by Eudora Welty
One with his camera and flash apparatus, the photographer stood with his back to us. He was baldheaded. We could see over him; he was short, and he leaned from side to side. He had long since discarded his coat, and his suspenders crossed tiredly on that bent back.
Sister Anne sat one way, then the other. A variety of expressions traveled over her face—pensive, eager, wounded, sad, and businesslike.
"I don't know why she can't make up her mind," I said all at once. "She's done nothing but practice all afternoon."
"Wait, wait, wait," said Kate. "Let her get to it."
What would show in the picture was none of Mingo at all, but the itinerant backdrop—the same old thing, a scene that never was, a black and white and gray blur of unrolled, yanked-down moonlight, weighted at the bottom with the cast-iron parlor rabbit doorstop, just behind Sister Anne's restless heel. The photographer raised up with arms extended, as if to hold and balance Sister Anne just exactly as she was now, with some special kind of semaphore. But Sister Anne was not letting him off that easily.
"Just a minute—I feel like I've lost something!" she cried, in a voice of excitement. "My handkerchief?"
I could feel Kate whispering to me, sideways along my cheek.
"Did poor Uncle Felix have to kill somebody when he was young?"
"I don't know." I shrugged, to my own surprise.
"Do you suppose she told him today there was a Yankee in the house? He might be thinking of Yankees." Kate slanted her whisper into my hair. It was more feeling, than hearing, what she said. "But he was almost too young for killing them....Of course he wasn't too young to be a drummer boy...." Her words sighed away.
I shrugged again.
"Mama can tell us! I'll make her tell us. What did the note say, did it go on just warning us to hide?"
I shook my head. But she knew I must have looked at it.
"Tell you when we get out," I whispered back, stepping forward a little from her and moving the curtain better.
"Oh, wait!" Sister Anne exclaimed again.
I could never have cared, or minded, less how Sister Anne looked. I had thought of what was behind the photographer's backdrop. It was the portrait in the house, the one picture on the walls of Mingo, where pictures ordinarily would be considered frivolous. It hung just there on the wall that was before me, crowded between the windows, high up—the romantic figure of a young lady seated on a fallen tree under brooding skies: my Great-grandmother Jerrold, who had been Evelina Mackaill.
And I remembered—rather, more warmly, knew, like a secret of the family—that the head of this black-haired, black-eyed lady who always looked the right, mysterious age to be my sister, had been fitted to the ready-made portrait by the painter who had called at the door—he had taken the family off guard, I was sure of it, and spoken to their pride. The yellow skirt spread fanlike, straw hat held ribbon-in-hand, orange beads big as peach pits (to conceal the joining at the neck)—none of that, any more than the forest scene so unlike the Mississippi wilderness (that enormity she had been carried to as a bride, when the logs of this house were cut, her bounded world by drop by drop of sweat exposed, where she'd died in the end of yellow fever) or the melancholy clouds obscuring the sky behind the passive figure with the small, crossed feet—none of it, world or body, was really hers. She had eaten bear meat, seen Indians, she had married into the wilderness at Mingo, to what unknown feelings. Slaves had died in her arms. She had grown a rose for Aunt Ethel to send back by me. And still those eyes, opaque, all pupil, belonged to Evelina—I knew, because they saw out, as mine did; weren't warned, as mine weren't, and never shut before the end, as mine would not. I, her divided sister, knew who had felt the wildness of the world behind the ladies' view. We were homesick for somewhere that was the same place.
I returned the touch of Kate's hand. This time, I whispered, "What he wrote was, 'River—Daisy—Midnight—Please.'"
"'Midnight'!" Kate cried first. Then, "River daisy? His mind has wandered, the poor old man."
"Daisy's a lady's name," I whispered impatiently, so impatiently that the idea of the meeting swelled right out of the moment, and I even saw Daisy.
Then Kate whispered, "You must mean Beck, Dicey, that was his wife, and he meant her to meet him in Heaven. Look again.—Look at Sister Anne!"
