The Ponder Heart

by Eudora Welty

  I waited till Uncle Daniel took a swallow—he was giving Mr. Springer's brother-in-law's sister a major operation in Kansas City, Missouri} and thank goodness we never laid eyes on her, before her operation or after. Then I said, "Uncle Daniel, listen just a minute—it's a little idea I woke up with. Why don't you try not giving Bonnie Dee the money this Saturday?"

  Did I say he'd gone on giving her the money? And that Judge Tip Clanahan and Mr. Bank Sistrunk were both threatening to wash their hands of us for letting her treat us that way.

  But I'm a Ponder too. I always got twenty-five dollars in fives from Eloise at the bank, and Uncle Daniel and I climbed in my trusty Ford, every Saturday afternoon after dinner, and ran the money out there. I took it up to the door, folded inside an envelope, and Uncle Daniel sat and watched from the car. Somehow he didn't seem to want to go in, just catch his glimpse. He's a real modest man, you know, and would never push his presence on you unless he thought you wanted him; then he would.

  I was perfectly willing about it. I just prissed across the yard and up the steps to the porch and around the washing machine to the front door and called for Narciss. If there'd been a doorbell, I'd have rung it, at my own birthplace. I wore white gloves and a hat, as it was. And Narciss would be waiting to go to town, and holler "Miss Bonnie Dee!" And Bonnie Dee would sashay to the door wearing some creation and put out her little hand—not always too shining—and take the envelope. Uncle Daniel didn't get to see much of her—just a sleeve.

  "Ta ta!"

  "You're welcome."

  In the car Uncle Daniel raised his hat.

  And Narciss caught a ride to town on our running board.

  Once or twice Bonnie Dee had looked out as far as the road, and waved a little bit, but not too hard.

  So now I said to Uncle Daniel—in front of the others, to hear how it sounded—"Why don't you try not giving the money to Bonnie Dee? Maybe stop her charge account at Sistrunk's Store too. Nobody can live on chicken and ham forever! And see what transpires. What do you say, Uncle Daniel?"

  He says with round eyes, "What would we do on Saturday?"

  "What did you used to do?" I says. "What do you think of that idea, Mr. Springer?"

  Mr. Springer said he thought there was nothing to lose.

  "What do you think, Eva?" I said, because there she was, fastened to her straw.

  "I think just like Mr. Springer, there's nothing to lose," is all Eva says. Eva can draw you a coat-of-arms—that's the one thing she can do, or otherwise have to teach school. That's ours, up over the clock: Ponder—with three deer. She says it's not her fault if the gold runs—it's the doorbell ringing or something. She never does anybody's over.

  "I think we'll try it, Uncle Daniel," I said. "I made my mind up while the rest of you ate ice."

  So I politely kept that Saturday's money for Uncle Daniel, and spoke to the butcher too. And guess what day she sent for us: Monday.

  You never saw a happier mortal in your life. He came hopping up those stairs lickety-split to tell me.

  I was up there in my room, reading some directions. That's something I find I like to do when I have a few minutes to myself—I don't know about you. How to put on furniture polish, transfer patterns with a hot iron, take off corns, I don't care what it is. I don't have to do it. Sometimes I'd rather sit still a minute and read a good quiet set of directions through than any story you'd try to wish off on me.

  "Oh, Edna Earle," he says. "What do you think? It worked!"

  And all of a sudden I just felt tired. I felt worn out, like when Mr. Springer stays over and makes me go to one of those sad, Monday night movies and never holds my hand at the right places. But I'll tell you what this was: a premonition. Only I couldn't quite place it at the time.

  Uncle Daniel was out of breath and spinning his best hat on his finger like a top. "I got the word," he says. "She sent it by three different people—the ice man, the blackberry lady, and the poor blind man with the brooms that liked-to never found me, but he told it the best. I was in the barbershop, you know. I just brought the whole string back with me to the hotel and gave them cigars out of the drawer} they all said they smoked. She says to come on. Says to come on before it storms, and this was to you, Edna Earle: please to go by the ice house on the way and put fifty pounds on your bumper for her. Come on, Edna Earle," he says, putting his hat on and putting mine on me. "Come see Bonnie Dee welcome me home. I don't want you to miss it. Where's Mr. Springer? I'd like him to come too."

