Flannery O'Connor Complete Short Stories (40 page)

“I don't want no bonus,” Mary Fortune said.

“I ain't ever seen you refuse one.”

“You ain't ever seen me ask for one neither,” she said.

“How much have you laid by?” he asked.

“Noner yer bidnis,” she said and stamped his shoulders with her feet. “Don't be buttin into my bidnis.”

“I bet you got it sewed up in your mattress,” he said, “just like an old nigger woman. You ought to put it in the bank. I'm going to start you an account just as soon as I complete this deal. Won't anybody be able to check on it but me and you.”

The bulldozer moved under them again and drowned out the rest of what he wanted to say. He waited and when the noise had passed, he could hold it in no longer. “I'm going to sell the lot right in front of the house for a gas station,” he said. “Then we won't have to go down the road to get the car filled up, just step out the front door.”

The Fortune house was set back about two hundred feet from the road and it was this two hundred feet that he intended to sell. It was the part that his daughter airily called “the lawn” though it was nothing but a field of weeds.

“You mean,” Mary Fortune said after a minute, “the lawn?”

“Yes mam!” he said. “I mean the lawn,” and he slapped his knee.

She did not say anything and he turned and looked up at her. There in the little rectangular opening of hair was his face looking back at him, but it was a reflection not of his present expression but of the darker one that indicated his displeasure. “That's where we play,” she muttered.

“Well there's plenty of other places you can play,” he said, irked by this lack of enthusiasm.

“We won't be able to see the woods across the road,” she said.

The old man stared at her. “The woods across the road?” he repeated.

“We won't be able to see the view,” she said.

“The view?” he repeated.

“The woods,” she said; “we won't be able to see the woods from the porch.”

“The woods from the porch?” he repeated.

Then she said, “My daddy grazes his calves on that lot.”

The old man's wrath was delayed an instant by shock. Then it exploded in a roar. He jumped up and turned and slammed his fist on the hood of the car. “He can graze them somewheres else!”

“You fall off that embankment and you'll wish you hadn't,” she said.

He moved from in front of the car around to the side, keeping his eye on her all the time. “Do you think I care where he grazes his calves! Do you think I'll let a calf interfere with my bidnis? Do you think I give a damn hoot where that fool grazes his calves?”

She sat, her red face darker than her hair, exactly reflecting his expression now. “He who calls his brother a fool is subject to hellfire,” she said.

“Jedge not,” he shouted, “lest ye be not jedged!” The tinge of his face was a shade more purple than hers. “You!” he said. “You let him beat you any time he wants to and don't do a thing but blubber a little and jump up and down!”

“He nor nobody else has ever touched me,” she said, measuring off each word in a deadly flat tone. “Nobody's ever put a hand on me and if anybody did, I'd kill him.”

“And black is white,” the old man piped, “and night is day!”

The bulldozer passed below them. With their faces about a foot apart, each held the same expression until the noise had receded. Then the old man said, “Walk home by yourself. I refuse to ride a Jezebel!”

“And I refuse to ride with the Whore of Babylon,” she said and slid off the other side of the car and started off through the pasture.

“A whore is a woman!” he roared. “That's how much you know!” But she did not deign to turn around and answer him back, and as he watched the small robust figure stalk across the yellow-dotted field toward the woods, his pride in her, as if it couldn't help itself, returned like the gentle little tide on the new lake—all except that part of it that had to do with her refusal to stand up to Pitts; that pulled back like an undertow. If he could have taught her to stand up to Pitts the way she stood up to him, she would have been a perfect child, as fearless and sturdy-minded as anyone could want; but it was her one failure of character. It was the one point on which she did not resemble him. He turned and looked away over the lake to the woods across it and told himself that in five years, instead of woods, there would be houses and stores and parking places, and that the credit for it could go largely to him.

He meant to teach the child spirit by example and since he had definitely made up his mind, he announced that noon at the dinner table that he was negotiating with a man named Tilman to sell the lot in front of the house for a gas station.

His daughter, sitting with her worn-out air at the foot of the table, let out a moan as if a dull knife were being turned slowly in her chest. “You mean the lawn!” she moaned and fell back in her chair and repeated in an almost inaudible voice, “He means the lawn.”

The other six Pitts children began to bawl and pipe, “Where we play!” “Don't let him do that, Pa!” “We won't be able to see the road!” and similar idiocies. Mary Fortune did not say anything. She had a mulish reserved look as if she were planning some business of her own. Pitts had stopped eating and was staring in front of him. His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it. His eyes began to move from child to child around the table as if he were hunting for one particular one of them. Finally they stopped on Mary Fortune sitting next to her grandfather. “You done this to us,” he muttered.

“I didn't,” she said but there was no assurance in her voice. It was only a quaver, the voice of a frightened child.

Pitts got up and said, “Come with me,” and turned and walked out, loosening his belt as he went, and to the old man's complete despair, she slid away from the table and followed him, almost ran after him, out the door and into the truck behind him, and they drove off.

This cowardice affected Mr. Fortune as if it were his own. It made him physically sick. “He beats an innocent child,” he said to his daughter, who was apparently still prostrate at the end of the table, “and not one of you lifts a hand to stop him.”

“You ain't lifted yours neither,” one of the boys said in an undertone and there was a general mutter from that chorus of frogs.

“I'm an old man with a heart condition,” he said. “I can't stop an ox.”

“She put you up to it,” his daughter murmured in a languid listless tone, her head rolling back and forth on the rim of her chair. “She puts you up to everything.”

“No child never put me up to nothing!” he yelled. “You're no kind of a mother! You're a disgrace! That child is an angel! A saint!” he shouted in a voice so high that it broke and he had to scurry out of the room.

