The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (88 page)

"Don't you drown yourself out there!"

"Oh, I won't," said Miss Hattie.

At the bank corner, small spotty pigs belonging to nobody, with snouts as long as corncobs, raced out in a company like clowns with the Circus, and ran with Dewey and Miss Hattie and all, for the rest of the way. There was one more block, and that was where the post office was. Also the Seed & Feed, and the schoolhouse beyond, and the Stave Mill Road; and also home was that way.

"Well, good-by, everybody," said Miss Hattie, arrived at the post office tree.

Dewey's father—the blackest-browed Coker of the family, much blacker-browed than Uncle Lavelle, who had run off a long time ago, by Dewey's reckoning—bowed himself out backward from under the umbrella and straightened up in the rain.

"Much obliged for the favor, Miss Hattie," he said. With a reminding hand he turned over his fishing pole to Dewey, and was gone.

"Thank you, ma'am, I enjoyed myself," said Dewey.

"You're wet as a drowned rat," said Miss Hattie admiringly.

Up beyond, the schoolhouse grew dim behind its silver yard. The bell mounted at the gate was making the sound of a bucket filling.

"I'll leave you with the umbrella, Opal. Opal, run home," said Miss Hattie, pointing her finger at Opal's chest, "and put down the south windows, and bring in the quilts and dry them out again before the fire. I can't tell you why I forgot clean about my own windows. You might stand on a chair and find a real pretty quart of snapbeans and put them on with that little piece of meat out of the safe. Run now. Where've you been?"

"Nowheres.—Hunting poke salad," said Opal, making a little face twice. She had wet cheeks, and there was a blue violet in her dress, hanging down from a buttonhole, and no coat on her back of any kind.

"Then dry yourself," said Miss Hattie. "
What's that?
"

"It's the train whistle," said Dewey.

Far down, the mail train crossed the three long trestles over Little Muscadine swamp like knocking three knocks at the door, and blew its whistle again through the rain.

Miss Hattie never let her powers interfere with mail time, or mail time interfere with her powers. She had everything worked out. She pulled open the door of her automobile, right there. There on the back seat was her mail sack, ready to go.

Miss Hattie lived next door—where Opal had now gone inside—and only used her car between here and the station; it stayed under the post office tree. Some day old Opal was going to take that car, and ride away. Miss Hattie climbed up inside.

The car roared and took a leap out into the rain. At the corner it turned, looking two stories high, swinging wide as Miss Hattie banked her curve, with a lean of her whole self deep to the right. She made it. Then she sped on the diagonal to the bottom of the hill and pulled up at the station just in time for Mr. Frierson to run out in his suspenders and hang the mail as the train rushed through. It hooked the old sack and flung off the new to Royals.

The rain slacked just a little on Miss Hattie while she hauled the mail uphill. Dewey stamped up the post office runway by her side to help her carry it in—the post office used to be a stable. He held the door open, they went inside, and the rain slammed down behind them.

"Dewey Coker?"

"Ma'am?"

"Why aren't you in school?"

In a sudden moment she dropped the sack and rubbed his head—just any old way—with something out of her purse; it might have been a dinner napkin. He rubbed cornbread crumbs as sharp as rocks out of his eye. Across the road, while this drying was happening, a wonderful white mule that had gotten into the cemetery and rolled himself around till he was green and white like a marble monument, got up to his feet and shivered and shook the raindrops everywhere.

"I may can still go," he said dreamily. "
Excalibur—
"

"Nonsense! Don't you see that rain?" cried Miss Hattie. "You'll stay here in this post office till I tell you."

The post office inside was a long bare room that looked and smelled like a covered bridge, with only a little light at the other end where Miss Hattie's window was. Dewey had never stayed inside here more than a minute at a time, in his life.

"You make yourself at home," said Miss Hattie, and disappeared into the back.

Dewey stood the poles by the front door and kept his fish in his hand on the bit of line, while Miss Hattie put up the mail. After she had put it all up as she saw fit, then she gave it out: pretty soon here came everybody. There was a lot of conversation through the window.

"Sure is a treat, Miss Hattie! Only wish it didn't have to stop."

"It looks like a gully washer to me, Miss Hat!"

