by Eudora Welty
"I didn' get back from my sisters' in the country."
"And poor Miss Katie Rainey dead. What were you so busy doing?"
"Showin' my teef."
Mrs. Stark raised her voice. "Only thing I can do for people any more, in joy or sorrow, is send 'em you. You know how Miss Jinny and Mr. Ran back out on me, then you go off. Now it's here next day. Fix my breakfast and yours and go on down there. Get in the kitchen and clean it up for Miss Virgie, don't pay any attention to her. Take that ham we haven't sliced into. Start cooking for the funeral, if others didn't beat you to it yesterday."
"Yes'm."
"Mind you learn to appreciate your good kitchen when you stand over a wood stove all day."
"I was comin' back. Sister's place a place once you get to it—hard time gettin' out."
Mrs. Stark snapped her fingers. "You and all your sisters!" She rose and walked, with her walk like a girl's, to the front door, looking down over the hill, the burned, patchy grass no better than Katie Rainey's, and the thirsty shrubs; but the Morgan sweet olive, her own grandmother's age, her grandmother's tree, was blooming. She murmured over her shoulder, "I never had cause to set foot in the Rainey house for over five minutes in my life. And I don't suppose they need me now. But I hope I know what any old woman owes another old woman. It doesn't matter if it's too late. Do you hear me? Go back and put on a clean apron."
The Raineys, Miss Katie and her daughter Virgie, still held on to the house beyond the pavement, on the MacLain Road. There on the ridge the tin roof shed the light under the crape myrtle and privet, gone to trees, that edged the porch. The cannas with their scorched edges, together with the well, made the three familiar islands in the whitened grass of the yard. Across and back again, with effort but bobbinlike, had moved Miss Katie, Mrs. Fate Rainey, in her dress the hard blue of a morning-glory.
In old age Miss Katie showed what a neat, narrow head she had under the hair no longer disheveled and flyaway. When she came outdoors, her carefully dressed and carefully held head was as silver-looking as a new mailbox. It was out of the autocracy of her stroke—she had suffered "a light stroke" five years ago, "while separating my cows and calves," she would recount it—that she'd begun ordering things done by set times. When it was time for Virgie to come home from work in the afternoon, Miss Katie fretted herself for fear she wouldn't be in time to milk before dark. She still had her two favorite Jerseys, pastured near. She stood out in the front yard, or moved the best way she could back and forth, waiting for Virgie.
A fiery streak of salvia that ran around the side of the house would turn darker in the leveling light. Though the shade broadened, she still walked her narrow path, not yielding even to the kind sun. She held up poorly there, propped by an old thornstick. Bleaching down by the roadside was a chair, an old chair she sold things from once, under the borrowed shade of the chinaberry across the road; but she didn't seem to want to sit down any more, or to be quite that near the trafficking. Clear up where she was, she felt the world tremble; day and night the loggers went by, to and from Morgan's Woods. That wore her out too. While she lived, she was going to wait—and she did wait, standing up—until Virgie her daughter, past forty now and too dressed up, came home to milk Bossy and Juliette the way she should. Virgie worked for the very people that were out depleting the woods, Mr. Nesbitt's company.
Miss Katie couldn't spare her good hand to put up and shade her eyes; yet after you passed, you saw her in that position, in your vision if not in your sight. She looked ready to ward you off, too, in case of pity, there in her gathered old-lady dress, sometimes in an old bonnety church-hat. There's the old lady that watches the turn of the road, thought the old countrymen, Sissums and Sojourners and Holifields, passing in trucks or wagons on Saturday, going home, lifting their hats. Young courting people, Little Sister Spights' crowd, giggled at her, but small children and Negroes did not; they took her for granted like the lady on the Old Dutch Cleanser can.
The old people in Morgana she reminded of Snowdie MacLain, her neighbor once, who watched and waited for her husband so long. They were reminded vaguely of themselves, too, now that they were old enough to see it, still watching and waiting for something they didn't really know about any longer, wouldn't recognize to see it coming in the road.
As she looked out from her hill in the creeping shade, Miss Katie Rainey might have liked to be argued with and prevailed upon to go back in the house; at the last she might have suffered contradiction, but from whom? Not from Virgie.
