When describing the grandmother’s reaction to hearing the gunshots that kill her son Bailey and her grandson John Wesley, the narrator uses a simile, as seen in the following passage:

There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if her heart would break.

The simile here—in which the grandmother is compared to “a parched old turkey hen”—is significant for several reasons. First, it implies just how helpless she feels. A turkey hen without water cannot acquire water for itself, but is at the whims of its human captor—all it can do is call out for assistance with no guarantee that assistance will come. This description also captures the anxiety and desperation in the grandmother’s voice as she calls out for her son who, she assumes correctly, has just been killed.

This moment is also significant in the grandmother’s character arc. While she has been arguing with her son almost non-stop since the beginning of the story, here she finally feels her love for him and expresses it by desperately calling out his name. O’Connor suggests here that the threat of violence has helped the grandmother to tap into compassion for the first time in a long time and to think about people other than herself.