Sister Anne had popped up from the organ bench. Whirling around, she flung up the lid—hymnbooks used to be stuffed inside—and pulled something out. To our amazement and delight, she rattled open a little fan, somebody's old one—it even sounded rusty. As she sat down again she drew that fan, black and covered over with a shower of forget-me-nots, languidly across her bosom. The photographer wasted not another moment. The flash ran wild through the house, singeing our very hair at the door, filling our lungs with gunpowder smoke as though there had been a massacre. I had a little fit of coughing.
"Now let her try forgiving herself for this," said Kate, and almost lazily folded her arms there.
"Did you see me?" cried Sister Anne, running out crookedly and catching onto both of us to stop herself. "Oh, I hope it's good! Just as the thing went off—I blinked!" She laughed, but I believed I saw tears start out of her eyes. "Look! Come meet Mr. Puryear. Come have your pictures taken! It's only a dollar down and you get them in the mail!"
And for a moment, I wanted to—wanted to have my picture taken, to be sent in the mail to someone—even against that absurd backdrop, having a vain, delicious wish to torment someone, then have something to laugh about together afterwards.
Kate drew on ladylike white cotton gloves, that I had not noticed her bringing. Whatever she had been going to say turned into, "Sister Anne? What have you been telling Uncle Felix?"
"What I didn't tell him," replied Sister Anne, "was that people were getting their pictures taken: I didn't want him to feel left out. It was just for one day. Mr. Alf J. Puryear is the photographer's name—there's some Puryears in Mississippi. I'll always remember his sad face."
"Thank you for letting us see Uncle Felix, in spite of the trouble we were," said Kate in her clear voice.
"You're welcome. And come back. But if I know the signs," said Sister Anne, and looked to me, the long-lost, for confirmation of herself the specialist, "we're losing him fast, ah me. Well! I'm used to it, I can stand it, that's what I'm for. But oh, I can't stand for you all to go! Stay—stay!" And she turned into our faces that outrageous, yearning smile she had produced for the photographer.
I knew I hadn't helped Kate out yet about Sister Anne. And so I said, "Aunt Ethel didn't come today! Do you know why? Because she just can't abide you!"
The bright lights inside were just then turned off. Kate and I turned and ran down the steps, just as a voice out of the porch shadow said, "It seems to me that things are moving in too great a rush." It sounded sexless and ageless both to me; it sounded deaf.
Somehow, Kate and I must have expected everybody to rush out after us. Sister Anne's picture, the free one, had been the last. But nobody seemed to be leaving. Children were the only ones flying loose. Maddened by the hour and the scene, they were running barefoot and almost silent, skimming around and around the house. The others sat and visited on, in those clouds of dust, all holding those little tickets or receipts I remembered wilting in their hands; some of the old men had them stuck in their winter hats. At last, maybe the Lady Baltimore cake would have to be passed.
"Sister Anne, greedy and all as she is, will cut that cake yet, if she can keep them there a little longer!" said Kate in answer to my thoughts.
"Yes," I said.
"She'll forget what you said. Oh the sweet evening air!"
I took so for granted once, and when had I left for ever, I wondered at that moment, the old soft airs of Mingo as I knew them—the interior airs that were always kitchenlike, of oil-lamps, wood ashes, and that golden scrapement off cake-papers—and outside, beyond the just-watered ferns lining the broad strong railing, the fragrances winding up through the luster of the fields and the di
m, gold screen of trees and the river beyond, fragrances so rich I once could almost see them, untransparent and Oriental? In those days, fresh as I was from Sunday School in town, I could imagine the Magi riding through, laden.
At other times—perhaps later, during visits back from the North—that whole big congregated outside smell, like the ripple of an animal's shining skin, used suddenly to travel across and over to my figure standing on the porch, like a marvel of lightning, and by it I could see myself, a child on a visit to Mingo, hardly under any auspices that I knew of, by myself, but wild myself, at the mercy of that touch.
"It's a wonder she didn't let the Negroes file in at the back and have theirs taken too. If you didn't know it was Sister Anne, it would be past understanding," Kate said. "It would kill Mama—we must spare her this."
