Delta Wedding

by Eudora Welty

  "Oh, Aunt Ellen," said Laura once more, coming forward. "Could I be in the wedding instead of Lady Clare? Because..."

  "Why, yes, dear," said Ellen, "of course."

  Then Bluet wandered by, dead on her feet, dragging Mashula's dulcimer, which she had asked for and someone had given her.

  "Bluet, aren't you asleep? Bluet!" she cried, suddenly realizing the hour.

  "Nobody put me to sleep," whispered Bluet. Ellen caught hold of her and kissed her—her seriousness sweeter than Ranny's delight now.

  "Where do you think you're going now, Ellen?" said Battle.

  He held her down a minute and she thought tenderly, there's no reason in the world why he should have been cowed in his life by Denis and George....

  "I'm going to put my baby to bed. You can't hold me down from that." She left them carrying Bluet in her arms, giving Robbie a soft, open look as she went out.

  Tempe sighed. Ellen simply didn't know how to treat Robbie Reid—she should have just let her at her! But then Ellen was a very innocent woman, Tempe knew that. There were things you simply could not tell her. Not that Ellen hadn't changed in recent years. That shy, big-eyed little thing Battle had brought back with him from school dying laughing at her persistence in her own reticent ways ... Ellen had come far, had yielded to much, for a Virginian, but still now a crowd, a roomful of people, was not her natural habitat, a plantation was not her true home.

  "I'm the wedding!" Ranny was still calling, running by and twirling Tempe round. "I'm the wedding!" He carried a little green switch now for a stick, with peach leaves on it. In that moment Tempe, laughing, experienced not a thought exactly but a truer thing, a suspicion, that what she loved was not gone with Denis, but was, perhaps, perennial.

  "Oh, there's always so much—so much happening here!" she cried contentedly to one of the bridesmaids, the McLeoud girl.

  Robbie put her hand up to her head a minute as she danced, against the whirl. Dabney was dancing before her, by herself, eyes shining on them all.... Indeed the Fairchilds took you in circles, whirling delightedly about, she thought, stirring up confusions, hopefully working themselves up. But they did not really want anything they got—and nothing really, nothing really so very much, happened! But the next moment Miss Primrose and Miss Jim Allen arrived with so much authority and ado that she almost had to believe in them.

  "This is our third trip between the Grove and Shellmound today," said Miss Jim Allen, almost falling against Battle in the door. "Nobody let us in!"

  "Pinchy's come through."

  "Of course."

  "It's a wonder poor Primrose is not dead from carrying those Japanese lanterns in all by herself!"

  "Why didn't you holler?" said George, still dancing.

  Primrose and Jim Allen looked in at the room, playfully holding up their little unlighted paper lanterns.

  "Oh, George, George, I'm still ashamed that guinea hen was tough!" Primrose cried.

  "Why, it was deliciously tender," said George, over Robbie's shoulder.

  "George! Was it?"

  Robbie knew he smiled, with his chin in her hair. Well, the comfort they took in him—all the family—and that he held dear, was a far cry from knowing him. (They did a trick step.) The Fairchilds were always seeing him by a gusty lamp—exaggerating, then blinding—by the lamp of their own indulgence. While she saw him lighted up by his own fire—no one else but himself was there, a solid man, going through the world, a husband. It was by his being so full of himself that she felt the anger, the love, pride, and rest of marriage.

  But oh, when all the golden persuasions of the Fairchilds focused upon him, he would vaunt himself again, if she did not watch him. He would drive her to vaunt herself too. After the Yellow Dog went by, he had turned on her a look that she would call the look of having been on a debauch. She could not follow. Sometimes she thought when he was so out of reach, so far away in his mind, that she could blame everything on some old story.... For he evidently felt that old stories, family stories, Mississippi stories, were the same as very holy or very passionate, if stories could be those things. He looked out at the world, at her, sometimes, with that essence of the remote, proud, over-innocent Fairchild look that she suspected, as if an old story had taken hold of him—entered his flesh. And she did not know the story.

