by Eudora Welty
She went back into the parlor. Like a forest murmur the waiting talk filled the room.
The door opened. Miss Snowdie stood against it, sideways, looking neither in nor out.
Immediately the ladies rose and filled the doorway; some of them went in. Only the end of the bed and Miss Katie's feet could be seen from within the parlor. There were soft cries. "Snowdie!" "Miss Snowdie! She looks beautiful!" Then the rest of the ladies tiptoed forward and could be seen bending over the bed as they would bend over the crib of a little kicking baby. They came out again.
"Come see your mother."
They pulled pre-emptorily at Virgie's arms, their voices bright.
"Don't touch me."
They pulled harder, still smiling but in silence, and Virgie pulled back. Her hair fell over her eyes. She shook it back. "Don't touch me."
"Honey, you just don't know what you lost, that's all."
They were all people who had never touched her before who tried now to struggle with her, their faces hurt. She was hurting them all, shocking them. They leaned over her, agonized, pleading with the pull of their hands. It was a Mrs. Flewellyn, pulling the hardest, who had caught the last breath of her husband in a toy balloon, by his wish, and had it at home still—most of it, until a Negro stole it.
Miss Perdita Mayo's red face looked over their wall. "Your mama was too fine for you, Virgie, too fine. That was always the trouble between you."
In that truth, Virgie looked up at them lightheadedly and they lifted her to her feet and drew her into the bedroom and showed her her mother.
She lay in the black satin. It had been lifted, heavy as a child, out of her trunk, the dress in which diminished, pea-sized mothballs had shone and rolled like crystals all Virgie's life, in waiting, taken out twice, and now spread out in full triangle. Her head was in the center of the bolster, the widow's place in which she herself laid it. Miss Snowdie had rouged her cheeks.
They watched Virgie, but Virgie gave them no sign now. She felt their hands smooth down her and leave her, draw away from her body and then give it a little shove forward, even their hands showing sorrow for a body that did not fall, giving back to hands what was broken, to pick up, smooth again. For people's very touch anticipated the falling of the body, the own, the single and watchful body.
Later, back in the parlor, she cried. They said, "She used to set out yonder and sell muscadines, see out there? There's where she got rid of all her plums, the early and late, blackberries and dewberries, and the little peanuts you boil. Now the road goes the wrong way." Though that was like a sad song, it was not true: the road still went the same, from Morgana to MacLain, from Morgana to Vicksburg and Jackson, of course. Only now the wrong people went by on it. They were all riding trucks, very fast or heavily loaded, and carrying blades and chains, to chop and haul the big trees to mill. They were not eaters of muscadines, and did not stop to pass words on the season and what grew. And the vines had dried. She wept because they could not tell it right, and they didn't press for her reasons.
"Call Mr. Mabry now. She's let loose."
Mr. Mabry, fresh from the barbershop, took Virgie's hands and swung them, then dropped them. She dried her eyes instantly and with-drew, giving him permission to go into the other room. She wondered when she had seen him leave her on tiptoe before. Old country fellows in the hall began to speak of him now, respectfully, as he looked down at the dead with his face so rubylike, so recently complimented upon, that in the next moment it would fill with concern for itself.
"He aims to get closer to Ives. Where he don't have to use hoot owls for roosters and fox for yard dogs, is the way he put it to me."
"Then why on earth don't he come to Morgana? No nicer place than right here, 's what I think, if I wanted to be close in."
"He prefers Ives."
"I see."
But in the parlor it was generally felt polite now to consider Miss Katie as the center of conversation, since the door was now open.
"Virgie might get a little bit of dairyfood savings now, bet she'll spend it on something 'sides the house, hm?" A lady Virgie couldn't place said it halfway in her direction, leaning toward her now and then as she had been doing, with her full weight. "Her pretty quilts, she can't ship those to the Fair no more. What does Virgie care about housekeeping and china plates without no husband, hm? Wonder what Virgie'll do with the chickens, Katie always enjoyed a mixed yard. Wonder who Virgie'll give the deer to if she don't want it. That picture of the deer Miss Katie's mother hooked in Tishomingo with the mistletoe crown over the horns, and the oak leaves, Miss Katie considered it the prettiest thing in the world. The cloth doll with the china head and hands, that she used to let any and all play with—"
"Guinevere! Oh, I wish I had her now!" Cassie Morrison held out both gloved hands.
"Her fern stand. Virgie won't stay here to keep care of ferns, I bet. Her begonia, thirty-five years old. Not much older than Virgie, is it, Virgie? She left her recipes to the Methodist Church—I hope."
"She was a living saint," answered another lady, as if this would agree with everything.
"Look at my diamond."
Jinny MacLain, Ran's wife, was coming in. With her hand out, she showed a ring about the room on her way to Virgie. "I deserved me a diamond," she went on to say to Cassie Morrison, twisting her hand on its wrist. "That's what I told Ran." Softly, abruptly, she turned and kissed Virgie's cheek, whispering, "I don't have to see her—do I, Virgie?"
