The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (74 page)

She saw her waist disappear into reflectionless water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All was one warmth, air, water, and her own body. All seemed one weight, one matter—until as she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instant. The iron taste of the old river was sweet to her, though. If she opened her eyes she looked at blue-bottles, the skating waterbugs. If she trembled it was at the smoothness of a fish or snake that crossed her knees.

In the middle of the river, whose downstream or upstream could not be told by a current, she lay on her stretched arm, not breathing, floating. Virgie had reached the point where in the next moment she might turn into something without feeling it shock her. She hung suspended in the Big Black River as she would know to hang suspended in felicity. Far to the west, a cloud running fingerlike over the sun made her splash the water. She stood, walked along the soft mud of the bottom and pulled herself out of the water by a willow branch, which like warm rain brushed her back with its leaves.

At a distance, two little boys lying naked in the red light on the sandbar looked at her as she disappeared into the leaves. They did not move or speak.

The moon, while she looked into the high sky, took its own light between one moment and the next. A wood thrush, which had begun to sing, hushed its long moment and began again. Virgie put her clothes back on. She would have given much for a cigarette, always wishing for a little more of what had just been.

She went back to the pasture, where the enormous ant hills shone, with long shadows, like pyramids on the other side of the world, and drove the cows home.

The crape myrtle had a last crown of bloom on top, once white, now faintly nutmegged. The ground below was littered with its shed bark, and the limbs shone like human limbs, lithe and warm, pink.

She went out to milk and came back to the house.

From the hall she looked into her mother's room. The window and the room were the one blue of first-dark. Only the black dress, the density of skirt, was stamped on it, like some dark chip now riding mid-air on blue lakes.

Miss Snowdie MacLain had elected to "sit up" the first hours of night. She slept in the bedroom rocker, in the luminous veil of her dress, the cocoon of her head hanging upon it, and the fan let fall from her fingers.

Virgie waked to see the morning star hanging over the fields. What had she meant to do so early? She made and drank her coffee, milked, drove the cows to pasture through mist, chopped wood, and at last she attacked the high grass in the yard. Yesterday cutting the Rainey grass in time for the funeral was considered a project so impossible that even if men could be spared and given scythes, success was never guaranteed. Virgie took her sewing scissors from the little bundle of plaid material in her room, and went outdoors. She crouched in the pink early light, clipping and sawing the heads off the grass—it had all gone to seed—a handful at a time. The choked-out roses scratched, surprised her, drew blood drops on her legs. She had to come in when Miss Snowdie, whose presence she had forgotten, stepped out on the porch and called her. As though for a long time she had been extremely angry and had wept many tears, she allowed Miss Snowdie to drive her inside the house and cook her breakfast.

Then Miss Lizzie Stark's Juba arrived, followed by a little stairsteps of Negro children bearing curtain stretchers, and Miss Snowdie and Juba began taking down all the curtains. In half an hour these were out in the backyard, stretched and set forth like the tents in the big Bible's Wilderness of Kadesh. The ladies soon were everywhere, radiating once more from the kitchen.

"First thing," Missie Spights told Virgie, "you called me Missie Spights yesterday. I'm married."

"Oh. Yes, I remember."

"I'm Missie Spights Littlejohn, and I've got three children. I married from off."

"I remember, Missie."

Some of Miss Katie's people arrived by noon, in good time for the funeral—big dark people named Mayhew, men and women alike with square, cleft chins and blue eyes. A little string of tow-headed children made a row behind, finishing some bananas. Virgie couldn't remember all the Mayhews or tell them apart; they all came upon her at once; after knocking on the porch to bring her out, all kissed her in greedy turn and begged before they got through the door for ice water or iced tea or both. They had ridden in in several trucks, now drawn up by the porch, from the Stockstill and Lastingwell communities near the Tennessee line. The first thing the largest Mayhew man did, once inside the house, was to catch up a little child of Missie Spights', who was swatting flies, and tickle her violently, speaking soberly over her screams, "Now wait: you don't know who I am."

Only the same old Rainey came from Louisiana who had come to Fate's funeral years ago and hadn't sent word since. Again he brought his own coffee. Again he offered to fix the front porch and in time, and again was prevented. He was the only Rainey that made the trip. The Raineys were mostly all died out, or couldn't leave the fields, or were too far to buy a ticket. The old man explained it all again, and told what had happened to the French name with all the years.

"Yes, some are missing," Miss Perdita Mayo told Virgie when she arrived and saw the lined-up kin. "But you got in touch, or I did for you. If the funeral's small we can't reproach ourselves."

Screams surrounded the house. The little MacLain children and their nurse had gotten away from old Miss Lizzie, their grandmother, and come to play in the Rainey yard. Gradually other children, Loomis and Maloney, attracted by the magnetic MacLains, played there too, all drunk with the attractions of an untried place, and a place sinister for the day. The little Mayhews, every time they were gathered up and brought away from these into the house, cried. Blue jays were scolding the whole morning over the roof, and the logging trucks thundered by, shaking their chains and threatening the clean curtains.

Miss Perdita Mayo, who had got into the bedroom and formed a circle, was telling a story. "Sister couldn't get her new shoes back on after that funeral, because while she was in the cemetery—" Suddenly Miss Perdita appeared backing out of the room, thinking herself still telling her story, but mistaken. She had heard the coffin come, and ran to meet it. Mr. Holifield at the hardware store sent his grandsons, Hughie and Dewey Holifield, with it on their produce truck. The boys came inside and made it steady, the Mayhews watching.

"Where's all them Mayhews going to bed down?" old Mr. Rainey, with nothing to do, asked Virgie, indicating Mayhews with a thumb purpled like a fig.

