The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (91 page)

"What's Uncle Felix's trouble?" I asked, shyly at last: but things, even fatal things, did have names. I wanted to know.

Aunt Ethel smiled, looked for a minute as if she would not be allowed to tell me, and then said, "Old age.—I think Sister Anne's lazy,
idle!
" she cried. "You're drawing it out of me. She never cooked nor sewed nor even cultivated her mind! She was a lily of the field." Aunt Ethel suddenly showed us both highly polished little palms, with the brave gesture a girl uses toward a fortune teller—then looked into them a moment absently and hid them at her sides. "She just hasn't got anybody of her own, that's her trouble. And she needs somebody."

"Hush! She
will
be coming here next!" Kate cried, and our smiles began to brim once more.

"She has no inner resources," confided my aunt, and watched to see if I were too young to guess what that meant. "How you girls do set each other off! Not that you're bothering me, I love you in here, and wouldn't deprive myself
of
it. Yes, you all just better wait and go Sunday. Make things as usual." She shut her eyes.

"Look—look!" chanted Kate.

Rachel, who believed in cutting roses in the heat of the day—and nobody could prevent her now, since we forgot to cut them ourselves or slept through the mornings—came in Aunt Ethel's room bearing a vaseful. Aunt Ethel's roses were at their height. A look of satisfaction on Rachel's face was like something nobody could interrupt. To our sighs, for our swooning attitudes, she paraded the vase through the room and around the bed, where she set it on the little table there and marched back to her kitchen.

"
Rachel
wants you to go. All right, you tell Uncle Felix," said Aunt Ethel, turning toward the roses, spreading her little hand out chordlike over them, "—of course he must have these—that
that's
Souvenir de Claudius Pernet—and
that's
Mermaid—Mary Wallace—Silver Moon—those three of course Etoiles—and oh, Duquesa de Penaranda—Gruss an Aachen's of course his cutting he grew for me a thousand years ago— but there's my Climbing Thor! Gracious!" she sighed, looking at it. Still looking at the roses she waited a moment. Pressing out of the vase, those roses of hers looked heavy, drunken with their own light and scent, their stems, just two minutes ago severed with Rachel's knife, vivid with pale thorns through cut-glass. "You know, Sundays always
are
hotter than any other days, and I tell you what: I do think you'd better go on to Mingo today, regardless of what you find."

Circling around in her mind like old people—which Aunt Ethel never used to do, she never used to get back!—she got back to where she started.

"Yes'm," said Kate.

"Aunt Ethel, wouldn't it be better for everybody if he'd come in town to the hospital?" I asked, with all my city seriousness.

"He wouldn't consider it. So give Sister Anne my love, and give Uncle Felix my dear love. Will you remember? Go on, naked," said my aunt to her daughter. "Take your cousin upstairs in her city bonnet. You both look right feverish to me. Start in a little while, so you can get your visit over and come back in the cool of the evening."

"These nights now are so bright," said my cousin Kate, with a strange stillness in her small face, transfixed, as if she didn't hear the end of the messages and did not think who was listening to her either, standing with bare arms pinned behind her head, with the black slick hair pinned up, "these nights are so bright I don't mind, I don't care, how long any ride takes, or how late I ever get home!"

I jumped up beside her and said, pleadingly somehow, to them both, "Do you know—I'd
forgotten
the Milky Way!"

My aunt didn't see any use answering that either. But Kate and I were suddenly laughing and running out together as if we were going to the party after all.

Before we set out, we tiptoed back into Aunt Ethel's room and made off with the roses. Rachel had darkened it. Again I saw us in the mirror, Kate pink and me blue, both our dresses stiff as boards (I had gone straight into Kate's clothes) and creaking from the way Rachel starched them, our teeth set into our lips, half-smiling. I had tried my hat, but Kate said, "Leave that, it's entirely too grand for out there, didn't you hear Mama?" Aunt Ethel stayed motionless, and I thought she was bound to look pretty, even asleep. I wasn't quite sure she was asleep.

"Seems mean," said Kate, looking between the thorns of the reddest rose, but I said, "She meant us to."

"Negroes always like them full blown," said Kate.

Out in the bright, "Look! Those crazy starlings have come. They always pick the greenest day!" said Kate.

