A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

know them all right, she said to someone. We fought in the world war together. They were under me and I saved them five times from Japanese suicide divers and Wendell said I am going to marry that kid and the other said oh no you ain’t I am and I said neither one of you is because I will court marshall you all before you can bat an eye. “I’ve seen them around is all,” she said.

When they came the girls stared at them a second and then began to giggle and talk to each other about the convent. They sat in the swing together and Wendell and Cory sat on the banisters together. They sat like monkeys, their knees on a level with their shoulders and their arms hanging down between. They were short thin boys with red faces and high cheekbones and pale seed-like eyes. They had brought a harmonica and a guitar. One of them began to blow softly on the mouth organ, watching the girls over it, and the other started strumming the guitar and then began to sing, not watching them but keeping his head tilted upward as if he were only interested in hearing himself. He was singing a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.

The child was standing on a barrel pushed into some bushes at the side of the house, her face on a level with the porch floor. The sun was going down and the sky was turning a bruised violet color that seemed to be connected with the sweet mournful sound of the music. Wendell began to smile as he sang and to look at the girls. He looked at Susan with a dog-like loving look and sang,

“I’ve found a friend in Jesus,

He’s everything to me,

He’s the lily of the valley,

He’s the One who’s set me free!”

Then he turned the same look on Joanne and sang,

“A wall of fire about me,

I’ve nothing now to fear,

He’s the lily of the valley,

And I’ll always have Him near!”

The girls looked at each other and held their lips stiff so as not to giggle but Susan let out one anyway and clapped her hand on her mouth. The singer frowned and for a few seconds only strummed the guitar. Then he began “The Old Rugged Cross” and they listened politely but when he had finished they said, “Let us sing one!” and before he could start another, they began to sing with their convent-trained voices, “Tantum ergo Sacramentum

Veneremur Cernui:

Et antiquum documentum

Novo cedat ritui:”

The child watched the boys’ solemn faces turn with perplexed frowning stares at each other as if they were uncertain whether they were being made fun of.

“Praestet fides supplementum

Sensuum defectui.

Genitori, Genitoque

Laus et jubilatio

Salus, honor, virtus quoque…”

The boys’ faces were dark red in the gray-purple light. They looked fierce and startled.

“Sit et benedictio;

Procedenti ab utroque

Compar sit laudatio.

Amen.”

The girls dragged out the Amen and then there was a silence.

“That must be Jew singing,” Wendell said and began to tune the guitar.

The girls giggled idiotically but the child stamped her foot on the barrel. “You big dumb ox!” she shouted. “You big dumb Church of God ox!” she roared and fell off the barrel and scrambled up and shot around the corner of the house as they jumped from the banister to see who was shouting.

Her mother had arranged for them to have supper in the back yard and she had a table laid out there under some Japanese lanterns that she pulled out for garden parties. “I ain’t eating with them,” the child said and snatched her plate off the table and carried it to the kitchen and sat down with the thin blue-gummed cook and ate her supper.

“Howcome you be so ugly sometime?” the cook asked.

“Those stupid idiots,” the child said.

The lanterns gilded the leaves of the trees orange on the level where they hung and above them was black- green and below them were different dim muted colors that made the girls sitting at the table look prettier than they were. From time to time, the child turned her head and glared out the kitchen window at the scene below.

“God could strike you deaf dumb and blind,” the cook said, “and then you wouldn’t be as smart as you is.”

“I would still be smarter than some,” the child said.

After supper they left for the fair. She wanted to go to the fair but not with them so even if they had asked her she wouldn’t have gone. She went upstairs and paced the long bedroom with her hands locked together behind her back and her head thrust forward and an expression, fierce and dreamy both, on her face. She didn’t turn on the electric light but let the darkness collect and make the room smaller and more private. At regular intervals a light crossed the open window and threw shadows on the wall. She stopped and stood looking out over the dark slopes, past where the pond glinted silver, past the wall of woods to the speckled sky where a long finger of light was revolving up and around and away, searching the air as if it were hunting for the lost sun. It was the beacon light from the fair.

She could hear the distant sound of the calliope and she saw in her head all the tents raised up in a kind of gold sawdust light and the diamond ring of the ferris wheel going around and around up in the air and down again and the screeking merry-go-round going around and around on the ground. A fair lasted five or six days and there was a special afternoon for school children and a special night for niggers. She had gone last year on the afternoon for school children and had seen the monkeys and the fat man and had ridden on the ferris wheel. Certain tents were closed then because they contained things that would be known only to grown people but she had looked with interest at the advertising on the closed tents, at the faded-looking pictures on the canvas of people in tights, with