Delta Wedding (8 page)

"Where's Dabney?" he asked again at the front door, and suddenly smiled at her, as if she might have been whimsical or foolish. She told him but he did not half listen. He was looking at her intently as they went through the hall and into the dining room. Nobody was there. He threw his coat and hat down and fell with a groan on the settee, which trembled under him the way it always did. "Warm day," he said at last, and shut his eyes. Roxie brought him the pitcher of lemonade, and he lifted up to drink a glass politely, but he would not have any cake just then. "I'll stretch a minute," he told Ellen, and at once his eyes shut again. She took his shoes off and he thanked her with a distant groan. She pulled the blinds a little, but he seemed far gone already with that intensity with which all the Fairchilds slept. In the darkened room his hair and all looked dark—turbulent and dark, almost Spanish. Spanish! She looked at him tenderly to have thought of such a far-fetched thing, and went out. The melting ice made a sound, and suddenly George did sigh heavily, as if protesting in his sleep.

"Poor man, he rode so
far,
" she thought.

"I'm in trouble, Ellen!" he called after her, his voice wide and awake and loud in the half-empty house. "Robbie's left me!"

She ran back to him. He still lay back with his eyes shut. The Spanish look was not exhaustion, it was misery.

"She left me four days and nights ago. I'm hoping she'll come on here—in time for the wedding." He opened his eyes, but looked at her unrevealingly. All the affront of Robbie Reid came in a downpour over Ellen, the affront she had all alone declared to be purely a little summer cloud.

"I never saw anybody get here as wrinkled up in my life." She kissed his cheek, and sat by him wordlessly for a little. "Why, Orrin's meeting the Southbound, just in case you all came that way," she said, still protesting.

"She took the car.—That's how I thought of a horse for Dabney." He grinned.

Bluet, barefooted, with a sore finger, and with her hair put up in rags, came into the dining room to be kissed. "Don't give me a lizard," she decided to beg him.

He asked for his coat and gave her some little thing wrapped up in paper which she took trustingly.

Shelley came in chasing Bluet, and listened stock-still. "She'd better not try to come here!" she cried, when she understood what Robbie had done. Her face was pale. "We wouldn't let her in. To do you like that—you, Uncle George!"

He groaned and sat up, rumpled and yawning.

Battle came in, groaning too, from the heat, and was told the news. He closed his eyes, and shouted for Roxie or anybody to bring him something cold to drink. Roxie came back with the lemonade. Then he fell into his chair, where he wagged the pitcher back and forth to cool it.

Ellen said, "Oh, don't tell Dabney—not yet—spoil her wedding—" She stopped in shame.

"Then don't tell India," said Shelley.

"And we can't let poor Tempe know—she just couldn't cope with this," said Battle in a soft voice. "Hard enough on Tempe to have Dabney marrying the way she is, and after Mary Denis married a Northern man and moved so far off. Can't tell Primrose and Jim Allen and hurt them."

"Of course don't tell any of the girls," George said, staring at Shelley unseeingly, his mouth an impatient line.

"Look, George," Battle said at length. "What's that sister of her's name? Rebel Reid! I bet you anything I've got Robbie's with Rebel."

"I've a very good notion she is," George said.

There were voices in the hall, Vi'let's and somebody's, a vaguely familiar voice.

"Troy's here. What's he doing here?" Ellen looked at Battle. "Oh—he's invited to supper."

"Man! Why don't you go get her, are you paralyzed? Then wring her neck. Did you go—are you going?" Battle turned his eyes from George to Ellen, Shelley, Bluet, and around to Troy—standing foxy-haired and high-shouldered in the door, his slow smile beginning—to invite indignation.

"What else is in your coat, Uncle George?" Ranny asked politely in the silence.

"No, I'm not going," George said. He watched Ranny and Bluet mildly as they went through his coat pulling everything out, and kept watching how Ranny squatted down opening a present with fingers careful enough to unlock some strange mystery in the world.

"Oh, George," Ellen was saying. "Oh, Battle." She looked from one to the other, then went to watch helplessly at the darkening window, where they could hear the horses coming. "Here's Dabney."

