Mrs. May describes the Greenleafs, her employee and his family, as "scrub-human" on the social ladder. Once again Mrs. May sees the bull eating everything but the Greenleafs, displacing her and her family. This threat is realized when Mrs. May visits the Greenleaf boys. She is astonished at the prosperity and cleanliness of their homestead. She is also dismayed as she considers the boys' offspring who will be the future well-mannered, refined individuals of society. Angered by her failing reality, she takes revenge on the boys through their father. Forcing him to kill the bull, Mrs. May sits on the car's bumper awaiting Mr. Greenleaf's return from following the bull into the woods. Her car is in the center of a "green arena" encircled with trees. The "arena" is the final battleground between Grace and the blindness that attempts to shut it out. Darkness comes bounding toward her, surrounding her in an unbreakable grip, goring her through the heart. The horn of Grace pierces through the darkness: "she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable" (Greenleaf 333). O'Connor critic Ruthann Knechel Johansen of University of Notre Dame observes, "Although the trickster [bull] cannot save or redeem the stubbornly willful, his interventions prepare the character's spirit for surrender" (Johansen). Mrs. May is dispossessed from the land of her self-perceived reality. The horror of accepting only an individual's reality separates us from one another. Believing we are separate entities living separate lives makes it easier to justify humanity's annihilation of itself.
Filching prosthetics from the impaired is an unthinkable act. But the greater evil is the inner blindness that makes this act possible. Such blindness often derives from arrogance, and Joy-Hulga Hopewell in "Good County People" is the epitome of arrogance.