won’t you stay for dinner? We’d
love to have you!” and was sorry the instant she heard herself say it.

“Yes
mam,” he said in an abashed voice. “I would sher love to do that!”

Joy had
given him one look on being introduced to him and then throughout the meal had
not glanced at him again. He had addressed several remarks to her, which she
had pretended not to hear. Mrs. Hopewell could not understand deliberate
rudeness, although she lived with it, and she felt she had always to overflow
with hospitality to make up for Joy’s lack of courtesy. She urged him to talk
about himself and he did. He said he was the seventh child of twelve and that
his father had been crushed under a tree when he himself was eight years old.
He had been crushed very badly, in fact, almost cut in two and was practically
not recognizable. His mother had got along the best she could by hard working
and she had always seen that her children went to Sunday School and that they
read the Bible every evening. He was now nineteen years old and he had been
selling Bibles for four months. In that time he had sold seventy-seven Bibles
and had the promise of two more sales. He wanted to become a missionary because
he thought that was the way you could do most for people. “He who losest his
life shall find it,” he said simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and
earnest that Mrs. Hopewell would not for the world have smiled. He prevented
his peas from sliding onto the table by blocking them with a piece of bread
which he later cleaned his plate with. She could see Joy observing sidewise
how he handled his knife and fork and she saw too that every few minutes, the
boy would dart a keen appraising glance at the girl as if he were trying to
attract her attention.

After
dinner Joy cleared the dishes off the table and disappeared and Mrs. Hopewell
was left to talk with him. He told her again about his childhood and his
father’s accident and about various things that had happened to him. Every
five minutes or so she would stifle a yawn. He sat for two hours until finally
she told him she must go because she had an appointment in town. He packed his
Bibles and thanked her and prepared to leave, but in the doorway he stopped
and wring her hand and said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady as
nice as her and he asked if he could come again. She had said she would always
be happy to see him.

Joy had
been standing in the road, apparently looking at something in the distance,
when he came down the steps toward her, bent to the side with his heavy
valise. He stopped where she was standing and confronted her directly. Mrs.
Hopewell could not hear what he said but she trembled to think what Joy would
say to him. She could see that after a minute Joy said something and that then
the boy began to speak again, making an excited gesture with his free hand.
After a minute Joy said something else at which the boy began to speak once
more. Then to her amazement, Mrs. Hopewell saw the two of them walk off
together, toward the gate. Joy had walked all the way to the gate with him and
Mrs. Hopewell could not imagine what they had said to each other, and she had
not yet dared to ask.

Mrs.
Freeman was insisting upon her attention. She had moved from the refrigerator
to the heater so that Mrs. Hopewell had to turn and face her in order to seem
to be listening. “Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again last night,” she
said. “She had this sty.”

“Hill,”
Mrs. Hopewell said absently, “is that the one who works in the garage?”

“Nome,
he’s the one that goes to chiropractor school,” Mrs. Freeman said. “She had
this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her in the other
night he says, ‘Lemme get rid of that sty for you,’ and she says, ‘How?’ and
he says, ‘You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of that car and I’ll show
you.’ So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several
times until she made him quit. This morning,” Mrs. Freeman said, “she ain’t
got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty.”

“I never
heard of that before,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“He ast
her to marry him before the Ordinary,” Mrs. Freeman went on, “and she told him
she wasn’t going to be married in no office.”

“Well,
Glynese is a fine girl,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Glynese and Carramae are both
fine girls.”

“Carramae
said when her and Lyman was married Lyman said it sure felt sacred to him. She
said he said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars for being married by a
preacher.”

“How much
would he take?” the girl asked from the stove.

“He said
he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars,” Mrs. Freeman repeated.

“Well we
all have work to do,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“Lyman
said it just felt more sacred to him,” Mrs. Freeman said. “The doctor wants
Carramae to eat prunes. Says instead of medicine. Says them cramps is coming
from pressure. You know where I think it is?”

“She’ll
be better in a few weeks,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“In the
tube,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Else she wouldn’t be as sick as she is.”

Hulga had
cracked her two eggs into a saucer and was bringing them to the table along
with a cup of coffee that she had filled too full. She sat down carefully and
began to eat, meaning to keep Mrs. Freeman there by questions if for any
reason she showed an inclination to leave. She could perceive her mother’s eye
on her. The first round-about question would be about the Bible salesman and
she did not wish to bring it on. “How did he pop her neck?” she asked.

