A View of the Woods

By Flannery O’ Connor

1956

THE week before, Mary Fortune and the old man had spent
every morning watching the machine that lifted out dirt and
threw it in a pile. The construction was going on by the new lakeside
on one of the lots that the old man had sold to somebody who
was going to put up a fishing club. He and Mary Fortune drove
down there every morning about ten o'clock and he parked his car,
a battered mulberry-colored Cadillac, on the embankment that overlooked the spot where the work was going on. The red corrugated
lake eased up to within fifty feet of the construction and was
bordered on the other side by a black line of woods which appeared
at both ends of the view to walk across the water and continue along
the edge of the fields.
  He sat on the bumper and Mary Fortune straddled the hood and
they watched, sometimes for hours, while the machine systematically
ate a square red hole in what had once been a cow pasture. It happened
to be the only pasture that Pitts had succeeded in getting the
bitter weed off and when the old man had sole it, Pitts had nearly
had a stroke; and as far as Mr. Fortune was concerned, he could
have gone on and had it.
  "Any fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress is
not on my books," he had said to Mary Fortune-- several times from
his seat on the bumper, but the child did not have eyes for anything
but the machine. She sat on the hood, locking down into the
red pit, watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay,
then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical
revulsion, turn and spit it up. Her pale eyes behind her
spectacles followed the repeated motion of it again and again and
her face-a small replica of the old man's-never lost its look of
complete absorption.
  No one was particularly glad that Mary Fortune looked like her
grandfather except the old man himself, He thought it added greatly
to her attractiveness. He thought she was the smartest and the
prettiest child he had ever seen and he let the rest of them know that
if, IF that was, he left anything to anybody, it would be Mary
Fortune he left it to. She was now nine, short and broad like himself,
with his very light blue eyes, his wide prominent forehead, his steady
penetrating scowl and his rich florid complexion; but she was like
him on the inside too. She had, to a singular degree, his intelligence,
his strong will, and his push and drive. Though there was seventy
years' difference in their ages, the spiritual distance between them
was slight. She was the only member of the family he had any respect
for.
  He didn't have any use for her mother, his third or fourth daughter
(he could never remember which), though she considered that
she took care of him. She considered--being careful not to say it,
only to look it--that she was the one putting up with him in his old
age and that she was the one he should leave the place to. She had
married an idiot named Pitts and had had seven children, all likewise
idiots except the youngest, Mary Fortune, who was a throwback
to him. Pitts was the kind who couldn't keep his hands on a nickel
and Mr. Fortune had allowed them, ten years ago, to move onto
his place and farm it. What Pitts made went to Pitts but the land
belonged to Fortune and he was careful to keep the fact before
them. When the well had gone dry, he had not allowed Pitts to
have a deep well drilled but had insisted that they pipe their water
from the spring. He did not intend to pay for a drilled well himself
and he knew that if he let Pitts pay for it, whenever he had occasion
to say to Pitts, "It's my land you're sitting on, " Pitts would be able
to say to him, "Well, it's my pump that's pumping the water you're
drinking."
  Being there ten years, the Pittses had got to feel as if they owned
the place. The daughter had been born and raised on it but the old
man considered that when she married Pitts she showed that she
preferred Pitts to home; and when she came back, she came back
like any other tenant, though he would not allow them to pay rent
for the same reason he would not allow them to drill a well. Anyone
over sixty years of age is in an uneasy position unless he controls
the greater interest and every now and then he gave the Pittses a
practical lesson by selling off a lot. Nothing infuriated Pitts more
than to see him sell off a piece of the property to an outsider, because
Pitts wanted to buy it himself.
  Pitts was a thin, long-jawed, irascible, sullen, sulking individual
and his wife was the duty-proud kind: It's my duty to stay here and
take care of Papa. Who would do it if I didn't? I do it knowing
full well I'll get no reward for it. I do it because it's my duty.