"It's a beginning," was all Miss Hattie would say. "I'll go back out there tomorrow, if I have the time, and if I live and don't nothing happen, and do some more on it. But depends on the size of the mail."

And someone leaned down and said to Dewey, "Hi, Dewey! I saw you! And what was
you
up to this evening?"

After everybody had shed their old letters and papers on the floor and tracked out, there would have been silence everywhere but for the bombardment on the roof. Miss Hattie still didn't come out of her little room back there, of which Dewey could see nothing but the reared-back honeycomb of her desk with nine letters in the holes.

Out here, motes danced lazily as summer flies in the running green light of the cracks in the walls. The hole of a missing stovepipe high up was blocked with a bouquet of old newspapers, yellow as roses. It was a little chilly. It smelled of rain, of fish, of pocket money and pockets. Whether the lonely dangling light was turned on or off it was hard to see. Its bulb hung down fierce in a little mask like a biting dog.

On the high table against the wall there was an ink well and a pen, as in a school desk, and an old yellow blotter limp as biscuit dough. Reaching tall, he rounded up the pen and with a great deal of the ink drew a picture on the blotter. He drew his fish. He gave it an eye and then mailed it through the slot to Miss Hattie.

Presently he hung his chin on the little ledge to her window, to see if she got it.

Miss Hattie was asleep in her rocking chair. She was sitting up with her head inclined, beside her little gas stove. She had laid away her hat, and there was a good weight to her hair, which was shaped and colored like the school bell. She looked noble, as if waiting to have the headsman chop off her head. All was quietness itself. For the rain had stopped. The only sound was the peeping of baby chicks from the parcel post at her feet.

"Can I go now?" he hollered.

"Mercy!" she exclaimed at once. "Did it bite? Nothing for you today! Who's that? I wasn't asleep! Whose face is that smiling at me? For pity's sakes!" She jumped up and shook her dress—some leaves fell out. Then she came to the window and said through it, "You want to go leave me? Run then! Because if you dream it's stopped, child, I won't be surprised a bit if it don't turn around and come back."

At that moment the post office shook with thunder, as if horses ran right through it.

Miss Hattie came to the door behind him. He slid down the runway with all he had. She remained there looking out, nodding a bit and speaking a few words to herself. All she had to say to him was "Trot!"

It was already coming down again, with the sound of making up for the lapse that had just happened. As Dewey began to run, he caught a glimpse of a patchwork quilt going like a camel through the yard next door toward Miss Hattie's house. He supposed Opal was under it. Fifteen years later it occurred to him it had very likely been Opal in the woods.

Just in time, he caught and climbed inside the rolling school bus with the children in it, and rode home after all with the others, a sort of hero.

After the bus put him down, he ran cutting across under the charred pines. The big sky-blue violets his mother loved were blooming, wet as cheeks. Pear trees were all but in bloom under the purple sky. Branches were being jogged with the rush and commotion of birds. The Cokers' patch of mustard that had gone to seed shone like gold from here. Dewey ran under the last drops, through the hooraying mud of the pasture, and saw the corrugations of their roof shining across it like a fresh pan of cornbread sticks. His father was off at a distance, on his knees—back at mending the fences. Minnie Lee, Sue, and Annie Bess were ready for Dewey and came flocking from the door, with the baby behind on all fours. None of them could hope to waylay him.

His mother stood in the back lot. Behind her, blue and white, her morning wash hung to the ground, as wet as clouds. She stood with a switch extended most strictly over the head of the silky calf that drank from the old brown cow—as though this evening she knighted it.

"Whose calf will that be? Mine?" he cried out to her. It was to make her turn, but this time, he thought, her answer would be yes.

"You have to ask your pa, son."

"Why do you always tell me the same thing?
Mama!
"

Arm straight before him, he extended toward her dear face his fish—still shining a little, held up by its tail, its eye and its mouth as agape as any big fish's. She turned.

"Get away from me!" she shrieked. "You and your pa! Both of you get the sight of you clear away!" She struck with her little green switch, fanning drops of milk and light. "Get in the house. Oh! If I haven't had enough out of you!"

Days passed—it rained some more, sometimes in the night—before Dewey had time to go back and visit the bridge. He didn't take his fishing pole, he just went to see about it. The sky had cleared in the evening, after school and the work at home were done with.

