Free Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor

cannot .…”
    Out of nowhere a guttural agonized voice groaned, “Jesus! Jesus!” In a second it came again with a terrible urgency. “Jesus! Jesus!”
    Mrs. May stopped still, one hand lifted to her throat. The sound was so piercing that she felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out of the ground and was charging toward her. Her second thought was more reasonable: somebody had been hurt on the place and would sue her for everything she had. She had no insurance. She rushed forward and turning a bend in the path, she saw Mrs. Greenleaf sprawled on her hands and knees off the side of the road, her head down.
    â€œMrs. Greenleaf!” she shrilled, “what’s happened?”
    Mrs. Greenleaf raised her head. Her face was a patchwork of dirt and tears and her small eyes, the color of two field peas, were red-rimmed and swollen, but her expression was as composed as a bulldog’s. She swayed back and forth on her hands and knees and groaned, “Jesus, Jesus.”
    Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true. “What is the matter with you?” she asked sharply.
    â€œYou broken my healing,” Mrs. Greenleaf said, waving her aside. “I can’t talk to you until I finish.”
    Mrs. May stood, bent forward, her mouth open and her stick raised off the ground as if she were not sure what she wanted to strike with it.
    â€œOh Jesus, stab me in the heart!” Mrs. Greenleaf shrieked. “Jesus, stab me in the heart!” and she fell back flat in the dirt, a huge human mound, her legs and arms spread out as if she were trying to wrap them around the earth.
    Mrs. May felt as furious and helpless as if she had been insulted by a child. “Jesus,” she said, drawing herself back, “would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from there this instant and go wash your children’s clothes!” and she had turned and walked off as fast as she could.
    Whenever she thought of how the Greenleaf boys had advanced in the world, she had only to think of Mrs. Greenleaf sprawled obscenely on the ground, and say to herself, “Well, no matter how far they go , they came from that.”
    She would like to have been able to put in her will that when she died, Wesley and Scofield were not to continue to employ Mr. Greenleaf. She was capable of handling Mr. Greenleaf; they were not. Mr. Greenleaf had pointed out to her once that her boys didn’t know hay from silage. She had pointed out to him that they had other talents, that Scofield was a successful business man and Wesley a successful intellectual. Mr. Greenleaf did not comment, but he never lost an opportunity of letting her see, by his expression or some simple gesture, that he held the two of them in infinite contempt. As scrub-human as the Greenleafs were, he never hesitated to let her know that in any like circumstance in which his own boys might have been involved, they—O. T. and E. T. Greenleaf—would have acted to better advantage.
    The Greenleaf boys were two or three years younger than the May boys. They were twins and you never knew when you spoke to one of them whether you were speaking to O. T. or E. T, and they never had the politeness to enlighten you. They were long-legged and raw-boned and red-skinned, with bright grasping fox-colored eyes like their father’s. Mr. Greenleaf’s pride in them began with the fact that they were twins. He acted, Mrs. May said, as if this were something smart they had thought of themselves. They were energetic and hard-working and she would admit to anyone that they had come a long way—and that the Second World War was responsible for it.
    They had both joined the service and, disguised in their uniforms, they could not be