Read Online The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor - Free Book Online

he had never seen woods before or been in a boat or caught a fish or walked on roads that were not paved, they did all those things too and, his uncle said, he even allowed him to plow. His sallow face had become bright in four days. At this point Tarwater would begin to weary of the story.
    The schoolteacher had spent four days in the clearing because his mother had not missed him for three days and when Luella Munson had mentioned where he had gone, she had to wait another day before his father came home and she could send him after the child. She would not come herself, the old man said, for fear the wrath of God would strike her at Powderhead and she would not be able to get back to the city again. She had wired the schoolteacher’s father and when the simpleton arrived at the clearing, the schoolteacher was in despair at having to leave. The light had left his eyes. He had gone but the old man insisted that he had been able to tell by the look on his face that he would never be the same boy again.
    “If he didn’t say he didn’t want to go, you can’t be sure he didn’t,” Tarwater would say contentiously.
    “Then why did he try to come back?” the old man asked. “Answer me that. Why one week later did he run away and try to find his way back and got his picture in the paper when the state patrol found him in the woods? I ask you why. Tell me that if you know so much.”
    “Because here was less bad than there,” Tarwater said. “Less bad don’t mean good, it only means better-than.”
    “He tried to come back,” his uncle said slowly, emphasizing each word, “to hear more about God his Father, more about Jesus Christ Who had died to redeem him and more of the Truth I could tell him.”
    “Well go on,” Tarwater would say irritably, “get on with the rest of it.” The story always had to be taken to completion. It was like a road that the boy had travelled on so often that half the time he didn’t look where they were going, and when at certain points he would become aware where they were, he would be surprised to see that the old man had not got farther on with it. Sometimes his uncle would lag at one point as if he didn’t want to face what was coming and then when he finally came to it, he would try to get past it in a rush. At such points, Tarwater plagued him for details. “Tell about when he came when he was fourteen years old and had already decided none of it was true and he give you all that sass.”
    “Bah,” the old man would say. “He was living in confusion. I don’t say it was his fault then. They told him I was a crazy man. But I’ll tell you one thing: he never believed them neither. They kept him from believing me but I kept him from believing them and he never took on none of their ways though he took on worse ones. And when he got shut of the three of them in that crash, nobody was gladder than he was. Then he turned his mind to raising you. Said he was going to give you every advantage, every advantage.” The old man snorted. “You have me to thank for saving you from those advantages.”
    The boy looked off into the distance as though he were staring blankly at his invisible advantages.
    “When he got shut of the three of them in that crash, this was the first place he came. On the very day they were killed he came out here to tell me. Straight out here. Yes sir,” the old man said with the greatest satisfaction, “straight out here. He hadn’t seen me in years but this is where he came. I was the one he came to. I was the one he wanted to see. Me. I had never left his mind. I had taken my seat in it.”
    “You skipped all that part about how he came when he was fourteen and give you all that sass,” Tarwater said.
    “It was sass he had got from them,” the old man said. “Just parrot-mouthing all they had ever said about how I was a crazy man. The truth was even if they told him not to believe what I had taught him, he couldn’t forget it. He never could