The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (53 page)

Then Loch almost gave a yell; pride filled him, like a second yell, that he did not. Here down the street came Old Man Moody, the marshal, and Mr. Fatty Bowles with him. They had taken the day off to go fishing in Moon Lake and came carrying their old fishing canes but no fish. Their pants and shoes were heavy with mud. They were cronies of old Mr. Holifield and often came to wake him up, this time of day, and hound him off to the gin.

Loch skinned the cat over the limb and waited head down as they came tramping, sure enough, across the yard. In his special vision he saw that they could easily be lying on their backs in the blue sky and waving their legs pleasantly around, having nothing to do with law and order.

Old Man Moody and Mr. Fatty Bowles divided at the pecan stump, telling a joke, joined, said "Bread and butter," and then clogged up the steps. The curtain at the front window flapped signaling in their faces. They looked at each other anew. Their bodies and their faces grew smooth as fishes. They floated around the porch and flattened like fishes to nose at the window. There were round muddy spots on the seats of their pants; they squatted.

Well, there it is, thought Loch—the houseful. Two upstairs, one downstairs, and the two on the porch. And on the piano sat the ticking machine.... Directly below Loch a spotted thrush walked noisily in the weeds, pointing her beak ahead of her straight as a gun, just as busy in the world as people.

He held his own right hand ever so still as the old woman, unsteady as the Christmas angel in Mrs. McGillicuddy's fourth-grade pageant, came forward with a lighted candle in her hand. It was a kitchen tallow candle; she must have taken it out of Mr. Holifield's boxful against all the times the lights went out in Morgana. She came so slowly and held the candle so high that he could have popped it with a pea-shooter from where he was. Her hair, he saw, was cropped and white and lighted up all around. From the swaying, farthest length of a branch that would hold his weight, he could see how bright her big eyes were under their black circling brows, and how seldom they blinked. They were owl eyes.

She bent over, painfully, he felt, and laid the candle in the paper nest she had built in the piano. He too drew his breath in, protecting the flame, and as she pulled her aching hand back he pulled his. The newspaper caught, it was ablaze, and the old woman threw in the candle. Hands to thighs, she raised up, her work done.

Flames arrowed out so noiselessly. They ran down the streamers of paper, as double-quick as freshets from a loud gully-washer of rain. The room was criss-crossed with quick, dying yellow fire, there were pinwheels falling and fading from the ceiling. And up above, on the other side of the ceiling, they, the first two, were as still as mice.

The law still squatted. Mr. Fatty's and Old Man Moody's necks stretched sideways, the fat and the thin. Loch could have dropped a caterpillar down onto either of their heads, which rubbed together like mother's and child's.

"So help me. She
done
it," Mr. Fatty Bowles said in a natural voice. He lifted his arm, that had been hugging Old Man Moody's shoulders, and transferred to his own back pocket a slap that would have cracked Old Man Moody's bones. "Bless her heart! She done it before our eyes. What would you have bet?"

"Not a thing," said Old Man Moody. "Watch. If it catches them old dried-out squares of matting, Booney Holifield's going to feel a little warm ere long."

"Booney! Why, I done forgot him!"

Old Man Moody laughed explosively with shut lips.

"Wouldn't you say it's done caught now," said Mr. Fatty, pointing into the room with his old fishing knife.

"The house is on fire!" Loch cried at the top of his voice. He was riding his limb up and down and shaking the leaves.

Old Man Moody and Mr. Fatty might have heard, for, a little as if they were insulted, they raised up, moved their fishing poles along, and deliberately chose the dining room window instead of the parlor window to get to work on.

They lifted the screen out, and Mr. Fatty accidentally stepped through it They inched the sash up with a sound that made them draw high their muck-coated heels. They could go in now: they opened their mouths and guffawed silently. They were so used to showing off, they almost called up Morgana then and there.

Mr. Fatty Bowles started to squeeze himself over the sill into the room, but Old Man Moody was ready for that, pulled him back by the suspenders, and went first. He leap-frogged it. Inside, they both let go a holler.

"Look out! You're caught in the act!"

In the parlor, the old lady backed herself into the blind corner.

