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He is last seen heading back to the city, "where the children of God lay sleeping." Author O'Connor tells this bizarre plot with her own brand of authority; her hard prose seems armed with staring, baleful eyes. The reader may shudder in distaste, but those eyes fix and hold him. And yet, while her handling of God-drunk backwoodsmen is based in religious seriousness, it seldom seems to rise above an ironic jape. It is this suggestion of the secure believer poking bitter fun at the confused and bedeviled that lingers in the mind after the tale is ended—rather than the occasional flashes of pity that alone make such a story bearable.