The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (65 page)

Nobody was inside but the barkeep—a silent, relegated place like a barn, old and tired. I let him bring some rum cokes out to the card table on the back where the two cane chairs were. It was open back there. The sun was going down on the island side while we sat, and making Vicksburg all picked out on the other. East and West were in our eyes.

"Don't make me drink it. I don't want to drink it," Maideen said.

"Go on and drink it."

"You drink it if you like it. Don't make me drink it."

"You drink it too."

I looked at her take some of it, and sit shading her eyes. There were wasps dipping from a nest over the old screen door and skimming her hair. There was a smell of fish and of the floating roots fringing the island, and of the oilcloth top of our table, and endless deals. A load of Negroes came over on the water taxi and stepped out sulphur-yellow all over, coated with cottonseed meal. They disappeared in the colored barge at the other end, in single file, carrying their buckets, like they were sentenced to it.

"Sure enough, I don't want to drink it."

"Look, you drink it and then tell me if it tastes bad, and I'll pour 'em both in the river."

"It will be too late."

Through the screen door I could see into the dim saloon. Two men with black cocks under their arms had come in. Without noise they each set a muddy boot on the rail and drank, the cocks absolutely still. They got off the barge on the island side and were lost in a minute in a hot blur of willow trees. They might never be seen again.

The heat shook on the water and on the other side shook along the edges of the old white buildings and the concrete slabs and the wall. From the barge Vicksburg looked like an image of itself in some old mirror—like a portrait at a sad time of life.

A short cowboy and his girl came in, walking alike. They dropped a nickel in the nickelodeon, and came together.

There weren't any waves visible, yet the water did tremble under our chairs. I was aware of it like the sound of a winter fire in the room.

"You don't ever dance, do you," Maideen said.

It was a long time before we left. A good many people had come out to the barge. There was old Gordon Nesbitt, dancing. When we left, the white barge and the nigger barge had both filled up, and it was good-dark.

The lights were far between on shore—sheds and warehouses, long walls that needed propping. High up on the ramparts of town some old iron bells were ringing.

"Are you a Catholic?" I asked her suddenly, and she shook her head.

Nobody was a Catholic but I looked at her—I made it plain she disappointed some hope of mine, and she had, standing there with a foreign bell ringing on the air.

"We're all Baptists. Why, are you a Catholic? Is that what you are?"

Without touching her except by accident with my knee I walked her ahead of me up the steep uneven way to where my car was parked listing downhill. Inside, she couldn't shut her door. I stood outside and waited, the door hung heavily and she had drunk all I had made her drink. Now she couldn't shut her door.

"Shut it."

"I'll fall out. I'll fall in your arms. If I fall, catch me."

"No. Shut it. You have to shut it. I can't. All your might."

At last. I leaned against her shut door, and held on for a moment.

I grated up the steep hills, turned and followed the river road along the bluff, turned again off into a deep rutted dirt way under shaggy banks, Father, dark and circling and rushing down.

"Don't lean on me," I said. "Better to sit up and get air."

"Don't want to."

"Pull up your head." I could hardly understand what she said any more. "You want to lie down?"

"Don't want to lie down."

"You get some air."

"Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore."

We circled down. The sounds of the river tossing and teasing its great load, its load of trash, I could hear through the dark now. It made the noise of a moving wall, and up it fishes and reptiles and uprooted trees and man's throw-aways played and climbed all alike in a splashing like innocence. A great wave of smell beat at my face. The track had come down here deep as a tunnel. We were on the floor of the world. The trees met and their branches matted overhead, the cedars came together, and through them the stars of Morgana looked sifted and fine as seed, so high, so far. Away off, there was the sound of a shot.

"Yonder's the river," she said, and sat up. "I see it—the Mississippi River."

"You don't see it. You only hear it."

"I see it, I see it."

"Haven't you ever seen the river before? You baby."

"I thought we were on it on the boat. Where's this?"

"The road's ended. You can see that."

