478
PARTISAN REVIEW
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 em–
bankment they were parked on.
If
he had moved his feet a few
inches farther 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