The fiver was up. It covered the sandbars and from the bridge he could no longer remember exactly how the driftwood had lain—only its upper horns stuck out of the water, where parades of brown bubbles were passing down. The gasping turtles had all dived under. The water must now be swimming with fish of all sizes and kinds.

Dewey walked the old plank back, there being no sand to drop down to. Then he visited above the bridge and wandered around in new places. They were drenched and sweet. The big fragrant bay was his marker.

He stood in the light of birdleg-pink leaves, yellow flower vines, and scattered white blooms each crushed under its drop of water as under a stone, the maples red as cinnamon drops and the falling, thready nets of willows, and heard the lonesomest sound in creation, an unknown bird singing through the very moment when he was the one that listened to it. Across the Little Muscadine the golden soldier-tassels of distant oaks filled with light, and there the clear sun dropped.

Before he got out of the river woods, it was nearly first-dark. The sky was pink and blue. The great moon had slid up in it, but not yet taken light, like the little plum tree that had sprung out in flower below. At that mysterious colored church, the one with the two towers and the two privies to the rear, that stood all in darkness, a new friend sat straight up on the top church step. Head to one side, little red tongue hanging out, it was a little black dog, his whole self shaking and alive from tip to tip. He might be part of the church, that was the way he acted. On the other hand, there was no telling where he might have come from.

Yet he had something familiar about him too. He had a look on his little pointed face—for all he was black; and was it he, or she?—that reminded Dewey of Miss Hattie Purcell, when she stood in the door of the post office looking out at the rain she'd brought and remarking to the world at large: "Well, I'd say that's right persnickety."

Needle in air, I stopped what I was making. From the upper casement, my lookout on the sea, I saw them disembark and find the path; I heard that whole drove of mine break loose on the beautiful strangers. I slipped down the ladder. When I heard men breathing and sandals kicking the stones, I threw open the door. A shaft of light from the zenith struck my brow, and the wind let out my hair. Something else swayed my body outward.

"Welcome!" I said—the most dangerous word in the world.

Heads lifted to the smell of my bread, they trooped inside—and with such a grunting and frisking at their heels to the very threshold. Stargazers! They stumbled on my polished floor, strewing sand, crowding on each other, sizing up the household for gifts (thinking already of sailing away), and sighted upward where the ladder went, to the sighs of the island girls who peeped from the kitchen door. In the hope of a bath, they looked in awe at their hands.

I left them thus, and withdrew to make the broth.

With their tear-bright eyes they watched me come in with the great winking tray, and circle the room in a winding wreath of steam. Each in turn with a pair of black-nailed hands swept up his bowl. The first were trotting at my heels while the last still reached with their hands. Then the last drank too, and dredging their snouts from the bowls, let go and shuttled into the company.

That moment of transformation—only the gods really like it! Men and beasts almost never take in enough of the wonder to justify the trouble. The floor was swaying like a bridge in battle. "Outside!" I commanded. "No dirt is allowed in this house!" In the end, it takes phenomenal neatness of housekeeping to put it through the heads of men that they are swine. With my wand seething in the air like a broom, I drove them all through the door—twice as many hooves as there had been feet before—to join their brothers, who rushed forward to meet them now, filthily rivaling, but welcoming. What tusks I had given them!

As I shut the door on the sight, and drew back into my privacy-deathless privacy that heals everything, even the effort of magic—I felt something from behind press like the air of heaven before a storm, and reach like another wand over my head.

I spun round, thinking, O gods, it has failed me, it's drying up. Before everything, I think of my power. One man was left.

"What makes you think you're different from anyone else?" I screamed; and he laughed.

Before I'd believe it, I ran back to my broth. I had thought it perfect—I'd allowed no other woman to come near it. I tasted, and it was perfect—swimming with oysters from my reef and flecks of golden pork, redolent with leaves of bay and basil and rosemary, with the glass of island wine tossed in at the last: it has been my infallible recipe. Circe's broth: all the gods have heard of it and envied it. No, the fault had to be in the drinker. If a man remained, unable to leave that magnificent body of his, then enchantment had met with a hero. Oh, I know those prophecies as well as the back of my hand—only nothing is here to warn me when it is
now.