"Yes, I can. Why does it come this far and stop?"

"How should I know?"

"What do they come down here for?"

"There're all kinds of people in the world." Far away, somebody was burning something.

"You mean bad people? Niggers?"

"Oh, fishermen. River men. See, you're waked up."

"I think we're lost," she said.

Mother said,
If I thought you'd ever go back to that finny Stark, I couldn't stand it.
—No, Mother, I'm not going back.—
The whole world knows what she did to you. It's different from when it's the man.

"You dreamed we're lost. That's all right, you can lie down a little."

"You can't get lost in Morgana."

"After you lie down a little you'll be all right again. We'll go somewhere where you can lie down good."

"Don't want to lie down."

"Did you know my car would back up a hill as steep as this?"

"You'll be killed."

"I bet nobody ever saw such a crazy thing. Do you think anybody ever saw such a crazy thing?"

We were almost straight up and down, Father, hanging on the wall of the bluff, and the rear end of the car bumping and rising like something that wanted to fly, lifting and dropping us. At last we backed back over the brink, like a bee pulling out of a flower cup, and skidded a little. Without that last drink, maybe I wouldn't have made it at all.

We drove a long way then. All through the dark Park; the same old statues and stances, the stone rifles at point again and again on the hills, lost and the same. The towers they've condemned, the lookout towers, lost and the same.

Maybe I didn't have my bearings, but I looked for the moon, due to be in the last quarter. There she was. The air wasn't darkness but faint light and floating sound. It was the breath of all the people in the world who were breathing out into the late night looking at the moon, knowing her quarter. And all along I knew I rode in the open world and took bearings by the stars.

We rode in wilderness under the lifting moon. Maideen was awake because I heard her sighing faintly, as if she longed for something for herself. A coon, white as a ghost, pressed low like an enemy, crossed over the road.

We crossed a highway and there a light burned in a whitewashed tree. Under hanging moss it showed a half-circle of whitewashed cabins, dark, and all along it a fence of pale palings. A little nigger boy leaned on the gate where our lights moved on him; he was wearing a train engineer's cap. Sunset Oaks.

The little nigger hopped on the runningboard, and I paid. I guided Maideen by the shoulders. She had been asleep after all.

"One step up," I told her at the door.

We fell dead asleep in our clothes across the iron bed.

The naked light hung far down into the room and our sleep, a long cord with the strands almost untwisted. Maideen got up after some time and turned the light off, and the night descended like a bucket let down a well, and I woke up. It was never dark enough, the enormous sky flashing with August light rushing into the emptiest rooms, the loneliest windows. The month of falling stars. I hate the time of year this is, Father.

I saw Maideen taking her dress off. She bent over all tender toward it, smoothing its skirt and shaking it and laying it, at last, on the room's chair; and tenderly like it was any chair, not that one. I propped myself up against the rods of the bed with my back pressing them. I was sighing—deep sigh after deep sigh. I heard myself. When she turned back to the bed, I said, "Don't come close to me."

And I showed I had the pistol. I said, "I want the whole bed." I told her she hadn't needed to be here. I got down in the bed and pointed the pistol at her, without much hope, the way I used to lie cherishing a dream in the morning, and she the way Jinny would come pull me out of it.

Maideen came into the space before my eyes, plain in the lighted night. She held her bare arms. She was disarrayed. There was blood on her, blood and disgrace. Or perhaps there wasn't. For a minute I saw her double. But I pointed the gun at her the best I could.

"Don't come close to me," I said.

Then while she spoke to me I could hear all the noises of the places we were in—the frogs and nightbirds of Sunset Oaks, and the little idiot nigger running up and down the fence, up and down, as far as it went and back, sounding the palings with his stick.

"Don't, Ran. Don't do that, Ran. Don't do it, please don't do it." She came closer, but when she spoke I wasn't hearing what she said. I was reading her lips, the conscientious way people do through train windows. Outside, I thought the little nigger at the gate would keep that up for ever, no matter what I did, or what anyone did—running a stick along the fence, up and then down, to the end and back again.

