by Eudora Welty
They had on their masks, of course, tied on over their Buster Brown bobs and pressing a rim around the back. I was used to how they looked by then—but I don't like masks. They both come from Spights' store and cost a nickel. One was the Chinese kind, all yellow and mean with slant eyes and a dreadful thin mustache of black horsy hair. The other one was a lady, with an almost scary-sweet smile on her lips. I never did take to that smile, with all day for it. Eugene Hudson wanted to be the Chinaman and so Lucius Randall had to be the lady.
So they were making tails and do-lollies and all kinds of foolishness, and sticking them on to their little middles and behinds, snatching every scrap from the shirts and flannels me and Snowdie was cutting out on the dining room table. Sometimes we could grab a little boy and baste something up on him whether or no, but we didn't really pay them much mind, we was talking about the prices of things for winter, and the funeral of an old maid.
So we never heard the step creak or the porch give, at all. That was a blessing. And if it wasn't for something that come from outside us all to tell about it, I wouldn't have the faith I have that it came about.
But happening along our road—like he does every day—was a real trustworthy nigger. He's one of Mrs. Stark's mother's niggers, Old Plez Morgan everybody calls him. Lives down beyond me. The real old kind, that knows everybody since time was. He knows more folks than I do, who they are, and all the fine people. If you wanted anybody in Morgana that wouldn't be likely to make a mistake in who a person is, you would ask for Old Plez.
So he was making his way down the road, by stages. He still has to do a few people's yards won't let him go, like Mrs. Stark, because he don't pull up things. He's no telling how old and starts early and takes his time coming home in the evening—always stopping to speak to people to ask after their health and tell them good evening all the way. Only that day, he said he didn't see a soul else—besides you'll hear who in a minute—on the way, not on porches or in the yards. I can't tell you why, unless it was those little gusts of north wind that had started blowing. Nobody likes that.
But yonder ahead of him was walking a man. Plez said it was a white man's walk and a walk he knew—but it struck him it was from away in another year, another time. It wasn't just the walk of anybody supposed to be going along the road to MacLain right at that time—and yet it was too—and if it was, he still couldn't think what business that somebody would be up to. That was the careful way Plez was putting it to his mind.
If you saw Plez, you'd know it was him. He had some roses stuck in his hat that day, I saw him right after it happened. Some of Miss Lizzie's fall roses, big as a man's fist and red as blood—they were nodding side-to-side out of the band of his old black hat, and some other little scraps out of the garden laid around the brim, throwed away by Mrs. Stark; he'd been cleaning out her beds that day, it was fixing to rain.
He said later he wasn't in any great hurry, or he would have maybe caught up and passed the man. Up yonder ahead he went, going the same way Plez was going, and not much more interested in a race. And a real familiar stranger.
So Plez says presently the familiar stranger paused. It was in front of the MacLains'—and sunk his weight on one leg and just stood there, posey as statues, hand on his hip. Ha! Old Plez says, according, he just leaned himself against the Presbyterian Church gate and waited a while.
Next thing, the stranger—oh, it was King! By then Plez was calling him Mr. King to himself—went up through the yard and then didn't go right in like anybody else. First he looked around. He took in the yard and summerhouse and skimmed from cedar to cedar along the edge of where he lived, and under the fig tree at the back and under the wash (if he'd counted it!) and come close to the front again, sniffy like, and Plez said though he couldn't swear to seeing from the Presbyterian Church exactly what Mr. King was doing, he knows as good as seeing it that he looked through the blinds. He would have looked in the dining room—have mercy. We shut the West out of Snowdie's eyes of course.
At last he come full front again, around the flowers under the front bedroom. Then he settled himself nice and started up the front steps.
The middle step sings when it's stepped on, but we didn't heat it. Plez said, well, he had on fine tennis shoes. So he got across the front porch and what do you think he's fixing to do but knock on that door? Why wasn't he satisfied with outdoors?
On his own front door. He makes a little shadow knock, like trying to see how it would look, and then puts his present behind his coat. Of course he had something there in a box for her. You know he constitutionally brought home the kind of presents that break your heart. He stands there with one leg out pretty, to surprise them. And I bet a nice smile on his face. Oh, don't ask me to go on!
Suppose Snowdie'd took a notion to glance down the hall—the dining room's at the end of it, and the folding-doors pushed back—and seen him, all "Come-kiss-me" like that. I don't know if she could have seen that good—but I could. I was a fool and didn't look.
It was the twins seen him. Through those little bitty mask holes, those eagle eyes! There ain't going to be no stopping those twins. And he didn't get to knock on the door, but he had his hand raised the second time and his knuckles sticking up, and out come the children on him, hollering "Boo!" and waving their arms up and down the way it would scare you to death, or it ought to, if you wasn't ready for them.
We heard them charge out, but we thought it was just a nigger that was going by for them to scare, if we thought anything.
Plez says—allowing for all human mistakes—he seen on one side of King come rolling out Lucius Randall all dressed up, and on the other side, Eugene Hudson all dressed up. Could I have forgotten to speak of their being on skates? Oh, that was all afternoon. They're real good skaters, the little fellows, not to have a sidewalk. They sailed out the door and circled around their father, flying their arms and making their fingers go scary, and those little Buster Brown bobs going in a circle.