"Of course!" Sparing was our family trait.
We were going down the walk, measuredly, like lady callers who had left their cards; in single file. That was the one little strip of cement in miles and miles—narrow as a ladder.
"But listen, who was Daisy, have you thought? Daisy," said Kate in front. She looked over her shoulder. "I don't believe it."
I smoothed out that brown page of the hymn book with the torn edge, that purple indelible writing across it where the print read "Round & Shaped Notes." Coming around, walking in the dampening uncut grass, I showed it to Kate. You could still make out the big bold D with the cap on.
"'Midnight!' But they always go to bed at dark, out here."
I put the letter back inside my pocket. Kate said, "Daisy must have been smart. I don't understand that message at all."
"Oh, I do," I lied. I felt it was up to me. I told Kate, "It's a kind of shorthand." Yet it had seemed a very long letter—didn't it take Uncle Felix a long time to write it!
"Oh, I can't think even out here, but mustn't Daisy be dead?... Not Beck?" Kate ventured, then was wordless.
"Daisy was Daisy," I said. It was the "please" that had hurt me. It was I who put the old iron ring over the gate and fastened it. I saw the Cape Jessamines were all in bud, and for a moment, just at the thought, I seemed to reel from a world too fragrant, just as I suspected Aunt Ethel had reeled from one too loud.
"I expect by now Uncle Felix has got his names mixed up, and Daisy was a mistake," Kate said.
She could always make the kind of literal remark, like this, that could alienate me, even when we were children—much as I love her. I don't know why, yet, but some things are too important for a mistake even to be considered. I was sorry I had showed Kate the message, and said, "Look, how we've left him by himself."
We stood looking back, in our wonder, until out of the house came the photographer himself, all packed up—a small, hurrying man, black-coated as his subjects were. He wore a pale straw summer hat, which was more than they had. It was to see him off, tell him good-bye, reassure him, that they had waited.
"Open it again! Look out, Dicey," said Kate, "get back."
He did not tarry. With paraphernalia to spare, he ran out between the big bushes ahead of us with a strange, rushing, fuse-like, Yankee sound—out through the evening and into his Ford, and was gone like that.
I felt the secret pang behind him—I know I did feel the cheat he had found and left in the house, the helpless, asking cheat. I felt it more and more, too strongly.
And then we were both excruciated by our terrible desire, and catching each other at the same moment with almost fierce hands, we did it, we laughed. We leaned against each other and on the weak, open gate, and gasped and choked into our handkerchiefs, and finally we cried. "Maybe she kissed him!" cried Kate at random. Each time we tried to stop ourselves, we sought each other's faces and started again. We laughed as though we were inspired.
"She forgot to take the pencil out of her hair!" gasped Kate.
"Oh no! What do you think Uncle Felix wrote with! He managed— it was the pencil out of Sister Anne's head!" That was almost too much for me. I held on to the gate.
I was aware somehow that birds kept singing passionately all around us just the same, and hurling themselves like bolts in front of our streaming eyes.
Kate tried to say something new—to stop us disgracing ourselves and each other, our visit, our impending tragedy, Aunt Ethel, everything. Not that anybody, anything in the world could hear us, reeled back in those bushes now, except ourselves.
"You know Aunt Beck—she never let us leave Mingo without picking us our nosegay on the way down this walk, every little thing she grew that smelled nice, pinks, four-o'clocks, verbena, heliotrope, bits of nicotiana—she grew all such little things, just for that, Di. And she wound their stems, round and round and round, with a black or white thread she would take from a needle in her collar, and set it all inside a rose-geranium leaf, and presented it to you at the gate—right here. That was Aunt Beck," said Kate's positive voice. "She wouldn't let you leave without it."
But it was no good. We had not laughed together that way since we were too little to know any better.
With tears streaming down my cheeks, I said, "I don't remember her."
"But she wouldn't let you forget. She made you remember her!"
