The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (76 page)

The evening fields were still moving, people busy, the sun gone yet busy, where their uneven cotton country tilted and fell riverward into the West. Most of the funeral party had returned to the Raineys' for refreshments. Virgie, with a slip from even Miss Lizzie's arm, which was tired, had not yet gone in.

Four little Mayhews waited for her, perched like birds on the old swivel chair. They hopped off, put their arms around her knees, and pleaded with her too to come in the house now. From the road the lighted-up house had a roof sheared sharp as a fold of paper. The serried leaves of the chinaberry trembled over the road, the branches spread winglike in a breeze that meant change. It was the last of the month of beautiful evening skies, of the lovely East, behind the dark double-twinkling of swallows.

Smells of ham, banana cake, and tuberoses came out and the longing children ran to meet it. Ferns seemed in the early alcoves of twilight to creep, or suddenly to descend like waterfalls in between the deserted porch chairs, and over old man Rainey sitting along the edge of the porch, feet dangling. Juba came running forth, saying Miss Lizzie said for Miss Virgie to come and eat with her company.

Virgie had often felt herself at some moment callous over, go opaque; she had known it to happen to others; not only when her mother changed on the bed while she was fanning her. Virgie had felt a moment in life after which nobody could see through her, into her—felt it young. But Mr. King MacLain, an old man, had butted like a goat against the wall he wouldn't agree to himself or recognize. What fortress indeed would ever come down, except before hard little horns, a rush and a stampede of the pure wish to live?

The feeling had been strong upon her from the moment she came home that she had lived the moment before; it was a moment that found Virgie too tender. She had needed a little time, she needed it now. On the path, with the funeral company at her heels, then surrounding her and passing her and now sitting down to her table without her, she strained against the feeling of the double coming-back.

"Take your time, Virge!" Old Man Rainey said softly. He climbed to his feet and walked into the house without waiting for her.

At seventeen, coming back, she'd jumped the high step from the Y. & M. V. train. She had reached earth dazzled, the first moment, at its unrocked calm. Grass tufted like the back of a dog that had been rolling the moment before shone brown under the naked sprawled-out light of a still-stretching outer world. She heard nothing but the sigh of the vanished train and the single drumbeat of thunder on a bright July day. Across the train yard was Morgana, the remembered oaks like the counted continents against the big blue. Having just jumped from the endless, grinding interior of the slow train from Memphis, she had come back to something—and she began to run toward it, with her suitcase as light as a shoebox, so little had she had to go away with and now to bring back—the lightness made it easier.

"You're back at the right time to milk for me," her mother said when she got there, and untied her bonnet and dashed it to the floor between them, looking up at her daughter. Nobody was allowed weeping over hurts at her house, unless it was Mrs. Rainey herself first, for son and husband, both her men, were gone.

For Virgie, there were practical changes to begin at once with the coming back—no music, no picture show job any more, no piano.

But in that interim between train and home, she walked and ran looking about her in a kind of glory, by the back way.

Virgie never saw it differently, never doubted that all the opposites on earth were close together, love close to hate, living to dying; but of them all, hope and despair were the closest blood—unrecognizable one from the other sometimes, making moments double upon themselves, and in the doubling double again, amending but never taking back.

For that journey, it was ripe afternoon, and all about her was that light in which the earth seems to come into its own, as if there would be no more days, only this day—when fields glow like deep pools and the expanding trees at their edges seem almost to open, like lilies, golden or dark. She had always loved that time of day, but now, alone, untouched now, she felt like dancing; knowing herself not really, in her essence, yet hurt; and thus happy. The chorus of crickets was as unprogressing and out of time as the twinkling of a star.

Her fingers set, after coming back, set half-closed; the strength in her hands she used up to type in the office but most consciously to pull the udders of the succeeding cows, as if she would hunt, hunt, hunt daily for the blindness that lay inside the beast, inside where she could have a real and living wall for beating on, a solid prison to get out of, the most real stupidity of flesh, a mindless and careless and calling body, to respond flesh for flesh, anguish for anguish. And if, as she dreamed one winter night, a new piano she touched had turned, after the one pristine moment, into a calling cow, it was by her own desire.