Then that stopped. I thought, he's still running. The fence stopped, and he ran on without knowing it.

I drew back the pistol, and turned it. I put the pistol's mouth to my own. My instinct is always quick and ardent and hungry and doesn't lose any time. There was Maideen still, coming, coming in her petticoat.

"Don't do it, Ran. Please don't do it." Just the same.

I made it—made the awful sound.

And
she
said, "Now you see. It didn't go
off.
Give me that. Give that old thing to me, I'll take care of it."

She took it from me. Dainty as she always was, she carried it over to the chair; and prissy as she was, like she knew some long-tried way to deal with a gun, she folded it in her dress. She came back to the bed again, and dropped down on it.

In a minute she put her hand out again, differently, and laid it cold on my shoulder. And I had her so quick.

I could have been asleep then. I was lying there.

"You're so stuck up," she said.

I lay there and after a while I heard her again. She lay there by the side of me, weeping for herself. The kind of soft, patient, meditative sobs a child will venture long after punishment.

So I slept.

How was I to know she would go and hurt herself? She cheated, she cheated too.

Father, Eugene! What you went and found, was it better than this?

And where's Jinny?

One morning at breakfast Eugene MacLain was opening his paper and without the least idea of why he did it, when his wife said some innocent thing to him—"Crumb on your chin" or the like—he leaned across the table and slapped her face. They were in their forties, married twelve years—she was the older: she was looking it now.

He waited for her to say "Eugene MacLain!" The oven roared behind her—the second pan of toast was under the flame. Almost leisurely—that is, he sighed—Eugene rose and walked out of the kitchen, holding on to his paper; usually he put it in Emma's hand as he gave her the good-bye kiss.

He listened for "Eugene?" to follow him into the chill of the hall and wait for "Yes, dear?" He saw his face go past the mirror with a smile on it; that was a memory of little Fan's fly-away habit of answering her mother—and the sticking out of her two pigtails behind her as she ran off, the fair hair screwed up to the first tightenings of vanity—"That's my name." She had now been dead a year.

He put on his raincoat and hat, and secured his paper flat under his arm. Emma was still sitting propped back in her chair between table and stove, with the parrot-tailed house-coat just now settling in a series of puffs about her, and her too small, fat feet, as if
they
had been the most outraged, propped out before her. He knew the way Emma was looking in the kitchen behind him not because he had ever struck anyone before but because, with her, it was like having eyes in the back of his head. (
Only
in the back of his head!) Why, now, drawing her breath fast in the only warm room, she sat self-hypnotized in her own domain, with her "Get-out-of-my-kitchen" and "Come-here-do-you-realize-what-you've-done," all her stiffening and wifely glaze running sweet and finespun as sugar threads over her.

But Eugene went down the hall—now he heard like an echo her wounded cry and the shriek of the toast-pan—and pulled the apartment door locked behind him. He never could bear the sound of his own name called out in public, and she could still fling open the door and cry "Eugene Hudson MacLain, come here to me!" down the stairs.

A tremor ran through his arm as it struggled with the front door, and he stepped through to the outside and the perfectly still, foggy morning. He let his breath out, and there it was: he could see it. The air, the street, a sea gull, all the same soft gray, were in the same degree visible and seemed to him suddenly as pure as his own breath was.

The sea gull like a swinging pearl came walking across Jones Street as if to join him. "Our sea gulls have become so immured to San Francisco life," he would remark on walking in Bertsingers'—for you came in to work with a humorous remark—"they even cross the streets at the intersections now." He couldn't have hurt Emma. There couldn't be a mark on her.

She was stronger than he was, 150 pounds to 139, he could inform old Mr. Bertsinger Senior, who liked to press for figures. He and Emma MacLain could at any time be printed in the paper where all could see, side by side naked and compared, in those testimonial silhouettes; maybe had been. Emma knew he hadn't hurt her; better than he knew, Emma knew.