Then they all rose as Miss Snowdie came in.
"I don't have to see anybody!" whispered Jinny fiercely.
Virgie, still holding a cup of coffee, walked out and waited on the porch, for she knew Miss Snowdie would come outside. She could hear her in the parlor now, staying to take a certain amount of praise. Then Miss Snowdie came out, now as at all times a gentle lady, her face white and graciously folded, gently concerned but no more. She stood and looked out, at once shading her eyes, to the house across the road where she used to live. She kissed Virgie then, almost idly.
"I think she looks all right, Virgie."
Her albino's hands were cruelly reddened. But she never seemed really to feel their redness any more. Her soft black-and-white dotted dress smelled as freshly as always of verbena.
"I saw to her well as I knew how. If Emmy Holifield were still living, she might have thought of things I didn't."
But her eyes went past Virgie, across the road, where the old house was a ruin now. In between where the women were standing and the sight of the old place, in the Rainey yard, the children waiting for their parents stood still, fell still, at that moment, and not knowing where to look all at once, listened—listened to the locusts, perforce, which sounded like the sound of the world going around to them as they suddenly beat their cupped hands over their ears.
"Virgie? You know Lizzie Stark and I long ago made up. About Ran and Jinny's trouble; that's over, all over. But do you reckon, at such a time, it was old feelings rising up that kept her away?"
Miss Snowdie sighed, as if she had forgotten her question with the asking, as if a reply would interrupt her. Across there was a place where she had lived a long time, the old deserted time, when Virgie played with Ran and Eugene under her trees, on her porch, under her house, along the river bank, and in Morgan's Woods. There were leggy cedars still lining the old property, their trunks white and knobbed like chicken bones. The old summerhouse was still back there, lattices leaning inward and not matching at the joinings, in the shadow like a place where long ago something had been kept that could peep out now; in the sun like a little temple raised to it. The big chinaberry tree had been cut down with the other lawn trees when the house burned, but its many suckers sprayed up from the stump like a fountain. Negroes had carried away most of the sides and roof that remained of the house, but had hardly made inroad on the chimney, surprisingly enough; it was its full height still, visible from here, dove-pink through the dust and leafiness. Little locusts and castor plants tall as a
man had come up all around, the altheas had come back and made trees, shaggy as old giants holding twilit, flimsy little flowers up high. Vines had taken the yard and the walk, the brick cross of the foundation, and the trees and all.
Virgie removed herself from Miss Snowdie's arm which had gone around her waist. The two women stood quiet in the afternoon light.
"I said I'd want her to lay me out," the old lady said. She trembled very slightly but did not go back.
From around the big boxwood Mr. King MacLain, treading so lightly they didn't hear him, came up the steps.
"You know Virgie," Miss Snowdie murmured, still motionless.
"And Katie Blazes, that's what we used to call your mother," Mr. King nodded at Virgie. The little patch of hair under his lip—not silky, coarse, a pinkish white—shook in a ruminating way. Viola, their Negro, had driven him over after giving him his dinner; she could be seen going to the back now, to visit the kitchen.
"Sir?"
"I'll take that coffee if it's hot and you ain't drinking it. Katie Blazes. Didn't you ever hear your mother tell how she never took a dare to put a match to her stockings, girl? Whsst! Up went the blazes, up to her knee! Sometimes both legs. Cotton stockings the girls used to wear—fuzzy, God knows they were. Nobody else among the girls would set fire to their legs. She had the neighborhood scared she'd go up in flames at an early age."
"Did you eat your dinner?" Miss Snowdie turned to him.
Virgie watched the black coffee beginning to shake in the little cup. There was something terrifying about that old man—he was too old.
"In flames!"
He left them and went into the hall of men.
"I don't know what to do with him," Miss Snowdie said, in a murmur as quiet as the world around them now. She did not know she had spoken. When her flyaway husband had come home a few years ago, at the age of sixty-odd, and stayed, they said she had never gotten over it—first his running away, then his coming back to her. "He didn't want to come at all. Now he has her mixed up with Nellie Loomis."
"Virgie, we've got enough ready to feed an army," Missie Spights called up the hall. She was coming, untying Miss Katie's apron from her dress, her arms shining red. "Ham, chickens, potato salad, deviled eggs, and all the cake and folderol people send besides."
"Does there have to be so much?" Virgie asked, going in to meet her.
"Watch. The out-of-town relatives are always hungry!"
Her busyness gave Missie an air of abandon, quite impregnable. Parnell Moody stood behind her, drying every circle of the potato masher with care. The others were clattering the dishes, putting them in stacks, talking.
"My husband's been waiting on me an hour."
"Mr. King Maclain took himself a nap pretty as you please. Viola had to shriek in his ear to get him up."
"We'll all be back early for the funeral, Virgie—wish you'd let us stay." Cassie drew her delicate brows, surveying the kitchen which she had never got to. "Everybody who would, I let stay with me."
"It's a good thing we cut all our flowers," Missie called, fastening her corset behind the door. "Virgie, you haven't a solitary one."
