Delta Wedding (3 page)

Just as Roxie was about to clear the table, Dabney gently but distractedly came in—dressed in blue, drying tears from her eyes, and murmuring to her mother as she passed her chair, "Oh, Mama,
that
was just because my brain isn't working; why did you bring up your children with faulty brains?"

"She ought to have drowned you when you were little," said Uncle Battle, and this was their extravagant way of talk. "Sit down, I saved you a wishbone and a heart besides what poor pickings is left."

"Run some more biscuit in the oven, Roxie," Ellen said. "I think too you'd better bring Miss Dabney a little ham, there's such a dearth of turkey to tempt her."

"Say it again, Mama," said Ranny, opening his eyes. Then he smiled at Dabney.

"What were you crying about—the worry you're bringing down on your father?" Battle said.

Holding out her plate for her father to serve (she sat close by him, at his right), Dabney smiled too, and waited. How beautiful she was—all flushed and knowing. Now they would tease her. An only child, Laura found teasing the thing she kept forgetting about the Delta cousins from on‹ summer to the next. Uncle Battle might put the heart on Dabney's plate yet, knowing she could not bear to look at the heart; though Dabney would know what to do. Was it possible that it was because they loved one another so, that it made them set little traps to catch one another? They looked with shining eyes upon their kin, and all their abundance of love, as if it were a devilment, was made reckless and inspired or was belittled in fun, though never, so far, was it said out. They had never told Laura they loved her.

She sighed. "Where's Aunt Primrose and Aunt Jim Allen?"

"Why don't you ask any questions about who's here?" said India.

"They said I had to come see them and tell them first," said Dabney, beginning to eat hungrily. "Touchy, touchy."

"I'm touchy too," said Uncle Battle.

"Oh,
Laura
!" cried Dabney delightedly. "I didn't know you'd got here! Why, honey!" She flew around the table and kissed her.

"I came to your wedding," said Laura, casting pleased, shy glances all around.

"Oh, Laura,
you
want me to marry Troy, don't you? You approve, don't you?"

"Yes," said Laura. "I approve, Dabney!"

"You be in my wedding! You be a flower girl!"

"I can't," said Laura helplessly. "My mother died."

"Oh," cried Dabney, as if Laura had slapped her, running away from her and back to her place at the table, hiding her face. "It's just so
hard
, everything's just so
hard....
"

"Here's your little ham, Miss Dab," said Roxie, coming in. "Do you good."

"Oh, Roxie, even you. No one will ever believe me, that I just can't swallow until Saturday. There's no use trying any more."

"You can bring the ice cream and cake then, Roxie," Aunt Ellen said. "It's Georgie's favorite cake, I do wish they could be here a day sooner!"

They sat sighing, eating cake, drinking coffee. The throb of the compress had never stopped. Laura could feel it now in the handle of her cup, the noiseless vibration that trembled in the best china, was within it.

***

It was hard to ever quite leave the dining room after supper. It would be still faintly day, and not much cooler. They all still sat, until the baby, who had hung teasing crumbs and coffee out of them from her highchair ("Mama, let Bluet eat at the table!") wilted over like a little flower in her kimono with the butterfly sleeves and was kissed all around and carried up in flushed sleep in Dabney's overeager arms.

The table was in the middle of the large room, and there was little tendency to leave even that. But besides the old walnut-and-cane chairs (Great-Grandfather made them) there were easy chairs covered with cotton in a faded peony pattern, and rockers for the two great-aunts, sewing stands and fire shields beside them, all near the watery-green tile hearth. A spready fern stood in front of the grate in summertime, with a cricket in it now, that nobody could do anything about. Along the wall the china closets reflected the windows, except for one visible shelf where some shell-pattern candlesticks shone, and the Port Gibson epergne, a fan of Apostle spoons, and the silver sugar basket with the pierce-work in it and its old cracked purplish glass lining. At the other end of the room the Victrola stood like a big morning-glory and there, laid with somebody's game, was the card table Great-Grandfather also made out of his walnut trees when he cut his way in to the Yazoo wilderness. A long ornate rattan settee, upslanting at the ends, with a steep scrolled back, was in the bay alcove. In the half-moon of space behind it were marble pedestals and wicker stands each holding a fern of advanced size or a little rooted cutting, sometimes in bloom. Overhead, over the loaded plate rails, were square oil paintings of splitmelons and cut flowers by Aunt Mashula as a young girl.