  The old man was not taken in by this for a minute. He knew they
were waiting impatiently for the day when they could put him in a
hole eight feet deep and cover him up with dirt. Then, even if he
did not leave the place to them, they figured they would be able to
buy it. Secretly he had made his will and left everything in trust to
Mary Fortune, naming his lawyer and not Pitts as executor. When
he died Mary Fortune could make the rest of them jump; and he
didn't doubt for a minute that she would be able to do it.
  Ten years ago they had announced that they were going to name
the new baby Mark Fortune Pitts, after him, if it were a boy, and
he had not delayed in telling them that if they coupled his name
with the name Pitts he would put them off the place. When the
baby came, a girl, and he had seen that even at the age of one day
she bore his unmistakable likeness, he had relented and suggested
himself that they name her Mary Fortune, after his beloved mother,
who had died seventy years ago, bringing him into the world.
  The Fortune place was in the country on a clay road that left the
paved road fifteen miles away and he would never have been able to
sell off any lots if it had not been for progress, which had always been
his ally. He was not one of these old people who fight improvement,
who object to everything new and cringe at every change. He
wanted to see a paved highway in front of his house with plenty
of new-model cars on it, he wanted to see a supermarket store across
the road from him, he wanted to see a gas station, a motel, a
drive-in picture-show within easy distance. Progress had suddenly set
all this in motion. The electric power company had built a dam on
the river and flooded great areas of the surrounding country and the
lake that resulted touched his land along a half-mile stretch. Every
Tom, Dick and Harry, every dog and his brother, wanted a lot on
the lake. There was talk of their getting a telephone line. There was
talk of paving the road that ran in front of the Fortune place. There
was talk of an eventual town. He thought this should be called
Fortune, Georgia. He was a man of advanced vision, even if he was
seventy-nine years old.
  The machine that drew up the dirt had stopped the day before
and today they were watching the hole being smoothed out by
two huge yellow bulldozers. His property had amounted to eight
hundred acres before he began selling lots, He had sold five twentyacre
lots on the back of the place and every time he sold one, Pitts's
blood pressure had gone up twenty points. "The Pittses are the kind
that would let a cow pasture interfere with the future," he said to
Mary Fortune, "but not you and me." The fact that Mary Fortune
was a Pitts too was something he ignored, in a gentlemanly fashion,
as if it were an affliction the child was nut responsible for. He liked
to think of her as being thoroughly of his clay . He sat on the bumper
and she sat on the hood with her bare feet on his shoulders. One of
the bulldozers had moved under them to shave the side of the embankment they were parked on. If he had moved his feet a few
inches out, the old man could have dangled them over the edge.
  "If you don't watch him," Mary Fortune shouted above the noise
of the machine, "he'll cut off some of your dirt."
  "Yonder's the stob," the old man yelled, "Ill hasn't gone beyond
the stob."
  "Not YET he hasn't," she roared.
The bulldozer passed beneath them and went on to the far side.
"Well you watch," he said. "Keep your eyes open  and if he knocks
that stob, I'll stop him. The Pittses are the kind that would let a
cow pasture or a mule lot or a row of beans interfere with progress,"
he continued. "The people like you and me  with heads on their
shoulders know you can't stop the marcher time for a cow .... "
  "He's shaking the stob on the other side!" she  screamed and before
he could stop her, she had jumped down from the hood and was
running along the edge of the embankment, her little yellow dress
billowing out behind.
  "Don't run so near the edge," he yelled but she had already
reached the stab and was squatting down by it to see how much it
had been shaken. She leaned over the embankment and shook her
first at the man on the bulldozer. He waved at her and went on
about his business. More sense in her little finger than all the rest of
that tribe in their heads put together, the old man said to himself,
and watched with pride as she started back to him.
  She had a head of thick, very fine, sand-colored hair--the exact
kind he had had when he had had any--that grew straight and was
cut just above her eyes and down the sides of her cheeks to the tips
of her ears so that it formed a kind of door opening onto the central
part of her face. Her glasses were silver-rimmed like his and she
even walked the way he did, stomach forward, with a careful abrupt
gait, something between a rock and a shuttle. She was walking so
close to the edge of the embankment that the outside of her right
foot was flush with it.