Lucius Randall, Plez said, had on something pink, and he did, the basted flannelette teddy-bears we had tried on on top of his clothes and he got away. And said Eugene was a Chinaman, and that was what he was. It would be hard to tell which would come at you the more outrageous of the two, but to me it would be Lucius Randall with the girl's face and the big white cotton gloves falling off his fingers, and oh! he had on my hat. This one I milk in.
And they made a tremendous uproar with their skates, Plez said, and that was no mistake, because I remember what a hard time Snowdie and me had hearing what each other had to say all afternoon.
Plez said King stood it a minute—he got to turning around too. They were skating around him and saying in high birdie voices, "How do you do, Mister Booger?" You know if children can be monkeys, they're going to be them. (Without the masks, though, those two children would have been more polite about it—there's enough Hudson in them.) Skating around and around their papa, and just as ignorant! Poor little fellows. After all, they'd had nobody to scare all day for Hallowe'en, except one or two niggers that went by, and the Y. & M. V. train whistling through at two-fifteen, they scared that.
But monkeys—! Skating around their papa. Plez said if those children had been black, he wouldn't hesitate to say they would remind a soul of little nigger cannibals in the jungle. When they got their papa in their ring-around-a-rosy and he couldn't get out, Plez said it was enough to make an onlooker a little uneasy, and he called once or twice on the Lord. And after they went around high, they crouched down and went around low, about his knees.
The minute come, when King just couldn't get out quick enough. Only he had a hard time, and took him more than one try. He gathered himself together and King is a man of six foot height and weighs like a horse, but he was confused, I take it. But he got aloose and up and out like the Devil was after him—or in him—finally. Right up over the bannister and the ferns, and down the yard and over the ditch and gone. He plowed into the rough toward the Big Black, and the willows waved behind hi
m, and where he run then, Plez don't know and I don't and don't nobody.
Plez said King passed right by him, that time, but didn't seem to know him, and the opportunity had gone by then to speak. And where he run then, nobody knows.
He should have wrote another note, instead of coming.
Well then, the children, I reckon, just held openmouth behind him, and then something got to mounting up after it was all over, and scared them. They come back in the dining room. There were innocent ladies visiting with each other. The little boys had to scowl and frown and drag their skates over the carpet and follow us around the table where we was cutting out Eugene Hudson's underbody, and pull on our skirts till we saw.
"Well, speak," said their mother, and they told her a booger had come up on the front porch and when they went out to see him he said, "I'm going. You stay," so they chased him down the steps and run him off. "But he looked back like this!" Lucius Randall said, lifting off his mask and showing us on his little naked face with the round blue eyes. And Eugene Hudson said the booger took a handful of pecans before he got through the gate.
And Snowdie dropped her scissors on the mahogany, and her hand just stayed in the air as still, and she looked at me, a look a minute long. And first she caught her apron to her and then started shedding it in the hall while she run to the door—so as not to be caught in it, I suppose, if anybody was still there. She run and the little glass prisms shook in the parlor—I don't remember another time, from her. She didn't stop at the door but run on through it and out on the porch, and she looked both ways and was running down the steps. And she run out in the yard and stood there holding to the tree, looking towards the country, but I could tell by the way her head held there wasn't nobody.
When I got to the steps—I didn't like to follow right away—there was nobody at all but old Plez, who was coming by raising his hat.
"Plez, did you see a gentleman come up on my porch just now?" I heard Snowdie call, and there was Plez, just ambling by with his hat raised, like he was just that minute passing, like we thought. And Plez, of course, he said, "No'm, Mistis, I don't recollect one soul pass me, whole way from town."
The little fellows held on to me, I could feel them tugging. And my little girl slept through it all, inside, and then woke up to swallow that button.
Outdoors the leaves was rustling, different from when I'd went in. It was coming on a rain. The day had a two-way look, like a day will at change of the year—clouds dark and the gold air still in the road, and the trees lighter than the sky was. And the oak leaves scuttling and scattering, blowing against Old Plez and brushing on him, the old man.
"You're real positive, I guess, Plez?" asks Snowdie, and he answers comforting-like to her, "You wasn't looking for nobody to come today, was you?"
It was later on that Mrs. Stark got hold of Plez and got the truth out of him, and I heard it after a while, through her church. But of course he wasn't going to let Miss Snowdie MacLain get hurt now, after we'd all watched her so long. So he fabricated.
After he'd gone by, Snowdie just stood there in the cool without a coat, with her face turned towards the country and her fingers pulling at little threads on her skirt and turning them loose in the wind, making little kind deeds of it, till I went and got her. She didn't cry.
"Course, could have been a ghost," Plez told Mrs. Stark, "but a ghost—I believe—if he had come to see the lady of the house, would have waited to have word with her."
And he said he had nary doubt in his mind, that it was Mr. King MacLain, starting home once more and thinking better of it. Miss Lizzie said to the church ladies, "I, for one, trust the Negro. I trust him the way you trust me, old Plez's mind has remained clear as a bell. I trust his story implicitly," she says, "because that's just what I know King MacLain'd do—run." And that's one time I feel in agreement about something with Miss Lizzie Stark, though she don't know about it, I guess.
