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Title: Marriage Is a Private Affair
Short story, 1973

Author(s): Chinua Achebe

Nigerian Writer ( 1930 – 2013 )

Other Names Used: Achebe, Albert Chinualumogu; Chinualumogu, Albert;

Source: Girls at War and Other Stories. Chinua Achebe. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1973.

p22.

Document Type: Short story

Text:

“Have you written to your dad yet?” asked Nene1 one afternoon as she sat with Nnaemeka in her
room at 16 Kasanga Street, Lagos.

“ No. I’ve been thinking about it. I think it’s better to tell him when I get home on leave!”

“But why? Your leave is such a long way off yet—six whole weeks. He should be let into our
happiness now.”

Nnaemeka was silent for a while, and then began very slowly as if he groped for his words: “I
wish I were sure it would be happiness to him.”

“Of course it must,” replied Nene, a little surprised. “Why shouldn’t it?”

“You have lived in Lagos all your life, and you know very little about people in remote parts of
the country.”

“That’s what you always say. But I don’t believe anybody will be so unlike other people that
they will be unhappy when their sons are engaged to marry.”

“Yes. They are most unhappy if the engagement is not arranged by them. In our case it’s
worse—you are not even an Ibo.”

This was said so seriously and so bluntly that Nene could not find speech immediately. In the
cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city it had always seemed to her something of a joke that a
person’s tribe could determine whom he married.

At last she said, “You don’t really mean that he will object to your marrying me simply on that
account? I had always thought you Ibos were kindly disposed to other people.”

“So we are. But when it comes to marriage, well, it’s not quite so simple. And this,” he added,
“is not peculiar to the Ibos. If your father were alive and lived in the heart of Ibibio-land he
would be exactly like my father.”

“I don’t know. But anyway, as your father is so fond of you, I’m sure he will forgive you soon
enough. Come on then, be a good boy and send him a nice lovely letter . . .”

“It would not be wise to break the news to him by writing. A letter will bring it upon him with a
shock. I’m quite sure about that.”

“All right, honey, suit yourself. You know your father.”

As Nnaemeka walked home that evening he turned over in his mind different ways of
overcoming his father’s opposition, especially now that he had gone and found a girl for him. He
had thought of showing his letter to Nene but decided on second thoughts not to, at least for the
moment. He read it again when he got home and couldn’t help smiling to himself. He
remembered Ugoye quite well, an Amazon of a girl who used to beat up all the boys, himself
included, on the way to the stream, a complete dunce at school.

I have found a girl who will suit you admirably—Ugoye Nweke, the eldest daughter of our
neighbor, Jacob Nweke. She has a proper Christian upbringing. When she stopped schooling
some years ago her father (a man of sound judgment) sent her to live in the house of a pastor
where she has received all the training a wife could need. Her Sunday school teacher has told
me that she reads her Bible very fluently. I hope we shall begin negotiations when you come
home in December.

On the second evening of his return from Lagos, Nnaemeka sat with his father under a cassia
tree. This was the old man’s retreat where he went to read his Bible when the parching December
sun had set and a fresh, reviving wind blew on the leaves.

“Father,” began Nnaemeka suddenly, “I have come to ask for forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness? For what, my son?” he asked in amazement.

“It’s about this marriage question.”

“Which marriage question?”

“I can’t—we must—I mean it is impossible for me to marry Nweke’s daughter.”

“Impossible? Why?” asked his father.

“I don’t love her.”

“Nobody said you did. Why should you?” he asked.

“Marriage today is different . . .”

“Look here, my son,” interrupted his father, “nothing is different. What one looks for in a wife
are a good character and a Christian background.”

Nnaemeka saw there was no hope along the present line of argument.

“Moreover,” he said, “I am engaged to marry another girl who has all of Ugoye’s good qualities,
and who . . .”

His father did not believe his ears. “What did you say?” he asked slowly and disconcertingly.

“She is a good Christian,” his son went on, “and a teacher in a girls’ school in Lagos.”

“Teacher, did you say? If you consider that a qualification for a good wife I should like to point
out to you, Emeka, that no Christian woman should teach. St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians
says that women should keep silence.” He rose slowly from his seat and paced forward and
backward. This was his pet subject, and he condemned vehemently those church leaders who
encouraged women to teach in their schools. After he had spent his emotion on a long homily he
at last came back to his son’s engagement, in a seemingly milder tone.

“Whose daughter is she, anyway?”

“She is Nene Atang.”

“What!” All the mildness was gone again. “Did you say Neneataga, what does that mean?”

“Nene Atang from Calabar. She is the only girl I can marry.” This was a very rash reply and
Nnaemeka expected the storm to burst. But it did not. His father merely walked away into his
room. This was most unexpected and perplexed Nnaemeka. His father’s silence was infinitely
more menacing than a flood of threatening speech. That night the old man did not eat.

When he sent for Nnaemeka a day later he applied all possible ways of dissuasion. But the young
man’s heart was hardened, and his father eventually gave him up as lost.

“I owe it to you, my son, as a duty to show you what is right and what is wrong. Whoever put
this idea into your head might as well have cut your throat. It is Satan’s work.” He waved his son
away.

“You will change your mind, Father, when you know Nene.”

“I shall never see her,” was the reply. From that night the father scarcely spoke to his son. He did
not, however, cease hoping that he would realize how serious was the danger he was heading for.
Day and night he put him in his prayers.

Nnaemeka, for his own part, was very deeply affected by his father’s grief. But he kept hoping
that it would pass away. If it had occurred to him that never in the history of his people had a
man married a woman who spoke a different tongue, he might have been less optimistic. “It has
never been heard,” was the verdict of an old man speaking a few weeks later. In that short
sentence he spoke for all of his people. This man had come with others to commiserate with
Okeke when news went round about his son’s behavior. By that time the son had gone back to
Lagos.

“It has never been heard,” said the old man again with a sad shake of his head.

“What did Our Lord say?” asked another gentleman. “Sons shall rise against their Fathers; it is
there in the Holy Book.”

“It is the beginning of the end,” said another.

The discussion thus tending to become theological, Madubogwu, a highly practical man, brought
it down once more to the ordinary level.

“Have you thought of consulting a native doctor about your son?” he asked Nnaemeka’s father.

“He isn’t sick,” was the reply.

“What is he then? The boy’s mind is diseased and only a good herbalist can bring him back to
his right senses. The medicine he requires is Amalile, the same that women apply with success to
recapture their husbands’ straying affection.”

“Madubogwu is right,” said another gentleman. “This thing calls for medicine.”

“I shall not call in a native doctor.” Nnaemeka’s father was known to be obstinately ahead of his
more superstitious neighbors in these matters. “I will not be another Mrs. Ochuba. If my son
wants to kill himself let him do it with his own hands. It is not for me to help him.”

“But it was her fault,” said Madubogwu. “She ought to have gone to an honest herbalist. She was
a clever woman, nevertheless.”

“She was a wicked murderess,” said Jonathan, who rarely argued with his neighbors because, he
often said, they were incapable of reasoning. “The medicine was prepared for her husband, it was
his name they called in its preparation, and I am sure it would have been perfectly beneficial to
him. It was wicked to put it into the herbalist’s food, and say you were only trying it out.”

Six months later, Nnaemeka was showing his young wife a short letter from his father:

It amazes me that you could be so unfeeling as to send me your wedding picture. I would have
sent it back. But on further thought I decided just to cut off your wife and send it back to you
because I have nothing to do with her. How I wish that I had nothing to do with you either.

When Nene read through this letter and looked at the mutilated picture her eyes filled with tears,
and she began to sob.

“Don’t cry, my darling,” said her husband. “He is essentially good-natured and will one day look
more kindly on our marriage.”

But years passed and that one day did not come.

For eight years, Okeke would have nothing to do with his son, Nnaemeka. Only three times
(when Nnaemeka asked to come home and spend his leave) did he write to him.

“I can’t have you in my house,” he replied on one occasion. “It can be of no interest to me where
or how you spend your leave—or your life, for that matter.”

The prejudice against Nnaemeka’s marriage was not confined to his little village. In Lagos,
especially among his people who worked there, it showed itself in a different way. Their women,
when they met at their village meeting, were not hostile to Nene. Rather, they paid her such
excessive deference as to make her feel she was not one of them. But as time went on, Nene
gradually broke through some of this prejudice and even began to make friends among them.
Slowly and grudgingly they began to admit that she kept her home much better than most of
them.

The story eventually got to the little village in the heart of the Ibo country that Nnaemeka and his
young wife were a most happy couple. But his father was one of the few people in the village
who knew nothing about this. He always displayed so much temper whenever his son’s name
was mentioned that everyone avoided it in his presence. By a tremendous effort of will he had
succeeded in pushing his son to the back of his mind. The strain had nearly killed him but he had
persevered, and won.

Then one day he received a letter from Nene, and in spite of himself he began to glance through
it perfunctorily until all of a sudden the expression on his face changed and he began to read
more carefully.

. . . Our two sons, from the day they learnt that they have a grandfather, have insisted on being
taken to him. I find it impossible to tell them that you will not see them. I implore you to allow
Nnaemeka to bring them home for a short time during his leave next month. I shall remain here
in Lagos . . .

The old man at once felt the resolution he had built up over so many years falling in. He was
telling himself that he must not give in. He tried to steel his heart against all emotional appeals. It
was a reenactment of that other struggle. He leaned against a window and looked out. The sky
was overcast with heavy black clouds and a high wind began to blow, filling the air with dust
and dry leaves. It was one of those rare occasions when even Nature takes a hand in a human
fight. Very soon it began to rain, the first rain in the year. It came down in large sharp drops and
was accompanied by the lightning and thunder which mark a change of season. Okeke was trying
hard not to think of his two grandsons. But he knew he was now fighting a losing battle. He tried

to hum a favorite hymn but the pattering of large raindrops on the roof broke up the tune. His
mind immediately returned to the children. How could he shut his door against them? By a
curious mental process he imagined them standing, sad and forsaken, under the harsh angry
weather—shut out from his house.

That night he hardly slept, from remorse—and a vague fear that he might die without making it
up to them.