Mrs.
Freeman went into a description of how he had popped her neck. She said he
owned a ’55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather marry a man with
only a ’36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher. The girl asked what if
he had a ’32 Plymouth and Mrs. Freeman said what Glynese had said was a ’36
Plymouth.

Mrs.
Hopewell said there were not many girls with Glynese’s common sense. She said
what she admired in those girls was their common sense. She said that reminded
her that they had had a nice visitor yesterday, a young man selling Bibles.
“Lord,” she said, “he bored me to death but he was so sincere and genuine I
couldn’t be rude to him. He was just good country people, you know,” she said,
“—just the salt of the earth.”

“I seen
him walk up,” Mrs. Freeman said, “and then later – I seen him walk off,” and
Hulga could feel the slight shift in her voice, the slight insinuation, that
he had not walked off alone, had he? Her face remained expressionless but the
color rose into her neck and she seemed to swallow it down with the next
spoonful of egg. Mrs. Freeman was looking at her as if they had a secret
together.

“Well, it
takes all kinds of people to make the world go ‘round,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“It’s very good we aren’t all alike.”

“Some
people are more alike than others,” Mrs. Freeman said.

Hulga got
up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was necessary, into her room
and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at ten o’clock at the
gate. She had thought about it half the night. She had started thinking of it
as a great joke and then she had begun to see profound implications in it. She
had lain in bed imagining dialogues for them that were insane on the surface
but that reached below the depths that no Bible salesman would be aware of.
Their conversation yesterday had been of this kind.

He had
stopped in front of her and had simply stood there. His face was bony and
sweaty and bright, with a little pointed nose in the center of it, and his
look was different from what it had been at the dinner table. He was gazing at
her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a new
fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he had run a great
distance to reach her. His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she could not
think where she had been regarded with it before. For almost a minute he
didn’t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck of breath, he whispered,
“You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?”

The girl
looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up for
consideration at the meeting of a philosophical association. “Yes,” she
presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.

“It must
have been mighty small!” he said triumphantly and shook all over with little
nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsiding finally into his
gaze of complete admiration, while the girl’s expression remained exactly the
same.

“How old
are you?” he asked softly.

She
waited some time before she answered. Then in a flat voice she said,
“Seventeen.”

His
smiles came in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a little lake.
“I see you got a wooden leg,” he said. “I think you’re real brave. I think
you’re real sweet.”

The girl
stood blank and solid and silent.

“Walk to
the gate with me,” he said. “You’re a brave sweet little thing and I liked you
the minute I seen you walk in the door.”

Hulga
began to move forward.

“What’s
your name?” he asked, smiling down on the top of her head.

“Hulga,”
she said.

“Hulga,”
he murmured, “Hulga. Hulga. I never heard of anybody name Hulga before. You’re
shy, aren’t you, Hulga?” he asked.

She
nodded, watching his large red hand on the handle of the giant valise.

“I like
girls that wear glasses,” he said. “I think a lot. I’m not like these people
that a serious thought don’t ever enter their heads. It’s because I may die.”

“I may
die too,” she said suddenly and looked up at him. His eyes were very small and
brown, glittering feverishly.

“Listen,”
he said, “don’t you think some people was meant to meet on account of what all
they got in common and all? Like they both think serious thoughts and all?” He
shifted the valise to his other hand so that the hand nearest her was free. He
caught hold of her elbow and shook it a little. “I don’t work on Saturday,” he
said. “I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O’er
the hills and far away. Picnics and things. Couldn’t we go on a picnic
tomorrow? Say yes, Hulga,” he said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his
insides about to drop out of him. He had even seemed to sway slightly toward
her.

During
the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined that the two of
them walked on the place until they came to the storage barn beyond the two
back fields and there, she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she
very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his
remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind. She
imagined that she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper
understanding of life. She took all his shame away and turned it into
something useful.

She set
off for the gate at exactly ten o’clock, escaping without drawing Mrs.
Hopewell’s attention. She didn’t take anything to eat, forgetting that food is
usually taken on a picnic. She wore a pair of slacks and a dirty white shirt,
and as an afterthought, she had put some Vapex on the collar of it since she
did not own any perfume. When she reached the gate no one was there.

