by Eudora Welty
"Do you like it?" Cassie was asking from the front seat beside Ran (Jinny had to go home with the children).
So it was Mrs. Morrison's angel. After being so gay and flighty always, Cassie's mother went out of the room one morning and killed herself. "I was proud of it," said Cassie. "It took everything I had."
"Where's Loch these days?" Ran asked.
"Ran, don't you remember he's in New York City? Likes it there. He writes us."
Loch was too young for Virgie ever to have known well in Morgana—always polite, "too good," "too young," people said when he went to war, and she remembered him only as walking up the wooden staircase to his father's printing office. He gave a bent, intent nod of the head, too young and already too distant.—But he's not dead! she thought—it's something else.
"What did you say, Virgie?"
"Nothing, Cassie." Yet she must have hurt Cassie some way, if only by that moment's imagining that what was young was all gone—disappeared wholly.
Virgie leaned out to look for a certain blackened lamb on a small hump of earth that was part of her childhood. It was the grave of some lady's stillborn child (now she knew it must have been that baby sister of Miss Nell Loomis's), the Iamb flattened by rains into a little fairy table. There she had entertained a large imaginary company with acorn cups, then ridden away on the table.
"You staying on in Morgana, Virgie?" came Miss Nell's undertone. She talked on—the same in a moving car as she was in a parlor.
"Going away. In the morning," Virgie was saying.
"Auction off everything?"
Virgie said nothing more; she had decided to leave when she heard herself say so—decided by ear.
"Turn to the right and stop, Ran."
That was the first thing Miss Lizzie had said; perhaps she had felt too crowded in her own car to break silence.
Ran stopped, and lifted the ladies out. The group of three fat ones—Ran with Miss Lizzie and Miss Nell in arm—moved in hobbled walk ahead. The Rainey lot was well back under the trees. Cassie put her fingers in Virgie's. All around, the yuccas were full of bells, the angels were reared and horsily dappled. The magnolias' inflamed cones and their brown litter smoldered in the tail of the eye. And also in the tail of the eye was Miss Billy Texas Spights: they had let her come. She wore purple—the costume she had worn on election day.
"Thank goodness Snowdie's not here to see that," Miss Perdita remarked ahead to Miss Hattie. "Ran's here, but nothing bothers Ran."
Virgie, as if nudged, knew they must be near the poor little country girl's grave, with the words "Thy Will Be Done" on the stone. She was buried here with the Sojourners.
I hate her, Virgie thought calmly, not turning her head. Hate her grave.
Mr. Holifield passed by, mowing the grass, and raised his hat significantly. Virgie saw the familiar stone of her father's grave, his name spelled out Lafayette, and the red hole torn out beside it. In spite of the flowers waiting, the place still smelled of the sweat of Negro diggers and of a big cedar root which had been cut through and glimmered wetly in the bed of the grave. Victor was buried on the other side. Perhaps there was nothing there. The box that came back from the other war—who knew what had been sent to the Raineys in that? Somewhere behind her, Virgie could hear the hollow but apologetic coughing of Mr. Mabry. Except that it could not be he, of course; he had not been able to come, after all.
Brother Dampeer was with them still; with his weight thrown to one hip, he stood in front of them all, ahead of the row of Mayhews, and watched the success of the lowering of the coffin and the filling of the grave.
After Dr. Williams' prayer, little crumbs and clods ran down the mound, pellmell; the earth grew immediately vivacious and wild as a creature. Virgie never moved. People taking their turns went up and scattered the wreaths about and slowly stuck the clods with paper cornucopias of flowers with pins to hold them. The cornucopias were none of them perfectly erect but leaned to one side or the other, edging the swollen pink mound, monstrous, wider than it was long until it should "settle."
As the party moved away, one of the cornucopias fell over and spilled its weight of red zinnias. No one returned to right it. A feeling of the tumbling activity and promptitude of the elements had settled over people and stirred up, of all things, their dignity; they could not go back now.
