Everything That Rises Must Converge (11 page)

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 twenty-acre 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 not 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. “He 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 stob and was squatting down by it to see how much it had been shaken. She leaned over the embankment and shook her fist 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 shuffle. 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.”

Any time 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 an 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.