for Henry only-Literaure

Literature Deliverable Length: 1,500-1,800 words Due Date: 2/10/2013 11:59:59 PM CT [removed]

In this course, you have been exposed to many authors, genres, writing styles and themes. For your Key Assignment, you will reflect on what you learned from the works of fiction, poetry and drama you have read and consider the impact literature has had—and will hopefully continue to have—on your own life.

Please write a final paper of 1500 words or more discussing the following questions. Be sure to begin your paper with an engaging introduction and clear thesis statement, develop each point in the body of your paper using examples and quotes from the assigned readings, and conclude your paper with a restatement of your thesis and closing remarks. As always, be sure to maintain your credibility by including in-text citations and a reference list correctly formatted in APA style. Must have websites for at least two references. make sure every question is addressed thoroughly

1.
Short Stories: Analyze the elements of fiction, including setting, characters, point of view, plot, symbolism, themes, tone and irony. Cite specific examples from the assigned stories for each element. Which of the short stories we read was your favorite, and why? Give several reasons.

2.
Poetry: Break down the elements of poetry, including imagery, figurative language, symbolism, word choice, themes, tone and sound. Cite specific examples from the assigned poems for each element. Which of the poems we read was your favorite, and why? Share several reasons.

3.
Drama: Review the elements of drama, including setting, characters, plot, stage directions, symbolism, themes and dialogue. Cite specific examples from Trifles for each element. How has reading the play deepened your understanding of live performances, television dramas and movies?

4.
Values and Morals: Values and morality have been recurring considerations in many of our assigned works. Talk about personal values and moral codes as they are conveyed in each of the following: the short story (“How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien 1987), the poem (“They” by Siegfried Sassoon), and the play, Trifles.

5.
Which of all the works we have read is your favorite and why? Choose
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, or one that is listed above. In what ways do you think it will make a lasting impact on you personally and professionally?

Final Considerations: Discuss how literature can provide “a reflection of life” which can help us understand our own struggles, triumphs, values and moral codes and increase our empathy for others. What is one thing you learned about yourself this term as a result of gazing into literature’s “mirror?”

Please See Attached Files

“They” by Siegfried Sassoon

The Bishop tells us: “When the boys come back

They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought

In a just cause: they lead the last attack

On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought

New right to breed an honourable race, 5

They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.”

“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.

“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not ﬁnd 10

A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.”

And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange!” (Meyer, 2012, p. 581).

“How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien 1987

How to Tell a True War Story

This is true.

I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley, but everybody

called him Rat.

A friend of his gets killed, so about a week later Rat sits down and

writes a letter to the guy’s sister. Rat tells her what a great brother she

had, how strack° the guy was, a number one pal and comrade. A real

soldier’s soldier, Rat says. Then he tells a few stories to make the point,

how her brother would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would vol-

unteer for in a million years, dangerous stuff, like doing recon° or going

out on these really badass night patrols. Stainless steel balls, Rat tells

her. The guy was a little crazy, for sure, but crazy in a good way, a real

daredevil, because he liked the challenge of it, he liked testing himself,

just man against gook. A great, great guy, Rat says.

Anyway, it’s a terriﬁc letter, very personal and touching. Rat almost bawls writing it. He gets all teary telling about the good times they had

together, how her brother made the war seem almost fun, always raising

hell and lighting up villes° and bringing smoke to bear every which way.

A great sense of humor, too. Like the time at this river when he went

ﬁshing with a whole damn crate of hand grenades. Probably the funniest

thing in world history, Rat says, all that gore, about twenty zillion dead

gook ﬁsh. Her brother, he had the right attitude. He knew how to have

a good time. On Halloween, this real hot spooky night, the dude paints

up his body all different colors and puts on this weird mask and goes out

on ambush almost stark naked, just boots and balls and an M-16. A tre-

mendous human being, Rat says. Pretty nutso sometimes, but you could

trust him with your life.

And then the letter gets very sad and serious. Rat pours his heart

out. He says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the

world. They were like soul mates, he says, like twins or something, they

had a whole lot in common. He tells the guy’s sister he’ll look her up when the war’s over. So what happens?

Rat mails the letter. He waits two months. The dumb cooze never

writes back.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage vir-

tue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men

from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do

not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel

that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste,

strack: A strict military appearance.

doing recon: Reconnaissance, or exploratory survey of enemy territory.

villes: Villages.

then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There

is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a ﬁrst rule of thumb,

therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromis-

ing allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says.

He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says

cooze. Then he spits and stares. He’s nineteen years old — it’s too much

for him — so he looks at you with those big gentle killer eyes and says

cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it’s so incredibly sad and

true: she never wrote back.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care

for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth,

watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

Listen to Rat: “Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fucking letter,

I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back.”

The dead guy’s name was Curt Lemon. What happened was, we crossed

a muddy river and marched west into the mountains, and on the third muddy river and marched west into the mountains, and on the third

day we took a break along a trail junction in deep jungle. Right away,

Lemon and Rat Kiley started gooﬁng off. They didn’t understand about

the spookiness. They were kids; they just didn’t know. A nature hike, they

thought, not even a war, so they went off into the shade of some giant

trees — quadruple canopy, no sunlight at all — and they were giggling and

calling each other motherfucker and playing a silly game they’d invented.

The game involved smoke grenades, which were harmless unless you did

stupid things, and what they did was pull out the pin and stand a few feet

apart and play catch under the shade of those huge trees. Whoever chick-

ened out was a motherfucker. And if nobody chickened out, the grenade

would make a light popping sound and they’d be covered with smoke and

they’d laugh and dance around and then do it again.

It’s all exactly true.

It happened nearly twenty years ago, but I still remember that trail

junction and the giant trees and a soft dripping sound somewhere

beyond the trees. I remember the smell of moss. Up in the canopy there were tiny white blossoms, but no sunlight at all, and I remember the shad-

ows spreading out under the trees where Lemon and Rat Kiley were play-

ing catch with smoke grenades. Mitchell Sanders sat ﬂipping his yo-yo.

Norman Bowker and Kiowa and Dave Jensen were dozing, or half-dozing,

and all around us were those ragged green mountains.

Except for the laughter things were quiet.

At one point, I remember, Mitchell Sanders turned and looked at

me, not quite nodding, then after a while he rolled up his yo-yo and

moved away.

It’s hard to tell what happened next.

They were just gooﬁng. There was a noise, I suppose, which must’ve

been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon step

from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-

waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight

came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full

of moss and vines and white blossoms.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difﬁcult to separate what

happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes

its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are

skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and

ﬂoat outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Lemon, you look away and

then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get

jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell

about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story

seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it

seemed.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and

the normal stuff isn’t because the normal stuff is necessary to make you

believe the truly incredible craziness.

In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just

beyond telling.

I heard this one, for example, from Mitchell Sanders. It was near

dusk and we were sitting at my foxhole along a wide, muddy river north

of Quang Ngai. I remember how peaceful the twilight was. A deep pink-

ish red spilled out on the river, which moved without sound, and in the

morning we would cross the river and march west into the mountains.

The occasion was right for a good story.

“God’s truth,” Mitchell Sanders said. “A six-man patrol goes up into

the mountains on a basic listening-post operation. The idea’s to spend a

week up there, just lie low and listen for enemy movement. They’ve got a

radio along, so if they hear anything suspicious — anything — they’re sup-

posed to call in artillery or gunships, whatever it takes. Otherwise they

keep strict ﬁeld discipline. Absolute silence. They just listen.”

He glanced at me to make sure I had the scenario. He was playing with his yo-yo, making it dance with short, tight little strokes of the

wrist.

His face was blank in the dusk.

“We’re talking hardass LP.° These six guys, they don’t say boo for a

solid week. They don’t got tongues. All ears.”

“Right,” I said.

“Understand me?”

“Invisible.”

LP: Listening post. 25

Sanders nodded.

