A man named Bailey intends to take his family from Georgia to Florida for a summer vacation, but his mother, (referred to as "the grandmother" in the story) wants him to drive to East Tennessee,
where the grandmother has friends ("connections"). She argues that his
children, John Wesley and June Star, have never been to East Tennessee,
and she shows him a news article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
about an escaped murderer who calls himself "The Misfit" and was last
seen in Florida. The next day, the grandmother wakes up early to hide
her cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket on the floor in the back of the car.
She is worried that the cat would die while they were gone. Bailey finds
her sitting in the car, dressed in her best clothes and an ostentatious
hat; she says that if she should die in an accident along the road, she
wants people to see her corpse and know she was refined and "a lady."
The Grandmother talks constantly during the trip, trying to engage her
two grandchildren in games and telling them jokes and a story, about
which June Star makes disdainful comments. She recalls her youth in the
Old South, reminiscing about her courtships and how much better
everything was in her time, when children were respectful and people
"did right then." When the family stops at an old diner outside of
Timothy for lunch, she talks to the owner, Red Sammy, about The Misfit.
He and the grandmother agree that things were much better in the past
and that the world at present is degenerate; she concurs with Sammy's
remark that "a good man is hard to find."
After the family returns to the road, the grandmother begins
telling the children a story about a mysterious house nearby with a
secret panel, a house she remembers from her childhood. This catches the
children's attention and they want to visit the house, so they harass
their father until he reluctantly agrees to allow them just one side
trip. As he drives them down a remote dirt road, the grandmother
suddenly realizes that the house she was thinking of was actually in
Tennessee, not Georgia. That realization makes her involuntarily kick
her feet which frightens the cat, causing it to spring from its hidden
basket onto Bailey's shoulder. Bailey then loses control of the car and
it flips over, ending up in a ditch below the road, near Toomsboro.
Only the children's mother is injured; the children are frantic with
excitement, and the grandmother's main concern is dealing with Bailey's
anger.
Shaking in the ditch, the family waits for help. When she notices
a black hearse coming down the road, the grandmother flags it down
until it stops. Three men come out and begin to talk to her. All three
have guns. The grandmother says that she recognizes the leader, the
quiet man in glasses, as The Misfit. He immediately confirms this,
saying it would have been better for them all if she had not recognized
him, and Bailey curses his mother. The Misfit's men take Bailey and John
Wesley into the woods on a pretense and two pistol shots ring out. The
Misfit claims that he has no memory of the crime for which he was
imprisoned; when he was informed by doctors that he had killed his
father, he claimed that his father died in a flu epidemic.
The men then return to take the children's mother, the baby, and
June Star to the woods for the same purpose as Bailey and the boy. The
grandmother begins pleading for her own life. When The Misfit talks to
her about Jesus, he expresses his doubts about His raising Lazarus from
the dead. As he speaks, The Misfit becomes agitated and angry. He snarls
into the grandmother's face and claims that life has "no pleasure but
meanness". In her growing confusion, she thinks that The Misfit is going
to cry, so she reaches out and touches his shoulder tenderly, saying
"Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" His
reaction is to jump away "as if a snake had bitten him" and he kills her
with three shots through the heart.
When the family has all been murdered, The Misfit takes a moment
to clean his glasses and pick up the grandmother's cat; he states that
the grandmother would have been a good woman if "it had been somebody
there to shoot her every minute of her life." The story ends with The
Misfit chastising one of his sidekicks, Bobby Lee, for making a comment
"some fun!" "Shut up, Bobby Lee," he retorts. "It's no real pleasure in
life."
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