"Well, maybe because they look so pretty in it," I said.

There they were, feeding all over the yard and every yard, iridescently black and multiplied at our feet, bound for the North. Around the house, as we climbed with our loads into the car, I saw Rachel looking out from the back hall window, with her cheek in her hand. She watched us go, carrying off her cake and her flowers too.

I was thinking, if I always say "still," Kate still says "always," and laughed, but would not tell her.

Mingo, I learned, was only nine miles and a little more away. But it was an old road, in a part the highway had deserted long ago, lonely and winding. It dipped up and down, and the hills felt high, because they were bare of trees, but they probably weren't very high—this was Mississippi. There was hardly ever a house in sight.

"So green," I sighed.

"Oh, but poor," said Kate, with her look of making me careful of what I said. "Gone to pasture now."

"Beautiful to me!"

"It's clear to Jericho. Looks like that cake would set heavy on your knees, in that old tin Christmas box."

"I'm not ever tired in a strange place. Banks and towers of honeysuckle hanging over that creek!" We crossed an iron bridge.

"That's the Hushomingo River."

We turned off on a still narrower, bumpier road. I began to see gates.

Near Mingo, we saw an old Negro man riding side saddle, except there was no saddle at all, on a slow black horse. He was coming to meet us—that is, making his way down through the field. As we passed, he saluted by holding out a dark cloth cap stained golden.

"Good evening, Uncle Theodore," nodded Kate. She murmured, "Rachel's his daughter, did you know it? But she never comes back to see him."

I sighed into the sweet air.

"Oh, Lordy, we're too late!" Kate exclaimed.

On the last turn, we saw cars and wagons and one yellow wooden school bus standing empty and tilted to the sides up and down the road. Kate stared back for a moment toward where Uncle Theodore had been riding so innocently away. Primroses were blowing along the ditches and between the wheelspokes of wagons, above which empty cane chairs sat in rows, and some of the horses were eating the primroses. That was the only sound as we stood there. No, a chorus of dogs was barking in a settled kind of way.

From the gate we could look up and see the house at the head of the slope. It looked right in size and shape, but not in something else—it had a queer intensity for afternoon. Was every light in the house burning? I wondered. Of course: very quietly out front, on the high and sloping porch, standing and sitting on the railing between the four remembered, pale, square cypress posts, was stationed a crowd of people, dressed darkly, but vaguely powdered over with the golden dust of their thick arrival here in mid-afternoon.

Two blackly spherical Cape Jessamine bushes, old presences, hid both gateposts entirely. Such old bushes bloomed fantastically early and late so far out in the country, the way they did in old country cemeteries.

"The whole countryside's turned out," said Kate, and gritted her teeth, the way she did last night in her sleep.

What I could not help thinking, as we let ourselves through the gate, was that I'd either forgotten or never known how
primitive
the old place was.

Immediately my mind remembered the music box up there in the parlor. It played large, giltlike metal discs, pierced with holes—eyes, eyelids, slits, mysterious as the symbols in a lady's dress pattern, but a whole world of them. When the disc was turned in the machine, the pattern of holes unwound a curious, metallic, depthless, cross music, with silences clocked between the notes. Though I did not like especially to hear it, I used to feel when I was here I must beg for it, as you should ask an old lady how she is feeling.

"I hate to get there," said Kate. She cried, "What a welcome for you!" But I said, "Don't say that." She fastened that creaky gate. We trudged up the straight but uneven dirt path, then the little paved walk toward the house. We shifted burdens, Kate took the cake and I took the flowers—the roses going like headlights in front of us. The solemnity on the porch was overpowering, even at this distance. It was serene, imperturbable, gratuitous: it was of course the look of "good country people" at such times.

On either side of us were Uncle Felix's roses—hillocks of bushes set in hillocks of rank grass and ragged-robins, hung with roses the size of little biscuits; indeed they already had begun to have a baked look, with little carmine edges curled. Kate dipped on one knee and came up with a four-leaf clover. She could always do that, even now, even carrying a three-layer cake.

