Selected Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor: "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Although the old woman lived in this desolate spot with only her daughter and she had never seen Mr. Shiftlet before, she could tell, even from a distance, that he was a tramp and no one to be afraid of.

His left coat sleeve was folded up to show there was only half an arm in it and his gaunt figure listed slightly to the side as if the breeze were pushing him.

He came on, at an amble, up her road, his face turned toward the sun which appeared to be balancing itself on the peak of a small mountain.

Mr. Shiftlet stopped just inside the yard and set his box on the ground and tipped his hat at her as if she were not in the least afflicted; then he turned toward the old woman and swung the hat all the way off.

He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.

"Lady," he said in a firm nasal voice, "I'd give a fortune to live where I could see me a sun do that every evening."

"I don't know nothing about you," the old woman muttered, irked.

Maybe the best I can tell you is, I'm a man; but listen lady," he said and paused and made his tone more ominous still, "what is a man?"

He had been a gospel singer, a foreman on the railroad, an assistant in an undertaking parlor, and he had come over the radio for three months with Uncle Roy and his Red Creek Wranglers.

The daughter was leaning very far down, hanging her head almost between her knees, watching him through a triangular door she had made in her overturned hair; and she suddenly fell in a heap on the floor and began to whimper.

I'm a man," he said with a sullen dignity, "even if I ain't a whole one.

I got," he said, tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he was going to say, "a moral intelligence!" and his face pierced out of the darkness into a shaft of doorlight and he stared at her as if he were astonished himself at this impossible truth.

"I told you you could hang around and work for food," she said, "if you don't mind sleeping in that car yonder."

He had not been around a week before the change he had made in the place was apparent.

She was ravenous for a son‑in‑law.

With a volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce and stately way.

Mr. Shiftlet was in the driver's seat, sitting very erect.

He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead.

In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet's smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire.

"I'll give you fifteen dollars for a week‑end trip," the old woman said in a crabbed voice.

He looked morose and bitter as if he had been insulted while someone held him.

Every now and then her placid expression was changed by a sly isolated little thought like a shoot of green in the desert.

Tears began to seep sideways out of her eyes and run along the dirty creases in her face.

Although the car would go only thirty miles an hour, Mr. Shiftlet imagined a terrific climb and dip and swerve that went entirely to his head so that he forgot his morning bitterness.

The late afternoon had grown hot and sultry and the country had flattened out.

Mr. Shiftlet felt oppressed.

"Son," he said after a minute, "I got the best old mother in the world so I reckon you only got the second best."

Son," he said, "I never rued a day in my life like the one I rued when I left that old mother of mine."

Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him.

After a few minutes there was a guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin‑can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet's car.