The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (75 page)

"Come up to my crossroads church some pretty Sunday, ever' one of y'all," was all he said, straightening up and addressing the living. With him, it seemed marked, as if he found nothing sufficiently remarkable about the dead to give him anything flattering to say. "I guarantee nobody'll bite you if you put in at the collection for the piano, either," he added, rocking sidewise off.

"Where were his manners! But of course, he couldn't be turned away," Miss Snowdie, back of Virgie, was whispering. "Coming was his privilege." She drew her fan deeply back and forth, with the pressure of a heavy tail on the air. "A perfect stranger, and he handed out fans from Katie's deer horns out there, because he was a preacher; gave one to everybody."

"It's not time for the Last Look," Parnell Moody said in her natural, school voice. But the little Mayhews had to follow right behind Brother Dampeer. There came the prompting voice of Mrs. Junie Mayhew, "Chirren? Want to see your cousin Kate? Go look in, right quick. She raised your Uncle Berry. Take hands and go now, while there's nobody else; so you'll have her to remember." And they came in dipping their heads and pulling one another. The oldest little boy came hopping; it was remembered that at one point during the day he had run a nail in his foot.

"Brothers and sisters." Dr. Williams was facing the room.

Virgie rose right up. In the pink china jar on the mantel shelf, someone had placed her mother's old stick—like a peach branch, as though it would flower. Brother Dampeer cleared his throat: his work. Before his eyes and everybody's she marched over, took the stick out of the vase, and carried it away to the hall, where she placed it in the ring on the hatrack. When she was back in her chair, Dr. Williams opened the book and held the service.

Every now and then Mr. King, his tender-looking old head cocked sideways, his heels lifted, his right hand pricking the air, tiptoed down the hall to the table to pick at the ham—all as if nobody could see him. While Mamie C. Loomis, a child in peach, sang "O Love That Will Not Let Me Go," Mr. King sucked a little marrow bone and lifted his wobbly head and looked arrogantly at Virgie through the two open doors of her mother's bedroom. Even Weaver Loomis and Little Sister Spights, holding hands on the back row, were crying by now, listening to music, but Mr. King pushed out his stained lip. Then he made a hideous face at Virgie, like a silent yell. It was a yell at everything—including death, not leaving it out—and he did not mind taking his present animosity out on Virgie Rainey; indeed, he chose her. Then he cracked the little bone in his teeth. She felt refreshed all of a sudden at that tiny but sharp sound.

She sat up straight and touched her hair, which sprang to her fingers, as always. Turning her head, looking out of the one bright window through which came the cries of the little MacLains playing in the yard, she knew another moment of alliance. Was it Ran or King himself with whom she really felt it? Perhaps that confusion among all of them was the great wound in Ran's heart, she was thinking at the same time. But she knew the kinship for what it was, whomever it settled upon, an indelible thing which may come without friendship or even too early an identity, may come even despisingly, in rudeness, intruding in the middle of sorrow. Except in a form too rarefied for her, it lacked future as well as past; but she knew when even a rarefied thing had become a matter of loyalty and alliance.

"Child, you just don't know yet what you've lost," said Miss Hattie Mayo through the words of the service. It was the only thing Virgie remembered ever hearing Miss Hattie say; and then it was a thing others had been saying before her.

Miss Lizzie Stark—for she had, after all, been able to come to the funeral—waved her own little fan—black chiffon—at Virgie's cheeks from a jet chain. Miss Lizzie looked very rested, and had succeeded in exchanging seats with Cassie Morrison. She let a hand fall plumply on Virgie's thigh, and did not lift it again.

Down the hall, with the blue sky at his back, Mr. King MacLain sent for coffee, tasted it, and put out his tongue in the air to cool, a bright pink tongue wagging like a child's while they sang "Nearer, My God, to Thee."

"Go back," they told Virgie as they all moved out of the parlor. "Be alone with her before you come with us."

"You're the onliest one now," a Mayhew said. The Mayhews had asked to carry Katie home to Lastingwell Church to bury her, but acknowledged that Mr. Fate, whom the Raineys had wanted likewise to take back to their home place, was in Morgana ground, and Victor—"And so will you be," they had concluded to Virgie.