They left the cemetery without looking at anything, and some parted with the company at the gate. Attrition was their wisdom. Already, tomorrow's rain pelted the grave with loudness, and made hasty streams ran down its sides, like a mountain red with rivers, already settling the patient work of them all; not one little "made" flower holder, but all, would topple; and so had, or might as well have, done it already; this was the past now.
Brother Dampeer said good-bye and climbed on his mount. He had ridden twenty miles on a mule for this; he did not disclose whether, today, it had been worth it.
The evening fields were still moving, people busy, the sun gone yet busy, where their uneven cotton country tilted and fell riverward into the West. Most of the funeral party had returned to the Raineys' for refreshments. Virgie, with a slip from even Miss Lizzie's arm, which was tired, had not yet gone in.
Four little Mayhews waited for her, perched like birds on the old swivel chair. They hopped off, put their arms around her knees, and pleaded with her too to come in the house now. From the road the lighted-up house had a roof sheared sharp as a fold of paper. The serried leaves of the chinaberry trembled over the road, the branches spread winglike in a breeze that meant change. It was the last of the month of beautiful evening skies, of the lovely East, behind the dark double-twinkling of swallows.
Smells of ham, banana cake, and tuberoses came out and the longing children ran to meet it. Ferns seemed in the early alcoves of twilight to creep, or suddenly to descend like waterfalls in between the deserted porch chairs, and over old man Rainey sitting along the edge of the porch, feet dangling. Juba came running forth, saying Miss Lizzie said for Miss Virgie to come and eat with her company.
Virgie had often felt herself at some moment callous over, go opaque; she had known it to happen to others; not only when her mother changed on the bed while she was fanning her. Virgie had felt a moment in life after which nobody could see through her, into her—felt it young. But Mr. King MacLain, an old man, had butted like a goat against the wall he wouldn't agree to himself or recognize. What fortress indeed would ever come down, except before hard little horns, a rush and a stampede of the pure wish to live?
The feeling had been strong upon her from the moment she came home that she had lived the moment before; it was a moment that found Virgie too tender. She had needed a little time, she needed it now. On the path, with the funeral company at her heels, then surrounding her and passing her and now sitting down to her table without her, she strained against the feeling of the double coming-back.
"Take your time, Virge!" Old Man Rainey said softly. He climbed to his feet and walked into the house without waiting for her.
At seventeen, coming back, she'd jumped the high step from the Y. & M. V. train. She had reached earth dazzled, the first moment, at its unrocked calm. Grass tufted like the back of a dog that had been rolling the moment before shone brown under the naked sprawled-out light of a still-stretching outer world. She heard nothing but the sigh of the vanished train and the single drumbeat of thunder on a bright July day. Across the train yard was Morgana, the remembered oaks like the counted continents against the big blue. Having just jumped from the endless, grinding interior of the slow train from Memphis, she had come back to something—and she began to run toward it, with her suitcase as light as a shoebox, so little had she had to go away with and now to bring back—the lightness made it easier.
"You're back at the right time to milk for me," her mother said when she got there, and untied her bonnet and dashed it to the floor between them, looking up at her daughter. Nobody was allowed weeping over hurts at her house, unless it was Mrs. Rainey herself first,
for son and husband, both her men, were gone.
For Virgie, there were practical changes to begin at once with the coming back—no music, no picture show job any more, no piano.
But in that interim between train and home, she walked and ran looking about her in a kind of glory, by the back way.
Virgie never saw it differently, never doubted that all the opposites on earth were close together, love close to hate, living to dying; but of them all, hope and despair were the closest blood—unrecognizable one from the other sometimes, making moments double upon themselves, and in the doubling double again, amending but never taking back.
For that journey, it was ripe afternoon, and all about her was that light in which the earth seems to come into its own, as if there would be no more days, only this day—when fields glow like deep pools and the expanding trees at their edges seem almost to open, like lilies, golden or dark. She had always loved that time of day, but now, alone, untouched now, she felt like dancing; knowing herself not really, in her essence, yet hurt; and thus happy. The chorus of crickets was as unprogressing and out of time as the twinkling of a star.