  She beat her hand softly, in time to "Constantinople," on George's hard back, for whatever threatened to waste his life, to lead him away, even if be liked it, she was going to go up against if it killed her. He laughed, and she bit him through his sleeve. Shelley saw her.

  "I wonder where Troy went, Mr. Rondo," said India.

  It was a little before then that Laura started up and raced out of the parlor. She met Aunt Ellen carrying Bluet and pressed thin as a switch against the stair banister as she hurried, to let them by. It was out of love and the logic of love, and the thrill of loss she had, that she had seen a vision of Uncle George's own pipe as a present for him.

  She slid still flatly and on tiptoe into the dining room. Nobody was there. Only the stack of plates for the supper and the flowers in the vases were there to see. On the chair under the lamp lay Uncle George's pipe, where by her memory he had left it. She took the pipe up and holding it gently, its stem to her nose, she started away.

  All at once Aunt Shannon's voice spoke. She was sitting in the rocker she sat in all the time, only Laura had not noticed her. She was sewing on a little piece of embroidery.

  "Denis," she was saying pleasantly, in an afterthought tone of voice, "I meant to tell you, little Annie Laurie's here. Set her heart on being in your wedding."

  Anxious as she was to get away with the pipe, Laura had to wait to hear what Aunt Shannon said about her mother.

  "Has a little malaria, I'm sure," murmured Aunt Shannon. "But looks a hundred times better already, now that she's here with us. —Gals are growing too fast. That's all." Aunt Shannon rocked a little and then bit off her thread, and that was all she ever told Denis about Laura's mother.

  Uncle George's pipe was perceptibly warm. It smelled stronger than Laura had guessed—it smelled violently. But she bore that, and crept out with it and edged up the stairs, meeting nobody. She knew where to hide the pipe—in her hat, which lay up in the wardrobe not to be touched till the day she put it on for the Yellow Dog to go home. The hat was a grand hiding place for her present for Uncle George, and the pipe was the thing he would want.

  "Do you realize, dear hearts, that we have been waiting all this time on His Honor the Bridegroom?" said Aunt Tempe.

  "Ah! What time is it?" inquired Mr. Rondo, but nobody answered. The piano was playing something soft and "classical," and George was passing cake among the fast-breathing, fallen bridesmaids all around the room.

  "Not a soul to send for him."

  Shelley did not want to stay, did not want to go and look for Troy. She saw Maureen grow overjoyed at the sight of the cake. "I take-la all your cake-la," she said, taking two big handfuls.

  "Not for me, not for me," she murmured, stunned at the sight of George at that moment offering the loaded plate to her. It seemed to Shelley all at once as if the whole room should protest, as if alarm and protest should be the nature of the body. Life was too easy—too easily holy, too easily not. It could change in a moment. Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other people's lives should be shattered now. Dabney at the moment cutting a lemon for the aunts' tea brought the tears to Shelley's eyes; could the lemon feel the knife? Perhaps it suffered; not that vague vegetable pain lost in the generality of the pain of the world, but the pain of the very moment. Yet in the room no one said "Stop." They all lay back in flowered chairs and ate busily, and with a greedy delight anticipated what was ahead for Dabney.... All except Shelley
, who stared at George as he held the cake plate before her. She realized he was looking at her inquiringly. "Aren't you famished?" It occurred to her that he suffered no grievance against the hiding and protesting that went on, the secrecy of life. What was dark and what shone fair—neither would stop him. She had to love him as she loved the darling Ranny. For who was going to look after men and boys like that, who would offer up everything? She took his cake.

  "Shelley, you go," said Dabney, smiling. "You go to the office and get Troy. Tell him we're all mad and we'll break his neck if he's not here in a minute."

  IX

  Shelley ran out, down the steps, and across the grass in her satin slippers. The air was blue. She heard the falling waves of the locusts' song, as if the last resistance of the day were being overcome and the languor of night would be soon now. She could see the lightning bugs plainly even between flashes of their lights—flying nearly upright through the blueness, tails swinging, like mermaids playing beneath a sea. She went along the bayou, by the startling towers of the yuccas, and heard only faintly the sounds of the house behind her.