“Afﬁrm,” he said. “Invisible. So what happens is, these guys get

themselves deep in the bush, all camouﬂaged up, and they lie down and

wait and that’s all they do, nothing else, they lie there for seven straight

days and just listen. And man, I’ll tell you — it’s spooky. This is moun-

tains. You don’t know spooky till you been there. Jungle, sort of, except

it’s way up in the clouds and there’s always this fog — like rain, except

it’s not raining — everything’s all wet and swirly and tangled up and you

can’t see jack, you can’t ﬁnd your own pecker to piss with. Like you don’t

even have a body. Serious spooky. You just go with the vapors — the fog

sort of takes you in. . . . And the sounds, man. The sounds carry forever.

You hear shit nobody should ever hear.”

Sanders was quiet for a second, just working the yo-yo, then he

smiled at me. “So, after a couple days the guys start hearing this real

soft, kind of wacked-out music. Weird echoes and stuff. Like a radio or

something, but it’s not a radio, it’s this strange gook music that comes

right out of the rocks. Faraway, sort of, but right up close, too. They

try to ignore it. But it’s a listening post, right? So they listen. And every night they keep hearing this crazyass gook concert. All kinds of chimes

and xylophones. I mean, this is wilderness — no way, it can’t be real — but

there it is, like the mountains are tuned in to Radio Fucking Hanoi. Nat-

urally they get nervous. One guy sticks Juicy Fruit in his ears. Another

guy almost ﬂips. Thing is, though, they can’t report music. They can’t

get on the horn and call back to base and say, ‘Hey, listen, we need some

ﬁrepower, we got to blow away this weirdo gook rock band.’ They can’t

do that. It wouldn’t go down. So they lie there in the fog and keep their

mouths shut. And what makes it extra bad, see, is the poor dudes can’t

horse around like normal. Can’t joke it away. Can’t even talk to each

other except maybe in whispers, all hush-hush, and that just revs up the

willies. All they do is listen.”

Again there was some silence as Mitchell Sanders looked out on the

river. The dark was coming on hard now, and off to the west I could see

the mountains rising in silhouette, all the mysteries and unknowns.

“This next part,” Sanders said quietly, “you won’t believe.”

“Probably not,” I said.

“You won’t. And you know why?”

“Why?”

He gave me a tired smile. “Because it happened. Because every word

is absolutely dead-on true.”

Sanders made a little sound in his throat, like a sigh, as if to say

he didn’t care if I believed it or not. But he did care. He wanted me to

believe, I could tell. He seemed sad, in a way.

“These six guys, they’re pretty fried out by now, and one night they

start hearing voices. Like at a cocktail party. That’s what it sounds like,

this big swank gook cocktail party somewhere out there in the fog. Music

and chitchat and stuff. It’s crazy, I know, but they hear the champagne corks. They hear the actual martini glasses. Real hoity-toity, all very civi-

lized, except this isn’t civilization. This is Nam.

“Anyway, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but

after a while they start hearing — you won’t believe this — they hear cham-

ber music. They hear violins and shit. They hear this terriﬁc mama-san

soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and a glee club and the

Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and all kinds of weird

chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff. The whole time, in the background,

there’s still that cocktail party going on. All these different voices. Not

human voices, though. Because it’s the mountains. Follow me? The

rock — it’s talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mon-

gooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk reli-

gion. The whole country. Vietnam, the place talks.

“The guys can’t cope. They lose it. They get on the radio and report

enemy movement — a whole army, they say — and they order up the

ﬁrepower. They get arty° and gunships. They call in air strikes. And I’ll

tell you, they fuckin’ crash that cocktail party. All night long, they just

smoke those mountains. They make jungle juice. They blow away trees and glee clubs and whatever else there is to blow away. Scorch time. They

walk napalm up and down the ridges. They bring in the Cobras and F-4s,

they use Willie Peter and HE° and incendiaries. It’s all ﬁre. They make

those mountains burn.

“Around dawn things ﬁnally get quiet. Like you never even heard

quiet before. One of those real thick, real misty days — just clouds and

fog, they’re off in this special zone — and the mountains are absolutely

dead-ﬂat silent. Like Brigadoon° — pure vapor, you know? Everything’s

all sucked up inside the fog. Not a single sound, except they still hear it.

“So they pack up and start humping. They head down the moun-

tain, back to base camp, and when they get there they don’t say diddly.

They don’t talk. Not a word, like they’re deaf and dumb. Later on this

fat bird colonel comes up and asks what the hell happened out there.

What’d they hear? Why all the ordnance? The man’s ragged out, he

gets down tight on their case. I mean, they spent six trillion dollars on

ﬁrepower, and this fat ass colonel wants answers, he wants to know what the fuckin’ story is.

“But the guys don’t say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of

funny-like, sort of amazed, and the whole war is right there in that stare.

It says everything you can’t ever say. It says, man, you got wax in your

ears. It says, poor bastard, you’ll never know — wrong frequency — you

don’t even want to hear this. Then they salute the fucker and walk away,

because certain stories you don’t ever tell.” You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not

ever. Not when Mitchell Sanders stood up and moved off into the dark.

It all happened.

Even now I remember that yo-yo. In a way, I suppose, you had to be

there, you had to hear it, but I could tell how desperately Sanders wanted

me to believe him, his frustration at not quite getting the details right,

not quite pinning down the ﬁnal and deﬁnitive truth.

And I remember sitting at my foxhole that night, watching the shad-

ows of Quang Ngai, thinking about the coming day and how we would

cross the river and march west into the mountains, all the ways I might

die, all the things I did not understand.

Late in the night Mitchell Sanders touched my shoulder.

“Just came to me,” he whispered. “The moral, I mean. Nobody lis-

tens. Nobody hears nothing. Like that fat ass colonel. The politicians, all

the civilian types, what they need is to go out on LP. The vapors, man.

Trees and rocks — you got to listen to your enemy.”

And then again, in the morning, Sanders came up to me. The platoon was preparing to move out, checking weapons, going through all

the little rituals that preceded a day’s march. Already the lead squad had

crossed the river and was ﬁling off toward the west.

“I got a confession to make,” Sanders said. “Last night, man, I had to

make up a few things.”

“I know that.”

“The glee club. There wasn’t any glee club.”

“Right.”

“No opera.”

“Forget it, I understand.”

“Yeah, but listen, it’s still true. Those six guys, they heard wicked

sound out there. They heard sound you just plain won’t believe.”

Sanders pulled on his rucksack, closed his eyes for a moment, then

almost smiled at me.

I knew what was coming but I beat him to it.

“All right,” I said, “what’s the moral?”

“Forget it.”

“No, go ahead.”

For a long while he was quiet, looking away, and the silence kept

stretching out until it was almost embarrassing. Then he shrugged and

gave me a stare that lasted all day.

“Hear that quiet, man?” he said. “There’s your moral.”

In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes

the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without

unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing

much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.”

True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstrac-

tion or analysis For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism

seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I

can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.

It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes

the stomach believe.

This one does it for me. I’ve told it before — many times, many ver-

sions — but here’s what actually happened.

We crossed the river and marched west into the mountains. On the

third day, Curt Lemon stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round. He was

playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead. The trees

were thick; it took nearly an hour to cut an LZ for the dustoff.°

Later, higher in the mountains, we came across a baby VC° water

buffalo. What it was doing there I don’t know — no farms or pad-

dies — but we chased it down and got a rope around it and led it along to

a deserted village where we set for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went

over and stroked its nose.

He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn’t interested.

Rat shrugged.

He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The ani-

mal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and

Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters

and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the ﬂanks. It wasn’t

to kill; it was just to hurt. He put the riﬂe muzzle up against the mouth

and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood

there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal

of pity for the baby water buffalo. Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his

best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal

letter to the guy’s sister, who would not write back, but for now it was

a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat

below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and ﬁlth, and

deep greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to

automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the

belly and butt. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time

it couldn’t quite make it. It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot

it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking

to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo was

silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had

been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enor-

mous, the pupils shiny black and dumb.

LZ for the dustoff: Landing zone for a helicopter evacuation of a casualty.

Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his

riﬂe and went off by himself.