  "I said don't walk so close to the edge," he called; "you fall off
there and you won't live to see the day this place gets built up." He
was always very careful to see that she avoided dangers. He would
not allow her to sit in snakey places or put her hands on bushes that
might hide hornets.
  She didn't move an inch. She had a habit of his of not hearing
what she didn't want to hear and since this was a little trick he
had taught her himself, he had to admire the way she practiced it.
He foresaw that in her own old age it would serve her well. She
reached the car and climbed back onto the hood without a word and
put her feet back on his shoulders where she had had them before,
as if he were no more than a part of the automobile. Her attention
returned to the far bulldozer.
  "Remember what you won't get if you don't mind," her grandfather
remarked.
  He was a strict disciplinarian but he had never whipped her. There
were some children, like the first six Pittses, whom he thought
should be whipped once a week on principle, but there were other
ways to control intelligent children and he had never laid a rough
hand on Mary Fortune. Furthermore, he had never allowed her
mother or her brothers and sisters so much as to slap her. The elder
Pitts was a different matter.
  He was a man of a nasty temper and of ugly unreasonable resentments.
Time and again, Mr. Fortune's heart had pounded to
see him rise slowly from his place at the table--not the head, Mr.
Fortune sat there, but from his place at the side--and abruptly, for
no reason, with no explanation, jerk his head at Mary Fortune and
say, "Come with me," and leave the room, unfastening his belt as
he went. A look that was completely foreign to the child's face would
appear on it. The old man could not define the look but it infuriated
him. It was a look that was part terror and part respect and part
something else, something very like cooperation. This look would
appear on her face and she would get up and follow Pitts out. They
would get in his truck and drive down the road out of earshot, where
he would beat her.
  Mr. Fortune knew for a fact that he beat her because he had followed
them in his car and had seen it happen. He had watched
from behind a boulder about a hundred feet away while the child
clung to a pine tree and Pitts, as methodically as if he were whacking
a bush with a sling blade, beat her around the ankles with his belt.
All she had done was jump up and down as if she were standing
on a hot stove and make a whimpering noise like a dog that was
being peppered. Pitts had kept at it for about three minutes and
then he had turned, without a word, and got back in his truck and
left her there, and she had slid down under the tree and taken both
feet in her hands and rocked back and forth. The old man had
crept forward to catch her. Her face was contorted into a puzzle of
small red lumps and her nose and eyes were running. He sprang on
her and sputtered, "Why didn't you hit him back? Where's your
spirit? Do you think I'd a let him beat me)"
  She had jumped up and started backing away from him with her
jaw stuck out. "Nobody beat me," she said.
  "Didn't I see it with my own eyes?" he exploded.
  "Nobody is here and nobody beat me," she said. "Nobody's ever
beat me in my life and if anybody did, I'd kill him. You can see for
yourself nobody is here."
  "Do you call me a liar or a blindman!" he shouted. "I saw him
with my own two eyes and you never did a thing but let him do it,
you never did a thing but hang onto that tree and dance up and
down a little and blubber and if it had been me, I'd a swung my fist
in his face and ... "
  "Nobody was here and nobody beat me and if anybody did I'd kill
him!" she yelled and then turned and dashed off through the woods.
  "And I'm a Poland china pig and black is white!" he had roared
after her and he had sat down on a small rock under the tree, disgusted
and furious. This was Pitts's revenge on him. It was as if it
were he that Pitts was driving down the road to beat and it was as if
he were the one submitting to it. He had thought at first that he
could stop him by saying that if he beat her, he would put them
off the place but when he had tried that, Pitts had said, "Put me off
and you put her off too. Go right ahead. She's mine to whip and
I'll whip her every day of the year if it suits me."