As Dabney and India rode in, Uncle George was coming down the front steps to meet them. He always met them like that, and they could tell him from anybody in the world. He called Dabney's name across the yard; his white shirt sleeve waved in the dark. He helped them down with the night light, and Dabney took it from him with a little predatory click of the tongue.

"Everything's fine with you, I hear," said George. "Troy's in the house," and Dabney brushed against him and kissed him.

India saw Troy—he was a black wedge in the lighted window.

"It's all right," Dabney said, coolly enough, and ran up the steps.

But they heard it—running, she dropped the little night light, and it broke and its pieces scattered. They heard that but no cry at all—only the opening and closing of the screen door as she went inside.

India ran up to Uncle George and flung herself against his knees and beat on his legs. She could not stop crying, through Uncle George himself stayed out there holding her and in a little began teasing her about a little old piece of glass that Dabney would never miss.

It was so hard to read at Shellmound. There was so much going on in real life. Laura had tried to read under the bed that morning, but Dabney had found her and pulled her out by the foot. Now with Volume I of
Saint Ronan's Well
inside her pinafore, next to her skin, she went tiptoeing in the direction of the library, where no one ever went at this hour. She could hear nothing, except the sounds of the Negroes, and the slow ceiling fan turning in the hall, and the submissive panting of the dogs just outside under the banana plants, lying up close to the house. Even Mary Lamar Mackey had gone to Greenwood.

Laura generally hesitated just a little in every doorway. Jackson was a big town, with twenty-five thousand people, and Fairchilds was just a store and a gin and a bridge and one big house, yet she was the one who felt like a little country cousin when she arrived, appreciating that she had come to where everything was dressy, splendid, and over her head. Demonically she tried to be part of it—she took a breath and whirled, went ahead of herself everywhere, then she would fall down a humiliated little girl whose grief people never seemed to remember. The very breath of preparation in the air, drawing in or letting out, hurried or deep and slow, made Dabney's wedding seem as fateful in the house as her mother's funeral had been, and she knew the serenity of this morning moment was only waiting for laughter or tears.

Even from the door, the library smelled of a tremendous dictionary that had come through high water and fire in Port Gibson and had now been left open on a stand, probably by Shelley. On the long wall, above the piles of bookcases and darker than the dark-stained books, was a painting of Great-Great-Uncle Battle, whose name was written on the flyleaf of the dictionary. It was done from memory by his brother, Great-Grandfather George Fairchild, a tall up-and-down picture on a slab of walnut, showing him on his horse with his saddlebags and pistols, pausing on a dark path between high banks, smiling not down at people but straight out into the room, his light hair gone dark as pressed wildflowers. His little black dogs, that he loved as a little boy, Great-Grandfather had put in too. Did he look as if he would be murdered? Certainly he did, and he was. Side by side with Old Battle's picture was one of the other brother, Denis, done by a real painter, changelessly sparkling and fair, though he had died in Mexico, "marching on a foreign land." Behind the glass in the bookcases hiding the books, and out on the tables, were the miniatures in velvet cases that opened like little square books themselves. Among them were Aunt Ellen's poor mother (who had married some Lord in England, or had died) and the three brothers and the husbands of Aunt Mac and Aunt Shannon, who could not be told apart from one another by the children; but no matter what hide-and-seek went on here, in this room where so many dead young Fairchilds, ruined people, were, there seemed to be always consciousness of their gazes, so courteous and meditative they were. Coming in, gratefully bringing out her book, Laura felt it wordlessly; the animation of the living generations in the house had not, even in forgetting identity, rebuked this gentleness, because the gentleness was still there in their own faces, part of the way they were made, the nervous, tender, pondering forehead, the offered cheek—the lonely body, broad shoulder, slender hand, the long pressing thigh of Old Battle Fairchild against his horse Florian.

She turned, and there by the mantel was Uncle George. Uncle George, every minute being welcomed and never alone, was alone now—except, that is, for Vi'let, leaning from a stepladder with one knee on a bookcase, very slowly taking down the velvet curtains. He was rearing tall by the mantel, the gold clock and the children's switches at his head, wearing his white city clothes, but coatless, and his finger moved along the open edge of a blue envelope, which, in his hand then, appeared an object from a star. He gave Laura a serious look as she stood in the middle of the room, unconsciously offering him her open book with both hands. Over his shoulder stared the small oval portrait of Aunt Ellen in Virginia, stating flatly her early beauty, her oval face in the melancholy mood of a very young girl, the full lips almost argumentative.