She
looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feeling that she had
been tricked, that he only meant to make her walk to the gate after the idea
of him. Then suddenly he stood up, very tall, from behind a bush on the
opposite embankment. Smiling, he lifted his hat which was new and
wide-brimmed. He had not worn it yesterday and she wondered if he had bought
it for the occasion. It was toast-colored with a red and white band around it
and was slightly too large for him. He stepped from behind the bush still
carrying the black valise. He had on the same suit and the same yellow socks
sucked down in his shoes from walking. He crossed the highway and said, “I
knew you’d come!”

The girl
wondered acidly how he had known this. She pointed to the valise and asked,
“Why did you bring your Bibles?”

He took
her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. “You can never tell
when you’ll need the word of God, Hulga,” he said. She had a moment in which
she doubted that this was actually happening and then they began to climb the
embankment. They went down into the pasture toward the woods. The boy walked
lightly by her side, bouncing on his toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy
today; he even swung it. They crossed half the pasture without saying anything
and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly,
“Where does your wooden leg join on?”

She
turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked
abashed. “I didn’t mean you no harm,” he said. “I only meant you’re so brave
and all. I guess God takes care of you.”

“No,” she
said, looking forward and walking fast, “I don’t even believe in God.”

At this
he stopped and whistled. “No!” he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to
say anything else.

She
walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with his hat.
“That’s very unusual for a girl,” he remarked, watching her out of the corner
of his eye. When they reached the edge of the wood, he put his hand on her
back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily.

The kiss,
which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of
adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a
burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he
released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding
him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been
kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional
experience and all a matter of the mind’s control. Some people might enjoy
drain water if they were told it was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant
but uncertain, pushed her gently away, she turned and walked on, saying
nothing as if such business, for her, were common enough.

He came
along panting at her side, trying to help her when he saw a root that she
might trip over. He caught and held back the long swaying blades of thorn vine
until she had passed beyond them. She led the way and he came breathing
heavily behind her. Then they came out on a sunlit hillside, sloping softly
into another one a little smaller. Beyond, they could see the rusted top of
the old barn where the extra hay was stored.

The hill
was sprinkled with small pink weeds. “Then you ain’t saved?” he asked
suddenly, stopping.

The girl
smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at him at all. “In my economy,”
she said, “I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in
God.”

Nothing
seemed to destroy the boy’s look of admiration. He gazed at her now as if the
fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a
loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to kiss her again and she
walked on before he had the chance.

“Ain’t
there somewheres we can sit down sometime?” he murmured, his voice softening
toward the end of the sentence.

“In that
barn,” she said.

They made
for it rapidly as if it might slide away like a train. It was a large
two-story barn, cook and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder that led
into the loft and said, “It’s too bad we can’t go up there.”

“Why
can’t we?” she asked.

“Yer
leg,” he said reverently.

The girl
gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the ladder, she climbed
it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She pulled herself expertly
through the opening and then looked down at him and said, “Well, come on if
your coming,” and he began to climb the ladder, awkwardly bringing the
suitcase with him.

“We won’t
need the Bible,” she observed.

“You
never can tell,” he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he was a
few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of straw. A wide
sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over her. She lay back
against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the front opening of the
barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the loft. The two pink-speckled
hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and
cold blue. The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the
other over her and began methodically kissing her face, making little noises
like a fish. He did not remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not
to interfere. When her glasses got in his way, he took them off of her and
slipped them into his pocket.

The girl
at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after
she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there,
kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out
of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child’s and the kisses were
sticky like a child’s. He mumbled about loving her and about knowing when he
first seen her that he loved her, but the mumbling was like the sleepy
fretting of a child being put to sleep by his mother. Her mind, throughout
this, never stopped or lost itself for a second to her feelings. “You ain’t
said you loved me none,” he whispered finally, pulling back from her. “You got
to say that.”

She
looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a black ridge
and then down farther into what appeared to be two green swelling lakes. She
didn’t realize he had taken her glasses but this landscape could not seem
exceptional to her for she seldom paid any close attention to her
surroundings.

“You got
to say it,” he repeated. “You got to say you love me.”

She was
always careful how she committed herself. “In a sense,” she began, “if you use
the word loosely, you might say that. But it’s not a word I use. I don’t have
illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.”

The boy
was frowning. “You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it,” he said.