The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo. For

a time no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something

brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not

yet a name for it.

Somebody kicked the baby buffalo.

It was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes.

“Amazing,” Dave Jensen said. “My whole life, I never seen anything

like it.”

“Never?”

“Not hardly. Not once.”

Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders picked up the baby buffalo. They

hauled it across the open square, hoisted it up, and dumped it in the vil-

lage well.

Afterward, we sat waiting for Rat to get himself together.

“Amazing,” Dave Jensen kept saying.

“For sure.”

“A new wrinkle. I never seen it before.”

Mitchell Sanders took out his yo-yo.

“Well, that’s Nam,” he said. “Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every

sin’s real fresh and original.”

How do you generalize?

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery

and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and

pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is

thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that

war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you

can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at

tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons.

You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the night-

time paddies. You admire the ﬂuid symmetries of troops on the move,

the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of

metal-ﬁre streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the

white phosphorous, the purply black glow of napalm, the rocket’s red

glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It ﬁlls the eye. It commands

you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest ﬁre, like

cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery bar-

rage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference — a powerful,

implacable beauty — and a true war story will tell the truth about this,

though the truth is ugly.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost

everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just

another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the

truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity

to life. After a ﬁre ﬁght, there is always the immense pleasure of alive-

ness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil — everything. All around you

things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes

you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your liv-

ing self — your truest self, the human being you want to be and then

become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a

good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human

concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness

to it; a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than

when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if

for the ﬁrst time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all

that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look

out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond,

and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the

mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you ﬁnd your-

self-studying the ﬁne colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the

setting of the sun, and you are ﬁlled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war

has the feel — the spiritual texture — of a great ghostly fog, thick and per-

manent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no lon-

ger binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong.

Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into

anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell

where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is absolute

ambiguity.

In war you lose your sense of the deﬁnite, hence your sense of truth

itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing much

is ever very true.

Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point

doesn’t hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up

and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you

get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a longtime you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to

your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and

think, Christ, what’s the point?

This one wakes me up.

In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He

laughed and said something to Rat Kiley. Then he took a peculiar half

step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped

105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so

Norman Bowker and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and

something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was

horrible, and stays with me, but what wakes me up twenty years later is

Norman Bowker singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a

story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer mat-

ters, you’ve got your answer.

For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A

grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his

three buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters.

You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding

reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the

way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen — and maybe it

did, anything’s possible — even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Happening-

ness is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing

may not happen and be truer than the truth. For ex ample: four guys

go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the

blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they

die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and

the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to

smile but he’s dead.

That’s a true story that never happened.

Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s face. I can see

him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that

curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and

shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve

thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight.

It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the

sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him into a tree, if I could somehow recreate the fatal whiteness of that light, the

quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the last

thing Lemon believed, which for him must’ve been the ﬁnal truth.

Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me after-

ward and say she liked it. It’s always a woman. Usually it’s an older

woman of kindly temperament and humane politics. She’ll explain that

as a rule she hates war stories, she can’t understand why people want to

wallow in blood and gore. But this one she liked. Sometimes, even, there

are little tears. What I should do, she’ll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell. I won’t say it but I’ll think it.

I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and I’ll think, You dumb cooze.

Because she wasn’t listening.

It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story. It was a ghost story.

But you can’t say that. All you can do is tell it one more time,

patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the

real truth. No Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Lemon, no Rat Kiley.

And it didn’t happen in the mountains, it happened in this little village

on the Batangan Peninsula, and it was raining like crazy, and one night a

guy named Stink Harris woke up screaming with a leech on his tongue.

You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.

In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about

the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you

must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you

are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about

sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, 1953

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some

of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance

to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy.

He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange

sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here,

read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other

rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls him-

self The Misﬁt is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida

and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it.

I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that

aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”

Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then

and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face

was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green

headkerchief that had two points on the top like a rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. “The chil-

dren have been to Florida before,” the old lady

said.

“You all ought to

take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts

of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee.”

The children’s mother didn’t seem to hear her but the eight-year-old

boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, “If you don’t want to

go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?” He and the little girl, June

Star, were reading the funny papers on the ﬂoor.

“She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day,” June Star said

without raising her yellow head.

“Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misﬁt, caught you?”

the grandmother asked.

“I’d smack his face,” John Wesley said.

“She wouldn’t stay at home for a million bucks,” June Star said.

“Afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.”

“All right, Miss,” the grandmother said. “Just remember that the next time you want me to curl your hair.”

June Star said her hair was naturally curly. The next morning the grandmother was the ﬁrst one in the car,

ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a

hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket

with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn’t intend for the cat to be left alone

in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she

was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and acciden-

tally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive at a motel

with a cat.

She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June

Star on either side of her. Bailey and the children’s mother and the baby

sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-ﬁve with the mileage on

the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought

it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they

got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.

The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton

gloves and putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the

back window. The children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her

head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy

blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were

white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a

purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident,

anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was

a lady.

She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither

too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was

ﬁfty-ﬁve miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind

billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you

had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the

scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up

to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked

with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on

the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest

of them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their

mother had gone back to sleep.

“Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much,” John Wesley said.

“If I were a little boy,” said the grandmother, “I wouldn’t talk about

my native state that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has

the hills.”

“Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground,” John Wesley said,

“and Georgia is a lousy state too.”

“You said it,” June Star said.

“In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined ﬁngers, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents

and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door

of a shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” she asked and they all

turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.

“He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star said.

“He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “Little

niggers in the country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d

paint that picture,” she said.

The children exchanged comic books.

The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children’s mother

passed him over the front seat to her. She set him on her knee and

bounced him and told him about the things they were passing. She rolled

her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into

his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They

passed a large cotton ﬁeld with ﬁve or six graves fenced in the middle

of it, like a small island. “Look at the graveyard!” the grandmother said,

pointing it out. “That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation.”

“Where’s the plantation?” John Wesley asked.

“Gone With the Wind,” said

the

grandmother.

“Ha. Ha.”

When the children ﬁnished all the comic books they had brought,

they opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter

sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw the box and

the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do

they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess

what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and

June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and

June Star said he didn’t play fair, and they began to slap each other over

the grandmother.

The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would

keep quiet. When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head

and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a maiden lady she

had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Geor-

gia. She said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials

cut in it, E.A.T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the

watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front

porch and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the water-

melon, she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials,

E.A.T.! This story tickled John Wesley’s funny bone and he giggled and

giggled but June Star didn’t think it was any good. She said she wouldn’t

marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The grand-

mother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because

he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it ﬁrst came

out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.

They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sandwiches. The Tower

was a part stucco and part wood ﬁlling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red Sammy Butts ran it

and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles

up and down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY’S FAMOUS BAR-

BECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED SAMMY’S! RED SAM! THE FAT

BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH. A VETERAN! RED SAMMY’S YOUR

MAN!

Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with

his head under a truck while a gray monkey about a foot high, chained

to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey sprang back

into the tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children

jump out of the car and run toward him.

Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end

and tables at the other and dancing space in the middle. They all sat

down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red Sam’s wife, a

tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin, came

and took their order. The children’s mother put a dime in the machine

and played “The Tennessee Waltz,” and the grandmother said that tune always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would like to

dance but he only glared at her. He didn’t have a naturally sunny disposi-

tion like she did and trips made him nervous. The grandmother’s brown

eyes were very bright. She swayed her head from side to side and pre-

tended she was dancing in her chair. June Star said play something she

could tap to so the children’s mother put in another dime and played a

fast number and June Star stepped out onto the dance ﬂoor and did her

tap routine.

“Ain’t she cute?” Red Sam’s wife said, leaning over the counter.

“Would you like to come be my little girl?”

“No I certainly wouldn’t,” June Star said. “I wouldn’t live in a

broken-down place like this for a million bucks!” and she ran back to the

table.

“Ain’t she cute?” the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.

“Aren’t you ashamed?” hissed the grandmother.

Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter

and hurry up with these people’s order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack of meal swaying

under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let out a

combination sigh and yodel. “You can’t win,” he said. “You can’t win,” and

he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. “These days

you don’t know who to trust,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth?”

“People are certainly not nice like they used to be,” said the

grandmother.

“Two fellers come in here last week,” Red Sammy said, “driving a

Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys

looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let

them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?” “Because you’re a good man!” the grandmother said at once.

“Yes’m, I suppose so,” Red Sam said as if he were struck with this

answer.

His wife brought the orders, carrying the ﬁve plates all at once with-

out a tray, two in each hand and one balanced on her arm. “It isn’t a soul

in this green world of God’s that you can trust,” she said. “And I don’t

count nobody out of that, not nobody,” she repeated, looking at Red

Sammy.

“Did you read about that criminal, The Misﬁt, that’s escaped?”

asked the grandmother.

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he didn’t attack this place right

here,” said the woman. “If he hears about it being here, I wouldn’t be

none surprised to see him. If he hears it’s two cent in the cash register, I

wouldn’t be a tall surprised if he. . . .”

“That’ll do,” Red Sam said. “Go bring these people their Co’-Colas,”

and the woman went off to get the rest of the order.

“A good man is hard to ﬁnd,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is get-

ting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your scree door un latched. Not no more.”

He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said

that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were

now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of

money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly

right. The children ran outside into the white sunlight and looked at

the monkey in the lacy chinaberry tree. He was busy catching ﬂeas on

himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a

delicacy.

They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took

cat naps and woke up every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside

of Toombs boro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had

visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said

the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an

avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on

either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll

in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it.

She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to

see it once again and ﬁnd out if the little twin arbors were still standing.

“There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the

truth but wishing that she were, “and the story went that all the family

silver was hidden in it when Sherman° came through but it was never found. . . .” “Hey!” John Wesley said. “Let’s go see it! We’ll ﬁnd it! We’ll poke all

the woodwork and ﬁnd it! Who lives there? Where do you turn off at?

Hey Pop, can’t we turn off there?”

“We never have seen a house with a secret panel!” June Star shrieked.

“Let’s go to the house with the secret panel! Hey Pop, can’t we go see the

house with the secret panel!”

“It’s not far from here, I know,” the grandmother said. “It won’t take

over twenty minutes.”

Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horse-

shoe. “No,” he said.

The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house

with the secret panel. John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June

Star hung over her mother’s shoulder and whined desperately into her ear

that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could never do

what THEY wanted to do. The baby began to scream and John Wesley kicked

the back of the seat so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.

“All right!” he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the

road. “Will you all shut up? Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don’t shut up, we won’t go anywhere.”

“It would be very educational for them,” the grandmother

murmured.

“All right,” Bailey said, “but get this: this is the only time we’re going

to stop for anything like this. This is the one and only time.”

“The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back,” the

grandmother directed. “I marked it when we passed.”

“A dirt road,” Bailey groaned.

After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road,

the grandmother recalled other points about the house, the beautiful

glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in the hall. John Wes-

ley said that the secret panel was probably in the ﬁreplace.

“You can’t go inside this house,” Bailey said. “You don’t know who

lives there.”

“While you all talk to the people in front, I’ll run around behind and

get in a window,” John Wesley suggested.

“We’ll all stay in the car,” his mother said.

They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a

swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when there were

no paved roads and thirty miles was a day’s journey. The dirt road was

hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous

embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the

blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be

in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them.

“This place had better turn up in a minute,” Bailey said, “or I’m

going to turn around.”

The road looked as if no one had traveled on it for months.

“It’s not much farther,” the grandmother said and just as she said

it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped

up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the

newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and

Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey’s shoulder.

The children were thrown to the ﬂoor and their mother, clutching

the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was

thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-

side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver’s

seat with the cat — gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange

nose — clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.

As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs,

they scrambled out of the car, shouting, “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!”

The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was

injured so that Bailey’s wrath would not come down on her all at once.

The horrible thought she had before the accident was that the house she

had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.

Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and ﬂung it out the window against the side of a pine tree. Then he got out of

the car and started looking for the children’s mother. She was sitting

against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but

she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. “We’ve had an

ACCIDENT!” the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.

“But nobody’s killed,” June Star said with disappointment as the

grandmother limped out of the car, her hat still pinned to her head but

the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray

hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children,

to recover from the shock. They were all shaking.

“Maybe a car will come along,” said the children’s mother hoarsely.

“I believe I have injured an organ,” said the grandmother, pressing

her side, but no one answered her. Bailey’s teeth were clattering. He had

on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed in it and his

face was as yellow as the shirt. The grandmother decided that she would

not mention that the house was in Tennessee.

The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops

of the trees on the other side of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in

there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few minutes they

saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the

occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved

both arms dramatically to attract their attention. The car continued to

come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving

even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black bat-

tered hearse-like automobile. There were three men in it.

It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver

looked down with a steady expressionless gaze to where they were sit-

ting, and didn’t speak. Then he turned his head and muttered some-

thing to the other two and they got out. One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the

front of it. He moved around on the right side of them and stood star-

ing, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on

khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low,

hiding most of his face. He came around slowly on the left side. Neither

spoke.

The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking

down at them. He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just

beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a

scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn’t have on any shirt

or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was

holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys also had guns.

“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children screamed.

The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled

man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had

known him all her life but she could not recall who he was. He moved his feet carefully so that he wouldn’t slip down the embankment,. He had on tan and white shoes

and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. “Good afternoon,” he

said. “I see you all had you a little spill.”

“We turned over twice!” said the grandmother.

“Oncet,” he corrected. “We seen it happen. Try their car and see will

it run, Hiram,” he said quietly to the boy with the gray hat.

“What you got that gun for?” John Wesley asked. “Whatcha gonna. He had on tan and white shoes

and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. “Good afternoon,” he
said. “I see you all had you a little spill.”

“Lady,” the man said to the children’s mother, “would you mind

calling them children to sit down by you? Children make me nervous. I

want all you all to sit down right together there where you’re at.”

“What are you telling US what to do for?” June Star asked.

Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.

“Come here,” said their mother.

“Look here now,” Bailey said suddenly, “we’re in a predicament!

We’re in. . . .”

The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stoodstaring. “You’re The Misﬁt!” she said. “I recognized you at once!”

“Yes’m,” the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite

of himself to be known, “but it would have been better for all of you,

lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me.”

Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother

that shocked even the children. The old lady began to cry and The Misﬁt

reddened.

“Lady,” he said, “don’t you get upset. Sometimes a man says things

he don’t mean. I don’t reckon he meant to talk to you that away.”

“You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” the grandmother said and

re moved a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it. The Misﬁt pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made

a little hole and then covered it up again. “I would hate to have to,” he

said.

“Listen,” the grandmother almost screamed, “I know you’re a good

man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must

come from nice people!”

“Yes mam,” he said, “ﬁnest people in the world.” When he smiled

he showed a row of strong white teeth. “God never made a ﬁner woman

than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold,” he said. The boy

with the red sweat shirt had come around behind them and was stand-

ing with his gun at his hip. The Misﬁt squatted down on the ground.

“Watch them children, Bobby Lee,” he said. “You know they make me

nervous.” He looked at the six of them huddled together in front of him

and he seemed to be embarrassed as if he couldn’t think of anything to

say. “Ain’t a cloud in the sky,” he remarked, looking up at it. “Don’t see

no sun but don’t see no cloud neither.”

“Yes, it’s a beautiful day,” said the grandmother. “Listen,” she said,

“you shouldn’t call yourself The Misﬁt because I know you’re a good

man at heart. I can just look at you and tell.”

“Hush!” Bailey yelled. “Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle

this!” He was squatting in the position of a runner about to sprint for-

ward but he didn’t move.

“I pre-chate that, lady,” The Misﬁt said and drew a little circle in the

ground with the butt of his gun.