  Theirs was a house where, in some room at least, the human voice was never still. Laughing and crying went rushing through the halls, and assuagement waylaid them both. In contrast, the bayou, in its silence, could seem like a lagoon in a foreign world, and a solitary person could walk beside it with inward, uncomforted thoughts. The house was charged with life, the fields were charged with life, endlessly exploited, but the bayou was filled with its summer trance or its winter trance of sleep, its uncaught fishes. And the river, that went by the Grove. "Yazoo means River of Death." India was fond of parading the thing they learned in the fourth grade, and of parading morbidity before Shelley anyway, but Shelley looked back at her unmoved at the word. "Snooty, that's what you are," said India.

  "River of Death" to Shelley meant not the ultimate flow of doom, but the more personal vision of the moment's chatter ceasing, the feelings of the day disencumbered, floating now into recognition, like a little boat come into sight; and tenderness and love, sadness and pleasure, being let alone to stretch in the shade. She thought this because of the way the Yazoo looked, its daily appearance. River of the death of the day the Yazoo was to Shelley, and their bayou went in and out of it like the curved arm of the sleeper, whose elbow was in their garden.

  Then Shelley ran along the bayou. Oh, to be beyond all this! To have tonight, tomorrow, over! The office, one of the houses none of the girls ever paid any attention to, was down near their bridge, on the other side. She felt the breath of air from the bayou as she ran over, and heard the clothes-like rustle of the fig trees that shaded the other bank. It was not yet dark—it would never get dark. The pervading heat and light of day lasted over even into night—in the pale sky, the warm fields, the wide-awakeness of every mockingbird, still this late in the year. They could mate another time before it was cold.

  Yes, there was a light in the office. And Troy was keeping them all waiting! To show him what she thought of him, and rather shocking herself, she walked in with the briefest of knocks.

  The green-shaded light fell over the desk. It shone on that bright-red head. Troy was sitting there—bathed and dressed in a stiff white suit, but having trouble with some of the hands. Shelley walked into the point of a knife.

  Root M'Hook, a field Negro, held the knife drawn; it was not actually a knife, it was an ice pick. Juju and another Negro stood behind, with slashed cheeks, and open-mouthed; still another, talking to himself, stood his turn apart.

  Shelley ran to Troy, first behind him and then to his side. Wordlessly, he pushed her behind him again. She saw he had the gun out of the drawer.

  "You start to throw at me, I'll shoot you," Troy said.

  Root vibrated his arm, aiming, Troy shot the finger of his hand, and Root fell back, crying out and waving at him.

  "Get the nigger out of here. I don't want to lay eyes on him."

  "Pinchy cause trouble comin' through," said Juju to the other boy as they lifted Root and pulled him through the doorway.

  "All right, who're you now?" Troy said, before he spoke to Shelley.

  "I's Big Baby, de one dey all calls."

  "All right, stop making that commotion and tell me what's got hold of you. Alligator bite your tail?"

  "Mr. Troy, I got my seat full of buck-shot," said the Negro, in confessional tones.

  Troy groaned with him, but laughed between his drawn lips.

  "Find me that ice pick. Pull down your clothes, Big Baby, and get over my knee. Shelley, did you come in to watch me?"

  "I can't get past—there's blood on the door," said Shelley, her voice like ice.

  "Then you'll have to jump over it, my darlin'," said Troy, sing-song.

  Shelley halfway smiled, with the sensation that she had only seen a man drunk. The next moment she felt a sharp, panicky triumph. As though the sky had opened and shown her, she could see the reason why Dabney's wedding should be prevented. Nobody could marry a man with blood on his door.... But even as she saw the reason, Shelley knew it would not avail. She would jump as Troy told her, and never tell anybody, for what was going to happen was going to happen.

  "Mr. Rondo's waiting," she said. "We're all ready, when you are. You have to practice coming into the parlor."