The rest of the afternoon he had to lie on his bed. His heart, whenever he knew the child had been beaten, felt as if it were slightly too large for the space that was supposed to hold it. But now he was more determined than ever to see the filling station go up in front of the house, and if it gave Pitts a stroke, so much the better. If it gave him a stroke and paralyzed him, he would be served right and he would never be able to beat her again.

Mary Fortune was never angry with him for long, or seriously, and though he did not see her the rest of that day, when he woke up the next morning, she was sitting astride his chest ordering him to make haste so that they would not miss the concrete mixer.

The workmen were laying the foundation for the fishing club when they arrived and the concrete mixer was already in operation. It was about the size and color of a circus elephant; they stood and watched it churn for a half-hour or so. At eleven-thirty, the old man had an appointment with Tilman to discuss his transaction and they had to leave. He did not tell Mary Fortune where they were going but only that he had to see a man.

Tilman operated a combination country store, filling station, scrap-metal dump, used-car lot and dance hall five miles down the highway that connected with the dirt road that passed in front of the Fortune place. Since the dirt road would soon be paved, he wanted a good location on it for another such enterprise. He was an up-and-coming man—the kind, Mr. Fortune thought, who was never just in line with progress but always a little ahead of it so that he could be there to meet it when it arrived. Signs up and down the highway announced that Tilman's was only five miles away, only four, only three, only two, only one; “Watch out for Tilman's, Around this bend!” and finally, “Here it is, Friends, TILMAN'S!” in dazzling red letters.

Tilman's was bordered on either side by a field of old used-car bodies, a kind of ward for incurable automobiles. He also sold outdoor ornaments, such as stone cranes and chickens, urns, jardinieres, whirligigs, and farther back from the road, so as not to depress his dance-hall customers, a line of tombstones and monuments. Most of his businesses went on out-of-doors, so that his store building itself had not involved excessive expense. It was a one-room wooden structure onto which he had added, behind, a long tin hall equipped for dancing. This was divided into two sections, colored and white, each with its private nickelodeon. He had a barbecue pit and sold barbecued sandwiches and soft drinks.

As they drove up under the shed of Tilman's place, the old man glanced at the child sitting with her feet drawn up on the seat and her chin resting on her knees. He didn't know if she would remember that it was Tilman he was going to sell the lot to or not.

“What you going in here for?” she asked suddenly, with a sniffing look as if she scented an enemy.

“Noner yer bidnis,” he said. “You just sit in the car and when I come out, I'll bring you something.”

“Don'tcher bring me nothing,” she said darkly, “because I won't be here.”

“Haw!” he said. “Now you're here, it's nothing for you to do but wait,” and he got out and without paying her any further attention, he entered the dark store where Tilman was waiting for him.

When he came out in half an hour, she was not in the car. Hiding, he decided. He started walking around the store to see if she was in the back. He looked in the doors of the two sections of the dance hall and walked on around by the tombstones. Then his eye roved over the field of sinking automobiles and he realized that she could be in or behind anyone of two hundred of them. He came back out in front of the store. A Negro boy, drinking a purple drink, was sitting on the ground with his back against the sweating ice cooler.

“Where did that little girl go to, boy?” he asked.

“I ain't seen nair little girl,” the boy said.

The old man irritably fished in his pocket and handed him a nickel and said, “A pretty little girl in a yeller cotton dress.”

“If you speakin about a stout chile look lak you,” the boy said, “she gone off in a truck with a white man.”

“What kind of a truck, what kind of a white man?” he yelled.

“It were a green pick-up truck,” the boy said smacking his lips, “and a white man she call ‘daddy.' They gone thataway some time ago.”

The old man, trembling, got in his car and started home. His feelings raced back and forth between fury and mortification. She had never left him before and certainly never for Pitts. Pitts had ordered her to get in the truck and she was afraid not to. But when he reached this conclusion he was more furious than ever. What was the matter with her that she couldn't stand up to Pitts? Why was there this one flaw in her character when he had trained her so well in everything else? It was an ugly mystery.

When he reached the house and climbed the front steps, there she was sitting in the swing, looking glum-faced in front of her across the field he was going to sell. Her eyes were puffy and pink-rimmed but he didn't see any red marks on her legs. He sat down in the swing beside her. He meant to make his voice severe but instead it came out crushed, as if it belonged to a suitor trying to reinstate himself.

“What did you leave me for? You ain't ever left me before,” he said.

“Because I wanted to,” she said, looking straight ahead.

“You never wanted to,” he said. “He made you.”

“I toljer I was going and I went,” she said in a slow emphatic voice, not looking at him, “and now you can go on and lemme alone.” There was something very final, in the sound of this, a tone that had not come up before in their disputes. She stared across the lot where there was nothing but a profusion of pink and yellow and purple weeds, and on across the red road, to the sullen line of black pine woods fringed on top with green. Behind that line was a narrow gray-blue line of more distant woods and beyond that nothing but the sky, entirely blank except for one or two threadbare clouds. She looked into this scene as if it were a person that she preferred to him.

“It's my lot, ain't it?” he asked. “Why are you so up-in-the-air about me selling my own lot?”

“Because it's the lawn,” she said. Her nose and eyes began to run horribly but she held her face rigid and licked the water off as soon as it was in reach of her tongue. “We won't be able to see across the road,” she said.

The old man looked across the road to assure himself again that there was nothing over there to see. “I never have seen you act in such a way before,” he said in an incredulous voice. “There's not a thing over there but the woods.”

“We won't be able to see 'um,” she said, “and that's the
lawn
and my daddy grazes his calves on it.”

At that the old man stood up. “You act more like a Pitts than a Fortune,” he said. He had never made such an ugly remark to her before and he was sorry the instant he had said it. It hurt him more than it did her. He turned and went in the house and upstairs to his room.