“It’ll take a half a hour to ﬁx this here car,” Hiram called, looking

over the raised hood of it.

“Well, ﬁrst you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step

over yonder with you,” The Misﬁt said, pointing to Bailey and John Wes-

ley. “The boys want to ast you something,” he said to Bailey. “Would you

mind stepping back in them woods there with them?”

“Listen,” Bailey began, “we’re in a terrible predicament! Nobody

realizes what this is,” and his voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and

intense as the parrots in his shirt and he remained perfectly still.

The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were

going to the woods with him but it came off in her hand. She stood star-

ing at it and after a second she let it fall to the ground. Hiram pulled Bai-

ley up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley caught

hold of his father’s hand and Bobby Lee followed. They went off toward

the woods and just as they reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and sup-

porting himself against a gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, “I’ll be back

in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!”

“Come back this instant!” his mother shrilled but they all disap-

peared into the woods.

“Bailey Boy!” the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she

was looking at The Misﬁt squatting on the ground in front of her. “I just

know you’re a good man,” she said desperately. “You’re not a bit common!” “Nome, I ain’t a good man,” The Misﬁt said after a second as if he

had considered her statement carefully, “but I ain’t the worst in the

world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my

brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their

whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it

is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!’ ”

He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep into

the woods as if he were embarrassed again. “I’m sorry I don’t have on a

shirt before you ladies,” he said, hunching his shoulders slightly. “We

buried our clothes that we had on when we escaped and we’re just mak-

ing do until we can get better. We borrowed these from some folks we

met,” he explained.

“That’s perfectly all right,” the grandmother said. “Maybe Bailey has

an extra shirt in his suitcase.”

“I’ll look and see terrectly,” The Misﬁt said.

“Where are they taking him?” the children’s mother screamed.

“Daddy was a card himself,” The Misﬁt said. “You couldn’t put any-

thing over on him. He never got in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them.”

“You could be honest too if you’d only try,” said the grandmother.

“Think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable

life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all the time.”

The Misﬁt kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as

if he were thinking about it. “Yes’m, somebody is always after you,” he

murmured.

The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just

behind his hat because she was standing up looking down on him. “Do

you ever pray?” she asked.

He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his

shoulder blades. “Nome,” he said.

There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another.

Then silence. The old lady’s head jerked around. She could hear the wind

move through the tree tops like a long satisﬁed insuck of breath. “Bailey

Boy!” she called.

“I was a gospel singer for a while,” The Misﬁt said. “I been mosteverything. Been in the arm service, both land and sea, at home and

abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with the railroads,

plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive oncet,”

and he looked up at the children’s mother and the little girl who were sit-

ting close together, their faces white and their eyes glassy; “I even seen a

woman ﬂogged,” he said.

“Pray, pray,” the grandmother began, “pray, pray. . . .”

“I never was a bad boy that I remember of,” The Misﬁt said in an

almost dreamy voice, “but somewheres along the line I done something

wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive,” and he looked

up and held her attention to him by a steady stare. “That’s when you should have started to pray,” she said. “What did

you do to get sent to the penitentiary that ﬁrst time?”

“Turn to the right, it was a wall,” The Misﬁt said, looking up again

at the cloudless sky. “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceil-

ing, look down it was a ﬂoor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and

set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to

this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never

come.”

“Maybe they put you in by mistake,” the old lady said vaguely.

“Nome,” he said. “It wasn’t no mistake. They had the papers on me.”

“You must have stolen something,” she said.

The Misﬁt sneered slightly. “Nobody had nothing I wanted,” he said.

“It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill

my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought

nineteen of the epidemic ﬂu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was

buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can see for

yourself.”

“If you would pray,” the old lady said, “Jesus would help you.”

“That’s right,” The Misﬁt said.

“Well then, why don’t you pray?” she asked trembling with delightsuddenly.

“I don’t want no hep,” he said. “I’m doing all right by myself.”

Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby

Lee was dragging a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it.

“Throw me that shirt, Bobby Lee,” The Misﬁt said. The shirt came

ﬂying at him and landed on his shoulder and he put it on. The grand-

mother couldn’t name what the shirt reminded her of. “No, lady,” The

Misﬁt said while he was buttoning it up, “I found out the crime don’t

matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a

tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was

you done and just be punished for it.”

The children’s mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she

couldn’t get her breath. “Lady,” he asked, “would you and that little

girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join your

husband?”

“Yes, thank you,” the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled help-

lessly and she was holding the baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other. “Hep that lady up, Hiram,” The Misﬁt said as she struggled to climb out

of the ditch, “and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl’s hand.”

“I don’t want to hold hands with him,” June Star said. “He reminds

me of a pig.”

The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm and

pulled her off into the woods after Hiram and her mother.

Alone with The Misﬁt, the grandmother found that she had lost

her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was noth-

ing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. he opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came

out. Finally she found herself saying, “Jesus, Jesus,” meaning Jesus will

help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be

cursing.

“Yes’m,” The Misﬁt said as if he agreed. “Jesus thown everything

off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t

committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because

they had the papers on me. Of course,” he said, “they never shown

me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get

your signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then

you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the pun-

ishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something

to prove you ain’t been treated right. I call myself The Misﬁt,” he said,

“because I can’t make what all I done wrong ﬁt what all I gone through

in punishment.”

There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a

pistol report. “Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished aheap and another ain’t punished at all?”

“Jesus!” the old lady cried. “You’ve got good blood! I know you

wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus,

you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!”

“Lady,” The Misﬁt said, looking beyond her far into the woods,

“there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.”

There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her

head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey

Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if her heart would break.

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misﬁt contin-

ued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If

He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away every-

thing and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do

but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can — by killing

somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness

to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become

almost a snarl.

“Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,” the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the

ditch with her legs twisted under her.

“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misﬁt said. “I wisht I

had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his ﬁst. “It ain’t right

I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen

lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known

and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” His voice seemed about to crack and

the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face

twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured,

“Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misﬁt sprang back

as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest.

Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and

began to clean them.

Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the

ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a

puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her

face smiling up at the cloudless sky.

Without his glasses, The Misﬁt’s eyes were red-rimmed and pale and

defenseless-looking. “Take her off and thow her where you thown the

others,” he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg.

“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” Bobby Lee said, sliding down the

ditch with a yodel.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misﬁt said, “if it had been

somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.

“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misﬁt said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”

5 Trifles,

Play

“Triﬂes” 1916 by Susan Glaspell (1882–1948)

Characters:

George Henderson, county attorney

Henry Peters, sheriff

Lewis Hale, a neighboring farmer

Mrs. Peters

Mrs. Hale

Scene: The kitchen in the now abandoned farmhouse of John Wright, a

gloomy kitchen, and left without having been put in order — unwashed

pans under the sink, a loaf of bread outside the breadbox, a dish towel on

the table — other signs of incompleted work. At the rear the outer door

opens and the Sheriff comes in followed by the County Attorney and

Hale. The Sheriff and Hale are men in middle life, the County Attorney is a young man; all are much bundled up and go at once to the stove. They

are followed by the two women — the Sheriff’s wife ﬁrst; she is a slight

wiry woman, a thin nervous face. Mrs. Hale is larger and would ordinarily

be called more comfortable looking, but she is disturbed now and looks

fearfully about as she enters. The women have come in slowly, and stand

close together near the door. County Attorney (rubbing his hands): This feels good. Come up to the ﬁre,

ladies.

Mrs. Peters (after taking a step forward): I’m not — cold.

Sheriff (unbuttoning his overcoat and stepping away from the stove as if to mark

the beginning of ofﬁcial business): Now, Mr. Hale, before we move

things about, you explain to Mr. Henderson just what you saw when

you came

here yesterday morning.

County Attorney: By the way, has anything been moved? Are things just as

you left them yesterday?

Sheriff (looking about): It’s just about the same. When it dropped below

zero last night I thought I’d better send Frank out this morning to

make a ﬁre for us — no use getting pneumonia with a big case on,

but I told him not to touch anything except the stove — and you

know Frank.

