The Ponder Heart

by Eudora Welty

  There was a kind of wait while DeYancey rattled his papers. I never knew what was on those. While he rattled, he had those little boys haul the fig tree around the room again, and up the aisle and back and forth in front of the jury, till Judge Waite made them quit and brush him off, and then they propped it up against the wall, in the corner across from the Confederate battle flag, where I reckon it still may be, with poor little figs no bigger than buttons still hanging on it. As Uncle Daniel said, we'll miss those.

  The Peacocks were all looking around again. I don't know what they came expecting. Every once in a while, old man Peacock had been raising up from his seat and intoning, "Anybody here got a timepiece?" And Mrs. Peacock had settled into asking questions from the people behind her and across the aisle, about Clay—mostly about how many churches we had here and the like. To tell you the truth, Mrs. Peacock talked her way through that trial. If there was one second's wait between things, she'd say something. Once she says, "Anybody able to tell me what you can do about all this swelling?" and shows her fingers. "Wake up in the morning all right, and then, along towards now, I look like you'd chopped my fingers all off and stuck 'em back on again." She was right. But she wasn't spending the day in a doctor's waiting room. The Peacock girls sat with their arms tight around each other's necks like a picture-show party—it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The littlest brother, about eight, walked up and down with a harmonica in his mouth, breathing through that. The babies kept sliding off laps and streaking for the door, and somebody had to run after them. And of course there was eternal jumping up for water from everybody, and a few water fights—one right in the middle of Miss Teacake's spiel. It was hot, hot, hot. Judge Waite was heard to remark from the bench that this was the hottest weather ever to come within his jurisprudence.

  Finally, DeYancey got started and said that what he was undertaking to prove was that the Peacocks didn't have a case on earth. He said it would be very shortly seen that Bonnie Dee was beyond human aid already by the time Uncle Daniel and I put our foot over the sill of the door to that house. I laid my hand on Uncle Daniel's knee. He smiled at me just fine, because here came the blackberry lady, the ice man, and the blind man with the brooms—people he was glad to see again. They fell over each other testifying that Bonnie Dee had sent for Uncle Daniel. They just opened their mouths once and sat down.

  Then Dr. Ewbanks. Busy, busy, busy and a widower to boot—everybody has to take him when they can get him. He had an Else Poulsen rose on too.

  He told the Court a little white boy called up his house on the telephone from the crossroads store near Ponder Hill that day and told the cook he was wanted out at Mr. Sam's in a hurry, and hung up; and she sent her little boy Elder, who hollered at him, and Dr. Ewbanks was fishing away on Clanahan's Lake, and it was commencing to pour down there too, but he made it on back to shore and back home and out to the Ponders as quick as he could get there in the pouring-down, and found his patient stretched on the sofa there in the parlor with life extinct. He found Uncle Daniel and me needing more attention than she did. He put it down death by misadventure.

  When Gladney asks him, he says no, he didn't notice signs of a struggle of any kind} the lady's heart had just up and failed her. It happened sometimes. And if that was how the Ponders had walked in on her and found her, it would never occur to him to doubt a Ponder's word.

  Old Gladney scratched his head and pretended to think. "Doc," he says, "what makes the heart fail? What would make a poor young lady's heart fail, without giving warning?"

  Dr. Ewbanks waved his hand. "Say fright. Fright due to the electrical storm we had roaming over the countryside at that time," he says. "That's reasonable. Why, a bolt of lightning just narrowly missed me, out in my boat on the lake, before I could get it turned around."

  Old Gladney edges up and takes a smell of Dr. Ewbanks' rose. He says, "Doctor, how many other cases of the same kind you come across since that storm?"

  Dr. Ewbanks says Bonnie Dee was the only case he had, he was glad to say.

  "Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, I believe the old saying goes," says Gladney. "Maybe the Ponder family feels like they're all out of danger now, and maybe the Ewbankses do too."

  The jury—one or two Ewbankses and Peppers and a Sistrunk connection or two and a Clanahan by marriage, plus a handful of good old Bodkins—and I wish you'd been here for the selection of the jury!—just looked back at Gladney. He wheels on Dr. Ewbanks with coattails flying. "Would you swear, Dr. Ewbanks, that the death you ascribe to heart failure might not also be ascribed to suffocation?"

  "That distinction would be perfectly pointless, Mr. Gladney. Misadventure, Mr. Gladney, in case you'd like to remember this for future occasions," says Dr. Ewbanks, who didn't like anybody to go smelling his rose, "is for all practical purposes an act of God. Like when the baby gets the pillow against its face, and just don't breathe any more." He stands up and smiles. "That answer your question?"

  He gave us a nod, and went up the aisle and sat down by Miss Teacake Magee. He'd told me, before the start, he might not be able to stay long enough to see how the case came out; but he did.

  And I was next.

  I wore this dress—I wear it for everyday, now—and a big Milan hat that's seen me through flood and fire already—but my other glasses, and my dinner ring.