Her fingers set, after coming back, set half-closed; the strength in her hands she used up to type in the office but most consciously to pull the udders of the succeeding cows, as if she would hunt, hunt, hunt daily for the blindness that lay inside the beast, inside where she could have a real and living wall for beating on, a solid prison to get out of, the most real stupidity of flesh, a mindless and careless and calling body, to respond flesh for flesh, anguish for anguish. And if, as she dreamed one winter night, a new piano she touched had turned, after the one pristine moment, into a calling cow, it was by her own desire.
After she had gone in and served her company and set the Mayhews ("You'd sure better come live with us. If it wasn't for leaving such a nice house," they murmured to her) on the right road (they had come clear around by Greenwood), and after Old Man Rainey had gone to bed in the old bedroom up under the roof, Virgie sat down in the uncleared kitchen and ate herself, while Juba ate nearby—a little chicken, at first, then ham, then bacon and eggs. She drank her milk. Then she sent Juba home and turned out a fantastic number of lights.
After she was in bed and her own light out, there was a peremptory pounding on the porch floor.
She walked to the open front door, her nightgown blowing about her in the moist night wind. She was trembling, and put on a light in the hall.
From the gleam falling over the transom behind her she could see an old lady in a Mother Hubbard and clayed boots, holding out something white in a dark wrapping.
"It's you," the old lady said abruptly. "Child, you don't know me, but I know you and brought you somethin'. Mighty late, ain't it? My night-blooming cereus throwed a flower tonight, and I couldn't forbear to bring you it. Take it—unwrop it."
Virgie looked at the naked, luminous, complicated flower, large and pale as a face on the dark porch. For a moment she felt more afraid than she had coming to the door.
"It's for you. Keep it—won't do the dead no good. And tomorrow it'll look like a wrung chicken's neck. Look at it enduring the night."
A horse stamped and whimpered from the dark road. The old woman declined to come in.
"No, oh no. You used to play the pi-anna in the picture show when you's little and I's young and in town, dear love," she called, turning away through the dark. "Sorry about your mama: didn't suppose anybody make as pretty music as you ever have no trouble.—I thought you's the prettiest little thing ever was."
Virgie was still trembling. The flower troubled her; she threw it down into the weeds.
She knew that now at the river, where she had been before on moonlit nights in autumn, drunken and sleepless, mist lay on the water and filled the trees, and from the eyes to the moon would be a cone, a long silent horn, of white light. It was a connection visible as the hair is in air, between the self and the moon, to make the self feel the child, a daughter far, far back. Then the water, warmer than the night air or the self that might be suddenly cold, like any other arms, took the body under too, running without visibility into the mouth. As she would drift in the river, too alert, too insolent in her heart in those days, the mist might thin momentarily and brilliant jewel eyes would look out from the water-line and the bank. Sometimes in the weeds a lightning bug would lighten, on and off, on and off, for as long in the night as she was there to see.
Out in the yard, in the coupe, in the frayed velour pocket next to the pistol, was her cache of cigarettes. She climbed inside and shielding the matchlight, from habit, began to smoke cigarettes. All around her the dogs were barking.
III
"I'll sell the cows to the first man I meet in the road," Virgie thought, waking up.
After she had milked them and driven them to pasture and come back, she saw Mrs. Stark's Juba back at the kitchen door.
"Leavin'? One thing, I seen your mama's ghost already," Juba said. She picked up a plate. As she began wrapping the china in newspaper, she explained that Virgie's goods must be packed in papers and locked in trunks before Virgie left, or Mrs. Stark would not think it fitting to the dead or to departure either. Virgie was to come up to the house and bid Mrs. Stark good-bye—before noon.
"Still in the house," Juba said. "Ghost be's."
"Well, I don't want to hear about ghosts," Virgie said. They were now crouched together over a shelf in the china closet.
"Don't?"
Juba courteously ignored Virgie's clashing two plates together. Things? Miss Virgie must despise things more than the meanest people, more than any throwing ghosts.
"I don't. I don't like ghosts."
