The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [181]
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. “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 tuned slowly in her chest. “You mean the lawn!” she moaned and fell back in her chair and repeated in an almost inaudible voice,