County Attorney: Somebody should have been left here yesterday.

Sheriff: Oh — yesterday. When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for

that man who went crazy — I want you to know I had my hands full

yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by today and as long as I went over everything here myself —

County Attorney: Well, Mr. Hale, tell just what happened when you came

here yesterday morning.

Hale: Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes. We came

along the road from my place and as I got here I said, “I’m going

to see if I can’t get John Wright to go in with me on a party tele-

phone.” I spoke to Wright about it once before and he put me off,

saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and

quiet — I guess you know about how much he talked himself; but

I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before

his wife, though I said to Harry that I didn’t know as what his wife

wanted made much difference to John —

County Attorney: Let’s talk about that later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk

about that, but tell now just what happened when you got to the

house.

Hale: I didn’t hear or see anything; I knocked at the door, and still it was

all quiet inside. I knew they must be up, it was past eight o’clock.

So I knocked again, and I thought I heard somebody say, “Come in.” I wasn’t sure, I’m not sure yet, but I opened the door — this door

(indicating the door by which the two women are still standing) and there

in that rocker — (pointing to it) sat Mrs. Wright. (They all look at the

rocker.)

County Attorney: What — was she doing?

Hale: She was rockin’ back and forth. She had her apron in her hand and

was kind of — pleating it.

County Attorney: And how did she — look?

Hale: Well, she looked queer.

County Attorney: How do you mean — queer? Hale: Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And

kind of done up.

County Attorney: How did she seem to feel about your coming?

Hale: Why, I don’t think she minded — one way or other. She didn’t pay

much attention. I said, “How do, Mrs. Wright, it’s cold, ain’t it?”

And she said, “Is it?” — and went on kind of pleating at her apron.

Well, I was surprised; she didn’t ask me to come up to the stove, or

to set down, but just sat there, not even looking at me, so I said,

“I want to see John.” And then she — laughed. I guess you would call

it a laugh. I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said a little

sharp: “Can’t I see John?” “No,” she says, kind o’dull like. “Ain’t he

home?” says I. “Yes,” says she, “he’s home.” “Then why can’t I see

him?” I asked her, out of patience. “’Cause he’s dead,” says she.

“Dead?” says I. She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited,

but rockin’ back and forth. “Why — where is he?” says I, not know-

ing what to say. She just pointed upstairs — like that (himself pointing

to the room above). I started for the stairs, with the idea of going up

there. I walked from there to here — then I says, “Why, what did he die

of?” “He died of a rope round his neck,” says she, and just went

on pleatin’ at her apron. Well, I went out and called Harry. I thought

I might — need help. We went upstairs and there he was lyin’ —

County Attorney: I think I’d rather have you go into that upstairs, where

you can point it all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story.

Hale: Well, my ﬁrst thought was to get that rope off. It looked . . . (stops;

his face twitches) . . . but Harry, he went up to him, and he said, “No,

he’s dead all right, and we’d better not touch anything.” So we went

back downstairs. She was still sitting that same way. “Has anybody

been notiﬁed?” I asked. “No,” says she, unconcerned. “Who did this,

Mrs. Wright?” said Harry. He said it businesslike — and she stopped

pleatin’ of her apron. “I don’t know,” she says. “You don’t know?”

says Harry. “No,” says she. “Weren’t you sleepin’ in the bed with

him?” says Harry. “Yes,” says she, “but I was on the inside.” “Some-

body slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him and you

didn’t wake up?” says Harry. “I didn’t wake up,” she said after

him.

We must ’a’ looked as if we didn’t see how that could be, for after a

minute she said, “I sleep sound.” Harry was going to ask her more questions

but I said maybe we ought to let her tell her story ﬁrst to

the coroner, or the sheriff, so Harry went fast as he could to Rivers’

place, where there’s a telephone.

County Attorney: And what did Mrs. Wright do when she knew that you

had gone for the coroner?

Hale: She moved from the rocker to that chair over there (pointing

to a small chair in the corner) and just sat there with her hands held

together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make

some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to

put in a telephone, and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me — scared. (The County Attorney, who has

had his notebook out, makes a note.) I dunno, maybe it wasn’t scared. I

wouldn’t like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd

came and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that’s all I know that you

don’t.

County Attorney (looking around): I guess we’ll go upstairs ﬁrst — and then

out to the barn and around there. (To the Sheriff.) You’re convinced

that there was nothing important here — nothing that would point

to any motive?

Sheriff: Nothing here but kitchen things. (The County Attorney, after again

looking around the kitchen, opens the door of a cupboard closet. He gets up on

a chair and looks on a shelf. Pulls his hand away, sticky.)

County Attorney: Here’s a nice mess. (The women draw nearer.)

Mrs. Peters (to the other woman): Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. (To the Law-

yer.) She worried about that when it turned so cold. She said the

ﬁre’d go out and her jars would break.

Sheriff (rises): Well, can you beat the woman! Held for murder and wor-

ryin’ about her preserves.

County Attorney: I guess before we’re through she may have something

more serious than preserves to worry about.

Hale: Well, women are used to worrying over triﬂes. (The two women move

a little closer together.)

County Attorney (with the gallantry of a young politician): And yet, for all

their worries, what would we do without the

ladies?

(The women do

not unbend. He goes to the sink, takes a dipperful of water from the pail, and

pouring it into a basin, washes his hands. Starts to wipe them on the roller

towel, turns it for a cleaner place.) Dirty towels! (Kicks his foot against

the pans under the sink.) Not much of a housekeeper, would you say,

ladies?

Mrs. Hale (stifﬂy): There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm.

County Attorney: To be sure. And yet (with a little bow to her) I know there

are some Dickson county farmhouses which do not have such roller

towels. (He gives it a pull to expose its full length again.)

Mrs. Hale: Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men’s hands aren’t always

as clean as they might be.

County Attorney: Ah, loyal to your sex, I see. But you and Mrs. Wright

were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too.

Mrs. Hale (shaking her head): I’ve not seen much of her of late years. I’ve

not been in this house — it’s more than a year.

County Attorney: And why was that? You didn’t like her?

Mrs. Hale: I liked her all well enough. Farmers’ wives have their hands

full, Mr. Henderson. And then —

County Attorney: Yes — ?

Mrs. Hale (looking about): It never seemed a very cheerful place.

County Attorney: No — it’s not cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the home-

making instinct.

Mrs. Hale: Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either.

County Attorney: You mean that they didn’t get on very well?

Mrs. Hale: No, I don’t mean anything. But I don’t think a place’d be any

cheerfuller for John Wright’s being in it.

County Attorney: I’d like to talk more of that a little later. I want to get

the lay of things upstairs now. (He goes to the left where three steps lead

to a stair door.)

Sheriff: I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does’ll be all right. She was to

take in some clothes for her, you know, and a few little things. We

left in such a hurry yesterday.

County Attorney: Yes, but I would like to see what you take, Mrs. Peters,

and keep an eye out for anything that might be of use to us.

Mrs. Peters: Yes, Mr. Henderson. (The women listen to the men’s steps on the

stairs, then look about the kitchen.)

Mrs. Hale: I’d hate to have men coming into my kitchen, snooping

around and criticizing. (She arranges the pans under sink which the law-

yer had shoved out of place.)

Mrs. Peters: Of course it’s no more than their duty.

Mrs. Hale: Duty’s all right, but I guess that deputy sheriff that came out

Mrs. Peters: Of course it’s no more than their duty.

Mrs. Hale: Duty’s all right, but I guess that deputy sheriff that came out

to make the ﬁ re might have got a little of this on. (Gives the roller

towel a pull.) Wish I’d thought of that sooner. Seems mean to talk

about her for not having things slicked up when she had to come

away in such a hurry.

Mrs. Peters (who has gone to a small table in the left rear corner of the room, and

lifted one end of a towel that covers a pan): She had bread set. (Stands

still.)

