The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [180]
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