  Anytime he could make Pitts feel his hand he was determined to
do it and at present he had a little scheme up his sleeve that was
going to be a considerable blow to Pitts. He was thinking of it with
relish when he told Mary Fortune to remember what she wouldn't
get if she didn't mind, and he added, without waiting for an answer,
that he might be selling another lot soon and that if he did, he might give her a bonus but not if she gave him any sass. He had
frequent little verbal tilts with her but this was a sport like putting a
mirror up in front of a rooster and watching him fight his reflection.
  "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 all 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 hell
fire," 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. "Nobcdy'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 parki1g 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 tuned 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 t hem, 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 starrted home. His
feelings raced back and forth between fur y 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 pinkrimmed
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 'urn," 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.
  Several times during the afternoon, he got up from his bed and
looked out the window across the "lawn" to the line of woods she
said they wouldn't be able to see any more. Every time he saw the
same thing: woods-not a mountain, not a waterfall, not any kind
of planted bush or flower, just woods. The sunlight was woven
through them at that particular time of the afternoon so that every
thin pine trunk stood out in all its nakedness. A pine trunk is a
pine trunk, he said to himself, and anybody that wants to see one
don't have to go far in this neighborhood. Every time he got up and
looked out, he was reconvinced of his wisdom in selling the lot. The
dissatisfaction it caused Pitts would be permanent, but he could make
it up to Mary Fortune by buying her something. With grown people,
a road led either to heaven or hell, but with children there were
always stops along the way where their attention could be turned
with a trifle.
  The third time he got up to look at the woods, it was almost six
o'clock and the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised if. a pool of red
light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them.
The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he
were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future
and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that
he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as if
someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed
in blood. After a few minutes this unpleasant vision was broken by
the presence of Pitts's pick-up truck grinding to a halt below the
window. He returned to his bed and shut his eyes and against the
closed lids hellish red trunks rose up in a black wood.
  At the supper table nobody addressed a word to him, including
Mary Fortune. He ate quickly and returned again to his room and
spent the evening pointing out to himself the advantages for the
future of having an establishment like Tilman's so near. They would
not have to go any distance for gas. Anytime they needed a loaf
of bread, all they would have to do would be step out their front
door into Tilman's back door. They could sell milk to Tilman.
Tilman was a likable fellow. Tilman would draw other business.
The road would soon be paved. Travelers from all over the country
would stop at Tilman's. If his daughter thought she was better than
Tilman, it would be well to take her down a little. All men were
created free and equal. When this phrase sounded in his head, his
patriotic sense triumphed and he realized that it was his duty to sell
the lot, that he must insure the future. He looked out the window at
the moon shining over the woods across the road and listened for a
while to the hum of crickets and treefrogs, and beneath their racket,
he could hear the throb of the future town of Fortune.
  He went to bed certain that just as usual, he would wake up in
the morning looking into a little red mirror framed in a door of
fine hair. She would have forgotten all about the sale and after breakfast
they would drive into town and get the legal papers from the
courthouse. On the way back he would stop at Tilman's and close
the deal.
  When he opened his eyes in the morning, he opened them on the
empty ceiling. He pulled himself up and looked around the room
but she was not there. He hung over the edge of the bed and looked
beneath it but she was not there either. He got up and dressed and
went outside. She was sitting in the swing on the front porch, exactly
the way she had been yesterday, looking across the lawn into the
woods. The old man was very much irritated. Every morning since
she had been able to climb, he had waked up to find her either on
his bed or underneath it. It was apparent that this morning she preferred
the sight of the woods. He decided to ignore her behavior for
the present and then bring it up later when she was over her pique.
He sat down in the swing beside her but she continued to look at
the woods. "I thought you and me'd go into town and have us a
look at the boats in the new boat store," he said.
  She didn't turn her head but she asked suspiciously, in a loud
voice. "What else are you going for?"
  "Nothing else," he said.
  After a pause she said, "If that's all, I'll go," but she did not bother
to look at him.
  "Well put on your shoes," he said. "I ain't going to the city with a
barefoot woman." She did not bother to laugh at this joke.
  The weather was as indifferent as her disposition. The sky did
not look as if it were going to rain or as if it were not going to rain.
