Flannery O'Connor
A VIEW OF THE WOODS
The week before, Mary Fortune and the old man had
spent every morning watching the machine that lifted out dirt and
threw it in a pile. The construction was going on by the new lake–
side on one of the lots that the old man had sold to somebody who
was going to put up a fishing club. He and Mary Fortune drove
down there every morning about ten o'clock and he parked
his
car,
a battered mulberry-colored Cadillac, on the embankment that over–
looked the spot where the work was going on. The red corrugated
lake eased up to within fifty feet of the construction and was bordered
on the other side by a black line of woods which appeared at both
ends of the view to walk across the water and continue along the
edge of the fields.
He sat on the bumper and Mary Fortune straddled the hood
and they watched, sometimes for hours, while the machine system–
atically ate a square red hole in what had once been a cow pasture.
It
happened to be the only pasture that Pitts had succeeded in getting
the bitterweed off and when the old man had sold it, Pitts had
nearly had a stroke; and as far as Mr. Fortune was concerned, he
could have gone on and had it.
"Any fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress
is not on my books," he had said to Mary Fortune several !times
from
his
seat on the bumper, but the child did not have eyes for
anything but the machine. She sat on the hood, looking down into
the red pit, watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the
clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow
mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up. Her pale eyes behind her
spectacles followed the repeated motion of it again and again and
her face-a small replica of the old man's-never lost its look of
complete absorption.