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Achebe, Chinua. “Marriage Is a Private Affair.” Girls at War and Other Stories. Chinua Achebe.
New York: Fawcett Premier, 1973. 22+. LitFinder. Web. 6 Dec. 2013.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA264014233&v=2.1&u=lincclin_bwcc&it=r&p=
LITF&sw=w&asid=f9fab6b30d67e90a598f59db65d2596c

Gale Document Number: GALE|A264014233

Title: The Necklace

Short story

Author(s):

Guy de Maupassant

French Writer ( 1850 – 1893 )

Other Names Used: Maupassant, Henri Rene Albert Guy de;

Source: Little Masterpieces of Fiction. Ed. Hamilton Wright Mabie and Lionel Strachey. Vol. 5. New York:
Doubleday, Page & Company, 1904. p20.

Document Type: Short story

Full

Text:

Original Language: French

Text:

SHE was one of those pretty, charming girls who are sometimes, as if through the irony of fate, born into a family of clerks. She was
without dowry or expectations, and had no means of becoming known, appreciated, loved, wedded, by any rich or influential man; so
she allowed herself to be married to a small clerk belonging to the Ministry of Public Instruction. She dressed plainly because she
could not afford to dress well, and was unhappy because she felt she had dropped from her proper station, which for women is a
matter of attractiveness, beauty, and grace, rather than of family descent. Good manners, an intuitive knowledge of what is elegant,
nimbleness of wit, are the only requirements necessary to place a woman of the people on an equality with one of the aristocracy.

She fretted constantly, feeling all things delicate and luxurious to be her birthright. She suffered on account of the meagreness of her
surroundings, the bareness of the walls, the tarnished furniture, the ugly curtains; deficiencies which would have left any other woman
of her class untouched, irritated and tormented her. The sight of the little Breton peasant who did her humble housework engendered
hopeless regrets followed by fantastic dreams. She thought of a noiseless, hallowed ante-room, with Oriental carpets, lighted with tall
branching candlesticks of bronze and of two big, kneebreeched footmen, drowsy from the stoveheated air, dozing in great arm-chairs.
She thought of a long drawing-room hung with ancient brocade, of a beautiful cabinet holding priceless curios, of an alluring, scented
boudoir intended for five-o’clock chats with intimates, with men famous and courted, and whose acquaintance is longed for by all
women.

When she sat down to dinner, at the round table spread with a cloth three days old, opposite her husband who uncovered the tureen,
and exclaimed with ecstasy, “Ah, I like a good stew! I know nothing to beat this!” she thought of dainty dinners, of shining plate, of
tapestry which peopled the walls with human shapes, and with strange birds flying among fairy trees. And then she thought of
delicious viands served in costly dishes, and of murmured gallantries which you listen to with a comfortable smile while you are
eating the rose-tinted flesh of a trout or the wing of a quail.

She had no handsome gowns, no jewels—nothing, though these were her whole life; it was these that meant existence to her. She
would so have liked to please, to be thought fascinating, to be envied, to be sought out. She had a friend, a former schoolmate at the
convent, who was rich, but whom she did not like to go to see any more because she would come home jealous, covetous.

But one evening her husband returned home jubilant, holding a large envelope in his hand.

“Here is something for you,” he said.

She tore open the cover sharply, and drew out a printed card bearing these words: “The Minister of Public Instruction and Mme.
Georges Ramponneau request the honour of M. and Mme. Loisel’s company at the palace of the Ministry on Monday evening, January
18th.”

Instead of being delighted as her husband expected, she threw the invitation on the table with disgust, muttering, “What do you think I
can do with that?”

“But, my dear, I thought you would be pleased. You never go anywhere, and this is such a rare opportunity. I had hard work to get it.
Every one is wild to go: it is very select, and invitations to clerks are scarce. The whole official world will be there.”

She looked at him with a scornful eye, as she said petulantly, “And what have I to put on my back?” He had not thought of that. He
stammered, “Why, the dress you wear to the theatre; it looks all right to me.”

He stopped in despair, seeing his wife was crying. Two big tears rolled down from the corners of her eyes to the corners of her mouth.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” he faltered.

With great effort, she controlled herself, and replied coldly, while she dried her wet cheeks:

“Nothing, except that I have no dress, and, for that reason, cannot go to the ball. Give your invitation to some fellow-clerk whose wife
is better provided than I am.”

He was dumfounded, but replied:

“Come, Mathilde, let us see now—how much would a suitable dress cost; one you could wear at other times—something quite
simple?”

She pondered several moments, calculating, and guessing too, how much she could safely ask for without an instant refusal or
bringing down upon her head a volley of objections from her frugal husband.

At length she said hesitatingly, “I can’t say exactly, but I think I could do with four hundred francs.”

He changed colour because he was laying aside just that sum to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting next summer on the
plain of Nanterre, with several friends, who went down there on Sundays to shoot larks. Nevertheless, he said: “Very well, I will give
you four hundred francs. Get a pretty dress.”

The day of the ball drew near, and Mme. Loisel seemed despondent, nervous, upset, though her dress was all ready. One evening her
husband observed: “I say, what is the matter, Mathilde? You have been very queer lately.” And she replied, “It exasperates me not to
have a single ornament of any kind to put on. I shall look like a fright—I would almost rather stay at home.” He answered: “Why not
wear flowers? They are very fashionable at this time of the year. You can get a handful of fine roses for ten francs.”

But she was not persuaded. “No, it’s so mortifying to look poverty-stricken among women who are rich.”

Then her husband exclaimed: “How slow you are! Go and see your friend, Mme. Forestier, and ask her to lend you some jewels. You
know her well enough to do that.”

She gave an exclamation of delight: “True! I never thought of that!”

Next day she went to her friend and poured out her woes. Mme. Forestier went to a closet with a glass door, took out a large
jewel-box, brought it back, opened it, and said to Mme. Loisel, “Here, take your choice, my dear.”

She looked at some bracelets, then at a pearl necklace, and then at a Venetian cross curiously wrought of gold and precious stones. She
tried on the ornaments before the mirror, hesitated, was loath to take them off and return them. She kept inquiring, “Have you any
more?”

“Certainly, look for yourself. I don’t know what you want.”

Suddenly Mathilde discovered, in a black satin box, a magnificent necklace of diamonds, and her heart began to beat with excitement.
With trembling hands she took the necklace and fastened it round her neck outside her dress, becoming lost in admiration of herself as
she looked in the glass. Tremulous with fear lest she be refused, she asked, “Will you lend me this—only this?”

“Yes, of course I will.”

Mathilde fell upon her friend’s neck, kissed her passionately, and rushed off with her treasure.

The day of the ball arrived.

Mme. Loisel was a great success. She was prettier than them all, lovely, gracious, smiling, and wild with delight. All the men looked
at her, inquired her name, tried to be introduced; all the officials of the Ministry wanted a waltz—even the minister himself noticed
her. She danced with abandon, with ecstasy, intoxicated with joy, forgetting everything in the triumph of her beauty, in the radiance of
her success, in a kind of mirage of bliss made up of all this worship, this adulation, of all these stirring impulses, and of that realisation
of perfect surrender, so sweet to the sould of woman.

She left about four in the morning.

Since midnight her husband had been sleeping in a little deserted anteroom with three other men whose wives were enjoying

themselves. He threw over her shoulders the wraps he had brought, ordinary, everyday garments, contrasting sorrily with her elegant
ball dress. She felt this, and wanted to get away so as not to be seen by the other women, who were putting on costly furs.

Loisel detained her: “Wait a little; you will catch cold outside; I will go and call a cab.”

But she would not listen to him, and hurried down-stairs. When they reached the street they could not find a carriage, and they began
to look for one, shouting to the cabmen who were passing by. They went down toward the river in desperation, shivering with cold. At
last they found on the quays one of those antiquated, all-night broughams, which, in Paris, wait till after dark before venturing to
display their dilapidation. It took them to their door in the Rue des Martyrs, and once more, wearily, they climbed the stairs.

Now all was over for her; as for him, he remembered that he must be at his office at ten o’clock. She threw off her cloak before the
glass, that she might behold herself once more in all her magnificence. Suddenly she uttered a cry of dismay—the necklace was gone!

Her husband, already half-undressed, called out, “Anything wrong?”

She turned wildly toward him: “I have—I have—I’ve lost Mme. Forestier’s necklace!”

He stood aghast: “Where? When? You haven’t!”

They looked in the folds of her dress, in the folds of her cloak, in her pocket, everywhere. They could not find it.

“Are you sure,” he said, “that you had it on when you left the ball?”

“Yes; I felt it in the corridor of the palace.”

“But if you had lost it in the street, we should have heard it fall. It must be in the cab.”

“No doubt. Did you take his number?”

“No. And didn’t you notice it either?”

“No.”

They looked at each other, terror-stricken. At last Loisel put on his clothes.

“I shall go back on foot,” he said, “over the whole route we came by, to see if I can’t find it.”

He went out, and she sat waiting in her ball dress, too dazed to go to bed, cold, crushed, lifeless, unable to think. Her husband came
back at seven o’clock. He had found nothing. He went to Police Headquarters, to the newspaper office—where he advertised a reward.
He went to the cab companies—to every place, in fact, that seemed at all hopeful.

She waited all day in the same awful state of mind at this terrible misfortune.

Loisel returned at night with a wan, white face. He had found nothing.

“Write immediately to your friend,” said he, “that you have broken the clasp of her necklace, and that you have taken it to be mended.
That will give us time to turn about.”

She wrote as he told her.

By the end of the week they had given up all hope. Loisel, who looked five years older, said, “We must plan how we can replace the
necklace.”

The next day they took the black satin box to the jeweller whose name was found inside. He referred to his books.

“You did not buy that necklace of me, Madame. I can only have supplied the case.”

They went from jeweller to jeweller, hunting for a necklace like the lost one, trying to remember its appearance, heartsick with shame
and misery. Finally, in a shop at the Palais Royal, they found a string of diamonds which looked to them just like the other. The price
was forty thousand francs, but they could have it for thirty-six thousand. They begged the jeweller to keep it three days for them, and
made an agreement with him that he should buy it back for thirty-four thousand francs if they found the lost necklace before the last of
February.

