The Violent Bear It Away

Flannery O'Connor

Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

Children are cursed with believing.

I only meant to drown him, the boy said. You're only born once. They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water. He shook his head violently as if to scatter his thoughts.

I had never read Flannery O'Connor but had her recommended to me by many people, almost always because she was Catholic. But I truly don't know what to say about The Violent Bear it Away. Like all Southern fiction for me, it feels as though I should live through a desert of some forty or fifty years before I read it, and come to it with a great weight of life and dry, yellow memory.
O'Connor's stories are deceivingly calm like summer afternoons in the South. They lull you into a lazy fog of simplicity, but lurking beneath is an intricate and delicately knit structure of thought and idea as complex as any metropolis. They are stories of 'and's rather than commas and yet these 'and's provide the same depth and intellectualism as commas but make it seem smoother and more droning.
As you may be able to gather, The Violent Bear it Away has left me dizzy and sweating and wishing I could sit in a rocking chair for the duration.