Mrs. Hale (eyes ﬁxed on a loaf of bread beside the breadbox, which is on a low

shelf at the other side of the room. Moves slowly toward it.): She was going

to put this in there. (Picks up loaf, then abruptly drops it. In a manner of

returning to familiar things.) It’s a shame about her fruit. I wonder if

it’s all gone. (Gets up on the chair and looks.) I think there’s some here

that’s all right, Mrs. Peters. Yes — here; (holding it toward the window)

this is cherries, too. (Looking again.) I declare I believe that’s the only

one. (Gets down, bottle in her hand. Goes to the sink and wipes it off on

the outside.) She’ll feel awful bad after all her hard work in the hot

weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last sum-

mer. (She puts the bottle on the big kitchen table, center of the room. With

a sigh, is about to sit down in the rocking-chair. Before she is seated realizes

what chair it is; with a slow look at it, steps back. The chair which she has

touched rocks back and forth.)

Mrs. Peters: Well, I must get those things from the front room closet. (She

goes to the door at the right, but after looking into the other room, steps back.)

You coming with me, Mrs. Hale? You could help me carry them.

(They go in the other room; reappear, Mrs. Peters carrying a dress and skirt,

Mrs. Hale following with a pair of shoes.) My, it’s cold in there. (She puts

the clothes on the big table, and hurries to the stove.)

Mrs. Hale (examining the skirt): Wright was close. I think maybe that’s why

she kept so much to herself. She didn’t even belong to the Ladies’

Aid. I suppose she felt she couldn’t do her part, and then you don’t

enjoy things when you feel shabby. I heard she used to wear pretty

clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town

girls singing in the choir. But that — oh, that was thirty years ago.

This all you want to take in?

Mrs. Peters: She said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want, for

there isn’t much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I sup-

pose just to make her feel more natural. She said they was in the top

drawer in this cupboard. Yes, here. And then her little shawl that

always hung behind the door. (Opens stair door and looks.) Yes, here it

is. (Quickly shuts door leading upstairs.)

Mrs. Hale (abruptly moving toward her): Mrs. Peters?

Mrs. Peters: Yes, Mrs. Hale?

Mrs. Hale: Do you think she did it?

Mrs. Peters (in a frightened voice): Oh, I don’t know.

Mrs. Hale: Well, I don’t think she did. Asking for an apron and her little

shawl. Worrying about her fruit.

Mrs. Peters (starts to speak, glances up, where footsteps are heard in the room

above. In a low voice): Mr. Peters says it looks bad for her. Mr. Hen-

derson is awful sarcastic in a speech and he’ll make fun of her sayin’

she didn’t wake up.

Mrs. Hale: Well, I guess John Wright didn’t wake when they was slipping

that rope under his neck.

Mrs. Peters: No, it’s strange. It must have been done awful crafty and still.

They say it was such a — funny way to kill a man, rigging it all up like

that.

Mrs. Hale: That’s just what Mr. Hale said. There was a gun in the house.

He says that’s what he can’t understand.

Mrs. Peters: Mr. Henderson said coming out that what was needed for

the case was a motive; something to show anger, or — sudden feeling.

Mrs. Hale (who is standing by the table): Well, I don’t see any signs of anger

around here. (She puts her hand on the dish towel which lies on the table,

stands looking down at table, one-half of which is clean, the other half messy.)

It’s wiped to here. (Makes a move as if to ﬁnish work, then turns and looks

at loaf of bread outside the breadbox. Drops towel. In that voice of coming

back to familiar things.) Wonder how they are ﬁnding things upstairs.

I hope she had it a little more red-up up there. You know, it seems

kind of sneaking. Locking her up in town and then coming out here

and trying to get her own house to turn against her!

Mrs. Peters: But, Mrs. Hale, the law is the law.

Mrs. Hale: I s’pose ’tis. (Unbuttoning her coat.) Better loosen up your

things, Mrs. Peters. You won’t feel them when you go out. (Mrs.

Peters takes off her fur tippet, goes to hang it on hook at back of room, stands

looking at the under part of the small corner table.)

Mrs. Peters: She was piecing a quilt. (She brings the large sewing basket and

they look at the bright pieces.)

Mrs. Hale: It’s a log cabin pattern. Pretty, isn’t it? I wonder if she was

goin’ to quilt it or just knot it? (Footsteps have been heard coming down

the stairs. The Sheriff enters followed by Hale and the County Attorney.)

Sheriff: They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it! (The men

laugh, the women look abashed.)

County Attorney (rubbing his hands over the stove): Frank’s ﬁ re didn’t do

much up there, did it? Well, let’s go out to the barn and get that

cleared up. (The men go outside.)

Mrs. Hale (resentfully): I don’t know as there’s anything so strange, our

takin’ up our time with little things while we’re waiting for them to

get the evidence. (She sits down at the big table smoothing out a block with

decision.) I don’t see as it’s anything to laugh about.

Mrs. Peters (apologetically): Of course they’ve got awful important things

on their minds. (Pulls up a chair and joins Mrs. Hale at the table.)

Mrs. Hale (examining another block): Mrs. Peters, look at this one. Here,

his is the one she was working on, and look at the sewing! All the

rest of it has been so nice and even. And look at this! It’s all over the

place! Why, it looks as if she didn’t know what she was about! (After

she has said this they look at each other, then start to glance back at the door.

After an instant Mrs. Hale has pulled at a knot and ripped the sewing.)

Mrs. Peters: Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?

Mrs. Hale (mildly): Just pulling out a stitch or two that’s not sewed very

good. (Threading a needle.) Bad sewing always made me ﬁdgety.

Mrs. Peters (nervously): I don’t think we ought to touch things.

Mrs. Hale: I’ll just ﬁnish up this end. (Suddenly stopping and leaning for-

ward.) Mrs. Peters?

Mrs. Peters: Yes, Mrs. Hale?

Mrs. Hale: What do you suppose she was so nervous about?

Mrs. Peters: Oh — I don’t know. I don’t know as she was nervous. I some-

times sew awful queer when I’m just tired. (Mrs. Hale starts to say some-

thing, looks at Mrs. Peters, then goes on sewing.) Well, I must get these

things wrapped up. They may be through sooner than we think.

(Putting apron and other things together.) I wonder where I can ﬁnd a

piece of paper, and string. (Rises.)

Mrs. Hale: In that cupboard, maybe.

Mrs. Peters (looking in cupboard): Why, here’s a bird-cage. (Holds it up.) Did

she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?

Mrs. Hale: Why, I don’t know whether she did or not — I’ve not been here

for so long. There was a man around last year selling canaries cheap,

but I don’t know as she took one; maybe she did. She used to sing

real pretty herself.

Mrs. Peters (glancing around): Seems funny to think of a bird here. But she

must have had one, or why would she have a cage? I wonder what

happened to it?

Mrs. Hale: I s’pose maybe the cat got it.

Mrs. Peters: No, she didn’t have a cat. She’s got that feeling some people

have about cats — being afraid of them. My cat got in her room and

she was real upset and asked me to take it out.

Mrs. Hale: My sister Bessie was like that. Queer, ain’t it?

Mrs. Peters (examining the cage): Why, look at this door. It’s broke. One

hinge is pulled apart.

Mrs. Hale (looking too): Looks as if someone must have been rough with it.

Mrs. Peters: Why, yes. (She brings the cage forward and puts it on the table.)

Mrs. Hale: I wish if they’re going to ﬁnd any evidence they’d be about it.

I don’t like this place.

Mrs. Peters: But I’m awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale. It would be

lonesome for me sitting here alone.

Mrs. Hale: It would, wouldn’t it? (Dropping her sewing.) But I tell you what

I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over sometimes when she

was here. I — (looking around the room) — wish I had.

Mrs. Peters: But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale — your house

and your children.

Mrs. Hale: I could’ve come. I stayed away because it weren’t cheerful — and

that’s why I ought to have come. I — I’ve never liked this place. Maybe

because it’s down in a hollow and you don’t see the road. I dunno

what it is, but it’s a lonesome place and always was. I wish I had

come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now — (Shakes

her head.)

Mrs. Peters: Well, you mustn’t reproach yourself, Mrs. Hale. Somehow we

just don’t see how it is with other folks until — something turns up.