Loisel had inherited eighteen thousand francs from his father. He could borrow the remainder. And he did borrow right and left, asking

a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, assumed heavy obligations,
trafficked with money-lenders at usurious rates, and, putting the rest of his life in pawn, pledged his signature over and over again. Not
knowing how he was to make it all good, and terrified by the penalty yet to come, by the dark destruction which hung over him, by the
certainty of incalculable deprivations of body and tortures of sould, he went to get the new bauble, throwing down upon the jeweller’s
counter the thirty-six thousand francs.

When Mme. Loisel returned the necklace, Mme. Forestier said to her coldly: “Why did you not bring it back sooner? I might have
wanted it.”

She did not open the case—to the great relief of her friend.

Supposing she had! Would she have discovered the substitution, and what would she have said? Would she not have accused Mme.
Loisel of theft?

Mme. Loisel now knew what it was to be in want, but she showed sudden and remarkable courage. That awful debt must be paid, and
she would pay it.

They sent away their servant, and moved up into a garret under the roof. She began to find out what heavy housework and the
fatiguing drudgery of the kitchen meant. She washed the dishes, scraping the greasy pots and pans with her rosy rails. She washed the
dirty linen, the shirts and dish-towels, which dried upon the line. She lugged slops and refuse down to the street every morning,
bringing back fresh water, stopping on every landing, panting for breath. With her basket on her arm, and dressed like a woman of the
people, she haggled with the fruiterer, the grocer, and the butcher, often insulted, but getting every sou’s worth that belonged to her.

Each month notes had to be met, others renewed, extensions of time procured. Her husband worked in the evenings, straightening out
tradesmen’s accounts; he sat up late at night, copying manuscripts at five sous a page.

And this they did for ten years.

At the end of that time they had paid up everything, everything—with all the principal and the accumulated compound interest.

Mme. Loisel looked old now. She had become a domestic drudge, sinewy, rough-skinned, coarse. With towsled hair, tucked-up skirts,
and red hands, she would talk loudly while mopping the floor with great splashes of water. But sometimes, when alone, she sat near
the window, and she thought of that gay evening long ago, of the ball where she had been so beautiful, so much admired. Supposing
she had not lost the necklace—what then? Who knows? Who knows? Life is so strange and shifting. How easy it is to be ruined or
saved!

But one Sunday, going for a walk in the Champs elysées to refresh herself after her hard week’s work, she accidentally came upon a
familiar-looking woman with a child. It was Mme. Forestier, still young, still lovely, still charming.

Mme. Loisel became agitated. Should she speak to her? Of course. Now that she had paid, she would tell her all about it. Why not?
She went up to her.

“How do you do, Jeanne?”

The other, astonished at the easy manner toward her assumed by a plain housewife whom she did not recognise, said:

“But, Madame, you have made a mistake; I do not know you.”

“Why, I am Mathilde Loisel!”

Her friend gave a start.

“Oh, my poor Mathilde,” she cried, “how you have changed!”

“Yes; I have seen hard days since last I saw you; hard enough—and all because of you.”

“Of me? And why?”

“You remember the diamond necklace you loaned me to wear at the Ministry ball?”

“Yes, I do. What of it?”

“Well, I lost it!”

“But you brought it back—explain yourself.”

“I bought one just like it, and it took us ten years to pay for it. It was not easy for us who had nothing, but it is all over now, and I am
glad.”

Mme. Forestier stared.

“And you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?”

“Yes; and you never knew the difference, they were so alike.” And she smiled with joyful pride at the success of it all.

Mme. Forestier, deeply moved, took both her hands.

“Oh, my poor Mathilde! My necklace was paste. It was worth only about five hundred francs!”

RELATED INFORMATION
Biography:

Guy de Maupassant

Explanation of:

“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Maupassant, Guy de. “The Necklace.” Little Masterpieces of Fiction. Ed. Hamilton Wright Mabie and Lionel Strachey. Vol. 5. New
York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1904. 20. LitFinder. Web. 6 Dec. 2013.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com.db03.linccweb.org/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CLTF0000439862WK&v=2.1&u=lincclin_bwcc&it=r&p=LITF&
sw=w&asid=be880efd855a0c951043e25f707b1333

Gale Document Number: GALE|LTF0000439862WK

Title: A Good Man is Hard to Find

Short story, 1955

Author(s):

Flannery O’Connor

American Writer ( 1925 – 1964 )

Other Names Used: O’Connor, Mary Flannery;

Source: The World’s Best Short Stories: Anthology & Criticism. Vol. 3: Famous Stories. The World’s Best
Series Great Neck, NY: Roth Publishing, Inc., p34.

Document Type: Short story

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1990 Roth Publishing, Inc.

Original Language: English

Text:

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 himself 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 head-kerchief that had two points on the top like
rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. “The children 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 accidentally 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, Georgia. 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 watermelon, 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 grandmother
said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought CocaCola 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 BARBECUE. 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 disposition 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 pretended 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.

“Arn’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 let I 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 without 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 attact 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 getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your
screen door unlatched. 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 Toombsboro 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 wouldn’t take over twenty minutes.”

Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. “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 Wesley 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 in 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 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 battered 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
sitting, and didn’t speak. Then he turned his head and muttered something 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
staring, 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 away from the car and began to come down the
embankment, placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn’t slip. 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 do with that gun?”

“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 began suddenly, “we’re in a predicament! We’re in…”

The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. “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 thataway.”

“You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” the grandmother said and removed 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, ma’m,” 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 standing 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
forward 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
Wesley. “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
staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground. Hiram pulled Bailey 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 supporting 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 disappeared 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 making 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 anything 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 most everything. 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 sitting 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 some
thing 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 ceiling, 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 go there and 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 delight suddenly.

“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.

“Thow 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
grandmother 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 helplessly 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
nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She 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 you a 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 punishment 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
a heap 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 continued, “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 everything 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.”

RELATED INFORMATION
Biography:

Flannery O’Connor

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The World’s Best Short Stories: Anthology & Criticism. Vol. 3: Famous Stories.
Great Neck, NY: Roth Publishing, Inc., 1990. 34. The World’s Best Series. LitFinder. Web. 6 Dec. 2013.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com.db03.linccweb.org/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CLTF0000504203WK&v=2.1&u=lincclin_bwcc&it=r&p=LITF&
sw=w&asid=37a95c67c02d486822470df09d5264f6

Gale Document Number: GALE|LTF0000504203WK

Title: Everyday Use

Short story, 1994

Author(s): Walker, Alice (American novelist)

American Novelist ( 1944 – )

Other Names Used: Walker, Alice Malsenior;

Source: In Love & Trouble. Alice Walker. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1973. p47.

Document Type: Short story

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1973 Alice Walker

Original Language: English

Text:

for your grandmama

I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable
than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the
fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the
breezes that never come inside the house.

Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in comers, homely and ashamed of the bum scars down
her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand,
that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.

You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father,
tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to
curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other’s faces. Sometimes the mother and father
weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have
seen these programs.

Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and
soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny
Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her
eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.

In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and
overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all
day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog.
One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before
nightfall. But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter,
my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my
quick and witty tongue.

But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me
looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head
turned in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her
nature.

“How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know
she’s there, almost hidden by the door.

“Come out into the yard,” I say.

Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who
is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in
shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.

Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She’s a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it
that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair
smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected
in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as
she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the
ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.

I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised the money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school.
She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant
underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know.
Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.

Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d
made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker
for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.

I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask my why. in 1927 colored asked fewer
questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see well. She knows she is
not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passed her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest
face) and then I’ll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could
carry a tune. I was always better at a man’s job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in ’49. Cows are soothing and slow
and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way.

I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make
shingle roofs any more. There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not
square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture, too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees
it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where we “choose” to live, she will manage to come see us. But she
will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, “Mama, when did Dee ever have any friends?”

She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with
her they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them.

When she was courting Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but turned all her faultfinding power on him. He flew to
marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.

When she comes I will meet–but there they are!

Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. “Come back here,” I say. And she
stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe.

It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were
always neat-looking, as ff God himself had shaped them with a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a short, stocky man.
Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath, “Uhnnnh,” is
what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. “Uhnnnh.”

Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to
throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down
to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits.
The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie go “Uhnnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight
up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards
disappearing behind her ears.

“Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!” she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to his
navel is all grinning and he follows up with “Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right
up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her chin.

“Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of a push. You can see me trying to move a second or two before I make
it. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down
quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a
shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and
Maggie and the house. Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses me on the forehead.

Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold,
despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or
maybe he don’t know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.

“Well,” I say. “Dee.”

“No, Mama,” she says. “Not “Dee,” Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!”

“What happened to “Dee’?” I wanted to know.

“She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.”

“You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee”
after Dee was born.

“But who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

“I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said.

“And who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

“Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably
could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches.

“Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.”

“Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say.

“There I was not,” I said, “before ‘Dicie’ cropped up in our family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?”

He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like somebody inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero
sent eye signals over my head.

“How do you pronounce this name?” I asked.

“You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said Wangero.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call you, we’ll call you.”

“I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero.

“I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.”

Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two
or three times he told me to just call him Hakim-a-barber. I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn’t really think he was, so I
didn’t ask.

“You must belong to those beef-cattle peoples down the road,” I said. They said “Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but they
didn’t shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down hay. When the
white folks poisoned some of the herd the men stayed up all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the
sight.

Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style.” (They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t
ask, whether Wangero (Dee) had really gone and married him.)

We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn’t eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins
and corn bread, the greens and everything else. She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the
fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs.

“Oh, Mama!| she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,”
she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s butter
dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.” She jumped up from the table and went
over in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it clabber by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it.

“This churn top is what I need,” she said. “Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher, too.”

“Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?” asked the barber.

Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.

“Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so low you almost couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called
him Stash.”

“Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing. “I can use the chum top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,” she said,
sliding a plate over the chum, “and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.”

When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands. You didn’t even have to look close to
see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small
sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the
yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.

After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen
over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them
on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain.
In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarfelrs Paisley
shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore
in the Civil War.

“Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have these old quilts?”

I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed.

“Why don’t you take one or two of the others?” I asked. “These old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your
grandma pieced before she died.”

“No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine.”

“That’ll make them last better,” I said.

“That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand.
Imagine!” She held the quilts securely in her arms, stroking them.

“Some of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother handed down to her,” I said, moving up to touch the
quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so that I couldn’t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.

“Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom.

“The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas.” She gasped like a bee had stung
her.

“Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

“I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ‘era for long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to
bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told me they were old-fashioned, out
of style.

“But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper. “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years
they’d be in rags. Less than that!”

“She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how to quilt.”

Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!”

“Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them?”

“Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.

Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other.

“She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I can
‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts.”

I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and it gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was
Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt.
She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew
God to work.

When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in
church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me,
then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just
sat there on my bed with her mouth open.

“Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee.

But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber.

“You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.

“What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know.

“Your heritage,” she said. And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, “You ought to try to make something of yourself, too,
Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it.”

She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and her chin.

Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me
a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Walker, Alice (American novelist). “Everyday Use.” In Love & Trouble. Alice Walker. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1973. 47+. LitFinder. Web. 6 Dec. 2013.

Document URL
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sw=w&asid=5e5fb08b7c0fb04f66a479a4f98d4666

Gale Document Number: GALE|A264014338

Title: Lamb to the Slaughter

Short story, 1953

Author(s):

Roald Dahl

British Children’s writer ( 1916 – 1990 )

Source: The World’s Best Short Stories: Anthology & Criticism. Vol. 5: Mystery and Detection. The World’s
Best Series Great Neck, NY: Roth Publishing, Inc., p58.

Document Type: Short story

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1991 Roth Publishing, Inc.

Original Language: English

Text:

THE ROOM WAS WARM and clean, the curtains drawn, the two table lamps alight — hers and the one by the empty chair opposite.
On the sideboard behind her, two tall glasses, soda water, whiskey. Fresh ice cubes in the Thermos bucket. Mary Maloney was waiting
for her husband to come home from work. Now and again she would glance up at the clock, but without anxiety, merely to please
herself with the thought that each minute gone by made it nearer the time when he would come. There was a slow smiling air about
her, and about everything she did. The drop o the head as she bent over her sewing was curiously tranquil. Her skin — for this was her
sixth month with child — had acquired a wonderful translucent quality, the mouth was soft, and the eyes, with their new placid look,
seemed larger, darker than before. When the clock said ten minutes to five, she began to listen, and few moments later, punctually as
always, she heard the tires on the gravel outside, and the car door slamming, the footsteps passing the window, the key turning in the
lock. She laid aside her sewing, stood up, and went forward to kiss him as he came in. “Hullo darling,” she said. “Hullo,” he answered.
She took his coat and hung it in the closet. Then she walked over and made the drinks, a strongish one for him, a weak one for herself,
and soon she was back again in her chair with the sewing, and he in the other, opposite, holding the tall glass with both his hands,
rocking it so the ice cubes tinkled against the side. For her, this was always a blissful time of day. She knew he didn’t want to speak
much until the first drink was finished, and she, on her side, was content to sit quietly, enjoying his company after the long hours alone
in the house. She loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man, and to feel — almost as a sunbather feels the sun — that warm male
glow that came out of him to her when they were alone together. She loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, for the way he
came in a door, or moved slowly across the room with long strides. She loved the intent, far look in his eyes when they rested on her,
the funny shape of the mouth, and especially the way he remained silent about his tiredness, sitting still with himself until the whiskey
had taken some of it away, “Tired, darling?” “Yes,” he said. “I’m tired.” And as he spoke, he did an unusual thing. He lifted his glass
and drained it in one swallow although there was still half of it, at least half of it left. She wasn’t really watching him, but she knew
what he bad done because she heard the ice cubes falling back against the bottom of the empty glass when he lowered his arm. He
paused a moment, leaning forward in the chair, then he got up and went slowly over to fetch himself another. “I’ll get it!” she cried,
jumping up. “Sit down,” he said. When he came back, she noticed that the new drink was dark amber with the quantity of whiskey in
it. “Darling, shall I get your slippers?” “No.” She watched him as he began to sip the dark yellow drink, and she could see little oily
swirls in the liquid because it was so strong. “I think it’s a shame,” she said, “that when a policeman gets to be as senior as you, they
keep him walking about on his feet all day long.” He didn’t answer, so she bent her head again and went on with her sewing; but each
time he lifted the drink to his lips, she heard the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass. “Darling,” she said. “Would you like
me to get you some cheese? I haven’t made any supper because it’s Thursday.” “No,” he said. “If you’re too tired to eat out,” she went
on, “it’s still not too late. There’s plenty of meat and stuff in the freezer, and you can have it right here and not even move out of the
chair.” Her eyes waited on him for an answer, a smile, a little nod, but he made no sign. “Anyway,” she went on, “I’ll get you some
cheese and crackers first.” “I don’t want it,” he said. She moved uneasily in her chair, the large eyes still watching his face. “But you
must have supper. I can easily do it here. I’d like to do it. We can have lamb chops. Or pork. Anything you want. Everything’s in the
freezer.” “Forget it,” he said. “But darling, you must eat! I’ll fix it anyway, and then you can have it or not, as you like.” She stood up
and placed her sewing on the table by the lamp. “Sit down,” he said. “Just for a minute, sit down.” It wasn’t till then that she began to
get frightened. “Go on,” he said. “Sit down.” She lowered herself back slowly into the chair, watching him all the time with those
large, bewildered eyes. He had finished the second drink and was staring down into the glass, frowning. “Listen,” he said. “I’ve got
something to tell you.” “What is it, darling? What’s the matter?” He had now become absolutely motionless, and he kept his head
down so that the light from the lamp beside him fell across the upper part of his face, leaving the chin and mouth in shadow. She
noticed there was a little muscle moving near the comer of his left eye. “This is going to be a bit of a shock to you, I’m afraid,” he said.
“But I’ve thought about it a good deal and I’ve decided the only thing to do is tell you right away. I hope you won’t blame me too
much.” And he told her. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at most, and she sat very still through it all, watching him with a kind
of dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word. “So there it is,” he added. “And I know it’s kind of a bad
time to be telling you, but there simply wasn’t any other way. Of course I’ll give you money and see you’re looked after. But there

needn’t really be any fuss. I hope not anyway. It wouldn’t be very good for my job.” Her first instinct was not to believe any of it, to
reject it all. It occurred to her that perhaps he hadn’t even spoken, that she herself had imagined the whole thing. Maybe, if she went
about her business and acted as though she hadn’t been listening, then later, when she sort of woke up again, she might find none of it
had ever happened. I “I’ll get the supper,” she managed to whisper, and this time he didn’t stop her. When she walked across the room
she couldn’t feel her feet touching the floor. She couldn’t feel anything at all — except a slight nausea and a desire to vomit. Everything
was automatic now — down the steps to the cellar, the light switch, the deep freeze, the hand inside the cabinet taking hold of the first
object it met. She lifted it out, and looked at it. It was wrapped in paper, so she took off the paper and looked at it again. A leg of lamb.
All right then, they would have lamb for supper. She carried it upstairs, holding the thin bone-end of it with both her hands, and as she
went through the living-room, she saw him standing over by the window with his back to her, and she stopped. “For God’s sake,” he
said, hearing her, but not turning round. “Don’t make supper for me. I’m going out.” At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up
behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the
back of his head. She might just as well have hit him with a steel club. She stepped back a pace, waiting, and the funny thing was that
he remained standing there for at least four or five seconds, gently swaying. Then he crashed to the carpet. The violence of the crash,
the noise, the small table overturning, helped bring her out of the shock. She came out slowly, feeling cold and surprised, and she
stood for a while blinking at the body, still holding the ridiculous piece of meat tight with both hands. All right, she told herself. So
I’ve killed him. It was extraordinary, now, how clear her mind became all of a sudden. She began thinking very fast. As the wife of a
detective, she knew quite well what the penalty would be. That was fine. It made no difference to her. In fact, it would be a relief. On
the other hand, what about the child? What were the laws about murderers with unborn children? Did they kill them both — mother
and child? Or did they wait until the tenth month? What did they do? Mary Maloney didn’t know. And she certainly wasn’t prepared to
take a chance. She carried the meat into the kitchen, placed it in a pan, turned the oven on high, and shoved it inside. Then she washed
her hands and ran upstairs to the bedroom. She sat down before the mirror, tidied her hair, touched up her lips and face. She tried a
smile. It came out rather peculiar. She tried again. “Hullo Sam,” she said brightly, aloud. The voice sounded peculiar too. “I want some
potatoes please, Sam. Yes, and I think a can of peas.” That was better. Both the smile and the voice were coming out better now. She
rehearsed it several times more. Then she ran downstairs, took her coat, went out the back door, down the garden, into the street. It
wasn’t six o’clock yet and the lights were still on in the grocery shop. “Hullo Sam,” she said brightly, smiling at the man behind the
counter. “Why, good evening, Mrs. Maloney. How’re you?” “I want some potatoes please, Sam. Yes, and I think a can of peas.” The
man turned and reached up behind him on the shelf for the peas. “Patrick’s decided he’s tired and doesn’t want to eat out tonight,” she
told him. “We usually go out Thursdays, you know, and now he’s caught me without any vegetables in the house.” “Then how about
meat, Mrs. Maloney?” “No, I’ve got meat, thanks. I got a nice leg of lamb from the freezer.” “Oh.” “I don’t much like cooking it frozen,
Sam, but I’m taking a chance on it this time. You think it’ll be all right?” “Personally,” the grocer said, “I don’t believe it makes any
difference. You want these Idaho potatoes?” “Oh yes, that’ll be fine. Two of those.” “Anything else?” The grocer cocked his head on
one side, looking at her pleasantly. “How about afterwards? What you going to give him for afterwards?” “Well — what would you
suggest, Sam?” The man glanced around his shop. “How about a nice big slice of cheesecake? I know he likes that.” “Perfect,” she
said. “He loves it.” And when it was all wrapped and she had paid, she put on her brightest smile and said, “Thank you, Sam.
Goodnight.” “Goodnight, Mrs. Maloney. And thank you.” And now, she told herself as she hurried back, all she was doing now, she
was returning home to her husband and he was waiting for his supper; and she must cook it good, and make it as tasty as possible
because the poor man was tired; and if, when she entered the house, she happened to find anything unusual, or tragic, or terrible, then
naturally it would be a shock and she’d become frantic with grief and horror. Mind you, she wasn’t expecting to find anything. She was
just going home with the vegetables. Mrs. Patrick Maloney going home with the vegetables on Thursday evening to cook supper for
her husband. That’s the way, she told herself. Do everything right and natural. Keep things absolutely natural and there’ll be no need
for any acting at all. Therefore, when she entered the kitchen by the back door, she was humming a little tune to herself and smiling.
“Patrick!” she called. “How are you, darling?” She put the parcel down on the table and went through into the living room; and when
she saw him lying there on the floor with his legs doubled up and one arm twisted back underneath his body, it really was rather a
shock. All the old love and longing for him welled up inside her, and she ran over to him, knelt down beside him, and began to cry her
heart out. It was easy. No acting was necessary. A few minutes later she got up and went to the phone. She knew the number of the
police station, and when the man at the other end answered, she cried to him, “Quick! Come quick! Patrick’s dead!” “Who’s
speaking?” “Mrs. Maloney. Mrs. Patrick Maloney.” “You mean Patrick Maloney’s dead?” “I think so,” she sobbed. “He’s lying on the
floor and I think he’s dead. ” “Be right over,” the man said. The car came very quickly, and when she opened the front door, two
policemen walked in. She knew them both — she knew nearly all t men at that precinct — and she fell right into Jack Noonan’s arms,
weeping hysterically. He put her gently into a chair, then went over join the other one, who was called O’Malley, kneeling by the body.
“Is he dead?” she cried. “I’m afraid he is. What happened?” Briefly, she told her story about going out to the grocer and coming back to
find him on the floor. While she was talking, crying and talking, Noonan discovered a small patch of congealed blood on the dead
man’s head. He showed it to O’Malley, who got up at once and hurried to the phone. Soon, other men began to come into the house.
First a doctor, then two detectives, one of whom she knew by name. Later, a police photographer arrived and took pictures, and a man
who knew about fingerprints. There was a great deal of whispering and muttering beside the corpse, and the detectives kept asking her
a lot of questions. But they always treated her kindly. She told her story again, this time right from the beginning, when Patrick had
come in, and she was sewing, and he was tired, so tired he hadn’t wanted to go out for supper. She told how she’d put the meat in the
oven — “it’s there now, cooking” — and how she’d slipped out to the grocer for vegetables, and come back to find him lying on the
floor. “Which grocer?” one of the detectives asked. She told him, and he turned and whispered something to the other detective, who
immediately went outside into the street. In fifteen minutes he was back with a page of notes, and there was more whispering, and

