The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [183]
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 that-a-way 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