“Six men was shot here,” an odd muffled voice close by said.The boy jumped.
A small white girl whose tongue was curled in the mouth of a Coca-Cola bottle was sitting in a patch of sand at his feet, watching him with a detached gaze. Her eyes were the same color as the bottle. She was barefooted and had straight white hair. She withdrew her tongue from the bottle with an explosive sound. “A bad man did it,” she said.
The boy felt the kind of frustration that accompanies contact with the certainty of children. “No,” he said, “he was not a bad man.”
The child put her tongue back in the bottle and withdrew it silently, her eyes on him.
“People were not good to him,” he explained. “They were mean to him. They were cruel. What would you do if someone were cruel to you?”
“Shoot them,” she said.
“Well, that’s what he did,” Calhoun said, frowning.
She continued to sit there and did not take her eyes off him. Her gaze might have been the depthless gaze of Partridge itself.
“You people persecuted him and finally drove him mad,” the boy said. “He wouldn’t buy a badge. Was that a crime? He was the Outsider here and you couldn’t stand that. One of the fundamental rights of man,” he said, glaring through the child’s transparent stare, “is the right not to behave like a fool. The right to be different,” he said hoarsely. “My God. The right to be yourself.”
Without taking her eyes off him, she lifted one of her feet and set it on her knee.
“He was a bad bad bad man,” she said.
-- Flannery O’Connor, The Partridge Festival.