Then we stopped
I stood there and folded the note back up. There was the house, floating on the swimming dust of evening, its gathered, safe-shaped mass darkening. A dove in the woods called its five notes—two and three—at first unanswered. The last gleam of sunset, except for the threadbare curtain of wistaria, could be seen going on behind. The cows were lowing. The dust was in windings, the roads in their own shapes in the air, the exhalations of where the people all had come from.
"They'll all be leaving now," said Kate. "It's first-dark, almost."
But the grouping on the porch still held, that last we looked back, posed there along the rail, quiet and obscure and never-known as passengers on a ship already embarked to sea. Their country faces were drawing in even more alike in the dusk, I thought. Their faces were like dark boxes of secrets and desires to me, but locked safely, like old-fashioned caskets for the safe conduct of jewels on a voyage.
Something moved. The little girl came out to the front, holding her glass jar, like a dark lantern, outwards. Kate and I turned, wound our arms around each other, and got down to the car. We heard the horses.
It was all one substance now, one breath and density of blue. Along the back where the pasture was, the little, low black cows came in, in a line toward the house, with their sober sides one following the other. Where each went looked like simply where nothing was. But across the quiet we heard Theodore talking to them.
Across the road was Uncle Theodore's cabin, where clumps of privet hedge in front were shaped into a set of porch furniture, god-size, table and chairs, and a snake was hung up in a tree.
We drew out of the line of vehicles, and turned back down the dark blue country road. We neither talked, confided, nor sang. Only once, in a practical voice, Kate spoke.
"I hate going out there without Mama. Mama's too nice to say it about Sister Anne, but I will. You know what it is: it's in there somewhere."
Our lips moved together. "She's common...."
All around, something went on and on. It was hard without thinking to tell whether it was a throbbing, a dance, a rattle, or a ringing—all louder as we neared the bridge. It was everything in the grass and trees. Presently Mingo church, where Uncle Felix had been turned down on "knick-knack," revolved slowly by, with its faint churchyard. Then all was April night. I thought of my sweetheart, riding, and wondered if he were writing to me.
GOING TO NAPLES
The Pomona sailing out of New York was bound for Palermo and Naples. It was the warm September of a Holy Year. Along with the pilgrims and the old people going home, there rode in turistica half a dozen pairs of mothers and daughters—these seemed to take up the most room. If Mrs. C. Serto, going to Naples, might miss by a hair's breadth being the largest mother, there was no question about which was the largest daughter—t
hat was hers. And how the daughter did love to scream! From the time the Pomona began to throb and move down the river, Gabriella Serto regaled the deck with clear, soprano cries. As she romped up and down after the other girls—she was the youngest, too: eighteen—screaming and waving good-by to the Statue of Liberty, a hole broke through her stocking and her flesh came through like a pear.
Before land was out of sight, everybody knew that whatever happened during the next two weeks at sea, Gabriella had a scream in store for it. It was almost as though their ship—not a large ship at all, the rumor began to go round—had been appointed for this. "Why do I have to be taken to Naples! Why? I was happy in Buffalo, with you and Papa and Aunt Rosalia and Uncle Enrico!" she wailed to her mother along the passages—where of course everybody else, as well as the Sertos, was lost.
"Enough for you it is l'Anno Santo," said Mama. "Hold straight those shoulders. Look the others."
The others were going to pair off any minute—as far as pairing would go. There were six young girls, but though there were six young men too, they were only Joe Monteoliveto, Aldo Scampo, Poldy somebody, and three for the priesthood. As for Poldy, he was a Polish-American who was on his way now to marry a girl in Italy that he had never seen.
Every morning, to reach their deck, Mrs. Serto and Gabriella had to find their way along the whole length of the ship, right along its humming and pounding bottom, where the passage was wet (Did the ship leak? people asked) and narrow as a schoolroom aisle; past the quarters of the crew—who looked wild in their half-undress, even their faces covered with black—and the Pomona engines; and at last up a steep staircase toward the light. Gabriella complained all the way. Mrs. Serto, feeling this was the uphill journey, only puffed. On the long way back to the dining room—downhill—Mrs. Serto had her say.