Old Man Moody and Mr. Fatty made a preliminary run around the dining room table to warm up, and then charged the parlor. They trod down the barrier of sparky matting and stomped in. They boxed at the smoke, hit each other, and ran to put up the window. Then Loch heard their well-known coughs and the creep and crack of fire inside the room. The smoke mostly stayed inside, contained and still.

Loch skinned the cat again. Here came somebody else. It was a fine day! Presently he thought he knew the golden Panama hat, and the elastic spareness of the man under it. He used to live in that vacant house and had at that time promised to bring Loch a talking bird, one that could say "Rabbits!" He had left and never returned. After all the years, Loch still wanted a bird like that. It was to his taste today.

"Nobody lives there now!" Loch called out of the leaves in an appropriate voice, for Mr. Voight turned in just like home at the vacant house. "If you go in, you'll blow up."

There was no talking bird on his shoulder yet. It was a long time ago that Mr. Voight had promised it. (And how often, Loch thought now with great surprise, he had remembered and cherished the promise!)

Mr. Voight shook his head rapidly as though a far-away voice from the leaves bothered him only for a moment. He ran up the steps with a sound like a green stick along a fence. He, though, instead of running into the flapping barrier over the door, drifted around the porch to the side and leisurely took a look through the window. Everything made his shout alarming.

"Will you please tell me why you're trespassing here?"

"So help me!" said Mr. Fatty Bowles, who was looking right at him, holding a burning hat.

Old Man Moody only said, "
Good
evening. Now I don't speak to you."

"Answer me! Trespassing, are you?"

"Whoa. Your house is afire."

"If my house is afire, then where's my folks gone?"

"Oh,
'tain't
your house no more, I forgot. It's Miss Francine Murphy's house You're late, Captain."

"What antics are these? Get out of my house. Put that fire out behind you. Tell me where they went. Never mind, I know where they went. All right, burn it down, who's to stop you?"

He slapped his hands on the boarding of the house, fanfare like, and must have glared at them between, at the window. He had inserted himself between Loch and what happened, and to tell the truth he made one too many.

Old Man Moody and Mr. Fatty, exchanging murderous looks, ran hopping about the parlor, clapping their hats at the skittering flames, working in a team mad at itself, the way two people try to head off chickens in a yard. They jumped up and knocked at the same flame. They kicked and rubbed under their feet a spark they found by themselves, sometimes imaginary. Maybe because they'd let the fire almost go out, or because Mr. Voight had come to criticize, they pretended this fire was bigger than it had ever been. They bit their underlips tightly as old people do in carrying out acts of rudeness. They didn't speak.

Mr. Voight shook all over. He was laughing, Loch discovered. Now he watched the room like a show. "That's it! That's it!" he said.

Old Man Moody and Mr. Bowles together beat out the fire in the piano, fighting over it hard, banging and twanging the strings. Old Man Moody, no matter how his fun had been spoiled, enjoyed jumping up and down on the fierce-burning magnolia leaves. So they put the fire out, every spark, even the matting, which twinkled all over time and again before it went out for good. When a little tongue of flame started up for the last time, they quenched it together; and with a whistle and one more stamp each, they dared it, and it stayed out.

"That's it, boys," said Mr. Voight.

Then the old woman came out of the blind corner. "Now who's this?" cried Mr. Voight. In the center of the room she stopped. Without the law to stand over her, she might have clasped her empty hands and turned herself this way and that. But she did not; she was more desperate still. Loch hollered out again, riding the tree, his branch in both fists.

"Why don't you step on in, Captain?" called Mr. Fatty Bowles, and he beckoned the old lady to him.

"Down to business here. Now I'd appreciate knowing why you done this, lady," Old Man Moody said, rubbing his eyes and rimming them with black. "Putting folks to all this trouble. Now what you got against us?"

"Cat's got her tongue," said Mr. Fatty.

"I'm an old man. But you're an old woman. I don't know why you done it. Unless of course it was for pure lack of good sense."

"Where you come from?" asked Mr. Fatty in his little tenor voice.

"You clowns."