It was an unpleasant gray and the sun had not troubled to come
out. All the way into town, she sat looking at her feet, which stuck
out in front of her, encased in heavy brown school shoes. The old
man had often sneaked up on her and found her alone in conversation
with her feet and he thought she was speaking with them
silently now. Every now and then her lips moved but she said nothing
to him and let all his remarks pass as if she had not heard them.
He decided it was going to cost him considerable to buy her good
humor again and that he had better do it with a boat, since he
wanted one too. She had been talking boats ever since the water
backed up onto his place. They went first to the boat store. "Show
us the yachts for po' folks!" he shouted jovially to the clerk as they
entered.
  "They're all for po' folks!" the clerk said. "You'll be po' when you
finish buying one!" He was a stout youth in a yellow shirt and blue
pants and he had a ready wit. They exchanged several clever remarks
in rapid-fire succession. Mr. Fortune looked at Mary Fortune
to see if her face had brightened. She stood staring absently over
the side of an outboard motor boat at the opposite wall.
  "Ain't the lady innerested in boats?" the clerk asked.
  She turned and wandered back out onto the sidewalk and got in
the car again. The old man looked after her with amazement. He
could not believe that a child of her intelligence could be acting this
way over the mere sale of a field. "I think she must be coming down
with something," he said. "We'll come back again," and he returned
to the car.
  "Let's go get us an ice-cream cone," he suggested, looking at her
with concern.
  "I don't want no ice-cream cone," she said.
   His actual destination was the courthouse but he did not want to
make this apparent. "How'd you like to visit the ten-cent store while
I tend to a little bidnis of mine?" he asked. "You can buy yourself
something with a quarter I brought along."
  "I ain't got nothing to do in no ten-cent store," she said. "I don't
want no quarter of yours."
  If a boat was of no interest, he should not have thought a quarter
would be and reproved himself for that stupidity. "Well what's the
matter, sister?" he asked kindly. "Don't you feel good?"
  She turned and looked him straight in the face arid said with a
slow concentrated ferocity, "It's the lawn. My daddy grazes his calves
there. We won't be able to see the woods any more."
  The old man had held his fury in as long as he could. "He beats
you!" he shouted. "And you worry about where he's going to graze
his calves!"
  "Nobody's ever beat me in my life," she said, "and if anybody did,
I'd kill him."
  A man seventy-nine years of age cannot let himself be run over by
a child of nine. His face set in a look that was just a; determined as
hers. "Are you a Fortune," he said, "or are you a Pitt? Make up
your mind."
  Her voice was loud and positive and belligerent "I'm Mary-
Fortune-Pitts," she said.
  "Well I," he shouted, "am PURE Fortune!"
  There was nothing she could say to this and she showed it. For
an instant she looked completely defeated, and the old man saw with
a disturbing clearness that this was the Pitts look. What he saw was
the Pitts look, pure and simple, and he felt personally stained by it,
as if it had been found on his own face. He turned in disgust and
backed the car out and drove straight to the courthouse,
  The courthouse was a red and white blaze-faced building set in
the center of a square from which most of the grass had been worn
off. He parked in front of it and said, "Stay here," in  an imperious
tone and got out and slammed the car door.
  It took him a half-hour to get the deed and have the sale paper
drawn up and when he returned to the car, she was sitting on the
back seat in the corner. The expression on that part her face that
he could see was foreboding and withdrawn. The sky had darkened
also and there was a hot sluggish tide in the air, the kind felt when
a tornado is possible.
  "We better get on before we get caught in a storm" he said and
emphatically, "because I got one more place to stop on the way
home," but he might have been chauffeuring a small dead body for
all the answer he got.

  On the way to Tilman's he reviewed once more he many just
reasons that were leading him to his present action and he could
not locate a flaw in any of them. He decided that while this attitude
of hers would not he permanent, he was permanently disappointed
in her and that when she came around she would have
to apologize; and that there would be no boat. He was coming to
realize slowly that his trouble with her had always been that he had
not shown enough firmness. He had been too generous. He was
so occupied with these thoughts that he did not notice the signs
that said how many miles to Tilman's until the last one exploded
joyfully in his face: "Here it is, Friends, TILMAN'S!" He pulled in
under the shed.