"Now!" Juba said, by way of affirmation. "However, this'n, your mama, her weren't in two pieces, or floatin' upside down, or any those things yet. Her lyin' up big on a stuff davenport like a store window, three four us fannin' her."
"I still don't want to hear about it," Virgie said. "Just wrap everything up quick for Mrs. Stark and put it away, then you can go."
"Yes, ma'am. Her ghost restin'. Not stren'us-minded like some. I sees ghosts go walkin' and carryin' on. But your mama." To be the ghost, Juba laid her hand on her chest and put her head to one side, fluttering her eyelids tenderly and not breathing. "Yes'm. Yonder up the wall, is where her was. I says Juba, tell Miss Virgie, her would appreciate word of that."
"Did you come here to make me wrap stuff up and then get in my way?" Virgie said. "You know I'm in a hurry to shut up this house."
"Goin' off and leave all these here clean curtains?"
"Juba, when I was in my worst trouble, I scared everybody off, did you know that? Now I'm not scary any more. Like Ran MacLain; he's not," Virgie said absently as they wrapped together.
Juba laughed in an obscure glee. "You'll scare 'em when you's a ghost."
"Hurry."
"I seen more ghosts than live peoples, round here. Black and white. I seen plenty both. Miss Virgie, some is given to see, some try but is not given. I seen that Mrs. Morrison from 'cross the road in long white nightgown, no head atall, in her driveway Saddy. Reckanize her freckle arms. You ever see her? I seen her here. She die in pain?"
Juba lowered her lids hypocritically.
"Pain a plenty and I don't ever want to see her." Virgie got to her feet. "Go on, go on back to Mrs. Stark. Tell her I can pack up better without you. Do I have to pack everything?"
"Yes'm. Her idea is," Juba said, "pack 'em up strong for the day somebody come unpack. And I done bent over and stoop best I could. Held all them curlycue plates without spillin' one."
"Do that for Mrs. Stark."
Juba picked herself up. She shook her head at the open cupboard, the dwindled and long-sugared jelly, the rusty cream of tartar box, the Mason jar of bay leaves, the spindly and darkened vanilla bottle, all the old confusion. Her eyes fastened and held to the twenty-year-old box of toothpicks, and Virgie, seeing, got it for her.
"Juba, take it all," she said then. "Plates, knives an
d forks, the plants on the porch, whatever you want, take. And what's in the trunks. You and Minerva divide." Then she had to burst out and say something to Juba. "And I saw Minerva! I saw her take Mama's hair switch—her young hair that was yellow and I never saw when it matched any more and she could do anything but keep it in that trunk, and I saw it put down in that paper sack. And my brother's baby clothes and my own, yellow and all the lace—I saw all stolen and put with Minerva's umbrella to take home, and I let them go. You tell that Negro. Tell her I know I was robbed, and that I don't care."
Juba nodded and changed the subject. "Thank you, Miss Virgie, for men's clothes. That salt-and-pepper of poor Mr. Rainey."
"Mama kept everything," Virgie said after a moment.
"Glory."
"Now you can go."
"Why, it's a-rainin'. Do hate rain."
Juba left. But she came back.
"That's it," she called softly, appearing once more in her fedora at the kitchen door. "That's right. Cry. Cry. Cry."
"Taking a trip? Think I might come along with you," said Old Man Rainey. "I always aimed to see the world." He looked at her closely.
"Please, sir, don't you come! Yes—I may go far—"
He gave her a hug before he turned to his coffee.
"Do you want to put our cows in your truck to take along?" She gave over to him everything she could think of, hoping he would accept something, something at least.
Virgie went out into the rainy morning and got into her car. She drove it, bumping, down the hill. In the road, the MacLains' old chinaberry tree brushed her window, enjoying the rain like a bird.
She drove through Morgana, hearing a horn blow from another car; it was Cassie Morrison. Cassie called out, driving abreast.
"I want you to come see Mama's Name in the Spring, Virgie. This morning before it rained I divided all the bulbs again, and it ought to be prettier than ever!"