"They won't stay. They're striking right out for Stockstill after the funeral, sir," said Virgie. "As soon as they've packed some lunch." And they were taking the bed, Katie's bed; they could set it right up in the truck, they said, looking at it detached from its owner who was lying on it; and the children could ride home on it instead of standing.

Mr. Rainey was shaking his head. "Pity. Never a chance to know those." He put up a little horned finger and touched a string on the old banjo of her father's, which hung on its nail in the hall, the head faintly luminous by morning light. But he didn't play the note. "
He
traveled around a bit," he said at length. "And settled hereabouts for the adventure of it."

The home-grown flowers came early, and the florist flowers late. Mr. Nesbitt sent word by the janitor in the barbershop, who wore gold-rimmed spectacles, that he must be out of town during the funeral, the Negro then bringing out from behind his back a large cross of gladiolas and ferns on a stand, evidently from Vicksburg, with Mr. Nesbitt's card tied on. The Mayhews moved upon it and placed it in front of all the other flowers—now steadily being made into wreaths on the back porch—where they could look at it during the service, to remember. The Sunday School chairs arrived by wagon, and the Mayhews took them at the door and set them in cater-cornered rows. Had Miss Lizzie Stark been able to come, people said, it wouldn't have happened quite the same way.

Old Mr. King MacLain did not appear happy over having to come to the Rainey house again today. He fumed, and went back to visit in the kitchen.

"Little conversation with your mother in '18, or along there," he said to Virgie, who was folding napkins with the Stark "S" on them. "You know in those days I was able to make considerable trips off, and only had my glimpses of the people back here."

Miss Snowdie had come to stand folding napkins too.

"I'd come and I'd go again, only I ended up at the wrong end, wouldn't you say?" He suddenly smiled, rather fiercely, but at neither woman. He wore the stiffest-starched white suit Virgie ever saw on any old gentleman; it looked fierce too—the lapels alert as ears. "Saw your mother in a pink sunbonnet. Rosy-cheeked. 'Hello!'—'I declare, King MacLain, you look to me as you ever did, strolling here in the road. You rascal.'—'Just for that, what would you rather have than anything?

I'm asking because I'm going to get it for you.'—'A swivel chair. So I can sit out front and sell crochet and peaches, if my good-for-nothing husband'll let me.' Ah, we all knew sweet old Fate, he was a sweet man among us. 'Shucks, that's too easy. Say something else. I'd have got you anything your living heart desired.'—'Well, I told you. And you mischief, I believe you.'

"Three niggers up to the house in a wagon, bang-up noon next day. Up to the door, pounding.

"'Oh, King MacLain! You've brought it so quick-like!'

"But I! I was no telling where by that time. Looked to her, I know, like I couldn't wait long enough to hear her pleasure. So bent, so bent I was on all I had to do, on what was ahead of me.

"
She
told me how she flew around the yard. 'Watch out, now, don't set that down a minute till I tell you where it'll go!' Had niggers carrying here, carrying there. Then she put it spang by the road, close as she could get.

"And her chair always too big for her, little heels wouldn't touch ground. It was big enough for a man, big enough for Drewsie Carmichael, 'cause it was his. I prevailed on the widow. Oh, Katie Rainey was a sight, I saw her swing her chair round many's the time, to hear me coming down the road or starting out, waving her hand to me. And sold more eggs than you'd dream. Oh, then, she could see where Fate Rainey had fallen down, and a lovely man, too; never got her the thing she wanted. I set her on a throne!"

"Mr. King, I never knew the chair came from you," Virgie said, smiling.

He looked all at once inconsolable, but Miss Snowdie shook her head.

"Have a little refreshments, sir. There's ham and potato salad—"

"Oh, is there ham?"

Virgie led him down the hall. The Negroes stood by the table with fly swatters. She laid a little piccalilli with the ham on his plate, which he held for her as long as she'd help it.

When Virgie returned to the parlor, Jinny MacLain came forward to greet her: as if their positions were reversed.

Jinny, who in childhood had seemed more knowing than her years, was in her thirties strangely childlike; was it old perversity or further tactics? She too arrived at close range, looked at the burns and scars on Virgie's hands, as Missie Spights had done, making them stigmata of something at odds in her womanhood.

"Listen. You should marry now, Virgie. Don't put it off any longer," she said, making a face, any face, at her own words. She was grimacing out of the iron mask of the married lady. It appeared urgent with her to drive everybody, even Virgie for whom she cared nothing, into the state of marriage along with her. Only then could she resume as Jinny Love Stark, her true self. She was casting her eye around the room, as if to pick Virgie some husband then and there; and her eyes rested over Virgie's head on—Virgie knew it—Ran MacLain. Virgie smiled faintly; now she felt, without warning, that two passionate people stood in this roomful, with their indifferent backs to each other.

A great many had gathered now. People sat inside and outside, listening and not listening. Young people held hands, all of them taking seats early to reserve the back row. Then some of the Mayhews carried the coffin into the parlor and placed it over the hearth on the four chairs from around the table. The wreaths were stood on edge to hide the chair legs.

"What are my children up to?" Jinny whispered hurriedly, and swept a curtain aside to expose the front yard. "My daughter has chosen today to catch lizards. She's wearing lizard earrings! How can she stand those little teeth in her!" Jinny laughed delightedly as she settled herself by the window.

"Sit by me, Virgie," said Cassie Morrison, who began to put her handkerchief to her eyes. "This is when it's the worst, or almost."

There was a new arrival just before the service. Brother Dampeer from Goodnight, whose father was the preacher when Mrs. Rainey was a child and baptized her as a girl in Cold Creek, in North Mississippi, couldn't let her go without one more glimpse, he said. Virgie had never seen Brother Dampeer; he sized her up and kissed her. There was a tuning fork in his shirt pocket that showed when he walked sideways back of the coffin and leaned over it full front to scrutinize the body.