There was nothing at all abstract in Uncle George's look, like the abstraction of painted people, of most interrupted real people. There was only penetration in his look, and it reached to her. So serious was it that she backed away, out of the library, into the hall, and backwards out the screen door. Outside, she picked up a striped kitten that was stalking through the grass-blades, and held him to her, pressing against the tumult in her fingers and in his body. The willful little face was like a question close to hers, and the small stems of its breath came up and tickled her nose like flowers. In front of her eyes the cardinals were flying hard at their reflections in the car, drawn up in the yard now (they had got back from Greenwood). A lady cardinal was in the rosebush, singing so hard that she throbbed between her shoulder blades. Laura could see herself in the car door too, holding the kitten whose little foot stretched out. She stood looking at herself reflected there—as if she had gotten along so far like an adventurer in an invisible coat, as magical as it was unsuspected by her. Now she felt visible to everything.

The screen door opened behind her and Uncle George came out on the porch. They were calling him somewhere. She could see him in the red door, his hands were in his pockets and the letter was not showing on him.

"Skeeta! Like Shelley's kitten?" he remarked.

"No," she said, dropping it in the sheer perversity of excitement, because she thought that whatever had happened, he hoped Laura still liked Shelley's kitten. Now it chased the cardinals, which darted and scolded, though the lady cardinal sang on.

"What do you like best of anything in the world?" he asked, lighting his pipe now.

"Riddles," she answered.

"Uncle George!" they cried, but he began asking her, "As I was going to St. Ives." One thing the Fairchilds could all do was to take an old riddle and make it sound like a new one, their own. "One," she said, "you. You were going to St. Ives, all by yourself."

"Out of all those? Only me?" Then Dabney came out and grabbed him, and he looked over her head at Laura pretending he could not believe what he heard, as if he expected anything in the world to happen—a new answer to the riddle, which she, Laura, had not given him.

While they were all still seated around the table drinking their last coffee, Mr. Dunstan Rondo, the Methodist preacher at Fairchilds, paid a noon call. They were all tired, trying to make Aunt Shannon eat.

"Eat, Aunt Shannon, you've had no more than a bird."

"How can I eat, child," Aunt Shannon would say mysteriously, "when there's nothing to eat?"

They did not expect Mr. Rondo, they hardly knew him, but plainly, Ellen saw, he considered his dropping in a nice thing, since he was to marry Dabney and Troy so soon. Aunt Mac and Aunt Shannon vanished. The children started to run.

"Come back here!" Battle shouted. "You stay right here. Mr. Rondo, there's a baby too, somewhere."

"I'm afraid I'm not much of a Sunday School girl," Dabney told Mr. Rondo demurely as he took her hand, "But I'm the bride."

"By all means!" said Mr. Rondo, his voice hearty but uncertain. He sat in Battle's chair. Battle sat down on a little needle-point-covered stool and gave Mr. Rondo a rather argumentative look.

"I suppose you've met at some time or other my brother George, though he never put foot in a church that I know of. Fooling with practicing law in Memphis now—we're hoping he'll give it up and move back. He did plant the Grove over on the river, before he went to war."

Mr. Rondo and George shook hands.

"Why, I believe I married him," said Mr. Rondo.

"Of course! You did—you did. They got you out of bed in the middle of the night—you knew about it before we did!" Battle laughed at Mr. Rondo as at some failing in him.

"Is your wife the former Miss Roberta Reid from Fairchilds City?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yes, sir. That's who she is," Battle answered, also.

"And have they children?" asked Mr. Rondo, of Battle, as if that would be more polite.

Bluet, who never carried less than two things with her, hobbled in burdened under a suitcase and a croquet mallet. She was wearing a pair of Shelley's gun-metal stockings around her neck like a fur. "I'm their little girl," she said.

"They have not," said Battle. "And he loves them—eats mine up. He loves children and they love him. Look at Bluet kiss him." He scowled at Mr. Rondo.