A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

and then make a speech on it. He used to teach in a high school.

“Guess,” he urged her.

“Abraham Lincoln,” she muttered.

“Hah! You are not trying,” he said. “Try.”

“George Washington,” she said, starting up the stairs.

“Shame on you!” he cried. “And your husband from there! Florida! Florida! Florida’s birthday,” he shouted. “Come in here.” He disappeared into his room, beckoning a long finger at her.

She came down the two steps and said, “I gotta be going,” and stuck her head inside the door. The room was the size of a large closet and the walls were completely covered with picture postcards of local buildings; this gave an illusion of space. A single transparent bulb hung down on Mr. Jerger and a small table.

“Now examine this,” he said. He was bending over a book, running his finger under the lines: ” ‘On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1516, he arrived on the tip of this continent.’ Do you know who this he was?” he demanded.

“Yeah, Christopher Columbus,” Ruby said.

“Ponce de Leon!” he screamed. “Ponce de Leon! You should know something about Florida,” he said. “Your husband is from Florida.”

“Yeah, he was born in Miami,” Ruby said. “He’s not from Tennessee.”

“Florida is not a noble state,” Mr. Jerger said, “but it is an important one.”

“It’s important alrighto,” Ruby said.

“Do you know who Ponce de Leon was?”

“He was the founder of Florida,” Ruby said brightly.

“He was a Spaniard,” Mr. Jerger said. “Do you know what he was looking for?”

“Florida,” Ruby said.

“Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth,” Mr. Jerger said, closing his eyes.

“Oh,” Ruby muttered.

“A certain spring,” Mr. Jerger went on, “whose water gave perpetual youth to those who drank it. In other words,” he said, “he was trying to be young always.”

“Did he find it?” Ruby asked.

Mr. Jerger paused with his eyes still closed. After a minute he said, “Do you think he found it? Do you think he found it? Do you think nobody else would have got to it if he had found it? Do you think there would be one person living on this earth who hadn’t drunk it?”

“I hadn’t thought,” Ruby said.

“Nobody thinks any more,” Mr. Jerger complained.

“I got to be going.”

“Yes, it’s been found,” Mr. Jerger said.

“Where at?” Ruby asked.

“I have drunk of it.”

“Where’d you have to go to?” she asked. She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard’s wing.

“Into my heart,” he said, placing his hand over it.

“Oh.” Ruby moved back. “I gotta be going. I think my brother’s home.” She got over the door sill.

“Ask your husband if he knows what great birthday this is,” Mr. Jerger said, looking at her coyly.

“Yeah, I will.” She turned and waited until she heard his door click. She looked back to see that it was shut and then she blew out her breath and stood facing the dark remaining steep of steps. “God Almighty,” she commented. They got darker and steeper as you went up.

By the time she had climbed five steps her breath was gone. She continued up a few more, blowing. Then she stopped. There was a pain in her stomach. It was a pain like a piece of something pushing something else. She had felt it before, a few days ago. It was the one that frightened her most. She had thought the word cancer once and dropped it instantly because no horror like that was coming to her because it couldn’t. The word came back to her immediately with the pain but she slashed it in two with Madam Zoleeda. It will end in good fortune. She slashed it twice through and then again until there were only pieces of it that couldn’t be recognized. She was going to stop on the next floor—God, if she ever got up there—and talk to Laverne Watts. Laverne Watts was a third-floor resident, the secretary to a chiropodist, and an especial friend of hers.

She got up there, gasping and feeling as if her knees were full of fizz, and knocked on Laverne’s door with the butt of Hartley Gilfeet’s gun. She leaned on the door frame to rest and suddenly the floor around her dropped on both sides. The walls turned black and she felt herself reeling, without breath, in the middle of the air, terrified at the drop that was coming. She saw the door open a great distance away and Laverne, about four inches high, standing in it.

Laverne, a tall straw-haired girl, let out a great guffaw and slapped her side as if she had just opened the door on the most comical sight she had yet seen. “That gun!” she yelled. “That gun! That look!” She staggered back to the sofa and fell on it, her legs rising higher than her hips and falling down again helplessly with a thud.

The floor came up to where Ruby could see it and remained, dipping a little. With a terrible stare of