After she had gone in and served her company and set the Mayhews ("You'd sure better come live with us. If it wasn't for leaving such a nice house," they murmured to her) on the right road (they had come clear around by Greenwood), and after Old Man Rainey had gone to bed in the old bedroom up under the roof, Virgie sat down in the uncleared kitchen and ate herself, while Juba ate nearby—a little chicken, at first, then ham, then bacon and eggs. She drank her milk. Then she sent Juba home and turned out a fantastic number of lights.

After she was in bed and her own light out, there was a peremptory pounding on the porch floor.

She walked to the open front door, her nightgown blowing about her in the moist night wind. She was trembling, and put on a light in the hall.

From the gleam falling over the transom behind her she could see an old lady in a Mother Hubbard and clayed boots, holding out something white in a dark wrapping.

"It's you," the old lady said abruptly. "Child, you don't know me, but I know you and brought you somethin'. Mighty late, ain't it? My night-blooming cereus throwed a flower tonight, and I couldn't forbear to bring you it. Take it—unwrop it."

Virgie looked at the naked, luminous, complicated flower, large and pale as a face on the dark porch. For a moment she felt more afraid than she had coming to the door.

"It's for you. Keep it—won't do the dead no good. And tomorrow it'll look like a wrung chicken's neck. Look at it enduring the night."

A horse stamped and whimpered from the dark road. The old woman declined to come in.

"No, oh no. You used to play the pi-anna in the picture show when you's little and I's young and in town, dear love," she called, turning away through the dark. "Sorry about your mama: didn't suppose anybody make as pretty music as you
ever
have no trouble.—I thought you's the prettiest little thing ever was."

Virgie was still trembling. The flower troubled her; she threw it down into the weeds.

She knew that now at the river, where she had been before on moonlit nights in autumn, drunken and sleepless, mist lay on the water and filled the trees, and from the eyes to the moon would be a cone, a long silent horn, of white light. It was a connection visible as the hair is in air, between the self and the moon, to make the self feel the child, a daughter far, far back. Then the water, warmer than the night air or the self that might be suddenly cold, like any other arms, took the body under too, running without visibility into the mouth. As she would drift in the river, too alert, too insolent in her heart in those days, the mist might thin momentarily and brilliant jewel eyes would look out from the water-line and the bank. Sometimes in the weeds a lightning bug would lighten, on and off, on and off, for as long in the night as she was there to see.

Out in the yard, in the coupe, in the frayed velour pocket next to the pistol, was her cache of cigarettes. She climbed inside and shielding the matchlight, from habit, began to smoke cigarettes. All around her the dogs were barking.

"I'll sell the cows to the first man I meet in the road," Virgie thought, waking up.

After she had milked them and driven them to pasture and come back, she saw Mrs. Stark's Juba back at the kitchen door.

"Leavin'? One thing, I seen your mama's ghost already," Juba said. She picked up a plate. As she began wrapping the china in newspaper, she explained that Virgie's goods must be packed in papers and locked in trunks before Virgie left, or Mrs. Stark would not think it fitting to the dead or to departure either. Virgie was to come up to the house and bid Mrs. Stark good-bye—before noon.

"Still in the house," Juba said. "Ghost be's."

"Well, I don't want to hear about ghosts," Virgie said. They were now crouched together over a shelf in the china closet.

"Don't?"

Juba courteously ignored Virgie's clashing two plates together. Things? Miss Virgie must despise things more than the meanest people, more than any throwing ghosts.

"I don't. I don't like ghosts."

"
Now!
" Juba said, by way of affirmation. "However, this'n, your mama, her weren't in two pieces, or floatin' upside down, or any those things yet. Her lyin' up big on a stuff davenport like a store window, three four
us
fannin' her."

"I still don't want to hear about it," Virgie said. "Just wrap everything up quick for Mrs. Stark and put it away, then you can go."

"Yes, ma'am. Her ghost restin'. Not stren'us-minded like some. I sees ghosts go walkin' and carryin' on. But your mama." To be the ghost, Juba laid her hand on her chest and put her head to one side, fluttering her eyelids tenderly and not breathing. "Yes'm. Yonder up the wall, is where her was. I says Juba, tell Miss Virgie, her would appreciate word of that."