This evening there was nobody but Uncle Battle to take cherry bounce, and hating anything alone he would not have it but with a groan sat down and took Bluet's doll out of his chair onto his knee. Dabney wandered in, Aunt Ellen wandered out, Mary Lamar Mackey wandered across the hall into the music room and began to play softly to herself, but nobody else, Great-Aunt Mac or anybody, could be persuaded to stir. Maureen, gentle now, sat on a stool and listened, listened for the cricket. In a little while Dabney and Shelley and Mary Lamar would have to go dress for a dance in Glen Alan, but now the two sisters stretched on the settee, each with her head at an elevated end and her stockinged feet in her sister's hair. Catching the light like drops of a waterfall the fronds of a maidenhair fern hung from a dark tub over them.

"Fan us, fan us, India," said Dabney, though the big overhead fan turned too.

"Ranny will fan you, before he goes to bed," India said, and Ranny came radiantly forward with Great-Aunt Shannon's palmetto.

"Ho hum," said Dabney. "You'd think I had nothing to do. I wonder if Troy is in from the fields."

"There's one speck of light left," said Shelley.

"Cousin Laura," said Orrin kindly, looking up from his book at her. He leaned on the table. "You weren't here, but Uncle George and Maureen nearly got killed."

"Uncle George?" Laura alone had not reclined; she stood looking into the big mirror over the sideboard which reflected the whole roomful of cousins.

"Ranny, you fan too hard. They nearly let the Yellow Dog run over them on the Dry Creek trestle." Dabney softly laughed from her prone position.

India moaned from the chair she was leaning over to read a book on the floor.

"It was almost a tragedy," said Shelley. She lifted up her head, then let it fall back.

"Why did they let the Yellow Dog almost run over them?" Laura made her way to the table and leaned on it to ask Orrin, who answered her gravely, with his finger in his place in the book. "Here's the way it was—" For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.

"The whole family but Papa and Mama, and ten or twenty Negroes with us, went fishing in Drowning Lake. It will be two weeks ago Sunday. And so coming home we walked the track. We were tired—we were singing. On the trestle Maureen danced and caught her foot. I've done that, but I know how to get loose. Uncle George kneeled down and went to work on Maureen's foot, and the train came. He hadn't got Maureen's foot loose, so he didn't jump either. The rest of us did jump, and the Dog stopped just before it hit them and ground them all to pieces."

Uncle Battle looked at Dabney with a kind of outraged puffing of his sunburned cheeks, a glare in her direction like some fatherly malediction; whether it was meant for Dabney herself in front of his eyes, or for what he had heard, Laura could not tell. And as if glaring itself made him nervous he dandled the ragged doll heavily on his knee.

Dabney gave a half-smile. "The engineer looked out the window—he said he was sorry."

Laura looked at her gravely. "I'm glad I wasn't there," she told her.

Then Aunt Ellen came in, meditatively, as the hall clock finished striking two which meant it was eight. She had a feather on her skirt—had she been out for her precious guinea eggs? She was a slight, almost delicate lady, seeming exactly strong enough for what was needed of her life. She was scarcely taller than Orrin, and Dabney and Shelley had been both taller and bigger than their mother for two years. She walked into the roomful of family without immediately telling them anything. She was more restful than the Fairchilds. Her brown hair and her dark-blue eyes seemed part of her quietness—like the colors of water, reflective. Her Virginia voice, while no softer or lighter than theirs, was a less questioning, a never teasing one. It was a voice to speak to the one child or the one man her eyes would go to. They all watched her with soft eyes, but distractedly.