  By the time I got settled in the witness chair, DeYancey had his coat off and his tie undone and his collar open. He's not his grandfather in court, by any means. And he called me "Ma'am" for the occasion—I could have killed him.

  "Now, ma'am," he says. "The State has been having themselves quite a time over a message Mr. Daniel Ponder is supposed to have sent his wife just two days before her death. If we're to rely on the word of Big John Beech, this message ran, 'I'm going to kill you dead, Miss Bonnie Dee, if you don't take me back.' Now, ma'am, did you ever hear remarks like that spoken in the Ponder household?"

  "Why, certainly," I says. "It was a perfectly normal household. Threats flew all the time. Yes, sir. 'I'm going to kill you dead—' The rest of it goes, 'if you try that one more time.'"

  "Have there been instances in your presence when Mr. Daniel Ponder said those very words to Miss Bonnie Dee?"

  "Plenty," I says. "And with no results whatever. Or when she said it to him either."

  "Can you tell us right now of one occasion when Mr. Daniel said it to her?"

  "Very probably he said it the first time Bonnie Dee tried to cut up a leg of his Sunday pants to make herself a skirt out of," I says.

  They objected to that—I don't know why. It was exactly what she made.

  "But whatever and whenever the occasion for that remark, it was a perfectly innocent remark?" says DeYancey.

  "I should hope so."

  "So that when Mr. Daniel Ponder sent word to Miss Bonnie Dee that he was going to kill her if she didn't take him back, in your estimation it meant nothing like a real threat?"

  "Meant he got it straight from Grandma," I says. "That's what it means. She said 'I'm going to kill you' every other breath to him—she raised him. Gentlest woman on the face of the earth. 'I'll break your neck,' 'I'll skin you alive,' 'I'll beat your brains out'—Mercy! How that does bring Grandma back. Uncle Daniel was brought up like anybody else. And had a married life like anybody else. I'd hate to hear the things the Clanahans say brought back to my ears! Mr. Gladney didn't need to traipse over the fields and find him an old Negro that can't talk good through his windpipe to tell the Court what word Uncle Daniel sent his wife—I could have repeated it without ever hearing it at all, if I'd been asked."

  "Thank you, ma'am, I believe you," says DeYancey. "And I believe as well as anything in this world that those words never meant a thing."

  After that, I testified in no uncertain terms that our visit out there that day was Bonnie Dee's idea, pure and simple.

  "Uncle Daniel had been asked to leave in the first place," I says. "Being a gentleman, he would surely w
ait to be asked to come back before he went"

  "And you went with Mr. Daniel Ponder for this reunion, ma'am?"

  "Would I have missed it for the world?" I said, and looked out at the courtroom. I was certainly on the side of love—that's well known and not worth denying. I said, "How would he have gotten out there otherwise? I drove. Drove us out there at forty, my limit, and pulled up under the pecan tree in the front yard. It was beginning to lightning and thunder at the crossroads} fixing to pour down as we turned in the gate. As I look back—" DeYancey held up his hand, but I went right on and said I had a premonition. You remember it.

  "Now tell what you found," says DeYancey, "when you all went in the parlor."

  "At first," I says, "I didn't know where I was. Because the furniture was all crazy. And it was so dark. Not any of the lights would turn on, after she had them put in! We tried 'em. Hard to see what she was doing. But it lightninged."

  "Go on and tell us," he says.

  I said, "Well, she had been piled up on the parlor sofa in the middle of the room with the windows all down, eating ice out of a tea glass in her best dress. And pushing up candy on the blade of a knife out of a turkey platter she'd poured it out in. I noticed the texture was grainy." I wanted them to see I couldn't hide anything.

  "What was she doing now, ma'am?"

  "Piled up on the sofa in her best and that's all."

  "You mean dead?"

  "As a doornail," I says. "I mean what I say, as I always do."

  "And how did you know she was dead, ma'am?" asks DeYancey.

  I told him it was because I had sense enough to. And I said, "Not a thing would revive her."

  "What did you do, ma'am?"

  "I hollered. 'Narciss!' I hollered. Because that Negro'd been here in the house since before I was born. 'Narciss!' But she'd gone to cover like a chicken in the daytime when something comes over the sun. 'Narcissi!' And not a peep. Not even boo."

  Narciss laughed from the back of the courtroom to hear how she did.

  "So I ran and reached the spirits of ammonia myself from the top shelf in the bathroom, and ran and held it to her—while you could have counted to a hundred, but it didn't do her a speck of good, as I could have told you beforehand."

  "Didn't you try calling any white people?" says DeYancey, trying to hurry me.

  "Front and back. I hollered for Otis and Lee Roy Pepper—they're white j they're responsible for running the place. But they didn't come when I called them—they never do. Turned out they were getting drenched to the skin under a persimmon tree a mile and a half away. So I had to stop a child of ten in his hay wagon, sheltering under a tree, and send him out in it to the crossroads to use the phone at the store and try to find the doctor. Then Dr. Ewbanks was out of human cry, till a little nine-year-old colored boy got to him with a bucket on his head. It's a wonder we ever got a doctor to her at all, all of us put together," I says. "No one has ever seen that little white boy or that hay wagon since."