  He got out without so much as looking at Mary Fortune and
entered the dark store where Tilman, leaning on the counter in
front of a triple shelf of canned goods. was waiting for him.
  Tilman was a man of quick action and few words. He sat habitually
with his arms folded on the counter and his insignificant
head weaving snake-fashion above them. He had a triangular-shaped
face with the point at the bottom and the top of his skull was
covered with a cap of freckles. His eyes were green and very narrow
and his tongue was always exposed in his partly opened mouth.
He had his checkbook handy and they got down to business at once.
It did not take him long to look at the deed and sign the bill of
sale. Then Mr. Fortune signed it and they grasped hands over the
counter.
  Mr. Fortune's sense of relief as he grasped Tilman's hand was
extreme. What was done, he felt, was done and there could be no
more argument, with her or with himself. He felt that he had acted
on principle and that the future was assured.
  Just as their hands loosened, an instant's change came over Tilman's
face and he disappeared completely under the counter as if
he had been snatched by the feet from below. A bottle crashed
against the line of tinned goods behind where he had been. The
old man whirled around. Mary Fortune was in the door, red-faced
and wild-looking, with another bottle lifted to hurl. As he ducked,
it broke behind him on the counter and she grabbed another from
the crate. He sprang at her but she tore to the other side of the
store, screaming something unintelligible and throwing everything
within her reach. The old man pounced again and this time he
caught her by the tail of her dress and pulled her backward out of
the store. Then he got a better grip and lifted her, wheezing and
whimpering but suddenly limp in his arms, the few feet to the car.
He managed to get the door open and dump her inside. Then he
ran around to the other side and got in himself and drove away as
fast as he could.
  His heart felt as if it were the size of the car and was racing
forward, carrying him to some inevitable destination faster than he
had ever been carried before. For the first five minutes he did not
think but only sped forward as if he were being driven inside his
own fury. Gradually the power of thought returned to him. Mary
Fortune, rolled into a ball in the corner of the seat, was snuffling
and heaving.
  He had never seen a child behave in such a way in his life. Neither
his own children nor anyone else's had ever displayed such temper
in his presence, and he had never for an instant imagined that the
child he had trained himself, the child who had been his constant
companion for nine years, would embarrass him like this. The child
he had never lifted a hand to!
  Then he saw, with the sudden vision that sometimes comes with
delayed recognition, that that had been his mistake.
  She respected Pitts because, even with no just cause, he beat her;
and if he--with his just cause--did not beat her now, he would
have nobody to blame but himself if she turned out a hellion. He
saw that the time had come, that he could no longer avoid whipping
her, and as he turned off the highway onto the dirt road leading to
home, he told himself that when he finished with her, she would
never throw another bottle again.
  He raced along the clay road until he came to the line where his
own property began and then he turned off onto a side path, just
wide enough for the automobile and bounced for a half a mile
through the woods. He stopped the car at the exact spot where he
had seen Pitts take his belt to her. It was a place where the road
widened so that two cars could pass or one could turn around, an
ugly red bald spot surrounded by long thin pines that appeared to
be gathered there to witness anything that would take place in such
a clearing. A few stones protruded from the clay.
  "Get out," he said and reached across her and opened the door.
She got out without looking at him or asking what they were
going to do and he got out on his side and carne around the front
of the car.
  "Now I'm going to whip you!" he said , and his voice was extra
loud and hollow and had a vibrating quality that appeared to be
taken up and passed through the tops of the pines. He did not
want to get caught in a downpour while he was whipping her
and he said, "Hurry up and get ready against that tree," and began
to take of his belt.
  What he had in mind to do appeared to come very slowly as if
it had to penetrate a fog in her head. She did not move but gradually
her confused expression began to clear . Where a few seconds
before her face had been red and distorted and unorganized, it
drained now of every vague line until nothing was left on it but
positiveness, a look that went slowly past determination and reached
certainty. "Nobody has ever beat me," she said, "and if anybody
tries it, I'll kill him."
