Selected Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor: "The Displaced Person"

About fifteen feet from the gesticulating group, she stopped and made her presence felt by training her gaze on the back of Mrs. McIntyre’s neck.

Her look first grazed the tops of the displaced people’s heads and then revolved downwards slowly, the way a buzzard glides and drops in the air until it alights on the carcass.

The priest’s homely red face hung over him, glowing with pleasure.

She turned herself in the direction of the barn, musing on this, her expression lofty and satisfied.

She turned herself in the direction of the barn, musing on this, her expression lofty and satisfied.

She approached the barn from an oblique angle that allowed her a look in the door before she could be seen herself.

He could work milking machines and he was scrupulously clean.

For people like herself, for people of gumption, it was a social occasion providing the opportunity to sing; but if she had ever given it much thought, she would have considered the devil the head of it and God the hanger-on.

“It is no man,” Mrs. Shortley said emphatically, “that works as hard as Chancey, or is as easy with a cow, or is more of a Christian,” and she folded her arms and her gaze pierced the distance.

Mrs. McIntyre bought a new drag harrow and a tractor with a power lift because she said, for the first time, she had someone who could handle machinery.

Mrs. McIntyre said, looking out over the red undulating ground.

He was silent, bending his knees precariously and edging the rake along the underside of the trough.

Finally he backed out with the wheelbarrow. “Judge say the devil he know is better than the devil he don’t,” he said in a clear mutter and trundled off.

This had been a naked granite cherub that the old man had seen in the city one day in a tombstone store window.

Her eyebrows, thin and fierce as a spider’s leg, had drawn together ominously and the deep vertical pit had plunged down from under the red bangs into the bridge of her nose.

The big cutter, with its monotonous roar, continued to shoot it pulverized into the wagon in a steady spurt of fodder.

By nightfall, the Displaced Person would have worked his way around and around until there would be nothing on either side of the two hills but the stubble, and down in the center, risen like a little island, the graveyard where the judge lay grinning under his desecrated monument.

Suddenly she lurched up and her voice fell across his brogue like a drill into a mechanical saw.

The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack.

She had not asked to be instructed but he instructed anyway, forcing a little definition of one of the sacraments or of some dogma into each conversation he had, no matter with whom.

She had not asked to be instructed but he instructed anyway, forcing a little definition of one of the sacraments or of some dogma into each conversation he had, no matter with whom.

She stood in the barn door, looking severely at the wet spotless floor and the dripping stanchions.

He complained in the grocery store and at the courthouse and on the street corner and directly to Mrs. McIntyre herself, for there was nothing underhanded about him.

She could not see his face, only his feet and legs and trunk sticking impudently out from the side of the tractor.