Delta Wedding

by Eudora Welty

  She had never thought it strange in her life before, having no land or possessions herself—Reids and Swan-sons had never become planters—but now she did. It was as if the women had exacted the place, the land, for something—for something they had had to give. Then, so as to be all gracious and noble, they had let it out of their hands—with a play of the reins—to the men....

  She remembered all at once a picture of some old-time Fairchild lady down at the Grove. On a picnic, playing, Robbie had got wet in the river and Miss Jim Allen had not been able to rush her into the house fast enough, to get the river off her—she had put her in a little parlor to sit on a plaid while she readied a bedroom that couldn't have helped but look as perfect as possible already—and looking down at Robbie was the old-time Fairchild lady with the look on her face. It was obviously turned upon her husband, upon a Fairchild, and it was condemning. Robbie had been caught staring up at it (she still knew the outside of the Fairchild houses better than the inside) when Miss Jim Allen ran back in. "That's Mary Shannon," Miss Jim Allen had said, as though she told her the name of a star, like Venus, so generally known that only poor little visitors come up from holes in the river bank would need to be told. "That's Mary Shannon when she came to the wilderness."

  And of course those women knew what to ask of their men. Adoration, first—but least. Then, small sacrifice by small sacrifice, the little pieces of the whole body! Robbie, with the sun on her head, could scream to see the thousand little polite expectations in their very smiles of welcome. "He would do anything for me!" they would say, airily and warningly, of a brother, an uncle, a cousin. "Dabney thinks George hung the moon," with a soft glance at George, and so, George, get Dabney the moon! Robbie was not that kind of woman. Maybe she was just as scandalous, but she was born another kind. She did want to ask George for something indeed, but not for the moon—not even for a child; she did not want to, but she had to ask him for something—life waited for it. (Here he lay in a hammock, just waiting for her to walk this whole distance!) What do you ask for when you love? If it was urgent to seek after something, so much did she love George, that that much the less did she know the right answer.

  Then, at the head of a railroad trestle, in high heels, fuming and wondering then if she had a child inside her, complaining to him that she worshiped his life, she had tried and been reproved, denied and laughed at, teased. When she jumped up for him to look back at and heed, not knowing how love, anything, might have transformed her, it was in terror that she had held the Fairchilds' own mask in front of her. She cried out for him to come back from his danger as a favor to her. And in his forthright risk of his life for that crazy child, she had seen him thrust it, the working of the Fairchild mask, from him, on his face was an elation of throwing it back at her. He reached out for Maureen that demanded not knowing any better....

  In Robbie's eyes all the Fairchild women indeed wore a mask. The mask was a pleading mask, a kind more false than a mask of giving and generosity, for they had already got it all—everything that could be given—all solicitude and manly care. Unless—unless nothing was ever enough—and they knew. Unless pleading must go on forever in life, and was no mask, but real, for longer than all other things, for longer than winning and having.

  She shaded her eyes and turned looking for one tree. She was so little she could take refuge in an inch of shade. Finally she saw a cotton shed that looked not too far to get to before she dropped in the heat. She had had the foresight to bring a sack of pickles and a box of cakes.

  But when she stepped into the abrupt dark, she jumped. There was a Negro girl there, a young one panting just inside the door. She must have been out of the field, for sweat hung on her forehead and cheeks in pearly chains in the gloom, her eyes were glassy.

  "Girl, I'm going to rest inside, you rest outside," said Robbie.

  Like somebody startled in sleep, the girl moved out a step, from inside to outside, to the strip of shade under the doorway, and clung there. Her eyes were wild but held a motionless gaze on the white fields and white glaring sky and the dancing, distant black rim of the river trees.

  Robbie ate the cool wet pickle and the little cakes. She had run off from her sister Rebel now, who would about this time begin to wonder where she was. She stretched her bare feet, for her high heels had made them tired. It was nice in here. She felt as if she were in a shell, floating in that sea of light, looking out its mouth with good creature comfort.