  "Mr. Springer has just bolted out of town," I says. "I heard the car take the corner." Mr. Springer was the perfect listener until he had to go.

  "Come without him," says Uncle Daniel, pulling me out of my poor chair. "But make haste. Listen to that! Bonnie Dee was right—she always is—it's fixing to storm." And sure enough, we heard it thunder in the west.

  I never thought of the ice again until this day. Bonnie Dee wouldn't have hesitated asking for the moon! That there should be a smidgen of ice left in Clay at that hour is one of the most unlikely things I ever heard of. What was left of the public cake on the Courthouse steps had run down in a trickle by noon.

  Well, to make a long story short, Bonnie Dee sent him word Monday after dinner and was dead as a doornail Monday before supper. Tuesday she was in her grave. Nobody more surprised than the Ponders. It was all I could do to make Uncle Daniel go to that funeral.

  He did try to give the Peacocks his cemetery lot, but I doubt if he knew what he was doing. They said they bury at Polk, thank you.

  He didn't want to go to Polk for anything, no indeed he did not. I had to make him. Then after he got dressed up and all the way down there, he behaved up until the last as well as I did; and it was scorching hot, too. I hope the day they bury me will be a little cooler. But at least people won't have so far to come.

  I believe Polk did use to be a town. Mr. Springer told us how to get to it. (He was shooting through Clay headed east by Tuesday—there's a great deal of wonder-drug trade going on in all parts of Mississippi.) You start out like you were going to Monterrey, turn at the consolidated school, and bear right till you see a Baptist steeple across a field, and you just leave the gravel and head for that, if you have good tires. And that's Polk. The Peacocks live out from it, but trade there, and, as they said, bury there.

  Well, their church is a shell—all burnt out inside. The funeral was further still, at the house.

  Portulaca in pie pans was what they set along the front porch. And the mirror on the front of the house: I told you. In the yard not a snap of grass—an old auto tire with verbena growing inside it ninety to nothing, all red. And a tin roof you could just imagine the chinaberries falling on—ping! And now the hot rays of the sun.

  The funeral was what you'd expect if you'd ever seen Polk—crowded. It was hot as fluzions in that little front room. A lot of Jacob's-Ladder tops and althea blooms sewed on cardboard crosses, and a salvia wreath with a bee in it. A lot of ferns hauled out of creek bottoms and drooping by the time they got ready for them. People, people, people, flowers, flowers, flowers, and the shades hauled down and the electricity burning itself up, and two preachers both red-headed j but mainly I felt there were Peacocks. Mrs. Peacock was big and fat as a row of pigs, and wore tennis shoes to her daughter's funeral—I guess she couldn't help it. I saw right there at the funeral that Bonnie Dee had been the pick.

  We went by in the line, Uncle Daniel tipping on his toes. Such cracks in the floor, and chickens right under your feet! They had the coffin across the hearth on kitchen chairs.

  Bonnie Dee was holding a magnolia a little too big for her size. She really did look seventeen. They had her in a Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, old-timey looking and too big for her—never washed or worn, just saved: white. She wouldn't have known herself in it. And a sash so new and blue and shiny it looked like it would break, right out of the Polk general merchandise, tied in a bow around a waist no bigger than your thumb.

  When you saw her there, it looked li
ke she could have loved somebody!

  Uncle Daniel pulled loose from me and circled back. He had Mrs. Peacock by the hand in no time. He said, "Mrs. Peacock, let me tell you something. Your daughter's pretty as a doll."

  And Mrs. Peacock says, "Well sir, that's just the way I used to look, but never cared to brag."

  They had one big rawboned country preacher on one side of Bonnie Dee, to get up and say look what gold and riches brought you to, and at such an early age—and the other big rawboned country preacher on the other side, to get started praying and not be able to stop. That one asked heavenly mercy for everybody he could think of from the Peacocks on up to the President of the United States. When he got to Uncle Daniel's name I was ready for him and gave Uncle Daniel a good pinch at the right minute. (He generally beams to hear his name called.) My rocking chair was dusty, but at least I got to sit down.