Virgie drew back while they marked time, and then she wasn't alone in the parlor. There was little Jinny MacLain, shoes and socks in hand, quietly bent over the coffin, looking boldly in. She had prized open the screen and climbed in the window. Green lizards hung like tiny springs at her ears, their eyes and jaws busy. At any other house today, Virgie knew, more care would have been exercised by them all; here a child could slip through.

Jinny looked up at Virgie; the expression on her face was disappointment.

"Hi, Jinny."

"This doesn't look like a coffin. Did you have to use a bureau drawer?"

"They haven't put the lid down, that's all."

"Well, will you put the lid down for me?"

"Run on. Go the back way," said Virgie. "Wait—how is it that you make lizards catch on to your ears?"

"Press their heads," Jinny said languidly, over her shoulder. She walked out beating her shoes softly together with her hands.

Virgie walked over and pressed her forehead against the broken-into screen. She looked far out, over the fields, down to the far, low trees—the old vision belonging to this window. It was the paper serpent with the lantern lights through whose interior was flowing the Big Black.

"So here you are," said Miss Perdita Mayo.

The procession—the coffin passing through their ranks and now going before—marched humped and awkward down the path. They were like people waked by night, in the shimmering afternoon.

This was the children's dispensation: what they'd been waiting for. Little Jinny, her face bright and important, stood by little King, who—he was exactly timing the funeral—sucked a four-o'clock. "Move, Clara," she was saying to the nurse. They adored seeing beyond dodging aprons and black protecting arms (except Clara at the moment was smoking) the sight of grown people streaming tears and having to be held up. They liked coffins carried out because of the chance they could perceive that coffins might be dropped and the dead people spilled right out. But the chance would fade a little more with today. No dead people had ever been spilled while any of them watched, just as no freight train had ever wrecked while they prayed for it to, so they could get the bananas.

"But mainly, Mr. MacLain, you should remember to keep off rich food," Miss Snowdie said, leading her husband down a divergent path. They were not going to the cemetery with the rest; no one expected it of them. Their Negro girl chauffeur waited with their car turned the other way. "At home we've got that nice Moody fish from Moon Lake."

Virgie watched the mysterious, vulnerable back of the old man. Even as Miss Snowdie, unmysterious, led him away, he was eating still. At some moment today she had said, "Virgie, I spent all Mama and Papa had tracing after him. The Jupiter Detective Agency in Jackson. I never told. They never found or went after the right one. But I'll never forgive myself for tracing after him." Virgie had wanted to say, "Forgive yourself, yes," but could not speak the words. And they would not have mattered that much to Miss Snowdie.

"Granddaddy's almost a hundred," said little King clearly. "When you get to be a hundred, you pop."

The old people did not think to say good-bye. Mr. MacLain pressed ahead, a white inch of hair in the nape of his neck curling over in the breeze.

Virgie was again seized by both arms, as if, in the open, she might try to bolt. Her body ached from the firm hand of—in the long run—Miss Lizzie Stark. She was escorted to the Stark automobile parked in the road, where Ran now waited in the driver's seat. The line of cars and trucks had started.

"Poor Mr. Mabry, he didn't show up." Miss Perdita Mayo's flushed face appeared a moment at the window. "He's down with a cold. It came on him yesterday: I saw it coming."

They had to drive the length of Morgana to the cemetery. It was spacious and quiet within, once they rolled over the cattle-guard; yet wherever Virgie looked from the Starks' car window, she seemed to see the same gravestones again, Mr. Comus Stark, old Mr. Tim Carmichael, Mr. Tertius Morgan, like the repeating towers in the Vicksburg park. Twice she thought she saw Mr. Sissum's grave, the same stone pulled down by the same vines—the grave into which Miss Eckhart, her old piano teacher whom she had hated, tried to throw herself on the day of his funeral. And more than once she looked for the squat, dark stone that marked Miss Eckhart's own grave; it would turn itself from them, as she'd seen it do before, when they wound near and passed. And a seated angel, first visible from behind with the stone hair spread on the shoulders, turned up later from the side, further away, showing the steep wings.

"Do you like it?" Cassie was asking from the front seat beside Ran (Jinny had to go home with the children).