"Did you come here to make me wrap stuff up and then get in my way?" Virgie said. "You know I'm in a hurry to shut up this house."

"Goin' off and leave all these here clean curtains?"

"Juba, when I was in my worst trouble, I scared everybody off, did you know that? Now I'm not scary any more. Like Ran MacLain; he's not," Virgie said absently as they wrapped together.

Juba laughed in an obscure glee. "You'll scare 'em when you's a ghost."

"Hurry."

"I seen more ghosts than live peoples, round here. Black and white. I seen plenty both. Miss Virgie, some is given to see, some try but is not given. I seen that Mrs. Morrison from 'cross the road in long white nightgown, no head atall, in her driveway Saddy. Reckanize her freckle arms. You ever see her? I seen her here. She die in pain?"

Juba lowered her lids hypocritically.

"Pain a plenty and I don't ever want to see her." Virgie got to her feet. "Go on, go on back to Mrs. Stark. Tell her I can pack up better without you. Do I have to pack everything?"

"Yes'm. Her idea is," Juba said, "pack 'em up strong for the day somebody come
un
pack. And I done bent over and stoop best I could. Held all them curlycue plates without spillin' one."

"Do that for Mrs. Stark."

Juba picked herself up. She shook her head at the open cupboard, the dwindled and long-sugared jelly, the rusty cream of tartar box, the Mason jar of bay leaves, the spindly and darkened vanilla bottle, all the old confusion. Her eyes fastened and held to the twenty-year-old box of toothpicks, and Virgie, seeing, got it for her.

"Juba, take it all," she said then. "Plates, knives and forks, the plants on the porch, whatever you want, take. And what's in the trunks. You and Minerva divide." Then she had to burst out and say something to Juba. "And I saw Minerva! I saw her take Mama's hair switch—her young hair that was yellow and I never saw when it matched any more and she could do anything but keep it in that trunk, and I saw it put down in that paper sack. And my brother's baby clothes and my own, yellow and all the lace—I saw all stolen and put with Minerva's umbrella to take home, and I let them go. You tell that Negro. Tell her I know I was robbed, and that I don't care."

Juba nodded and changed the subject. "Thank you, Miss Virgie, for men's clothes. That salt-and-pepper of poor Mr. Rainey."

"Mama kept everything," Virgie said after a moment.

"Glory."

"Now you can go."

"Why, it's a-rainin'. Do hate rain."

Juba left. But she came back.

"That's it," she called softly, appearing once more in her fedora at the kitchen door. "That's right. Cry. Cry. Cry."

"Taking a trip? Think I might come along with you," said Old Man Rainey. "I always aimed to see the world." He looked at her closely.

"Please, sir, don't you come! Yes—I may go far—"

He gave her a hug before he turned to his coffee.

"Do you want to put our cows in your truck to take along?" She gave over to him everything she could think of, hoping he would accept something, something at least.

Virgie went out into the rainy morning and got into her car. She drove it, bumping, down the hill. In the road, the MacLains' old chinaberry tree brushed her window, enjoying the rain like a bird.

She drove through Morgana, hearing a horn blow from another car; it was Cassie Morrison. Cassie called out, driving abreast.

"I want you to come see Mama's Name in the Spring, Virgie. This morning before it rained I divided all the bulbs again, and it ought to be prettier than ever!"

"Always see it when I pass your yard," Virgie called back.

"Virgie! I know how you feel. You'll never get over it, never!"

They called from car to car, running parallel along the road with the loose gravel from the unpaved part knocking loudly, bounced from one car to the other.

"Well. You come."

"I guess it takes a lot of narcissus to spell Catherine," Virgie called, when Cassie still did not pass her.

"Two hundred and thirty-two bulbs! And then Miss Katie's hyacinthus all around those, and I've got it bordered in violets, you know, to tell me where it is in summer!" Cassie's voice, growing louder, grew at the same time more anxious and more reverent. She was not hurt, not suspecting, only anxious. But it was for Cassie that Virgie had turned her car toward town, to not let her see. "Now you come. We were friends that summer—" (Virgie remembered Cassie and herself in the revival tent, pulling light bugs off each other's shoulders while singing "Throw Out the Life Line.") "You could come play my piano, nobody does but my pupils."