The girl
looked at him almost tenderly. “You poor baby,” she murmured. “It’s just as
well you don’t understand,” and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against
her. “We are all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our
blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”

The boy’s
astonished eyes looked blankly through the ends of her hair. “Okay,” he almost
whined, “but do you love me or don’tcher?”

“Yes,”
she said and added, “in a sense. But I must tell you something. There mustn’t
be anything dishonest between us.” She lifted his head and looked him in the
eye. “I am thirty years old,” she said. “I have a number of degrees.”

The boy’s
look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing
about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and
he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said,
“Yes, yes.”

“Okay
then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”

She
smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him
without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he
should be delayed a little.

He leaned
over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he
whispered.

The girl
uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The
obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had
sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last
traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have
felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But
she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No
one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his
soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away. “No,” she said.

“I known
it,” he muttered, sitting up. “You’re just playing me for a sucker.”

“On no
no!” she cried. “It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to
see it?”

The boy
gave her a long penetrating look. “Because,” he said, “it’s what makes you
different. You ain’t like anybody else.”

She sat
staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round freezing-blue
eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if her heart had
stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided that for the first
time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an
instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. When
after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice, “All right,” it was like
surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it
again, miraculously, in his.

Very
gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a white
sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended
in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy’s face and his
voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, “Now show me how to
take it off and on.”

She took
it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off himself,
handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. “See!” he said with a
delighted child’s face. “Now I can do it myself!”

“Put it
back on,” she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that
every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again.
“Put it back on,” she said.

“Not
yet,” he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. “Leave it off for
awhile. You got me instead.”

She gave
a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again.
Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have
stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was
not very good at. Different expressions raced back and forth over her face.
Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two steel spikes, would glance
behind him where the leg stood. Finally she pushed him off and said, “Put it
back on me now.”

“Wait,”
he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward him and opened
it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He
took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained
a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing
on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-spaced
row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a goddess. He put the blue
box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE,
she read, and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He
stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an
ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. “Take
a swig,” he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her,
but like one mesmerized, she did not move.

Her voice
when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,” she murmured,
“aren’t you just good
country people?”

The boy
cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she
might be trying to insult him. “Yeah,” he said, curling his lip slightly, “but
it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week.”

“Give me
my leg,” she said.

He pushed
it farther away with his foot. “Come on now, let’s begin to have us a good
time,” he said coaxingly. “We ain’t got to know one another good yet.”

“Give me
my leg!” she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.

“What’s
the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he screwed the top
on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. “You just a while ago
said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!”

Her face
was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a fine Christian!
You’re just like them all – say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect
Christian, you’re…”

The boy’s
mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant
tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is
up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”

“Give me
my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep
the cards and the blue box back into the Bible and throw the Bible into the
valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted
forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its
opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it
down the hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had passed but
his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any
admiration in it. “I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One
time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch
me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house
I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing,
Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t
so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” and then the
toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on
the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the
opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green
speckled lake.

Mrs.
Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging up onions,
saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward
the highway. “Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell
me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. “He must have been
selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple,” she said, “but I
guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.”

Mrs.
Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under
the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she
was lifting from the ground. “Some can’t be that simple,” she said. “I know I
never could.”

Deception

Ripping
off

Hiding
under the cause of God

Why dies
he rip people off??

“Real
Americans”

One of Flannery O’Connor’s most successful and frequently
anthologized stories, “Good Country People” was published in her first
collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in 1955. As with many
of her works, “Good Country People” addresses themes of good versus evil, the possibility of redemption achieved through an encounter
with violence ???, and the foolishness of intellectual pretensions. The
protagonist, Joy, has changed her name to Hulga because that is the ugliest
name she could think of. Maimed as a child in a hunting accident, Hulga has a
wooden leg—her most valuable possession because it is a mark of her
difference. She prizes this because she
considers herself more intellectual than all of the “good country people” around her—especially her mother, their neighbors, and finally Manley
Pointer, a Bible salesman. Manley steals her leg after seducing her in the
loft of a barn, although it is Joy/Hulga who intends to seduce Manley. In
losing her leg, she learns about evil, which undermines her previous conviction that
“Nothing” is the only meaning in the universe.
The story hinges on this powerful irony: in the long run, what
Joy loses is her faith but it is a faith in Nothing, which means that she
finally gains a knowledge of evil.

http://www.enotes.com/good-country-people

Through O'Connor's use of symbolism, we discover Hulga's belief in nothing
and intellect only veil her true faith and pride that she hides in her sacred leg.

