The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [179]
“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