“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 lives 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!’ “
“I never was a bad boy that I remember of, but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive…”
“Turn to the right, 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. Once 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.
“No’me,” he said, “It wasn’t no mistake. They had the papers on me.”
“You must have stolen something,” she said.
“Nobody had nothing I wanted… 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…”
from “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, posthumous winner of the Pulizer Prize
(this was the first short story assigned to me by my first creative writing teacher in College (Jayne Anne Phillips, at Humboldt State University) as well as my second teacher of same (Jim Galvin).