“Good Country People,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor,
tells of Hulga Hopewell and how her wooden leg is stolen. Throughout the
story, Hulga feels sorry for herself because she has lost her leg, wears
glasses, and has a heart condition; however, she seems to place herself above
the rest of society because of her education. Hulga searches for ways to be
misunderstood by her family and claims to believe in nothing. (Can’t put bible in parlor) She even thinks she is too ugly to be called the happy
name of Joy, so she legally changes it to Hulga.

While the surface level of “Good Country People” conveys the story
of how Hulga’s wooden leg was stolen by Manley, if we penetrate deeper, we discover that the wooden leg
represents Hulga’s faith and pride.

Hulga’s Faith

Throughout the story Hulga claims to believe in nothing, but
Hulga’s faith is actually embedded in her prosthetic leg. Even though Hulga
considers faith in her wooden leg to be no faith at all, a belief in nothing is truly impossible.
Every person has beliefs
based on background, environment, and situations: even an atheist decides
certain things to believe in. Out of fear of the unknown, Hulga
subconsciously chooses an object she thinks of as unchanging and permanent: her wooden leg.

When Hulga was younger, she felt differently about her leg:
ashamed of it. But as she grew older, Hulga placed faith in her education and
wooden leg instead of feeling embarrassed of it. After Hulga’s reliance on her
leg, she panics when she can no longer trust her sacred leg. She has never
depended upon anything other than her education and leg, and Manley deprives
Hulga of both. After being left in the loft, Hulga has lost her intelligence
and faith, and because of this humiliating lesson, she must decide what is most important and
dependable in her life.

Hulga’s Pride

Hulga also bases her pride in her artificial leg. She wraps her
entire self into the leg and allows it to become a private obsession, never
allowing anyone to touch it, taking care of it in private. The leg that used
to cause Hulga shame ironically becomes a source of self-assurance. While Hulga seems superior
and appears to place all self-importance solely on her intelligence, on closer
examination, Hulga actually hides her pride in her leg.

Although Hulga holds herself back because of her wooden leg,
Hulga’s pride is still outsized. Hulga places herself above others, and when
Manley Pointer comes along appearing so simple, she thinks she can easily
outsmart him. Manley, however, knows he can just as easily outsmart the
prideful Hulga.

To determine how to steal Hulga’s leg, Manley must figure out how
Hulga views herself, so he takes a stab at her ego, asking questions to determine the size of her ego.
Later into the story when Manley has realized how highly Hulga views herself,
he pretends to be polite by not suggesting they go into the hayloft. This
flusters Hulga into proving herself to him, and she blindly falls into
Manley’s clever trap.

Once abandoned in the hayloft, Hulga is left without her faith,
pride, and intelligence, and she must humble herself by asking for help. Hulga
has discovered she is not
as intelligent or independent as she thought. Hulga’s pride has been
twisted into humility, and she must decide what to place her faith in now that
it has been snatched away. Left in the loneliness of the hayloft, Hulga must learn how to deal
with only one leg. Through O’Connor’s use of symbolism, we find that
Hulga’s belief in nothing is only veiling her true faith and pride that lay in
her sacred leg.

http://modern-american-fiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/symbolism_in_good_country_people

33: Treachery

To Country and
Hosts

Count and
Archbishop knawling from hunger

To guests
(hospitality)

Manley was enjoying
hospitality – broke it

Both are “godless”
– they are in the vestibule

In Good Country People, Manley Pointer breaks
the sacred ties of hospitality and takes advantage of Hulga’s trust in him.
Dante puts breach of trust as the second most important infraction in hell,
after pride.

Seems like a very
narrow con-man

What motivates a
man to collect these body parts?

What does it
suggest?

If he is just
insane – not worth writing about

What are the
ramifications?

Helpless

Irony: thought
Hulga was in control

Has little pride

Man said: “you
thought you were smart – but you’re not” Inferno style Punishment

You are not so
unique

Guards her leg
normally

Secret she has on
her sleeve

2
names

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from <file:///G:\English\Dante\03-Side%20by%20Side%20Journal%2033%20Good%20Country%20People.doc>