She was one of those little mothers that the wind seems almost to hurt, and they knew they needed to look after her. She held very straight in her back, like a little boy who can do right in dancing class. And while she meditated, she hurried—how she hurried! She was never slow—she was either still or darting. They said she had no need for hurry with a houseful of Negroes to do the first thing she told them. But she did not wait for them or anybody to wait on her. "Your mother is killing herself," Battle's sisters told the children. "But you can't do a thing in the world with her," they answered. "We're going to have to whip her or kill her before she'll lie down
in the afternoons, even." They spoke of killing and whipping in the exasperation and helplessness of much love. Laura could see as far as that she was the opposite of a Fairchild, and that was a stopping point. Aunt Ellen would be seen busy in a room, where Aunt Tempe for instance was never seen except proceeding down halls, or seated. She never cared how she dressed any more than a child. Aunt Tempe said to India last summer, in the voice in which she always spoke to little girls, as if everything were a severe revelation, "When your mother goes to Greenwood she simply goes to the closet and says, 'Clothes, I'm going to Greenwood, anything that wants to go along, get on my back.' She has never learned what is reprehensible and what is not, in the Delta." She was often a little confused about her keys, and sometimes would ask Dabney, "What was I going for?" "Why am I here?" When she threw her head back dramatically, it meant she was listening for a baby. Her small sweetly shaped nose was sparingly freckled like a little girl's, like India's in summer. Sometimes, as when now she stood still for a moment in the room full of talking people, an unaccountable rosiness would jump into her cheeks and a look of merriment would make her eyes grow wide. Down low over the dinner table hung a lamp with a rectangular shade of tinted glass, like a lighted shoe-box toy, a "choo-choo boat" with its colored paper windows. In its light she would look over the room, at the youngest ones intertwining on the rug and hating so the approach of night, the older ones leaning across the cleared table, chasing each other in a circle, or reading, or lost to themselves on the flimsy settee; Battle pondering in his way or fuming, while from time to time the voices of the girls called out to the telephone would sound somewhere in the air like the twittering of birds—and it would be as if she had never before seen anything at all of this room with the big breasting china closets and the fruit and cake plates around the rail, had never watered the plants in the window, or encountered till now these absorbed, intent people—ever before in her life, Laura thought. At that moment a whisper might have said Look! to her, and the dining-room curtains might have traveled back on their rings, and there
they
were. Even some unused love seemed to Laura to be in Aunt Ellen's eyes when she gazed, after supper, at her own family. Could she get it? Laura's heart pounded. But the baby had dreams and soon she would cry out on the upper floor, and Aunt Ellen listening would run straight to her, calling to her on the way, and forgetting everything in this room.

How Ellen loved their wide and towering foreheads, their hairlines on the fresh skin silver as the edge of a peach, clean as a pencil line, dipping to a perfect widow's peak in every child she had. Their cheeks were wide and their chins narrow but pressed a little forward—lips caught, then parted, as if in constant expectation—so that their faces looked sturdy and resolute, unrevealing, from the side, but tender and heart-shaped from the front. Their coloring—their fair hair and their soot-dark, high eyebrows and shadowy lashes, the long eyes, of gray that seemed more luminous, more observant and more passionate than blue—moved her deeply and freshly in each child. Dear Orrin, talking so seriously now, the dignity in his look! And little Ranny with his burning cheeks and the silver bleach of summer on his hair, so deliberately wielding the fan over his sisters! She had never had a child to take after herself and would be as astonished as Battle now to see her own ways or looks dominant, a blue-eyed, dark-haired, small-boned baby lying in her arms. All the mystery of looks moved her, for she was with child once more.

In the men grown, in Battle and George, it was a paradoxical thing, the fineness and tenderness with the bulk and weight of their big bodies. All the Fairchild men (the old-maid sister, Jim Allen, would recite that like a bit of catechism) were six feet tall by the time they were sixteen and weighed two hundred pounds by the time they were forty. But Battle weighed two hundred and fifty, and groaned to be gentle as he was; and George, though he was not himself fat, was markedly bigger and fairer than any of them in the early portraits, as if he were not a throwback to the type (which had faltered but little, after all, through marriages with little women like her, like Laura Allen and Mary Shannon before her) but a new original—a sport of the tree itself. She guessed she apprehended everything through the way they looked and felt—George sometimes more than Battle. Battle wore the glower of fatherhood or its little undermask of helplessness, that George had not put on. And George had remained left-handed, the thing they all inherited, as was somehow visibly apparent not just momently but always—perhaps by such a thing as the part in his hair. Her secret tremor at Battle's determined breaking of her children's left-handedness made her cherish it like a failing in George.