The Thanksgiving Visitor returns to the childhood days Truman Capote wrote about in his previously published semi-autobiographical short story, A Christmas Memory. This time, a schoolyard bully, Odd Henderson, menaces young Buddy. To his horror, Buddy's older cousin, Sook, invites Odd to Thanksgiving dinner in hopes of ending the boys' feud. At dinner, Buddy attempts to publicly humiliate Odd, but this revenge scheme fails. Buddy learns about cruelty, the lesson of Two Wrongs, and the dignity of empathy.
After his failed attempt at revenge, Buddy sulks in the shed. Capote writes:
The door to the shed was ajar, and a knife of sunshine exposed a shelf supporting several bottles. Dusty bottles with skull-and-crossbone labels. If I drank from one of those, then all of them up there in the dining room, the whole swilling and gobbling caboodle, would know what sorry was. It was worth it, if only to witness Uncle B.’s remorse when they found me cold and stiff on the smokehouse floor; worth it to hear the human wails and Queenie’s howls as my coffin was lowered into cemetery depths.
Note: The Thanksgiving Visitor was first published in the November 1967 issue of McCall's magazine.
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