  The moment she had thought over with the most ruin to her pride was the one after the train had actually stopped. George was safe, and the engineer had leaned out. George had suddenly leaped up from where he had fallen on the swampy earth, to greet him. "Oh, it's Mr. Doolittle!" he had said.

  The engineer had raised his stripey elbow, saluted George, and said, "Excuse me." "You nearly got a whole mess of Fairchilds that time! Where do you think you're taking that thing?" George had shouted. 'Taking it to Memphis, ever heard of it?" Mr. Doolittle had said—what absurd conversation men could indulge in with each other, at the most awful moments! Oh, Robbie could have killed them both. "It was somebody I knew!" George scoffed, right in bed, groaning for sleep. "Mr. Doolittle wasn't going to hit me!" When she knew all the time that George was sure Mr. Doolittle was. Until she couldn't stand it any longer. He would not say anything more; he wasn't used to saying anything more to women.

  Robbie sat still, cross-legged, on the floor of the cotton house, with a forgotten motion fanning herself with her skirt. Across her vision the Negro clung and darted just outside, fitful as a black butterfly, perhaps crazy with the heat, and beyond her the light danced. Was this half-way? Her eyes fastened hypnotically on the black figure that seemed to dangle as if suspended in the light, as she would watch a little light that twinkled in the black, far out on the river at night, from her window, waiting.

  The pure, animal way of love she longed for, when she watched, listened, came out, stretched, slept content. Where he lay naked and unconscious she knew the heat of his heavy arm, the drag of his night beard over her. She knew what he cried out in his sleep, she was outside herself as a cup those three drops fell in. She breathed the night in beside him, away off from dreams and time and her own thoughts awake—the companion of his weight and warmth. Then she was glad there was nothing at all, no existence in the world, beyond George asleep, this real and forgetful and exacting body. She slept by him as if in the shadow of a mountain of being. Any moon and stars there were could rise and set over his enfolding, unemanating length. The sun could lean over his backside and wake her.

  She heard the Fairchilds' plantation bell ring in the dense still noon. Dinner. She drew her breath in fiercely as always when the fond, teasing, wistful play of the family love for George hung and threatened near. Nothing was worthy of him but the pure gold, a love that could be simply beside him—her love. Only she could hold him against that grasp, that separating thrust of Fairchild love that would go on and on persuading him, comparing him, begging him, crowing over him, slighting him, proving to him, sparing him, comforting him, deceiving him, confessing and yielding to him, tormenting him ... those smiling and not really mysterious ways of the Fairchilds. In those ways they eluded whatever they feared, sometimes the very thing they really desired....

  Robbie desired veracity—more than she could even quite fathom, as if she had been denied it, like an education at Sunflower Junior College; from a kind of poverty's ambition she desired it—as hard and immediate a veracity as the impact of George's body. It meant coming to touch the real, undeceiving world within the fairy Shellmound world to love George—from all she had spent her life hearing Fairchild, Fairchild, Fairchild, and working for Fairchilds and taking from Fairchilds, with gratitude for Shelley's dresses, then to go straight through like parting a shiny curtain and to George. He was abrupt and understandable to her as the here and now—and now had become a figure strangely dark, alone as the boogie-man, back of them all, and seemed waiting with his set mouth open like a drunka
rd's or as if he were hungry. She, plain hard-head who never dreamed, dreamed every night now she saw him like that, until the image had become matter-of-fact as some glimpse of him on a daylight street corner in Memphis watching her coming. It was a nightmare, Rebel would shake her till she woke up in terror. Where are you? the cry would be in her throat. What if it was she who had run away? It was he who was lost, without her, a Fairchild man, lost at Shellmound.

  Robbie drew up sharply; she heard a horse. The next minute she heard Troy Flavin's voice call out, "Go on, Pinchy! Go on! I get tired of seeing you everywhere!"

  Robbie looked out the door. Troy laughed at her. "I wondered how far you'd get," he said. "Jump up in front of me and ride."

  "No, sir," said Robbie. Then because she always told everything, she said, "I want it to be real hard, like this, to make him feel worse."