  During the service, half the Peacocks—the girls—were still as mice, but the boys, some of them grown men, were all collected out on the porch. Do you know what they did out there, on the other side of the wall from us? Bawled. Howled. Not that they ever did a thing for their sister in life, very likely, or even came to see her, but now they decided to let forth. And do you know all through everything the broom was still standing behind the door in that room?

  Once outside, up on the hill, I noticed from the corner of my eye a good many Peacocks buried in the graveyard, well to the top of the hill, where you could look out and see the Clay Courthouse dome like a star in the distance. Right old graves, with "Peacock" on them out bold. It may be that the Peacocks at one time used to amount to something (there are worthwhile Peacocks, Miss Lutie Powell has vouched for it to Eva Sistrunk), but you'll have a hard time making me believe they're around us. I believe these have always been just about what they are now. Of course, Polk did use to be on the road. But the road left and it didn't get up and follow, and neither did the Peacocks. Up until Bonnie Dee.

  It was there at the graveside that Uncle Daniel had his turn. There might have been high foolishness or even trouble—both big red-headed Baptist preachers took hold of him. It was putting her in the ground he didn't like.

  But I said, very still, "Look, Uncle Daniel. It looks right cool, down yonder in the ground. Here we are standing up on top in the burning heat. Let her go."

  So he stepped back, for me.

  While they were laying on the ferns, away down below us a freight train went by through the empty distance, and the two littlest Peacocks, another generation coming up, stepped forward and waved it out of sight. And I counted the cars—not because I didn't know any better, like them, but because I couldn't help it right then. I counted seventy-nine.

  Going back down the hill, Uncle Daniel offered Mrs. Peacock a new pick-up truck for her to haul their watermelons to market; he'd noticed through a slit in the shade, during all that praying, that they were about ripe over the fence, and he complimented the Peacocks on them and said he hoped they'd bring him one. The girls said all right, they would. If he hadn't been so shy with the Peacock boys, he might have given them something} but they didn't get a thing, for the way they acted.

  And then, when we got home, they charged, us.

  I know of a case where a man really murdered his wife, with a sure-enough weapon, and her family put on her tombstone, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay." And his family—the nicer people—had to go take it off with a cold chisel when her family wasn't looking. Ancient history. But thank goodness the Peacocks hadn't heard about that. They just charged us in Court.

  Because of course the minute the funeral was over good, and the county paper came out with Eva Sistrunk's write-up and poem, that county attorney we wished on ourselves, Dorris R. Gladney—no friend of the Ponders—out he sailed in a black Ford older than mine, and searched out the Peacocks in Polk and found them, too, and told them what they could do.

  They charged Uncle Daniel with murder.

  So last week it came up on the docket—it hadn't been anything much of a docket before that, and they shoved a few things out of the way for it.

  Old Judge Waite was sitting on the case. Judge Tip Clanahan is not really a judge. What he is is a splendid lawyer and our best friend, even if he is a thousand years old and can't really see where he's going. But lo and behold, Judge Tip told me, just before we got off to the start, he had to let DeYancey, his grandson, argue Uncle Daniel's case, because he never realized how his strength was leaving him, and he had to go to Hot Springs.

  "I was always partial to Daniel, but I'm getting too old for him now," he says. "I got to go to Hot Springs tomorrow."

  I knew Grandpa was turning in his grave. "Go out of town?" I says. "You think I'm going to forgive you for it when you get back?"

  He gives me a little pinch. The day I don't rate a pinch of some kind from a Clanahan, I'll know I'm past redemption—an old maid.

  Uncle Daniel has always considered DeYancey one of his best friends, and was always partial to him until this happened. De Yancey came out and announced that Uncle Daniel wasn't going to open his mouth at his own trial. Not at all, not a word. The trial was going to proceed without him.

  It would be like this. I was to testify about what happened. That's very important. Dr. Ewbanks was to testify from the medical point of view. And a few other odds and ends. But Uncle Daniel, the main one, was just supposed to sit there and be good, and not say anything at all. And he felt left out. He didn't understand a bit. It was so unlikely! Why, he loves the limelight.

