Selected Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor: "Good Country People"

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.

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.

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.

He was a tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible.

He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and said, “Lady, I've come to speak of serious things.”

She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked abashed.

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.

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.

“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?

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.”

The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently awestruck.

The boy's look was irritated but dogged.

The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her.

“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!”

“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!”