through her sobbing she heard a few of the whispered phrases-“…acted quite normal … very cheerful … wanted to give him a good
supper … peas … cheesecake … impossible that she…” After a while, the photographer and the doctor departed and, two other men
came in and took the corpse away on a stretcher. Then the fingerprint man went away. The two detectives remained, and so did the two
policemen. They were exceptionally nice to her, and Jack Noonan asked if she wouldn’t rather go somewhere else, to her sister’s house
perhaps, or to his own wife, who would take care of her and put her up for the night. No, she said. She didn’t feel she could move even
a yard at the moment. Would they mind awfully if she stayed just where she was until she felt better? She didn’t feel too good at the
moment, she really didn’t. Then hadn’t she better lie down on the bed? Jack Noonan asked. No, she said. She’d like to stay right where
she was, in this chair. A little later perhaps, when she felt better, she would move. So they left her there while they went about their
business, searching the house. Occasionally one of the detectives asked her another question. Sometimes Jack Noonan spoke at her
gently as he passed by. Her husband, he told her, had been killed by a blow on the back of the head administered with a heavy blunt
instrument, almost certainly a large piece of metal. They were looking for the weapon. The murderer may have taken it with him, but
on the other hand he may’ve thrown it away or hidden it somewhere on the premises. “It’s the old story,” he said. “Get the weapon, and
you’ve got the man.” Later, one of the detectives came up and sat beside her. Did she know, he asked, of anything in the house that
could’ve been used as the weapon? Would she mind having a look around to see if anything was missing — a very big spanner, for
example, or a heavy metal vase. They didn’t have any heavy metal vases, she said. “Or a big spanner?” She didn’t think they had a big
spanner. But there might be some things like that in the garage. The search went on. She knew that there were other policemen in the
garden all around the house. She could hear their footsteps on the gravel outside, and sometimes she saw the flash of a torch through a
chink in the curtains, It began to get late, nearly nine she noticed by the clock on the mantle. The four men searching the rooms
seemed to be growing weary, a trifle exasperated. I “Jack,” she said, the next time Sergeant Noonan went by. “Would you mind giving
me a drink?” “Sure I’ll give you a drink. You mean this whiskey?” “Yes please. But just a small one. It might make me feel better.” He
banded her the glass. “Why don’t you have one yourself,” she said, “You must be awfully tired. Please do. You’ve been very good to
me.” “Well,” he answered. “It’s not strictly allowed, but I might take just a drop to keep me going.” One by one the others came in and
were persuaded to take a little nip of whiskey. They stood around rather awkwardly with the drinks in their hands, uncomfortable in
her presence, trying to say consoling things to her. Sergeant Noonan wandered into the kitchen, came out quickly and said, “Look,
Mrs. Maloney. You know that oven of yours is still on, and the meat still inside.” “Oh dear me!” she cried. “So it is!” “I better turn it
off for you, hadn’t I?” “Will you do that, Jack? Thank you so much.” When the sergeant returned the second time, she looked at him
with her large, dark, tearful eyes. “Jack Noonan,” she said. “Yes?” “Would you do me a small favor — you and these others?” “We can
try, Mrs. Maloney.” “Well,” she said. “Here you all are, and good friends of dear Patrick’s too, and helping to catch the man who killed
him. You must be terribly hungry by now because it’s long past your suppertime, and I know Patrick would never forgive me, God
bless his soul, if I allowed you to remain in his house without offering you decent hospitality. Why don’t you eat up that lamb that’s in
the oven? It’ll be cooked just right by now.” “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sergeant Noonan said. “Please,” she begged. “Please eat it.
Personally I couldn’t touch a thing, certainly not what’s been in the house when he was here. But it’s all right for you. It’d be a favor to
me if you’d eat it up. Then you can go on with your work again afterwards.” There was a good deal of hesitating among the four
policemen, but they were clearly hungry, and in the end they were persuaded to go into the kitchen and help themselves. The woman
stayed where she was, listening to them through the open door, and she could hear them speaking among themselves, their voices thick
and sloppy because their mouths were full of meat. “Have some more, Charlie?” “No. Better not finish it.” “She wants us to finish it.
She said so. Be doing her a favor.” “Okay then. Give me some more.” “That’s a hell of a big club the guy must’ve used to hit poor
Patrick,” one of them was saying. “The doc says his skull was smashed all to pieces just like from a sledgehammer.” “That’s why it
ought to be easy to find.” “Exactly what I say.” “Whoever done it, they’re not going to be carrying a thing like that around with them
longer than they need.” One of them belched. “Personally, I think it’s right here on the premises.” “Probably right under our very
noses. What you think, Jack?” And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle. Copyright (c) 1953 by Roald Dahl. Reprinted
from Someone Like You by Roald Dahl. Used by permission of David Higham Associates.

RELATED INFORMATION
Biography:

Roald Dahl

Explanation of:

“Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Dahl, Roald. “Lamb to the Slaughter.” The World’s Best Short Stories: Anthology & Criticism. Vol. 5: Mystery and Detection. Great
Neck, NY: Roth Publishing, Inc., 1991. 58. The World’s Best Series. LitFinder. Web. 6 Dec. 2013.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com.db03.linccweb.org/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CLTF0000153117WK&v=2.1&u=lincclin_bwcc&it=r&p=LITF&
sw=w&asid=97f9ff55be9d712ecec63f736385c26a

Gale Document Number: GALE|LTF0000153117WK

Title: A Jury of Her Peers

Short story, 1917

Author(s):

Susan Glaspell

American Writer ( 1882 ? – 1948 )

Other Names Used: Glaspell, Susan Keating;

Source: The Best Short Stories of 1917 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story. Ed. Edward J. O’Brien.
Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1918. p256.

Document Type: Short story

Full

Text:

Original Language: English

Text:

When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly
wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away — it was
probably further from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen
was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.

She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came
running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too — adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scary and wanted
another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.

“Martha!” now came her husband’s impatient voice. “Don’t keep folks waiting out here in the cold.”

She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.

After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs.
Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn’t seem like a sheriff’s wife. She was
small and thin and didn’t have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, sheriff’s wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice
that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn’t look like a sheriff’s wife, Peters made it up
in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff — a heavy man with a big voice, who
was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals.
And right there it came into Mrs. Hale’s mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to
the Wrights’ now as a sheriff.

“The country’s not very pleasant this time of year,” Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the
men.

Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make
her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a
hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened.
The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it.

“I’m glad you came with me,” Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door.

Even after she had her foot on the door-step, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that
threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn’t cross it now was simply because she hadn’t crossed it before. Time and time again it
had been in her mind, “I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster” — she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years
she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could
come.

The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around
and said, “Come up to the fire, ladies.”

Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. “I’m not — cold,” she said.

And so the two women stood by the door, at first not even so much as looking around the kitchen.

The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them,
and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that
seemed to mark the beginning of official business. “Now, Mr. Hale,” he said in a sort of semi-official voice, “before we move things
about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning.”

The county attorney was looking around the kitchen.

“By the way,” he said, “has anything been moved?” He turned to the sheriff. “Are things just as you left them yesterday?”

Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker a little to one side of the kitchen table.

“It’s just the same.”

“Somebody should have been left here yesterday,” said the county attorney.