By the house, wistaria had taken the scaffolding where a bell hung dark, and gone up into a treetop. The wistaria trunk, sinews raised and twined, like some old thigh, rose above the porch corner, above roof and all, where its sheet of bloom, just starting to go, was faded as an old sail. In spite of myself, I looked around the corner for that well: there it was, squat as a tub beneath the overpiece, a tiger-cat asleep on its cover.

The crowd on the porch were men and women, mostly old, some young, and some few children. As we approached they made no motion; even the young men sitting on the steps did not stand up. Then an old man came out of the house and a lady behind him, the old man on canes and the lady tiptoeing. Voices were murmuring softly all around.

Viewing the body, I thought, my breath gone—but nobody here's kin to me.

The lady had advanced to the head of the steps. It had to be Sister Anne. I saw her legs first—they were old—and her feet were set one behind the other, like an "expression teacher's," while the dress she had on was rather girlish, black taffeta with a flounce around it. But to my rising eyes she didn't look half so old as she did when she was pulled back out of the well. Her hair was not black at all. It was rusty brown, soft and unsafe in its pins. She didn't favor Aunt Ethel and Mama and them, or Kate and me, or any of us in the least, I thought—with that short face.

She was beckoning—a gesture that went with her particular kind of uncertain smile.

"What do I see? Cake!"

She ran down the steps. I bore down on Kate's shoulder behind her. Ducking her head, Kate hissed at me. What had I said? "Who pulled her out?"?

"You
surprised
me!" Sister Anne cried at Kate. She took the cake box out of her hands and kissed her. Two spots of red stabbed her cheeks. I was sorry to observe that the color of her hair was the very same I'd been noticing that spring in robins' breasts, a sort of stained color.

"Long-lost cousin, ain't you!" she cried at me, and gave me the same kiss she had given Kate—a sort of reprisal-kiss. Those head-heavy lights of Aunt Ethel's roses smothered between our unequal chests.

"Monkeys!" she said, leading us up, looking back and forth between Kate and me, as if she had to decide which one she liked best, before anything else in the world could be attended to. She had a long neck and that short face, and round, brown, jumpy eyes with little circles of wrinkles at each blink, like water wrinkles after something's popped in; that looked somehow like a twinkle, at her age. "Step aside for the family, please?" she said next, in tones I thought rather melting.

Kate and I did not dare look at each other. We did not dare look anywhere. As soon as we had moved through the porch crowd and were arrived inside the breezeway—where, however, there were a few people too, standing around—I looked and saw the corner clock was wrong. I was deeply aware that all clocks worked in this house, as if they had been keeping time just for me all this while, and I remembered that the bell in the yard was rung every day at straight-up noon, to bring them in out of the fields at picking time. And I had once supposed they rang it at midnight too.

Around us, voices sounded as they always did everywhere, in a house of death, soft and inconsequential, and tidily assertive.

"I believe Old Hodge's mules done had an attack of the wanderlust. Passed through my place Tuesday headed East, and now you seen 'em in Goshen."

Sister Anne was saying bodingly to us, "You just come
right
on
through,
"

This was where Kate burst into tears. I held her to me, to protect her from more kisses. "When, when?" she gasped. "When did it happen, Sister Anne?"

"Now when did what happen?"

That was the kind of answer one kind of old maid loves to give. It goes with "Ask me sometime, and I'll tell you." Sister Anne lifted her brow and fixed her eye on the parlor doorway. The door was opened into that room, but the old red curtain was drawn across it, with bright light, looking red too, streaming out around it.

Just then there was a creaking sound inside there, like an old winter suit bending at the waist, and a young throat was cleared.

"Little bit of commotion here today, but I
would
rather you didn't tell Uncle Felix anything about it," said Sister Anne.

"Tell him! Is he alive?" Kate cried wildly, breaking away from me, and then even more wildly, "I might have known it! What sort of frolic are you up to out here, Sister Anne?"

Sister Anne suddenly marched to the other side of us and brought the front bedroom door to with a good country slam. That room—Uncle Felix's—had been full of people too.

"I beg your pardon," said Kate in a low voice in the next moment. We were still just inside the house—in the breezeway that was almost as wide as the rooms it ran between from front porch to back. It was a hall, really, but still when I was a child called the breezeway. Open at the beginning, it had long been enclosed, and papered like the parlor, in red.