She saw them all, except Miss Snowdie who stayed, get into their cars in the yard, or walk down the path and into the road. As they went, they seemed to drag some mythical gates and barriers away from her view. She looked at the lighted distance, the little last crescent of hills before the country of the river, and the fields. The world shimmered. Cotton fields look busy on Sunday even; while they are not being picked they push out their bloom the same. The frail screens of standing trees still measured, broke, divided—Stark from Loomis from Spights from Holifield, and the summer from the rain. Each tree like a single leaf, half hair-fine skeleton, half gauze and green, let the first suspicious wind through its old, pressed shape, its summertime branches. The air came smelling of what it was, the end of September.
Down the settling dust of the road came an ancient car. It would turn in here. Old Plez, up until his death, had stopped by to milk and feed the chickens for Miss Katie Rainey on his way to and from the Starks'. His grandchildren, still country people, would come today. The car pounded up the hill to her. It was cracked like some put-together puzzle of the globe of the world. Its cracks didn't meet from one side across to the other, and it was all held together with straightened-out baling wire, for today. Next day, next year, it would sit in the front yard for decoration, at rest on its axles, the four wheels gone and the tires divided up between women and children: two for flowerbeds and two for swings.
They had brought the flowers from their dooryard, princess feathers, snow-on-the-mountain. It took them a long time to turn around and get a start back. A little boy ran back with the pan of butterbeans and okra.
"All come to the funeral if you can get away!" she called after them, too late.
Virgie walked down the hill too, crossed the road, and made her way through the old MacLain place and the pasture and down to the river. She stood on the willow bank. It was bright as mid-afternoon in the openness of the water, quiet and peaceful. She took off her clothes and let herself into the river.
She saw her waist disappear into reflectionless water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All was one warmth, air, water, and her own body. All seemed one weight, one matter—until as she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instant. The iron taste of the old river was sweet to her, though. If she opened her eyes she looked at blue-bottles, the skating waterbugs. If she trembled it was at the smoothness of a fish or snake that crossed her knees.
In the middle of the river, whose downstream or upstream could not be told by a current, she lay on her stretched arm, not breathing, floating. Virgie had reached the point where in the next moment she might turn into something without feeling it shock her. She hung suspended in the Big Black River as she would know to hang suspended in felicity. Far to the west, a cloud running fingerlike over the sun made her splash the water. She stood, walked along the soft mud of the bottom and pulled herself out of the water by a willow branch, which like warm rain brushed her back with its leaves.
At a distance, two little boys lying naked in the red light on the sandbar looked at her as she disappeared into the leaves. They did not move or speak.
The moon, while she looked into the high sky, took its own light between one moment and the next. A wood thrush, which had begun to sing, hushed its long moment and began again. Virgie put her clothes back on. She would have given much for a cigarette, always wishing for a little more of what had just been.
She went back to the pasture, where the enormous ant hills shone, with long shadows, like pyramids on the other side of the world, and drove the cows home.
The crape myrtle had a last crown of bloom on top, once white, now faintly nutmegged. The ground below was littered with its shed bark, and the limbs shone like human limbs, lithe and warm, pink.
She went out to milk and came back to the house.
From the hall she
looked into her mother's room. The window and the room were the one blue of first-dark. Only the black dress, the density of skirt, was stamped on it, like some dark chip now riding mid-air on blue lakes.
Miss Snowdie MacLain had elected to "sit up" the first hours of night. She slept in the bedroom rocker, in the luminous veil of her dress, the cocoon of her head hanging upon it, and the fan let fall from her fingers.
II
Virgie waked to see the morning star hanging over the fields. What had she meant to do so early? She made and drank her coffee, milked, drove the cows to pasture through mist, chopped wood, and at last she attacked the high grass in the yard. Yesterday cutting the Rainey grass in time for the funeral was considered a project so impossible that even if men could be spared and given scythes, success was never guaranteed. Virgie took her sewing scissors from the little bundle of plaid material in her room, and went outdoors. She crouched in the pink early light, clipping and sawing the heads off the grass—it had all gone to seed—a handful at a time. The choked-out roses scratched, surprised her, drew blood drops on her legs. She had to come in when Miss Snowdie, whose presence she had forgotten, stepped out on the porch and called her. As though for a long time she had been extremely angry and had wept many tears, she allowed Miss Snowdie to drive her inside the house and cook her breakfast.
Then Miss Lizzie Stark's Juba arrived, followed by a little stairsteps of Negro children bearing curtain stretchers, and Miss Snowdie and Juba began taking down all the curtains. In half an hour these were out in the backyard, stretched and set forth like the tents in the big Bible's Wilderness of Kadesh. The ladies soon were everywhere, radiating once more from the kitchen.
"First thing," Missie Spights told Virgie, "you called me Missie Spights yesterday. I'm married."
"Oh. Yes, I remember."
"I'm Missie Spights Littlejohn, and I've got three children. I married from off."
"I remember, Missie."