“Oh — yesterday,” returned the sheriff, with a little gesture as of yesterday having been more than he could bear to think of. “When I
had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy — let me tell you. I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get
back from Omaha by today, George, and as long as I went over everything here myself — ”

“Well, Mr. Hale,” said the county attorney, in a way of letting what was past and gone go, “tell just what happened when you came
here yesterday morning.”

Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often
wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that
would just make things harder for Minnie Foster. He didn’t begin at once, and she noticed that he looked queer — as if standing in that
kitchen and having to tell what he had seen there yesterday morning made him almost sick.

“Yes, Mr. Hale?” the county attorney reminded.

“Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes,” Mrs. Hale’s husband began.

Harry was Mrs. Hale’s oldest boy. He wasn’t with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday
and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn’t been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the
Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out. With all Mrs. Hale’s other emotions came the
fear now that maybe Harry wasn’t dressed warm enough — they hadn’t any of them realized how that north wind did bite.

“We come along this road,” Hale was going on, with a motion of his hand to the road over which they had just come, “and as we got in
sight of the house I says to Harry, ‘I’m goin’ to see if I can’t get John Wright to take a telephone.’ You see,” he explained to Henderson,
“unless I can get somebody to go in with me they won’t come out this branch road except for a price I can’t pay. I’d spoke to Wright
about it once before; but he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet — 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, and said all the
women-folks liked the telephones, and that in this lonesome stretch of road it would be a good thing — well, I said to Harry that that
was what I was going to say — though I said at the same time that I didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John
— ”

Now there he was! — saying things he didn’t need to say. Mrs. Hale tried to catch her husband’s eye, but fortunately the county
attorney interrupted with:

“Let’s talk about that a little later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that but, I’m anxious now to get along to just what happened when
you got here.”

When he began this time, it was very deliberately and carefully:

“I didn’t see or hear 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, louder, 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,” jerking a hand toward the door by which the two women stood. “and there, in that rocker” — pointing to it — “sat
Mrs. Wright.”

Everyone in the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale’s mind that that rocker didn’t look in the least like Minnie Foster
— the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the
chair sagged to one side.

“How did she — look?” the county attorney was inquiring.

“Well,” said Hale, “she looked — queer.”

“How do you mean — queer?”

As he asked it he took out a note-book and pencil. Mrs. Hale did not like the sight of that pencil. She kept her eye fixed on her
husband, as if to keep him from saying unnecessary things that would go into that note-book and make trouble.

Hale did speak guardedly, as if the pencil had affected him too.

“Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And kind of — done up.”

“How did she seem to feel about your coming?”

“Why, I don’t think she minded — one way or other. She didn’t pay much attention. I said, ‘Ho’ do, Mrs. Wright? It’s cold, ain’t it?’ And
she said. ‘Is it?’ — and went on pleatin’ at her apron.

“Well, I was surprised. She didn’t ask me to come up to the stove, or to sit down, but just set there, not even lookin’ at me. And 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 I see John?’ ‘No,’ says she — kind of dull like. ‘Ain’t he home?’
says I. Then she looked at me. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s home.’ ‘Then why can’t I see him?’ I asked her, out of patience with her now. ‘Cause
he’s dead’ says she, just as quiet and dull — and fell to pleatin’ her apron. ‘Dead?’ says, I, like you do when you can’t take in what
you’ve heard.

“She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin’ back and forth.

“‘Why — where is he?’ says I, not knowing what to say.

“She just pointed upstairs — like this” — pointing to the room above.

“I got up, with the idea of going up there myself. By this time I — didn’t know what to do. I walked from there to here; then I says:
‘Why, what did he die of?’

“‘He died of a rope around his neck,’ says she; and just went on pleatin’ at her apron.”

Hale stopped speaking, and stood staring at the rocker, as if he were still seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before.
Nobody spoke; it was as if every one were seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before.

“And what did you do then?” the county attorney at last broke the silence.

“I went out and called Harry. I thought I might — need help. I got Harry in, and we went upstairs.” His voice fell almost to a whisper.
“There he was — lying over the — ”

“I think I’d rather have you go into that upstairs,” the county attorney interrupted, “where you can point it all out. Just go on now with
the rest of the story.”

“Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. It looked — ”

He stopped, his face twitching.

“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 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’ at her apron. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You
don’t know?’ says Harry. ‘Weren’t you sleepin’ in the bed with him?’ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘but I was on the inside. ‘Somebody 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 may have 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 that weren’t our business; maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to
the coroner or the sheriff. So Harry went fast as he could over to High Road — the Rivers’ place, where there’s a telephone.”

“And what did she do when she knew you had gone for the coroner?” The attorney got his pencil in his hand all ready for writing.

“She moved from that chair to this one over here” — Hale pointed to a small chair in the corner — “and just sat there with her hands
held together and lookin 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.”

At the sound of a moving pencil the man who was telling the story looked up.

“I dunno — maybe it wasn’t scared,” he hastened: “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.”

He said that last with relief, and moved a little, as if relaxing. Everyone moved a little. The county attorney walked toward the stair
door.

“I guess we’ll go upstairs first — then out to the barn and around there.”

He paused and looked around the kitchen.

“You’re convinced there was nothing important here?” he asked the sheriff. “Nothing that would — point to any motive?”

The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself.

“Nothing here but kitchen things,” he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.

The county attorney was looking at the cupboard — a peculiar, ungainly structure, half closet and half cupboard, the upper part of it
being built in the wall, and the lower part just the old-fashioned kitchen cupboard. As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and
opened the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away sticky.

“Here’s a nice mess,” he said resentfully.

The two women had drawn nearer, and now the sheriff’s wife spoke.

“Oh — her fruit,” she said, looking to Mrs. Hale for sympathetic understanding. She turned back to the county attorney and explained:
“She worried about that when it turned so cold last night. She said the fire would go out and her jars might burst.”

Mrs. Peters’ husband broke into a laugh.

“Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder, and worrying about her preserves!”

The young attorney set his lips.

“I guess before we’re through with her she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about.”

“Oh, well,” said Mrs. Hale’s husband, with good-natured superiority, “women are used to worrying over trifles.”

The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke. The county attorney seemed suddenly to remember his manners
— and think of his future.

“And yet,” said he, with the gallantry of a young politician. “for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?”

The women did not speak, did not unbend. He went to the sink and began washing his hands. He turned to wipe them on the roller
towel — whirled it for a cleaner place.

“Dirty towels! Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?”

He kicked his foot against some dirty pans under the sink.

“There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm,” said Mrs. Hale stiffly.

“To be sure. And yet” — with a little bow to her — ‘I know there are some Dickson County farm-houses that do not have such roller
towels.” He gave it a pull to expose its full length again.

“Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men’s hands aren’t always as clean as they might be.

“Ah, loyal to your sex, I see,” he laughed. He stopped and gave her a keen look, “But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose
you were friends, too.”

Martha Hale shook her head.

“I’ve seen little enough of her of late years. I’ve not been in this house — it’s more than a year.”

“And why was that? You didn’t like her?”

“I liked her well enough,” she replied with spirit. “Farmers’ wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then — ” She looked
around the kitchen.

“Yes?” he encouraged.

“It never seemed a very cheerful place,” said she, more to herself than to him.

“No,” he agreed; “I don’t think anyone would call it cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the home-making instinct.”

“Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either,” she muttered.

“You mean they didn’t get on very well?” he was quick to ask.

“No; I don’t mean anything,” she answered, with decision. As she turned a little away from him, she added: “But I don’t think a place
would be any the cheerfuler for John Wright’s bein’ in it.”

“I’d like to talk to you about that a little later, Mrs. Hale,” he said. “I’m anxious to get the lay of things upstairs now.”

He moved toward the stair door, followed by the two men.

“I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does’ll be all right?” the sheriff inquired. “She was to take in some clothes for her, you know — and a
few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday.”

The county attorney looked at the two women they were leaving alone there among the kitchen things. “Yes — Mrs. Peters,” he said,
his glance resting on the woman who was not Mrs. Peters, the big farmer woman who stood behind the sheriff’s wife. “Of course Mrs.
Peters is one of us,” he said, in a manner of entrusting responsibility. “And keep your eye out, Mrs. Peters, for anything that might be
of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive — and that’s the thing we need.”

Mr. Hale rubbed his face after the fashion of a showman getting ready for a pleasantry.

“But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?” he said; and, having delivered himself of this, he followed the others
through the stair door.

The women stood motionless and silent, listening to the footsteps, first upon the stairs, then in the room above them.

Then, as if releasing herself from something strange. Mrs. Hale began to arrange the dirty pans under the sink, which the county
attorney’s disdainful push of the foot had deranged.

“I’d hate to have men comin’ into my kitchen,” she said testily — “snoopin’ round and criticizin’.”

“Of course it’s no more than their duty,” said the sheriff’s wife, in her manner of timid acquiescence.

“Duty’s all right,” replied Mrs. Hale bluffly; “but I guess that deputy sheriff that come out to make the fire might have got a little of
this on.” She gave 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.”

She looked around the kitchen. Certainly it was not “slicked up.” Her eye was held by a bucket of sugar on a low shelf. The cover was
off the wooden bucket, and beside it was a paper bag — half full.

Mrs. Hale moved toward it.

“She was putting this in there,” she said to herself — slowly.

She thought of the flour in her kitchen at home — half sifted, half not sifted. She had been interrupted, and had left things half done.
What had interrupted Minnie Foster? Why had that work been left half done? She made a move as if to finish it, — unfinished things
always bothered her, — and then she glanced around and saw that Mrs. Peters was watching her — and she didn’t want Mrs. Peters to
get that feeling she had got of work begun and then — for some reason — not finished.

“It’s a shame about her fruit,” she said, and walked toward the cupboard that the county attorney had opened, and got on the chair,
murmuring: “I wonder if it’s all gone.”

It was a sorry enough looking sight, but “Here’s one that’s all right,” she said at last. She held it toward the light. “This is cherries, too.”
She looked again. “I declare I believe that’s the only one.”

With a sigh, she got down from the chair, went to the sink, and wiped off the bottle.

“She’ll feel awful bad, after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer.