So it was Mrs. Morrison's angel. After being so gay and flighty always, Cassie's mother went out of the room one morning and killed herself. "I was proud of it," said Cassie. "It took everything I had."

"Where's Loch these days?" Ran asked.

"Ran, don't you remember he's in New York City? Likes it there. He writes us."

Loch was too young for Virgie ever to have known well in Morgana—always polite, "too good," "too young," people said when he went to war, and she remembered him only as walking up the wooden staircase to his father's printing office. He gave a bent, intent nod of the head, too young and already too distant.—But he's not dead! she thought—it's something else.

"What did you say, Virgie?"

"Nothing, Cassie." Yet she must have hurt Cassie some way, if only by that moment's imagining that what was young was all gone—disappeared wholly.

Virgie leaned out to look for a certain blackened lamb on a small hump of earth that was part of her childhood. It was the grave of some lady's stillborn child (now she knew it must have been that baby sister of Miss Nell Loomis's), the Iamb flattened by rains into a little fairy table. There she had entertained a large imaginary company with acorn cups, then ridden away on the table.

"You staying on in Morgana, Virgie?" came Miss Nell's undertone. She talked on—the same in a moving car as she was in a parlor.

"Going away. In the morning," Virgie was saying.

"Auction off everything?"

Virgie said nothing more; she had decided to leave when she heard herself say so—decided by ear.

"Turn to the right and stop, Ran."

That was the first thing Miss Lizzie had said; perhaps she had felt too crowded in her own car to break silence.

Ran stopped, and lifted the ladies out. The group of three fat ones—Ran with Miss Lizzie and Miss Nell in arm—moved in hobbled walk ahead. The Rainey lot was well back under the trees. Cassie put her fingers in Virgie's. All around, the yuccas were full of bells, the angels were reared and horsily dappled. The magnolias' inflamed cones and their brown litter smoldered in the tail of the eye. And also in the tail of the eye was Miss Billy Texas Spights: they had let her come. She wore purple—the costume she had worn on election day.

"Thank goodness Snowdie's not here to see that," Miss Perdita remarked ahead to Miss Hattie. "Ran's here, but nothing bothers Ran."

Virgie, as if nudged, knew they must be near the poor little country girl's grave, with the words "Thy Will Be Done" on the stone. She was buried here with the Sojourners.

I hate her, Virgie thought calmly, not turning her head. Hate her grave.

Mr. Holifield passed by, mowing the grass, and raised his hat significantly. Virgie saw the familiar stone of her father's grave, his name spelled out Lafayette, and the red hole torn out beside it. In spite of the flowers waiting, the place still smelled of the sweat of Negro diggers and of a big cedar root which had been cut through and glimmered wetly in the bed of the grave. Victor was buried on the other side. Perhaps there was nothing there. The box that came back from the other war—who knew what had been sent to the Raineys in that? Somewhere behind her, Virgie could hear the hollow but apologetic coughing of Mr. Mabry. Except that it could not be he, of course; he had not been able to come, after all.

Brother Dampeer was with them still; with his weight thrown to one hip, he stood in front of them all, ahead of the row of Mayhews, and watched the success of the lowering of the coffin and the filling of the grave.

After Dr. Williams' prayer, little crumbs and clods ran down the mound, pellmell; the earth grew immediately vivacious and wild as a creature. Virgie never moved. People taking their turns went up and scattered the wreaths about and slowly stuck the clods with paper cornucopias of flowers with pins to hold them. The cornucopias were none of them perfectly erect but leaned to one side or the other, edging the swollen pink mound, monstrous, wider than it was long until it should "settle."

As the party moved away, one of the cornucopias fell over and spilled its weight of red zinnias. No one returned to right it. A feeling of the tumbling activity and promptitude of the elements had settled over people and stirred up, of all things, their dignity; they could not go back now.

They left the cemetery without looking at anything, and some parted with the company at the gate. Attrition was their wisdom. Already, tomorrow's rain pelted the grave with loudness, and made hasty streams ran down its sides, like a mountain red with rivers, already settling the patient work of them all; not one little "made" flower holder, but all, would topple; and so had, or might as well have, done it already; this was the past now.

Brother Dampeer said good-bye and climbed on his mount. He had ridden twenty miles on a mule for this; he did not disclose whether, today, it had been worth it.