Flannery O'Connor Complete Short Stories by Flannery O’Connor Page B

Eastrod.
    Haze glanced out the window at the shapes black-spinning past him. He could shut his eyes and make Eastrod at night out of any of them—he could find the two houses with the road between and the store and the nigger houses and the one barn and the piece of fence that started off into the pasture, gray-white when the moon was on it. He could put the mule face, solid, over the fence and let it hang there, feeling how the night was. He felt it himself. He felt it light-touching around him. He seen his ma coming up the path, wiping her hands on an apron she had taken off, looking like the night change was on her, and then standing in the doorway: Haaazzzzeeeee, Haazzzeee, come in here. The train said it for him. He wanted to get up and go find the porter.
    â€œAre you going home?” Mrs. Hosen asked him. Her name was Mrs. Wallace Ben Hosen; she had been a Miss Hitchcock before she married.
    â€œOh!” Haze said, startled—“I get off at, I get off at Taulkinham.”
    Mrs. Hosen knew some people in Evansville who had a cousin in Taulkinham—a Mr. Henrys, she thought. Being from Taulkinham, Haze might know him. Had he ever heard the. . . .
    â€œTaulkinham ain’t where I’m from,” Haze muttered. “I don’t know nothin’ about Taulkinham.” He didn’t look at Mrs. Hosen. He knew what she was going to ask next and he felt it coming and it came, “Well, where do you live?”
    He wanted to get away from her. “It was there,” he mumbled, squirming in the seat. Then he said, “I don’t rightly know, I was there but . . . this is just the third time I been at Taulkinham,” he said quickly—her face had crawled out and was staring at him—“I ain’t been since I went when I was six. I don’t know nothin’ about it. Once I seen a circus there but not. . . .” He heard a clanking at the end of the car and looked to see where it was coming from. The porter was pulling the walls of the sections farther out. “I got to see the porter a minute,” he said and escaped down the aisle. He didn’t know what he’d say to the porter. He got to him and he still didn’t know what he’d say. “I reckon you’re fixing to make them up now,” he said.
    â€œThat’s right,” the porter said.
    â€œHow long does it take you to make one up?” Haze asked.
    â€œSeven minutes,” the porter said.
    â€œI’m from Eastrod,” Haze said. “I’m from Eastrod, Tennessee.”
    â€œThat isn’t on this line,” the porter said. “You on the wrong train if you counting on going to any such place as that.”
    â€œI’m going to Taulkinham,” Haze said. “I was raised in Eastrod.”
    â€œYou want your berth made up now?” the porter asked.
    â€œHuh?” Haze said. “Eastrod, Tennessee; ain’t you ever heard of Eastrod?”
    The porter wrenched one side of the seat flat. “I’m from Chicago,” he said. He jerked the shades down on either window and wrenched the other seat down. Even the back of his neck was like. When he bent over, it came out in three bulges. He was from Chicago. “You standing in the middle of the aisle. Somebody gonna want to get past you,” he said, suddenly turning on Haze.
    â€œI reckon I’ll go sit down some,” Haze said, blushing.
    He knew people were staring at him as he went back to his section. Mrs. Hosen was looking out the window. She turned and eyed him suspiciously; then she said it hadn’t snowed yet, had it? and relaxed into a stream of talk. She guessed her husband was getting his own supper tonight. She was paying a girl to come cook his dinner but he was having to get his own supper. She didn’t think that hurt a man once in a while. She thought it did him good. Wallace wasn’t lazy but he didn’t think what it took to keep going with housework