And I live and hope he hit a stone and fell down running, before he got far off from here, and took the skin off his handsome nose, the devil.
And so that's why Snowdie comes to get her butter now, and won't let me bring it to her any longer. I think she kind of holds it against me, because I was there that day when he come; and she don't like my baby any more.
And you know, Fate says maybe King did know it was Hallowe'en. Do you think he'd go that far for a prank? And his own come back to him? Fate's usually more down to earth than that.
With men like King, your thoughts are bottomless. He was going like the wind, Plez swore to Miss Lizzie Stark; though he couldn't swear to the direction—so he changed and said.
But I bet my little Jersey calf King tarried long enough to get him a child somewhere.
What makes me say a thing like that? I wouldn't say it to my husband, you mind you forget it.
JUNE RECITAL
Loch was in a tempest with his mother. She would keep him in bed and make him take Cocoa-Quinine all summer, if she had her way. He yelled and let her wait holding the brimming spoon, his eyes taking in the whole ironclad pattern, the checkerboard of her apron—until he gave out of breath, and took the swallow. His mother laid her hand on his pompadour cap, wobbled his scalp instead of kissing him, and went off to her nap.
"Louella!" he called faintly, hoping she would come upstairs and he could devil her into running to Loomis's and buying him an ice cream cone out of her pocket, but he heard her righteously bang a pot to him in the kitchen. At last he sighed, stretched his toes—so clean he despised the very sight of his feet—and brought himself up on his elbow to the window.
Next door was the vacant house.
His family would all be glad if it burned down; he wrapped it with the summer's love. Beyond the hackberry leaves of their own tree and the cedar row and the spready yard over there, it stretched its weathered side. He let his eyes rest or go flickering along it, as over something very well known indeed. Its left-alone contour, its careless stretching away into that deep backyard he knew by heart. The house's side was like a person's, if a person or giant would lie sleeping there, always sleeping.
A red and bottle-shaped chimney held up all. The roof spread falling to the front, the porch came around the side leaning on the curve, where it hung with bannisters gone, like a cliff in a serial at the Bijou. Instead of cowboys in danger, Miss Jefferson Moody's chickens wandered over there from across the way, flapped over the edge, and found the shade cooler, the dust fluffier to sit in, and the worms thicker under that blackening floor.
In the side of the house were six windows, two upstairs and four down, and back of the chimney a small stair window shaped like a keyhole—one made never to open; they had one like it. There were green shades rolled up to various levels, but not curtains. A table showed in the dining room, but no chairs. The parlor window was in the shadow of the porch and of thin, vibrant bamboo leaves, clear and dark as a pool he knew in the river. There was a piano in the parlor. In addition there were little fancy chairs, like Sunday School chairs or children's drug store chairs, turned this way and that, and the first strong person trying to sit down would break them one after the other. Instead of a door into the hall there was a curtain; it was made of beads. With no air the curtain hung still as a wall and yet you could see through it, if anybody should pass the door.
In that window across from his window, in the back upper room, a bed faced his. The foot was gone, and a mattress had partly slid down but was holding on. A shadow from a tree, a branch and its leaves, slowly traveled over the hills and hollows of the mattress.
In the front room there, the window was dazzling in afternoon; it was raised. Except for one tall post with a hat on it, that bed was out of sight. It was true, there was one person in the house—Loch would recall him sooner or later—but it was only Mr. Holifield. He was the night watchman down at the gin, he always slept all day. A framed picture could be seen hanging on the wall, just askew enough so that it looked straightened every now and then. Sometimes the glass in the
picture reflected the light outdoors and the flight of birds between branches of trees, and while it reflected, Mr. Holifield was having a dream.
Loch could look across through cedars that missed one, in the line, and in a sweeping glance see it all—as if he possessed it—from its front porch to its shed-like back and its black-shadowed summerhouse—which was an entirely different love, odorous of black leaves that crumbled into soot; and its shade of four fig trees where he would steal the figs if July ever came. And above all the shade, which was dark as a boat, the blue sky flared—shooting out like a battle, and hot as fire. The hay riders his sister went with at night (went with against their father's will, slipped out by their mother's connivance) would ride off singing, "Oh, It Ain't Gonna Rain No More." Even under his shut eyelids, that light and shade stayed divided from each other, but reversed.
Some whole days at a time, often in his dreams day and night, he would seem to be living next door, wild as a cowboy, absolutely by himself, without his mother or father coming in to feel his skin, or run a finger up under his cap—without one parent to turn on the fan and the other to turn it off, or them both together to pin a newspaper around the light at night to shade him out of their talk. And there was where Cassie could never bring him books to read, miserable girls' books and fairy tales.
It was the leaky gutter over there that woke Loch up, back in the spring when it rained. Splashy as a waterfall in a forest, it shook him with that agony of being made to wake up from a sound sleep to be taken away somewhere, made to go. It made his heart beat fast.
They could do what they wanted to to him but they could not take his pompadour cap off him or take his house away. He reached down under the bed and pulled up the telescope.