She set the bottle on the table, and, with another sigh, started to sit down in the rocker. But she did not sit down. Something kept her
from sitting down in that chair. She straightened — stepped back, and, half turned away, stood looking at it, seeing the woman who had
sat there “pleatin’ at her apron.”

The thin voice of the sheriff’s wife broke in upon her: “I must be getting those things from the front-room closet.” She opened the door
into the other room, started in, stepped back. “You coming with me, Mrs. Hale?” she asked nervously. “You — you could help me get
them.”

They were soon back — the stark coldness of that shut-up room was not a thing to linger in.

“My!” said Mrs. Peters, dropping the things on the table and hurrying to the stove.

Mrs. Hale stood examining the clothes the woman who was being detained in town had said she wanted.

“Wright was close!” she exclaimed, holding up a shabby black skirt that bore the marks of much making over. “I think maybe that’s
why she kept so much to herself. I s’pose she felt she couldn’t do her part; and then, you don’t enjoy things when you feel shabby. 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 twenty years ago.”

With a carefulness in which there was something tender, she folded the shabby clothes and piled them at one corner of the table. She
looked up at Mrs. Peters, and there was something in the other woman’s look that irritated her.

“She don’t care,” she said to herself. “Much difference it makes to her whether Minnie Foster had pretty clothes when she was a girl.”

Then she looked again, and she wasn’t so sure; in fact, she hadn’t at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that
shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things.

“This all you was to take in?” asked Mrs. Hale.

“No,” said the sheriffs wife; “she said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want, ” she ventured in her nervous little way, “for there’s
not much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. If you’re used to wearing an apron
— . She said they were in the bottom drawer of this cupboard. Yes — here they are. And then her little shawl that always hung on the
stair door.”

She took the small gray shawl from behind the door leading upstairs, and stood a minute looking at it.

Suddenly Mrs. Hale took a quick step toward the other woman.

“Mrs. Peters!”

“Yes, Mrs. Hale?”

“Do you think she — did it?’

A frightened look blurred the other thing in Mrs. Peters’ eyes.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, in a voice that seemed to shrink away from the subject.

“Well, I don’t think she did,” affirmed Mrs. Hale stoutly. “Asking for an apron, and her little shawl. Worryin’ about her fruit.”

“Mr. Peters says — .” Footsteps were heard in the room above; she stopped, looked up, then went on in a lowered voice: “Mr. Peters
says — it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech, and he’s going to make fun of her saying she didn’t — wake
up.”

For a moment Mrs. Hale had no answer. Then, “Well, I guess John Wright didn’t wake up — when they was slippin’ that rope under his
neck,” she muttered.

“No, it’s strange,” breathed Mrs. Peters. “They think it was such a — funny way to kill a man.”

She began to laugh; at sound of the laugh, abruptly stopped.

“That’s just what Mr. Hale said,” said Mrs. Hale, in a resolutely natural voice. “There was a gun in the house. He says that’s what he
can’t understand.”

“Mr. Henderson said, coming out, that what was needed for the case was a motive. Something to show anger — or sudden feeling.”

“Well, I don’t see any signs of anger around here,” said Mrs. Hale, “I don’t — ”

She stopped. It was as if her mind tripped on something. Her eye was caught by a dish-towel in the middle of the kitchen table. Slowly
she moved toward the table. One half of it was wiped clean, the other half messy. Her eyes made a slow, almost unwilling turn to the
bucket of sugar and the half empty bag beside it. Things begun — and not finished.

After a moment she stepped back, and said, in that manner of releasing herself:

“Wonder how they’re finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more red-up up there. You know,” — she paused, and feeling
gathered, — “it seems kind of sneaking; locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!”

“But, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff’s wife, “the law is the law.”

“I s’pose ’tis,” answered Mrs. Hale shortly.

She turned to the stove, saying something about that fire not being much to brag of. She worked with it a minute, and when she
straightened up she said aggressively:

“The law is the law — and a bad stove is a bad stove. How’d you like to cook on this?” — pointing with the poker to the broken lining.
She opened the oven door and started to express her opinion of the oven; but she was swept into her own thoughts, thinking of what it
would mean, year after year, to have that stove to wrestle with. The thought of Minnie Foster trying to bake in that oven — and the
thought of her never going over to see Minnie Foster — .

She was startled by hearing Mrs. Peters say: “A person gets discouraged — and loses heart.”

The sheriff’s wife had looked from the stove to the sink — to the pail of water which had been carried in from outside. The two women
stood there silent, above them the footsteps of the men who were looking for evidence against the woman who had worked in that
kitchen. That look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else, was in the eyes of the sheriff’s wife now. When
Mrs. Hale next spoke to her, it was gently:

“Better loosen up your things, Mrs. Peters. We’ll not feel them when we go out.”

Mrs. Peters went to the back of the room to hang up the fur tippet she was wearing. A moment later she exclaimed, “Why, she was
piecing a quilt,” and held up a large sewing basket piled high with quilt pieces.

Mrs. Hale spread some of the blocks on the table.

“It’s log-cabin pattern,” she said, putting several of them together, “Pretty, isn’t it?”

They were so engaged with the quilt that they did not hear the footsteps on the stairs. Just as the stair door opened Mrs. Hale was
saying:

“Do you suppose she was going to quilt it or just knot it?”

The sheriff threw up his hands.

“They wonder whether she was going to quilt it or just knot it!”

There was a laugh for the ways of women, a warming of hands over the stove, and then the county attorney said briskly:

“Well, let’s go right out to the barn and get that cleared up.”

“I don’t see as there’s anything so strange,” Mrs. Hale said resentfully, after the outside door had closed on the three men — “our taking
up our time with little things while we’re waiting for them to get the evidence. I don’t see as it’s anything to laugh about.”

“Of course they’ve got awful important things on their minds,” said the sheriff’s wife apologetically.

They returned to an inspection of the block for the quilt. Mrs. Hale was looking at the fine, even sewing, and preoccupied with
thoughts of the woman who had done that sewing, when she heard the sheriff’s wife say, in a queer tone:

“Why, look at this one.”

She turned to take the block held out to her.

“The sewing,” said Mrs. Peters, in a troubled way, “All the rest of them have been so nice and even — but — this one. Why, it looks as
if she didn’t know what she was about!”

Their eyes met — something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other.
A moment Mrs. Hale sat there, her hands folded over that sewing which was so unlike all the rest of the sewing. Then she had pulled a
knot and drawn the threads.

“Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?” asked the sheriff’s wife, startled.

“Just pulling out a stitch or two that’s not sewed very good,” said Mrs. Hale mildly.

“I don’t think we ought to touch things,” Mrs. Peters said, a little helplessly.

“I’ll just finish up this end,” answered Mrs. Hale, still in that mild, matter-of-fact fashion.

She threaded a needle and started to replace bad sewing with good. For a little while she sewed in silence. Then, in that thin, timid
voice, she heard:

“Mrs. Hale!”

“Yes, Mrs. Peters?”

“What do you suppose she was so — nervous about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Hale, as if dismissing a thing not important enough to spend much time on. “I don’t know as she was —
nervous. I sew awful queer sometimes when I’m just tired.”

She cut a thread, and out of the corner of her eye looked up at Mrs. Peters. The small, lean face of the sheriff’s wife seemed to have
tightened up. Her eyes had that look of peering into something. But next moment she moved, and said in her thin, indecisive way:

“Well, I must get those clothes wrapped. They may be through sooner than we think. I wonder where I could find a piece of paper —
and string.”

“In that cupboard, maybe,” suggested to Mrs. Hale, after a glance around.

One piece of the crazy sewing remained unripped. Mrs. Peter’s back turned, Martha Hale now scrutinized that piece, compared it with
the dainty, accurate sewing of the other blocks. The difference was startling. Holding this block made her feel queer, as if the
distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try and quiet herself were communicating themselves to her. Mrs.
Peters’ voice roused her.

“Here’s a birdcage,” she said. “Did she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?

“Why, I don’t know whether she did or not.” She turned to look at the cage Mrs. Peters was holding up. “I’ve not been here in so long.”
She sighed. “There was a man round 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 looked around the kitchen.

“Seems kind of funny to think of a bird here.” She half laughed — an attempt to put up a barrier. “But she must have had one — or why
would she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it.”

“I suppose maybe the cat got it,” suggested Mrs. Hale, resuming her sewing.

“No; she didn’t have a cat. She’s got that feeling some people have about cats — being afraid of them. When they brought her to our
house yesterday, my cat got in the room, and she was real upset and asked me to take it out.”

“My sister Bessie was like that,” laughed Mrs. Hale.

The sheriff’s wife did not reply. The silence made Mrs. Hale turn round. Mrs. Peters was examining the birdcage.

“Look at this door,” she said slowly. “It’s broke. One hinge has been pulled apart.”

Mrs. Hale came nearer.

“Looks as if someone must have been — rough with it.”

Again their eyes met — startled, questioning, apprehensive. For a moment neither spoke nor stirred. Then Mrs. Hale, turning away,
said brusquely:

“If they’re going to find any evidence, I wish they’d be about it. I don’t like this place.”

“But I’m awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale.” Mrs. Peters put the birdcage on the table and sat down. “It would be lonesome for
me — sitting here alone.”

“Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?” agreed Mrs. Hale, a certain determined naturalness in her voice. She had picked up the sewing, but now it
dropped in her lap, and she murmured in a different voice: “But I tell you what I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over
sometimes when she was here. I wish — I had.”

“But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale. Your house — and your children.”

“I could’ve come,” retorted Mrs. Hale shortly. “I stayed away because it weren’t cheerful — and that’s why I ought to have come. I” —
she looked around — “I’ve never liked this place. Maybe because it’s down in a hollow and you don’t see the road. I don’t know 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 — ” She did not
put it into words.

“Well, you mustn’t reproach yourself,” counseled Mrs. Peters. “Somehow, we just don’t see how it is with other folks till — something
comes up.”

“Not having children makes less work,” mused Mrs. Hale, after a silence, “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?”

“Not to know him. I’ve seen him in town. They say he was a good man.”