"Where's my girl? Have you seen my girl?"
Miss Katie thought she called to the road, but she didn't; shame drew down her head, for she could still feel one thing if she could feel little else coming to her from the outside world: lack of chivalry.
Waiting, she heard circling her ears like the swallows beginning, talk about lovers. Circle by circle it twittered, church talk, talk in the store and post office, vulgar man talk possibly in the barbershop. Talk she could never get near now was coming to her.
"So long as the old lady's alive, it's all behind her back."
"Daughter wouldn't run off and leave her, she's old and crippled."
"Left once, will again."
"That fellow Mabry's been taking out his gun and leaving Virgie a bag o' quail every other day. Anybody can see him go by the back door."
"I declare."
"He told her the day she got tired o' quail, let him know and he'd quit and go on off, that's what I heard."
"Do tell."
"Furthermore, I reckon it would be possible for a human being, a woman, to live off them rich birds for the remaining space of time. Her ma can help her eat 'em. Her ma ain't lost her appetite!"
"Hush."
"Guess it wouldn't be polite for her or him neither one to stop on the quails. Even if he heard. Got to keep on now."
"Oh, sure. Fate Rainey's a clean shot, too."
"But ain't he heard?"
Not Fate Rainey at all; but Mr. Mabry. It was just that the talk Miss Katie heard was in voices of her girlhood, and some times they slipped.
Then, in an odd set way, for she lied badly, she would lie to Virgie when she came. "I asked Passing. And not one of 'em said they could tell me where you were, what kept you so long in town."
But it's my last summer, and she ought to get back here and milk on time, the old lady thought, stubbornly and yet pityingly, the two ways she was.
"Look where the sun is," she called, as Virgie did drive up in the yard in the old coupe Miss Katie kept forgetting she had, the battered thing she took in trade for the poor little calf.
"I see it, Mama."
Virgie's long, dark, too heavy hair swung this way and that as she came up in her flowered voile dress, on her high heels through the bearded grass.
"You have to milk before dark, after driving them in, and there's four little quails full of shot for you to dress, lying on my kitchen table."
"Come on back in the house, Mama. Come in with me."
"I been by myself all day."
Virgie bent and gave her mother her evening kiss.
Miss Katie knew then that Virgie would drive the cows home and milk and feed them and deliver the milk on the road, and come back and cook the little quails.
"It's a wonder, though," she thought. "A blessed wonder to see the child mind."
The day Miss Katie died, Virgie was kneeling on the floor of her bedroom cutting out a dress from some plaid material. She was sewing on Sunday.
"There's nothing Virgie Rainey loves better than struggling against a real hard plaid," Miss Katie thought, with a thrust of pain from somewhere unexpected. Whereas, there was a simple line down through her own body now, dividing it in half; there should be one in every woman's body—it would need to be the long way, not the cross way—that was too easy—making each of them a side to feel and know, and a side to stop it, to be waited on, finally.
But she wanted to drop to her knees there where Virgie's plaid spread out like a pretty
rug for her. Her last clear feeling as she stood there, holding herself up, was that she wanted to be down and covered up, in, of all things, Virgie's hard-to-match-up plaid. But she turned herself around by an act of strength which tore her within and walked, striking her cane, the width of the hall and two rooms and lay down on her own bed.
"Stop and fan me a minute," she called aloud. She was thinking rapidly to herself, though, that Virgie had said, "I aim to get married on my bulb money."
Virgie, who worked in her gown, came in with pins in her mouth and her thumb marked green from the scissors, and stood over her. She brought a paper up and down over her mother's face. She fanned her with the Market Bulletin.
Dying, Miss Katie went rapidly over the list in it, her list. As though her impatient foot would stamp at each item, she counted it, corrected it, and yet she was about to forget the seasons, and the places things grew. Purple althea cuttings, true box, four colors of cannas for 150, moonvine seed by teaspoonful, green and purple jew. Roses: big white rose, little thorn rose, beauty-red sister rose, pink monthly, old-fashioned red summer rose, very fragrant, baby rose. Five colors of verbena, candlestick lilies, milk and wine lilies, blackberry lilies, lemon lilies, angel lilies, apostle lilies. Angel trumpet seed. The red amaryllis.
