Mary Hood and the speed of grace: catching up with Flannery O'Connor

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Joy A. Farmer

Mr. Head ... heard himself say, "They ain't got enough real ones

here. They got to have an artificial one."[T]he boy nodded with a

strange shivering about his mouth, and said, "Let's go home before

we get ourselves lost again." (213)

The counterpart of the lawn ornament in "How Far She Went" is the grandmother's little dog, whose death reconciles the two women. The silver bubbles that rise from his fur suggest the enormous cost of drowning him; the grandmother's subsequent behavior attests to that cost: Dropping to her knees, she murmurs a trinity of "Oh honeys," "maybe all three times for the dog, maybe once for each of them" (77)--the dog plus Sylvie and the granddaughter. However, when the girl says, "I'm sorry," the grandmother replies, "It was him or you" (77), acknowledging a deep feeling for the child that neither has suspected. The woman's act of extreme sacrifice has enormous implications for them both. Not only does it impress upon the girl the reality of the evil with which she has so blithely flirted and the wages of sin, but it also proves to the grandmother the existence of a love that redeems all human wickedness, from the girl's recent disobedience to Sylvie's spiteful pregnancy to the grandmother's "sinful fumble of flesh" (70) so many years ago. The result is a dissolving of the women's differences and the beginning of understanding: "They saw each other as well as they could in that failing light, in any light" (77). When they start for home, they are unified:

The girl walked close behind her, exactly where she walked,

matching her pace, matching her stride, close enough to put her

hand forth (if the need arose) and touch her granny's back where

the faded voile was clinging damp, the merest gauze between their

wounds. (77)

That these wounds will eventually heal for the girl and her grandmother just as they heal for Mr. Head and Nelson seems certain now.

After jesting with the Long Island novelist about her 30-year distance from Flannery O'Connor, Mary Hood paused, then added purposefully, "But I'm catching up." To those who admire her fiction, works like "Something Good for Ginnie" and "How Far She Went" show that Hood has already caught up. The heritage that she once said "seemed grander than any to which I, with my library card and secondhand paperbacks, could lay claim of kinship" (36) has already embraced her. With her first novel's publication in 1995 (Familiar Heat), it will be interesting to chart how far Hood will go.

WORKS CITED

"A Stubborn Sense of Place." Harper's Aug. 1986: 35-46. Hood, Mary. "Hindsight." How Far 93-101.

--. How Far She Went. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1984.

--. "How Far She Went." How Far 67-77.

--. "Inexorable Progress." How Far 102-23.

--. "Something Good for Ginnie." And Venus Is Blue. New York: Simon, 1986. 61-97.

O'Connor, Flannery. "The Artificial Nigger." Three 195-214.

--. "The Displaced Person." Three 262-99.

--. Three. New York: NAL, 1962. 195-214.

--. The Violent Bear It Away. Three 301-447.

--. Wise Blood. Three 9-126.