“Yes — good,” conceded John Wright’s neighbor grimly. “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 — .” She stopped, shivered a little. “Like a raw wind
that gets to the bone.” Her eye fell upon the cage on the table before her, and she added, almost bitterly: “I should think she would’ve
wanted a bird!”

Suddenly she leaned forward, looking intently at the cage. “But what do you s’pose went wrong with it?”

“I don’t know,” returned Mrs. Peters; “unless it got sick and died.”

But after she said it she reached over and swung the broken door. Both women watched it as if somehow held by it.

“You didn’t know — her?” Mrs. Hale asked, a gentler note in her voice.

“Not till they brought her yesterday,” said the sheriff’s wife.

“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.”

That held her for a long time. Finally, as if struck with a happy thought and relieved to get back to everyday things, she exclaimed:

“Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don’t you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind.”

“Why, I think that’s a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale,” agreed the sheriff’s wife, as if she too were glad to come into the atmosphere of a
simple kindness. “There couldn’t possibly be any objection to that, could there? Now, just what will I take? I wonder if her patches are
in here — and her things?”

They turned to the sewing basket.

“Here’s some red,” said Mrs. Hale, bringing out a roll of cloth. Underneath that was a box. “Here, maybe her scissors are in here — and
her things.” She held it up. “What a pretty box! I’ll warrant that was something she had a long time ago — when she was a girl.”

She held it in her hand a moment; then, with a little sigh, opened it.

Instantly her hand went to her nose.

“Why — !”

Mrs. Peters drew nearer — then turned away.

“There’s something wrapped up in this piece of silk,” faltered Mrs. Hale.

“This isn’t her scissors,” said Mrs. Peters, in a shrinking voice.

Her hand not steady, Mrs. Hale raised the piece of silk. “Oh, Mrs. Peters!” she cried. “It’s — ”

Mrs. Peters bent closer.

“It’s the bird,” she whispered.

“But, Mrs. Peters!” cried Mrs. Hale. “Look at it! Its neck — look at its neck! It’s all — other side to.”

She held the box away from her.

The sheriff’s wife again bent closer.

“Somebody wrung its neck,” said she, in a voice that was slow and deep.

And then again the eyes of the two women met — this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror.
Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met. And just then there was a sound at the
outside door.

Mrs. Hale slipped the box under the quilt pieces in the basket, and sank into the chair before it. Mrs. Peters stood holding to the table.
The county attorney and the sheriff came in from outside.

“Well, ladies,” said the county attorney, as one turning from serious things to little pleasantries, “have you decided whether she was
going to quilt it or knot it?”

“We think,” began the sheriff’s wife in a flurried voice, “that she was going to — knot it.”

He was too preoccupied to notice the change that came in her voice on that last.

“Well, that’s very interesting, I’m sure,” he said tolerantly. He caught sight of the birdcage.

“Has the bird flown?”

“We think the cat got it,” said Mrs. Hale in a voice curiously even.

He was walking up and down, as if thinking something out.

“Is there a cat?” he asked absently.

Mrs. Hale shot a look up at the sheriff’s wife.

“Well, not now,” said Mrs. Peters. “They’re superstitious, you know; they leave.”

She sank into her chair.

The county attorney did not heed her. “No sign at all of anyone having come in from the outside,” he said to Peters, in the manner of
continuing an interrupted conversation. “Their own rope. Now let’s go upstairs again and go over it, piece by piece. It would have to
have been someone who knew just the — ”

The stair door closed behind them and their voices were lost.

The two women sat motionless, not looking at each other, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When
they spoke now it was as if they were afraid of what they were saying, but as if they could not help saying it.

“She liked the bird,” said Martha Hale, low and slowly. “She was going to bury it in that pretty box.”

When I was a girl,” said Mrs. Peters, under her breath, “my kitten — there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes — before I
could get there — ” She covered her face an instant. “If they hadn’t held me back I would have” — she caught herself, looked upstairs
where footsteps were heard, and finished weakly — “hurt him.”

Then they sat without speaking or moving.

“I wonder how it would seem,” Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground — “never to have had any children
around?” Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years “No, Wright
wouldn’t like the bird,” she said after that — “a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too.” Her voice tightened.

Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.

“Of course we don’t know who killed the bird.”

“I knew John Wright,” was Mrs. Hale’s answer.

“It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff’s wife. “Killing a man while he slept — slipping a
thing round his neck that choked the life out of him.”

Mrs. Hale’s hand went out to the birdcage.

“We don’t know who killed him,” whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. “We don’t know.”

Mrs. Hale had not moved. “If there had been years and years of — nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful — still — after
the bird was still.”

It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.

“I know what stillness is,” she said, in a queer, monotonous voice. “When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died — after
he was two years old — and me with no other then — ”

Mrs. Hale stirred.

“How soon do you suppose they’ll be through looking for the evidence?”

“I know what stillness is,” repeated Mrs. Peters, in just that same way. Then she too pulled back. “The law has got to punish crime,
Mrs. Hale,” she said in her tight little way.

“I wish you’d seen Minnie Foster,” was the answer, “when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir
and sang.”

The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was
suddenly more than she could bear.

“Oh, I wish I’d come over here once in a while!” she cried. “That was a crime! Who’s going to punish that?”

“We mustn’t take on,” said Mrs. Peters, with a frightened look toward the stairs.

“I might ‘a’ known she needed help! 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! If it weren’t — why do you and I understand? Why do we know — what
we know this minute?”

She dashed her hand across her eyes. Then, seeing the jar of fruit on the table she reached for it and choked out:

“If I was you I wouldn’t tell her her fruit was gone! Tell her it ain’t. Tell her it’s all right — all of it. Here — take this in to prove it to
her! She — she may never know whether it was broke or not.”

She turned away.

Mrs. Peters reached out for the bottle of fruit as if she were glad to take it — as if touching a familiar thing, having something to do,
could keep her from something else. She got up, looked about for something to wrap the fruit in, took a petticoat from the pile of
clothes she had brought from the front room, and nervously started winding that round the bottle.

“My!” she began, in a high, false voice, “it’s a good thing the men couldn’t hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a —
dead canary.” She hurried over that. “As if that could have anything to do with — with — My, wouldn’t they laugh?”

Footsteps were heard on the stairs.

“Maybe they would,” muttered Mrs. Hale — “maybe they wouldn’t.”

“No, Peters,” said the county attorney incisively; “it’s all perfectly clear, except the 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 clumsy way of doing it.”

In a covert way Mrs. Hale looked at Mrs. Peters. Mrs. Peters was looking at her. Quickly they looked away from each other. The outer
door opened and Mr. Hale came in.

“I’ve got the team round now,” he said. “Pretty cold out there.”

“I’m going to stay here awhile by myself,” the county attorney suddenly announced. “You can send Frank out for me, can’t you?” he
asked the sheriff. “I want to go over everything. I’m not satisfied we can’t do better.”

Again, for one brief moment, the two women’s eyes found one another.

The sheriff came up to the table.

“Did you want to see what Mrs. Peters was going to take in?”

The county attorney picked up the apron. He laughed.

“Oh, I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out.”

Mrs. Hale’s hand was on the sewing basket in which the box was concealed. She felt that she ought to take her hand off the basket. She
did not seem able to. He picked up one of the quilt blocks which she had piled on to cover the box. Her eyes felt like fire. She had a
feeling that if he took up the basket she would snatch it from him.

But he did not take it up. With another little laugh, he turned away, saying:

“No; Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff’s wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs.
Peters?”

Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away.
When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

“Not — just that way,” she said.

“Married to the law!” chuckled Mrs. Peters’ husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney:

“I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows.”

“Oh — windows,” said the county attorney scoffingly.

“We’ll be right out, Mr. Hale,” said the sheriff to the farmer, who was still waiting by the door.

Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again — for one final moment — the
two women were alone in that kitchen.

Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes,
for the sheriff’s wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale
made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the
other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion or flinching.
Then Martha Hale’s eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the
other woman — that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour.

For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to
put it in her handbag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke — she could not touch
the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish.

There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff’s wife, and got it in the pocket
of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back into the kitchen.

“Well, Henry,” said the county attorney facetiously, “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’s hand was against the pocket of her coat.

“We call it — knot it, Mr. Henderson.”

RELATED INFORMATION
Biography:

Susan Glaspell

Explanation of:

A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Glaspell, Susan. “A Jury of Her Peers.” The Best Short Stories of 1917 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story. Ed. Edward J.
O’Brien. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1918. 256. LitFinder. Web. 6 Dec. 2013.

Document URL
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sw=w&asid=73a4314284ec782eeeaaecb64927e129

Gale Document Number: GALE|LTF0000242879WK

The depth and breadth of the response will be considered.

Grammar counts, too. When discussing literature, quote as needed

for support. As a general rule, your original response should be

thoughtful, thorough, and well developed. Your original response

needs to meet the minimum of 100 words.

1. “Marriage Is a Private Affair”

One of the issues explored in this story is the relationship between fathers and sons. What, specifically, do you think is being said about that relationship?

Find at least one quotation from the story that helps to support your answer and use proper MLA to cite it.

2. “Everyday Use”

Must post first. One of the issues explored in this story is the relationship between mothers and daughters. What, specifically, do you think is being said about that relationship? Find at least one quotation from the story that helps to support your answer and use proper MLA to cite it.

3. “A Jury of Her Peers”

One of the issues explored in this story is the way men and women see things differently. What, specifically, do you think is being said about that? Does the story argue that one sex is better at seeing things than the other? What allows one sex to see things and the other to overlook them? Find at least one quotation from the story that helps to support your answer and use proper MLA to cite it.

4. “Lamb to the Slaughter”

What does the domestic setting contribute to this story? What, specifically, do you think is being said about men and women? Find at least one quotation from the story that helps to support your answer and use proper MLA to cite it.

5. The Necklace”

One of the issues explored in this greed. What, specifically, do you think is being said about greed? Find at least one quotation from the story that helps to support your answer and use proper MLA to cite it.

6. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

How would you characterize the grandmother? How does the story’s setting – including its time period – inform your understanding of her and of what seems important to her? Find at least one quotation from the story that helps to support your answer and use proper MLA to cite it.