  "I don't want no sass," he said and started toward her. His knees
felt very unsteady, as if they might turn either backward or forward.
  She moved exactly one step back and, keeping her eye on him
steadily, removed her glasses and dropped them behind a small
rock near the tree he had told her to get ready against. "Take off
your glasses," she said
  "Don't give me orders!" he said in a high, voice and slapped awkwardly
at her ankles with his belt.
  She was on him so quickly that he could not have recalled which
blow he felt first, whether the weight of her whole solid body or
the jabs of her feet or the pummeling of her fist on his chest. He
flailed the belt in the air, not knowing where to hit but trying to
get her off him until he could decide where to get a grip on her.
"Leggo!" he shouted. "Leggo I tell you!" But she seemed to be
everywhere, coming at him from all directions  at once. It was as if
he were being attacked not by one child but by a pack of small
demons all with stout brown school shoe, and  small rocklike fists.
His glasses flew to the side.
  "I toljer to take them off," she growled without  pausing.
  He caught his knee and danced on one foot and a rain of blows
fell on his stomach. He felt five claws in the flesh of his upper arm
where she was hanging from while her feet mechanically battered
his knees and her free fist pounded him again and again in the
chest. Then with horror he saw her face rise up in front of his,
teeth exposed, and he roared like a bull as she bit the side of his
jaw. He seemed to see his own face coming to bite him from several
sides at once but he could not attend to it for he was being kicked
indiscriminately, in the stomach and then in the crotch. Suddenly
he threw himself on the ground and began to roll like a man on
fire. She was on top of him at once, rolling with him and still
kicking, and now with both fists free to batter his chest.
  "I'm an old man!" he piped. "Leave me alone!" But she did not
stop. She began a fresh assault on his jaw.
  "Stop stop!" he wheezed. "I'm your grandfather!"
She paused, her face exactly on top of his. Pale identical eye
looked into pale identical eye. "Have you had enough?" she asked.
  The old man looked up into his own image. It was triumphant
and hostile. "You been whipped," it said, "by me," and then it
added, bearing down on each word, "and I'm PURE Pitts."
  In the pause she loosened her grip and he got hold of her throat.
With a sudden surge of strength, he managed to roll over and reverse
their positions so that he was looking down into the face that
was his own but had dared to call itself Pitts. With his hands still
tight around her neck, he lifted her head and brought it down once
hard against the rock that happened to be under it. Then he brought
it down twice more. Then looking into the face in which the eyes,
slowly rolling back, appeared to pay him not the slightest attention,
he said, "There's not an ounce of Pitts in me."
  He continued to stare at his conquered image until he perceived
that though it was absolutely silent, there was no look of remorse
on it. The eyes had rolled back down and were set in a fixed glare
that did not take him in. "This ought to teach you a good lesson,"
he said in a voice that was edged with doubt.
  He managed painfully to get up on his unsteady kicked legs and
to take two steps, but the enlargement of his heart which had
begun in the car was still going on. He turned his head and looked
behind him for a long time at the little motionless figure with its
head on the rock.
  Then he fell on his back and looked up helplessly along the bare
trunks into the tops of the pines and his heart expanded once
more with a convulsive motion. It expanded so fast that the old man
felt as if he were being pulled after it through the woods, felt as if
he were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines toward the
lake. He perceived that there would be a little opening there, a
little place where he could escape and leave the woods behind him.
He could see it in the distance already, a little opening where the
white sky was reflected in the water. It grew as he ran toward it
until suddenly the whole lake opened up before him, riding majestically
in little corrugated folds toward his feet. He realized suddenly
that he could not swim and that he had not bought the boat.
On both sides of him he saw that the gaunt trees had thickened
into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and
away into the distance. He looked around desperately for someone
to help him but the place was deserted except for one huge yellow
monster which sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorging itself
on clay.

End