Mr. Voight, who said that, now went lightly as a dragonfly around the porch and entered the house by the front door: it was not locked. He might have been waiting until all the beating about had been done by others—clowns—or perhaps he thought he was so valuable that he could burn up in too big a hurry.

Loch saw him step, with rather a flare, through the beads at the hall door and come into the parlor. He gazed serenely about the walls, pausing for a moment first, as though something had happened to them not that very hour but a long time ago. He was there and not there, for he alone was not at his wit's end. He went picking his feet carefully among the frills and flakes of burned paper, and wrinkled up his sharp nose; not from the smell, it seemed, but from wider, dissolving things. Now he stood at the window. His eyes rolled. Would he foam at the mouth? He did once. If he did not, Loch might not be sure about him; he remembered Mr. Voight best as foaming.

"Do you place her, Captain?" asked Old Man Moody in a cautious voice. "Who's this here firebug? You been places."

Mr. Voight was strolling about the room, and taking the poker he poked among the ashes. He picked up a seashell. The old lady advanced on him and he put it back, and as he came up he took off his hat. It looked more than polite. There close to the old lady's face he cocked his head, but she looked through him, a long way through Mr. Voight. She could have been a lady on an opposite cliff, far away, out of eye range and earshot, but about to fall.

The tick-tock was very loud then. Just as Mr. Fatty had forgotten Mr. Booney Holifield, Loch had forgotten the dynamite. Now he could go back to expecting a blast. The fire had had a hard time, but fire could manage to connect itself with an everlasting little mechanism that could pound like that, right along, right in the room.

("Do you hear something, Mr. Moody?" Loch could cry out right now. "Mr. Voight, listen."—"All right, say—do you want your bird this minute?" might be the reply. "We'll call everything off.")

"Man, what's that?" asked Mr. Fatty Bowles, and "Fatty boy, do you hear something ugly?" Old Man Moody asked at the same instant. At last they cocked their ears at the ticking that had been there in the room with them all this time. They looked at each other and then with hunched shoulders paraded around looking for the source of it.

"It's a rattlesnake! No, it ain't! But it's close," said Mr. Fatty.

They looked high and low all over the room but they couldn't see it right in front of their eyes and up just a little, on top of the piano. That was honestly not a fair place, not where most people would put a thing. They looked at each other harder and hurried faster, but all they did was run on each other's heels and tip the chairs over. One of the chair legs snapped like a chicken bone.

Mr. Voight only got in their way, since he did not move an inch. He was still standing before the eyes of the sailor's mother, looking at her with lips puckered. It could be indeed that he knew her from his travels. He looked tired from these same travels now.

At last Old Man Moody, the smarter one of those two, spied what they were looking for, the obelisk with its little moving part and its door open. Once seen, that thing was so surely
it
that he merely pointed it out to Mr. Fatty. Mr. Fatty tiptoed over and picked the obelisk up and set it down again quickly. So Old Man Moody stumped over and picked it up and held it up on the diagonal, posing, like a fisherman holding a funny-looking fish to have come out of Moon Lake.

The old woman lifted her head and walked around Mr. Voight to Old Man Moody. She reached up and took the ticking thing right out of his hand, and he turned it loose agreeably; Old Man Moody seemed not taken by surprise by women.

The old woman held her possession to her, drawn to her big gray breast. Her eyesight returned from far to close by. Then she stood looking at the three people fixedly, as if she showed them her insides, her live heart.

And then a little whir of her own voice: "See ... See, Mr. MacLain."

Nothing blew up, but Mr. Voight (but she called him MacLain) groaned.

"No, boys. I never saw her in my life," he said.

He walked stiffly out of the room. He walked out of the house and cater-cornered across the yard toward the MacLain Road. As he reached the road itself, he put his hat on, and then he did not look as shabby, or as poor.

Loch clasped a leafy armful of the tree and sank his head in the green cool.

"Let
me
see your play-pretty," Mr. Fatty Bowles was saying with his baby-smile. He took the obelisk away from the old woman, and with a sudden change on his face threw it with all his might out the open window. It came straight toward Loch, and fell into the weeds below him. And still it ticked.

"You could have been a little too quick there, Fatty boy," said Old Man Moody. "Flinging evidence."