  Everybody in town was indignant with DeYancey when they heard. More than one member of our congregation baked and sent Uncle Daniel his favorite cake—banana—and a Never Fail Devil's Food came from the Clanahans the day Judge Tip went off. Miss Teacake sent a beautiful Prince of Wales cake in black and white stripes—her specialty, but I couldn't help thinking of convicts when I sliced it. The bank sent a freezer of peach ice cream from their own peaches, beautifully turned and packed. Uncle Daniel got the idea things must be more momentous than he thought. And we couldn't let a soul get near enough to him for him to do any talking beforehand—that was the hardest part.

  Of course they hadn't done anything about Uncle Daniel: he didn't have to go anywhere. They knew where he was: with me.

  "They're letting you roam," says DeYancey to Uncle Daniel.

  "Roam?" says he.

  "Now that isn't anything for you to worry about," says De Yancey. "Just means they can count on you for coming." As if they could keep him away.

  But De Yancey Clanahan was here roaming around with him. I never saw the like—he was his shadow! He said, "Come on in the dining room, Daniel, I want to practice you not talking." That was easier in the dining room than anywhere else, but it wouldn't be clear sailing anywhere. Uncle Daniel couldn't bear to hear out what De Yancey was saying, that was always the trouble.

  He managed to keep up his appetite, anyway. When the day came, he was up with the sun as usual, and looking pretty cheerful at breakfast. He had on his new white Sunday suit and white shirt with the baby-blue pinstripe in it, and snow-white shoes and his Sunday tie. He set out when breakfast was over and got a fresh haircut at the barbershop and came back looking fat and fine to me, with a little Else Poulsen rose in his lapel.

  Well, the town was jam-packed. Everybody and his brother was on hand, on account of Uncle Daniel's general popularity—and then people not knowing the Ponders but knowing of them are just about everywhere you'd look. It was a grand day, hot but with that little breeze blowing that we get from the south.

  Uncle Daniel and I didn't get there either early or late, but just on time, and Uncle Daniel had to speak to a world of people—but just "Hello." He was delighted at where our seats were saved—inside the railing. That was the furthest down front he'd ever sat anywhere. I kept my gloves on, and shook open my Japanese fan, and just fanned.

  Of course, inside the Courthouse was hot, and one ceiling fan sticks, and the Peacocks coming to town and crowding thei
r way in behind us made the courtroom a good deal hotter.

  They came in a body. I didn't count, either time, but I think there were more Peacocks if possible at the trial than at the funeral. I imagine all Polk was there with them there were people we'd never laid eyes on before in our lives.

  The immediate Peacock family had paraded into town in Uncle Daniel's pick-up truck that he'd sent them, as pretty as you please. To see them in Polk was bad enough, but you ought to see them in Clay! Country! And surprised to death at where they found themselves, I bet you a nickel, even if they were the ones started this.

  We saw them come in; I turned right around and looked. Old lady Peacock wagged in first, big as a house, in new bedroom slippers this time, with pompons on the toes. She had all of them behind her—girls going down in stairsteps looking funnier and funnier in Bonnie Dee's parceled-out clothes, and boys all ages and sizes and the grown ones with wives and children, and Old Man Peacock bringing up the rear. I didn't remember him at all, but there he was—carrying the lunch. He had a face as red as a Tom turkey and not one tooth to his name, but he had on some new pants. I noticed the tag still poking out the seam when he creaked in at the door.

  They're not dying out. Took up the first two rows, with some sitting on laps. And I think it was their dog barked so incessantly at all the dogs in town from the Courthouse porch. Now that the boys weren't hawling, they sat there with their mouths wide open. The biggest ones' babies just wore their little didies to court, one of them with a brand-new double holster around on top, about to fall off. Couldn't a one of them talk. And of course there was eternal jumping up from the Peacocks to get water. Our drinking fountain in the Courthouse quit working years ago, so it's heaped up with concrete to cover the spout and rounded off and painted blue—our sheriff's wife's idea—and you have to know where to go if you're honestly thirsty.