  Troy put his thumb knuckle in his mouth and bit it gently. Then he got off his horse meditatively, telling her to wait. He came holding out a little round cake affair with one big bite gone, for Robbie to see.

  "You're a married woman," he said. "Taste this," and watched her take a bite.

  "It tastes like castor oil," said Robbie.

  "Dabney made it for me. But myself, I don't think that positively requires me to eat it all." He clapped his hands at Pinchy, hovering.

  "Oh-oh," said Robbie. "It tastes plenty awful. I do pride myself I could cook better than that when I was a bride."

  "Well, I think myself something spilled in it. Such a big kitchen to try to cook anything in. I'll just tell her plainly, try again."

  "She might pull your eyes out, on her wedding day," Robbie said darkly.

  "Here, Pinchy—here's a cake, Pinchy," said Troy. "Eat it or give it to the other Negroes. Now scat!" He clapped his hands at her skirt.

  Pinchy, with the cake, moved on stiffly, out into the light, like a matchstick in the glare, and was swallowed up in it.

  "Hate to ride off and leave a lady," said Troy, "but surprise your husband if that's the way you want. A wet leaf on the head prevents the sunstroke."

  He galloped toward Shellmound.

  "My nose itches," said Troy in the parlor. "Company's coming."

  "I'll tell you how to make the best mousse in the world," said Aunt Tempe.

  "How?" cried India.

  "Take a pair of Pinckney's old drawers." Aunt Tempe began to describe how she made gelatin. The boys were coming in one by one, with wet hair and glowing fiery cheeks, and grabbing up their books. Lady Clare swayed in, in a lady's dress and Dabney's pink satin shoes.

  Shelley, pulling Laura, flew in out of breath.

  "I'm a wreck! Partheny's got something of yours, Mama, but she wouldn't give it to me for fear she didn't know what a garnet was, and India bit a guinea pig and ran away."

  "Not for good, I'm afraid," said Battle. "She beat you home."

  "Wait! Then, we saw old Dr. Murdoch in the cemetery taking flowers to his wife's grave and he poked me in the eye and hit Laura after her mother died, and he said there wasn't enough room in our lot for all of us," Shelley said furiously.

  "Where is he? I'm going to kill the man yet," Battle cried, jumping to his feet.

  "I forgot the string for Howard's altar," Shelley said tremulously, and ran to the door in tears and cried pausing there against the wall. Bluet ran in and hid her face in her skirt.

  "Shut up if you want me to kill him!" cried Battle.

  "Remember, dear, he's the smartest man in the Delta," Ellen said, and he sat down again truculently.

  "He is not!" Shelley sobbed.

  "Don't cry! He's any old fool," Troy exclaimed suddenly. His face was glowing-red and concerned; could it be that he had never seen Shelley cry before? There was a feeling in the room, too, that this was the first time he had ever addressed Shelley directly.

  "He's a fool, a fool, a fool!" Laura cried in triumph, hopping forward.

  Ellen felt a stab of pain to see her. It seemed to her that being left motherless had made little Laura feel privileged. Laura was almost dancing around Troy.

  Shelley, with a fresh burst of tears, ran out of the parlor.

  "Troy," Aunt Tempe said, leaning her cheek on her forefinger, "you are speaking of one of our closest friends, a noble Delta doctor that has brought virtually every Fairchild in this room into the world."

  "Laura McRaven," Battle was saying rapidly, "go directly and wash your mouth out with soap. You know better than call anybody a fool. Your mother told you that."

  "Old Dr. Murdoch, I despise him," said Laura, preening for one more moment.

  "Who doesn't?" said Aunt Shannon, with lucid eyes.

  "You could have cussed him out if you wanted to, and we'd all listened. But you call him a fool, or anybody in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta a fool, and I'll blister your behind good for you. Switch for that right in this room. Now march in the kitchen and tell Roxie to wash your mouth out with soap. And tell her to hurry and get something on the table. You contradicted your aunt, too."

  "Yes, sir. He stood on my mother's grave!" said Laura, and opened her mouth and cried. That was not quite true, but at the moment she thought she could go out crying if Shelley could.