Faster and faster, Mrs. Rainey thought: Red salvia, four-o'clock, pink Jacob's ladder, sweet geranium cuttings, sword fern and fortune grass, century plants, vase palm, watermelon pink and white crape myrtle, Christmas cactus, golden bell. White Star Jessamine. Snowball. Hyacinthus. Pink fairy lilies. White. The fairy white.
"Fan me. If you stop fanning, it's worse than if you never started."
And when Mama is gone, almost gone now, she meditated, I can tack on to my ad: the quilts! For sale, Double Muscadine Hulls, Road to Dublin, Starry Sky, Strange Spider Web, Hands All Around, Double Wedding Ring. Mama's rich in quilts, child.
Miss Katie lay there, carelessly on the counterpane, thinking, Crochet tablecloth, Sunburst design, very lacy. She knew Virgie stood over her, fanning her in rhythmic sweeps. Presently Miss Katie's lips shut tight.
She was thinking, Mistake. Never Virgie at all. It was me, the bride—with more than they guessed. Why, Virgie, go away, it was me.
She put her hand up and never knew what happened to it, her protest.
Virgie knelt, crouched there. She held her head, her mouth opened, and one by one the pins fell out on the floor. She was not much afraid of death, either of its delay or its surprise. As yet nothing in the place of fear came into her head; only something about her dress.
The bed, the headboard dark and ungiving as an old mirror on the wall, to her as a child a vast King Arthur shield that might have concealed a motto, cast its afternoon shadow down dark as muscadines, to her mother's waist. The old shadow, familiar as sleep the life long, always ran down over the bolster this time of year, the warm and knotty medallions of the familiar counterpane—the overworked, inherited, and personal pattern—from which her mother's black shoes now pointed up.
Behind the bed the window was full of cloudy, pressing flowers and leaves in heavy light, like a jar of figs in syrup held up. A humming bird darted, fed, darted. Every day he came. He had a ruby throat. The clock jangled faintly as cymbals struck under water, but did not strike; it couldn't. Yet a torrent of riches seemed to flow over the room, submerging it, loading it with what was over-sweet.
Virgie ran to the porch. Waiting on a passing Negro, she called, in a moment, "Go get me Dr. Loomis out of church!" The Negro began to sprint in his Sunday clothes.
By mid-afternoon the house was filling with callers and helpers. Each one who came seemed stopped by the enormous dead boxwood, like a yellow sponge, that stood by the steps; it had to be gone around. Coffee was being kept on the stove and iced tea in the pitcher in the hall. Virgie was dressed, in the dress she had ironed that morning for Monday, and at the front of the house. Moving around her, a lady watered the ferns and evened the shades in the parlor, then watered and evened again, as if some obscure sums were being balanced and checked. Every seat in the parlor and Virgie's room was taken, the porch and the steps creaked under the men who stood outside.
Cassie Morrison, her black-stockinged legs seeming to wade among the impeding legs of the other women, crossed the parlor to where Virgie sat in the chair at the closed sewing machine. Cassie had chosen the one thin, gold-rimmed coffee cup for herself, and balanced it serenely.
"Papa sent his sympathy. Let me sit by you, Virgie." She kissed her. "You know I know what it's like."
"Excuse me," Virgie was saying. All at once she slept, straight in the cane chair. When she opened her eyes, she watched and listened to the even fuller roomful as carefully, and as carelessly, as vacillating as though she were on the point of departure. Through their murmur she heard herself circle the room to speak to them and be kissed. She made the steps of the walk they had to watch, head, breasts, and hips in their helpless agitation, like a rope of bells she started in their ears.
"She can't help it," Cassie Morrison was saying to the person beside her in the gentle tones of a verdict. "She can't take in what's happened quite yet and she doesn't really know us."