  "I'll be there in due time, Shelley," said Troy evenly. He held the ice pick in a hand bright with red hairs, and red hairs sprang even from his ears.

  Shelley jumped over the doorsill.

  Running back along the bayou, faster than she had come, Shelley could only think in her anger of the convincing performance Troy had given as an overseer born and bred. Suppose a real Deltan, a planter, were no more real than that. Suppose a real Deltan only imitated another Deltan. Suppose the behavior of all men were actually no more than this—imitation of other men. But it had previously occurred to her that Troy was trying to imitate her father. (Suppose her father imitated ... oh, not he!) Then all men could not know any too well what they were doing. Everybody always said George was a second Denis.

  She felt again, but differently, that men were no better than little children. She ran across the grass toward the house. Women, she was glad to think, did know a little better—though everything they knew they would have to keep to themselves ... oh, forever!

  After, at last, the rehearsal, and the supper, and the Winona dance, Shelley, in a cool nightgown, opened her diary.

  What could she put down?..."First, the wrong person has eaten Partheny's cake," she wrote, "like in Shakespeare..."

  There was a whirr and a clawing at the window screen back of the light. A big beetle, a horned one, was trying to get in. All at once Shelley was sickeningly afraid of life, life itself, afraid for life.... She turned out the light, fell on her bed, and the beating and scratching ceased.

  6

  Next morning Pinchy was setting the table and Aunt Mac was at the china closet loudly counting the glasses of each kind. Horace was hosing down the Summers's car and in a mystifiyingly high falsetto he was singing "Why?" Howard, with Maureen running about the foot of his ladder, was with almost imperceptible motions hanging paper lanterns in the trees, gradually moving across the yard like the movement of shade under the climbing sun. In the soft early air—Ellen stood at her window, with Battle asleep—in which there was a touch, today perhaps the first touch, of fall, the sounds of the busy fields came traveling up to the yard, the beat and sashay of a horse's feet. Though by another hour the fields would seem to jump in the sight with heat, now there was over them—and would be later when evening would come—the distance and clarity of fall, out of which came a breath of cool. Ellen took it, the breath, and turned to wake Battle.

  "When does Primrose Fairchild think she can make that ton of chicken salad, if she doesn't come on?" cried Tempe aloud in the kitchen as the clock was striking the dot of something. Some of the roast turkeys and the ham were lined up in the middle of the kitchen table, and the oven gave off waves of fire and fr
agrance. Roxie was cooking breakfast over a crowded little unused stove in another part of the kitchen, followed by Ranny begging sticks of bacon, and stamping her foot at some kittens that ran about over there. "I bet Jim Allen is trying to make mints. That can keep you running crazy all day, and with a wedding waiting on you. Roxie, where are the Memphis mints?"

  "Great big pasteboard box yonder in de pantry, Miss Tempe," called Roxie. "Have to untie you de ribbon to git you a taste. But you ought to see dem Memphis ice slippers! Green!"

  Tempe went from the pantry to the back-porch icebox. "And hard as rocks—I know," she said. "And slippery—! People'll lose them off their plates and they'll slide across the floor from here to yonder, oh me. It's an old story, Roxie, weddings to me." She slammed the icebox door, after taking out a little piece of celery.

  "Yes, ma'am, sure is. Old story."

  "Who's going to make the beaten biscuit, Roxie? I have to have the kitchen to myself when the cornucopias are made! I'll kill anybody making beaten biscuit around me."

  "Miss Tempe, you sure will. Miss Ellen say she make one or two ovens of biscuit while you all be taking your napses."

  "Good idea. Everything would be done more satisfactorily if you could do it with most people asleep. I don't think that's even remotely near the number of pickled peaches it will take for going around the hams and turkeys!" She started counting on her fingers. Ranny offered her a bite of bacon and she bent and took it.

  The Memphis flowers had come down just right, on the Yellow Dog that morning, and Miss Thelma had sent them up on horseback, the boxes tied over Sammie McNair's saddle, with Sammie holding Miss Thelma's umbrella over them.