  She waited for Uncle Battle to clap his hands together and shoo her. But it was Troy's words that hung in the parlor air, not hers. Aunt Tempe, it was easy to see, had made up her mind about him. Troy, who stood with his feet apart on the hearth rug, with his eyes a little cast up, was capable of calling the Fairchilds some name or other too, without much trouble, the way he spoke up. Laura had to go get her mouth washed out with soap for Troy.

  "Well," said Ellen. "We'd better eat, if we're so righteous. I'm certain Dabney's back with the groceries. Don't I hear Roxie's bell?"

  Sure enough, as if in answer, the dinner bell rang.

  "Here I am!" cried Dabney, rushing in radiant in a fresh blue dress, closing her little blue ruffled parasol as she came.

  "You all can come to some old crumbs and scraps," said Roxie in the door. She looked hardest at Dabney and said, "Lucky for you we can wring a chicken and had a ham left."

  "I forgot the groceries," Dabney whispered to Troy as she kissed him.

  There was a new commotion in the hall. It was Pinck.

  "Uncle Pinck!"

  "Did you get the shepherdess crooks?" asked Aunt Tempe forthrightly from across the room.

  "Tempe, I didn't," said Uncle Pinck. "I tried, God knows—couldn't even find the place. However, Dabney, look in front of the house."

  Dabney ran to the window. "A Pierce-Arrow? Oh, Uncle Pinck, you shouldn't!"

  "Well, I couldn't get the damn crooks," said Uncle Pinck.

  "I thought Uncle Pinck was a man of influence," said India anxiously.

  They laughed affectionately at Aunt Tempe. That was what she thought.

  "But, oh, I'd so much rather have my shepherdess crooks!" Dabney cried at the window.

  "Well! All I can say is, Pinck Summers didn't give his own baby grandson a Pierce-Arrow," Aunt Tempe said.

  Uncle Pinck was going around kissing everybody, his prematurely white hair bobbing, bending down with his handsome lips and his sober breath.

  "No matter what anybody omits or commits in September, good people," he said, and kissed Aunt Tempe loudly, "it's because: it's hot as fluzions."

  Aunt Tempe hit him with the Chinese fan from Inverness.

  V

  At first Robbie thought wildly that they were making a to-do over her return. From the porch she smelled the floors just waxed, and at the windows saw the curtains standing out stiff-starched, and flowers even in the umbrella stand. Then she remembered once more—Dabney was getting married.

  Of course George was not in the hammock! There was no sign of him or of any Fairchild. There was not even a sound, except the tinkle of chandelier prisms in the hall breeze. They were probably back there eating—they always were. She reached inside and tapped with the knocker on the open door—an absurdly tiny sound to get into that big house.
Nobody answered the door at all. They were all back there in oblivion, eating.

  Immediately, from within the house, a burst of unmistakable dinner-table laughter rose and went round its circle. The Fairchilds! She would make them hear. She beat on the screen door and on the thick side lights with her small fist, in which were wrinkled up together a wet handkerchief and a pinch of verbena she had taken from the front gate.

  Little Uncle came toward the door, and then backed up and called Roxie through the back porch. Miss Robbie, the one Mr. George threw himself away on, stood knocking. Roxie came and let her in, and for a moment Robbie nearly wavered. Everybody would be hard to confront at noon dinner. Suppose she just fainted? That would scare George. Roxie, her hands out like baby wings, turned and tiptoed, absurdly, down into the dining room. Robbie could hear what was said.

  "Miss Ellen, surprise. Miss Robbie cryin' at de do'."

  "Well! Good evening." That was Miss Tempe, all right, in the austere voice she admitted surprise with.

  "Well, tell her quickly to come on back in the dining room and have dessert with us, Roxie," said Ellen. Of course as if nothing had happened! No shout from George, no sign.

  Robbie came through the dining-room archway a little blindly—she had collided with Vi'let carrying an armload of fresh-pressed evening dresses up the hall. But George was not in here. "Where's George?" she asked.