A VIEW OF
THE
WOODS
487
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 eyes began to
run horribly but she held her face rigid and licked the water off
as soon as it was in reach of her tongue. "We won't be able to see
across the road," she said.
The old man looked across the road to assure himself again
that there was nothing over there to see. "I never have seen you act
in such a way before," he said in an incredulous voice. "There's not
a thing over there but the woods."
"We won't be able to see 'urn," she said, "and that's the
lawn
and my daddy grazes his calves on it."
At that the old man stood up. "You act more like a Pitts than
a Fortune," he said. He had never made such an ugly remark to
her before and he was sorry the instant he had said it. It hurt him
more than it did her. He turned and went in the house and upstairs
to his room.
Several times during the afternoon, he got up from his bed
and looked out the window across the "lawn" to the line of woods
she said they wouldn't be able to see any more. Every time he saw