Mrs. Hale: Not having children makes less work — but it makes a quiet

house, and Wright out to work all day, and no company when he did

come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs. Peters?

Mrs. Peters: Not to know him; I’ve seen him in town. They say he was a

good man.

Mrs. Hale: Yes — good; he didn’t drink, and kept his word as well as most,

I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just

to pass the time of day with him — (Shivers.) Like a raw wind that

gets to the bone. (Pauses, her eye falling on the cage.) I should think she

would ’a’ wanted a bird. But what do you suppose went with it?

Mrs. Peters: I don’t know, unless it got sick and died. (She reaches over and

swings the broken door, swings it again, both women watch it.)

Mrs. Hale: You weren’t raised round here, were you? (Mrs. Peters shakes her

head.) You didn’t know — her?

Mrs. Peters: Not till they brought her yesterday.

Mrs. Hale: She — come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself —

real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and — ﬂuttery. How — she —

did — change. (Silence: then as if struck by a happy thought and relieved to

get back to everyday things.) Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don’t you

take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind.

Mrs. Peters: Why, I think that’s a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale. There couldn’t

possibly be any objection to it could there? Now, just what would I

take? I wonder if her patches are in here — and her things. (They look

in the sewing basket.)

Mrs. Hale: Here’s some red. I expect this has got sewing things in it. (Brings

out a fancy box.) What a pretty box. Looks like something somebody

would give you. Maybe her scissors are in here. (Opens box. Suddenly

puts her hand to her nose.) Why — (Mrs. Peters bends nearer, then turns her

face away.) There’s something wrapped up in this piece of silk.

Mrs. Peters: Why, this isn’t her scissors.

Mrs. Hale (lifting the silk): Oh, Mrs. Peters — it’s — (Mrs. Peters bends closer.)

Mrs. Peters: It’s the bird.

Mrs. Hale (jumping up): But, Mrs. Peters — look at it! Its neck! Look at its

neck! It’s all — other side to.

Mrs. Peters: Somebody — wrung — its — neck. (Their eyes meet. A look of

growing comprehension, of horror. Steps are heard outside. Mrs. Hale slips

box under quilt pieces, and sinks into her chair. Enter Sheriff and County

County Attorney (as one turning from serious things to little pleasantries): Well,

ladies, have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?

Mrs. Peters: We think she was going to — knot it.

County Attorney: Well, that’s interesting, I’m sure. (Seeing the bird-cage.)

Has the bird ﬂ own?

Mrs. Hale (putting more quilt pieces over the box): We think the — cat got it.

County Attorney (preoccupied): Is there a cat? (Mrs. Hale glances in a quick

covert way at Mrs. Peters.)

Mrs. Peters: Well, not now. They’re superstitious, you know. They leave.

County Attorney (to Sheriff Peters, continuing an interrupted conversation): No

sign at all of anyone having come from the outside. Their own rope.

Now let’s go up again and go over it piece by piece. (They start upstairs.)

It would have to have been someone who knew just the — (Mrs. Peters

sits down. The two women sit there not looking at one another, but as if peer-

ing into something and at the same time holding back. When they talk now it

is in the manner of feeling their way over strange ground, as if afraid of what

they are saying, but as if they cannot help saying it.)

Mrs. Hale: She liked the bird. She was going to bury it in that pretty box.

Mrs. Peters (in a whisper): When I was a girl — my kitten — there was a boy

took a hatchet, and before my eyes — and before I could get there —

(Covers her face an instant.) If they hadn’t held me back I would have —

(catches herself, looks upstairs where steps are heard, falters weakly) — hurt

him.

Mrs. Hale (with a slow look around her): I wonder how it would seem never

to have had any children around. (Pause.) No, Wright wouldn’t like

the bird — a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too.

Mrs. Peters (moving uneasily): We don’t know who killed the bird.

Mrs. Hale: I knew John Wright.

Mrs. Peters: It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs.

Hale. Killing a man while he slept, slipping a rope around his neck

that choked the life out of him.

Mrs. Hale: His neck. Choked the life out of him. (Her hand goes out and

rests on the bird-cage.)

Mrs. Peters (with rising voice): We don’t know who killed him. We don’t know.

Mrs. Hale (her own feeling not interrupted): If there’d been years and years

of nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful — still, after

the bird was still.

Mrs. Peters (something within her speaking): I know what stillness is. When

we homesteaded in Dakota, and my ﬁrst baby died — after he was

two years old, and me with no other then —

Mrs. Hale (moving): How soon do you suppose they’ll be through look-

ing for the evidence?

Mrs. Peters: I know what stillness is. (Pulling herself back.) The law has got

to punish crime, Mrs. Hale.

Mrs. Hale (not as if answering that): I wish you’d seen Minnie Foster when

she wore a white dress with blue ribbons and stood up there in the

choir and sang. (A look around the room.) Oh, I wish I’d come over here

once in a while! That was a crime! That was a crime! Who’s going to

punish that?

Mrs. Peters (looking upstairs): We mustn’t — take on.

Mrs. Hale: I might have known she needed help! I know how things

can be — for women. I tell you, it’s queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close

together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things —

it’s all just a different kind of the same thing. (Brushes her eyes, notic-

ing the bottle of fruit, reaches out for it.) If I was you I wouldn’t tell her

her fruit was gone. Tell her it ain’t. Tell her it’s all right. Take this in

to prove it to her. She — she may never know whether it was broke

or not.

Mrs. Peters (takes the bottle, looks about for something to wrap it in; takes pet-

ticoat from the clothes brought from the other room, very nervously begins

winding this around the bottle. In a false voice): My, it’s a good thing the

men couldn’t hear us. Wouldn’t they just laugh! Getting all stirred

up over a little thing like a — dead canary. As if that could have any-

thing to do with — with — wouldn’t they laugh! (The men are heard

coming down stairs.)

Mrs. Hale (under her breath): Maybe they would — maybe they wouldn’t.

County Attorney: No, Peters, it’s all perfectly clear except a reason for

doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was

some deﬁnite thing. Something to show — something to make a story

about — a thing that would connect up with this strange way of doing

it — (The women’s eyes meet for an instant. Enter Hale from outer door.)

Hale: Well, I’ve got the team around. Pretty cold out there.

County Attorney: I’m going to stay here a while by myself. (To the Sheriff.)

You can send Frank out for me, can’t you? I want to go over every-

thing. I’m not satisﬁed that we can’t do better.

Sheriff: Do you want to see what Mrs. Peters is going to take in? (The Law-

yer goes to the table, picks up the apron, laughs.)

County Attorney: Oh, I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies

have picked out. (Moves a few things about, disturbing the quilt pieces

which cover the box. Steps back.) No, Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervis-

ing. For that matter a sheriff’s wife is married to the law. Ever think

of it that way, Mrs. Peters?

Mrs. Peters: Not — just that way.

Sheriff (chuckling): Married to the law. (Moves toward the other room.) I

just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a

look at these windows.

County Attorney (scofﬁngly): Oh, windows!

Sheriff: We’ll be right out, Mr. Hale. (Hale goes outside. The Sheriff follows

the County Attorney into the other room. Then Mrs. Hale rises, hands tight

together, looking intensely at Mrs. Peters, whose eyes make a slow turn,

ﬁnally meeting Mrs. Hale’s. A moment Mrs. Hale holds her, then her own

eyes point the way to where the box is concealed. Suddenly Mrs. Peters

throws back quilt pieces and tries to put the box in the bag she is wearing.

It is too big. She opens box, starts to take bird out, cannot touch it, goes to

pieces, stands there helpless. Sound of a knob turning in the other room. Mrs.

Hale snatches the box and puts it in the pocket of her big coat. Enter County

Attorney and Sheriff.)

County Attorney (facetiously): Well, Henry, at least we found out that she

was not going to quilt it. She was going to — what is it you call it,

ladies?

Mrs. Hale (her hand against her pocket): We call it — knot it, Mr. Henderson.

Curtain

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