Free The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor Page A

might want to glance over it and the old man had sat down at once at the kitchen table and commenced to read it. He recalled that the schoolteacher had kept passing by the kitchen door to witness how he was taking the piece.
    About the middle of it, old Tarwater had begun to think that he was reading about someone he had once known or at least someone he had dreamed about, for the figure was strangely familiar. “This fixation of being called by the Lord had its origin in insecurity. He needed the assurance of a call and so he called himself,” he read. The schoolteacher kept passing by the door, passing and repassing, and finally he came in and sat down quietly on the other side of the small white metal table. When the old man looked up, the schoolteacher smiled. It was a very slight smile, the slightest that would do for any occasion. The old man knew from the smile who it was he had been reading about.
    For the length of a minute, he could not move. He felt he was tied hand and foot inside the schoolteacher’s head, a space as bare and neat as the cell in the asylum, and was shrinking, drying up to fit it. His eyeballs swerved from side to side as if he were pinned in a strait jacket again. Jonah, Ezekiel, Daniel, he was at that moment all of them—the swallowed, the lowered, the enclosed.
    The nephew, his smile still fixed, reached across the table and put his hand on the old man’s wrist in a gesture of pity. “You’ve got to be born again, Uncle,” he said, “by your own efforts, back to the real world where there’s no saviour but yourself.”
    The old man’s tongue lay in his mouth like a stone but his heart began to swell. His prophet’s blood surged in him, surged to floodtide for a miraculous release, though his face remained shocked, expressionless. The nephew patted his huge clenched fist and got up and left the kitchen, bearing away his smile of triumph.
    The next morning when he went to the crib to give the baby his bottle, he found nothing in it but the blue magazine with the old man’s message scrawled on the back of it: THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN.
    “It was me could act,” the old man said, “not him. He could never take action. He could only get everything inside his head and grind it to nothing. But I acted. And because I acted, you sit here in freedom, you sit here a rich man, knowing the Truth, in the freedom of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
    The boy would move his thin shoulder blades irritably as if he were shifting the burden of Truth like a cross on his back. “He came out here and got shot to get me back,” he said obstinately.
    “If he had really wanted you back, he could have got you,” the old man said. “He could have had the law out here after me or got me put back in the asylum. There was plenty he could have done, but what happened to him was that welfare-woman. She persuaded him to have one of his own and let you go, and he was easy persuaded. And that one,” the old man would say, beginning to brood on the schoolteacher’s child again, “that one—the Lord gave him one he couldn’t corrupt.” And then he would grip the boy’s shoulder and put a fierce pressure on it. “And if I don’t get him baptized, it’ll be for you to do,” he said. “I enjoin you to do it, boy.”
    Nothing irritated the boy so much as this. “I take my orders from the Lord,” he would say in an ugly voice, trying to pry the fingers out of his shoulder. “Not from you.”
    “The Lord will give them to you,” the old man said, gripping his shoulder tighter.
    “He had to change that one’s pants and he done it,” Tarwater muttered.
    “He had the welfare-woman to do it for him,” his uncle said. “She had to be good for something, but you can bet she ain’t still around there. Bernice Bishop!” he said as if he found this the most idiotic name in the language. “Bernice Bishop!”
    The boy had sense enough to know that he had been betrayed by