The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor

look? I know what’s behind it.”
    “What’s behind it?”
    “Nothing. He’s full of nothing.”
    “He knows a heap,” the boy said. “I don’t reckon it’s anything he don’t know.”
    “He don’t know it’s anything he can’t know,” the old man said. “That’s his trouble. He thinks if it’s something he can’t know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same. And if you were to go there, the first thing he would do would be to test your head and tell you what you were thinking and howcome you were thinking it and what you ought to be thinking instead. And before long you wouldn’t belong to your self no more, you would belong to him.”
    The boy had no intention of allowing this to happen. He knew enough about the schoolteacher to be on his guard. He knew two complete histories, the history of the world, beginning with Adam, and the history of the schoolteacher, beginning with his mother, old Tarwater’s own and only sister who had run away from Powderhead when she was eighteen years old and had become—the old man said he would mince no words, even with a child—a whore, until she had found a man by the name of Rayber who was willing to marry one. At least once a week, beginning at the beginning, the old man had reviewed this history through to the end.
    His sister and this Rayber had brought two children into the world, one the schoolteacher and one a girl who had turned out to be Tarwater’s mother and who, the old man said, had followed in the natural footsteps of her own mother, being already a whore by the time she was eighteen.
    The old man had a great deal to say about Tarwater’s conception, for the schoolteacher had told him that he himself had got his sister this first (and last) lover because he thought it would contribute to her self-confidence. The old man would say this, imitating the schoolteacher’s voice and making it sillier than the boy felt it probably was. The old man was thrown into a fury of exasperation that there was not enough scorn in the world to cast upon this idiocy. Finally he would give up trying. The lover had shot himself after the accident, which was a relief to the schoolteacher for he wanted to bring up the baby himself.
    The old man said that with the devil having such a heavy role in his beginning, it was little wonder that he should have an eye on the boy and keep him under close surveillance during his time on earth, in order that the soul he had helped call into being might serve him forever in hell. “You are the kind of boy,” the old man said, “that the devil is always going to be offering to assist, to give you a smoke or a drink or a ride, and to ask you your bidnis. You had better mind how you take up with strangers. And keep your bidnis to yourself.” It was to foil the devil’s plans for him that the Lord had seen to his upbringing.
    “What line you going to get into?” Meeks asked.
    The boy didn’t appear to hear.
    Whereas the schoolteacher had led his sister into evil, with success, old Tarwater had made every attempt to lead his own sister to repentance, without success. Through one means or another, he had managed to keep up with her after she ran away from Powderhead; but even after she married, she would not listen to any word that had to do with her salvation. He had twice been thrown out of her house by her husband—each time with the assistance of the police because the husband was a man of no force—but the Lord had prompted him constantly to go back, even in the face of going to jail. When he could not get inside the house, he would stand outside it and shout and then she would let him in lest he attract the attention of the neighbors. The neighborhood children would gather to listen to him and she would have to let him in.
    It was not to be wondered at, the old man would say, that the schoolteacher was no better than he was with such a father as he had. The man, an insurance