The unnaturally closed door led from Miss Katie's room out to the parlor. Behind it, they all knew—waiting as they were for it to open—Miss Snowdie MacLain was laying Miss Katie out. She washed and dressed her herself, tolerating only two old Loomis Negroes to wait on her, and Miss Snowdie was nearly seventy too, and had come seven miles from MacLain. There was something about it nobody liked, perhaps a break in custom. Miss Lizzie Stark, whose place they felt it to be to supervise the house while old Miss Emmy Holifield laid out the dead, had felt too weak today, and sent word she had had to lie down. And old Emmy herself was gone.
It was true that none of the callers except Miss Snowdie had been inside the Rainey house since Mr. Fate Rainey's funeral. No wonder Virgie looked at them now, staring, at moments.
Always in a house of death, Virgie was thinking, all the stories come evident, show forth from the person, become a part of the public domain. Not the dead's story, but the living's.
She could see Ran MacLain, standing at the door shaking hands with Mr. Nesbitt who was coming in. And didn't it show on Ran, that once he had taken advantage of a country girl who had died a suicide? It showed at election time as it showed now, and he won the election for mayor over Mr. Carmichael, for all was remembered in his middle-age when he stood on the platform. Ran was smiling—holding on to a countryman now. They had voted for him for that—for his glamour and his story, for being a MacLain and the bad twin, for marrying a Stark and then for ruining a girl and the thing she did. Old Man Moody found her on the floor of his store—the place she worked—and walked out into the street with her in his arms. They voted for the revelation; it had made their hearts faint, and they would assert it again. Ran knew that every minute, there in the door he stood it.
"Cheer up, now, cheer up," Mr. Nesbitt was saying to her, seeming to lift her to her feet by running his finger under her chin. His eyes—so willed by him, she thought—ran tears and dried. "Come here," he called over his shoulder.
"Virgie, tell Mr. Thisbee who's your best friend in this town." He had brought the new man in the company.
"You, Mr. Bitts," Virgie said.
"Everybody in Morgana calls me Mr. Bitts, Thisbee; you can too. Now wait. Tell him who hired you when nobody else was in the hiring mood, Virgie. Tell him. And was always kind to you and stood up for you."
She never turned away until it was finished; today this seemed somehow brief and easy, a relief.
"Hurry up, Virgie. Got to cheer my daughter up next."
Nina Carmichael, Mrs. Junior Nesbitt heavy with child, was seated where he could see her, head fine and indifferent, one puffed white arm stretched along the sewing machine. He winked at her across the room.
"You, Mr. Bitts."
"Tell him how long you've been working for old Mr. Bitts."
"A long time.
"
"No, tell him how long it's been—my my my, tell him. I've been in three different businesses, Thisbee. How long?"
"Since 1920, Mr. Bitts."
"And if you ever made any mistakes in your letters and figgers, who was it stood behind you with the company?"
"I'm very sorry for you in your sorrow," Mr. Thisbee said suddenly, letting go her hand. She almost fell.
"But who? Who stood behind you?"
Mr. Nesbitt extended his arms overly wide, as he did when asking her to dance with him in Vicksburg. Abruptly he wheeled and went off; he was hurt, disappointed in her for the hundredth time. She saw Mr. Nesbitt's fat, hurt back as he wandered as if lost and stood a long time contemplating and cheering up Nina Carmichael.
Food—two banana cakes and a baked ham, a platter of darkly deviled eggs, new rolls—and flowers kept arriving at the back, and the kitchen filled with women as the parlor now filled with men come farther in. Virgie went back once more to the kitchen, but again the women stopped what they were doing and looked at her as though something—not only today—should prevent her from knowing at all how to cook—the thing they knew. She went to the stove, took a fork, and turned over a piece or two of the chicken, to see Missie Spights look at her with eyes wide in a kind of wonder and belligerence.
Then she walked through them and stood on the quiet back porch to feel the South breeze. The packed freezer, wrapped in a croker sack, the old, golden stopper of newspaper hidden and waiting on tomorrow, stood in the dishpan. The cut flowers were plunged stem-down and head-down in shady water buckets. Virgie had a sudden recollection of recital night at Miss Eckhart's—the moment when she was to be called out. She was thirteen, waiting outside, on guard at a vast calming spectacle of turmoil, and saving it. A little drop spilled, she remembered it now: an anxiety which brought her to the point of sickness, that back in there they were laughing at her mother's hat.