Read Online Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor - Free Book Online Page A

to bed thinking that if the Greenleaf boys had risen in the world it was because she had given their father employment when no one else would have him. She had had Mr. Greenleaf fifteen years but no one else would have had him five minutes. Just the way he approached an object was enough to tell anybody with eyes what kind of a worker he was. He walked with a high-shouldered creep and he never appeared to come directly forward. He walked on the perimeter of some invisible circle and if you wanted to look him in the face, you had to move and get in front of him. She had not fired him because she had always doubted she could do better. He was too shiftless to go out and look for another job; he didn’t have the initiative to steal, and after she had told him three or four times to do a thing, he did it; but he never told her about a sick cow until it was too late to call the veterinarian and if her barn had caught on fire, he would have called his wife to see the flames before he began to put them out. And of the wife, she didn’t even like to think. Beside the wife, Mr. Greenleaf was an aristocrat.
    â€œIf it had been my boys,” he would have said, “they would have cut off their right arm before they would have allowed their maw to.…”
    â€œIf your boys had any pride, Mr. Greenleaf,” she would like to say to him some day, “there are many things that they would not allow their mother to do.”
    *   *   *
    The next morning as soon as Mr. Greenleaf came to the back door, she told him there was a stray bull on the place and that she wanted him penned up at once.
    â€œDone already been here three days,” he said, addressing his right foot which he held forward, turned slightly as if he were trying to look at the sole. He was standing at the bottom of the three back steps while she leaned out the kitchen door, a small woman with pale near-sighted eyes and grey hair that rose on top like the crest of some disturbed bird.
    â€œThree days!” she said in the restrained screech that had become habitual with her.
    Mr. Greenleaf, looking into the distance over the near pasture, removed a package of cigarets from his shirt pocket and let one fall into his hand. He put the package back and stood for a while looking at the cigaret. “I put him in the bull pen but he torn out of there,” he said presently. “I didn’t see him none after that.” He bent over the cigaret and lit it and then turned his head briefly in her direction. The upper part of his face sloped gradually into the lower which was long and narrow, shaped like a rough chalice. He had deep-set fox-colored eyes shadowed under a grey felt hat that he wore slanted forward following the line of his nose. His build was insignificant.
    â€œMr. Greenleaf,” she said, “get that bull up this morning before you do anything else. You know he’ll ruin the breeding schedule. Get him up and keep him up and the next time there’s a stray bull on this place, tell me at once. Do you understand?”
    â€œWhere you want him put at?” Mr. Greenleaf asked.
    â€œI don’t care where you put him,” she said. “You are supposed to have some sense. Put him where he can’t get out. Whose bull is he?”
    For a moment Mr. Greenleaf seemed to hesitate between silence and speech. He studied the air to the left of him. “He must be somebody’s bull,” he said after a while.
    â€œYes, he must!” she said and shut the door with a precise little slam.
    She went into the dining room where the two boys were eating breakfast and sat down on the edge of her chair at the head of the table. She never ate breakfast but she sat with them to see that they had what they wanted. “Honestly!” she said, and began to tell about the bull, aping Mr. Greenleaf saying, “It must be somebody’s bull.”
    Wesley continued to read the newspaper folded beside