  "What was your uncle doing at this time?" asks DeYancey, offhand.

  "I quieted him down," I says real calm, so he wouldn't look up. He was looking at the floor. "I told him just to sit there quiet while I listened for her heart. And every time my uncle says, 'Edna Earle, Edna Earle, what do you hear?' I have to say, 'Nothing yet.' 'Then what's that I hear?' he says, and I says, 'You must hear your own heart.'"

  I heard a real deep sigh come up from everybody, like a breeze. It settled me some. I saw Eva Sistrunk taking out her handkerchief.

  "Finally, though, here trotted Dr. Ewbanks in from Clanahan's Lake, in his boots and soaking wet and a dirty duck hat on his head full of water, tracking swamp mud and leaves through the house. He was surprised to see me. He was extremely fishy. I think he had some baits in a tin can he forgot to take out. I saw an awful-looking knife sticking out, and my uncle turns his eyes on it too.

  "'Where's my patient?' says Dr. Ewbanks, and poor Uncle Daniel falls right over at his feet."

  Then I told all about Uncle Daniel stretched out on the floor and giving him the spirits of ammonia and how he groaned and how pitiful it was and we couldn't lift him, and I heard everybody in court beginning to cry, I believe—but Uncle Daniel was the loudest. He was looking at me now.

  "Well," says DeYancey, "to go back a moment to the deceased. When you discovered Mrs. Bonnie Dee Ponder the way she was, ma'am, you were sorry and upset—but were you greatly surprised?"

  "Why, no," I says. "Not greatly surprised. I've been more surprised in my life by other sudden deaths in this town."

  "Just tell us how long ago you might have been prepared for something like this."

  "She was always out of breath, like somebody that's been either working or talking as hard as they could go all day," I says. "For no reason. She weighed less than a hundred pounds on my scales in the Beulah lobby—I weighed her. Before she married Uncle Daniel, she fainted in Miss Eva Sistrunk's and my presence in Wool worth's one day, just because the fan went off. Of course, everybody knows Woolworth's would be the most breathless spot in creation to stay in."

  "So as her niece-in-law, you would testify that Mrs. Bonnie Dee Ponder, to the best of your memory and knowledge, was always frail?"

  "A gust of wind might have carried her away, any time." I thought of blowing a kiss out the window to show them, but I felt Uncle Daniel's eyes still on me.

  "Your witness," says DeYancey, with a bow to old Gladney.

  I looked at Gladney and he looked at me, and drew his hand up to his chin. Grandma Ponder said, "Show me a man wears a diamond ring, and I'll show you a wife beater." There he was.

  He says to me, "Mizriz Ponder?" That's what he calls me—Mizriz. He likes to act country, but he don't have all that far to go—he is country. "So threats to kill husband or wife never amounts to a hill of beans around here?"

  "Depends on who says it," I says, very cool. "It would be different if you take somebody like Williebelle Kilmichael, out in the country. She really empties a load of birdshot into her husband's britches, every so often. Whenever he stands up all through Sunday School, you can be pretty well sure what's happened. Williebelle Kilmichael does it all the time—because she means it. Grandma didn't mean it, Grandpa didn't mean it, I don't mean it—Uncle Daniel don't mean it. You don't mean it."

  Just then, too late, I remembered where Mr. Gladney had been peppered, so we heard. He was somebody that knew somebody'd meant it. But I went on fanning, and he went on looking like an old deacon, and opened his mouth and said:

  "Well—it may not mean a thing in general, to send a lady a message you're going to kill her if she don't please you, but what if the day after, she's found dead?"

  "It was two days after. Then everybody's sorry," I says. The Judge makes me change my answer to say it still don't mean anything. "Except love, of course. It's all in a way of speaking," I says. "Putting it into words. With some people, it's little threats. With others, it's liable to be poems."

  He says, "All right, Mizriz Ponder, set me straight about something else. I've been worrying about that storm that come up right the same time as your visit—wasn't that too bad for everybody! What worries me most about it is how that ball of fire ever got into you all's house out there. To the best of my memory, every time I ever passed that house, it was covered with lightning rods."

  "You're behind the times," I says. "Look up over your head next time you go out of the Courthouse. The first time I had men on the roof after Grandpa Ponder was gone, fixing the holes, I had those things pulled down 3 Grandma never could stand them. And the Courthouse took them off my hands. Judge Tip Clanahan thought they added enough to the Courthouse to justify the purchase."

  "I'm way behind the times," says old Gladney. "Can't keep up with you at all. Now a ball of fire, like that nigger of yours saw, I've got yet to see one—and might not know one if I met it in the road."

  "If you don't know what a ball of fire looks like by this time, I'm afraid it's too late to tell you," I says.

>   He says, "Don't tell me you've seen one, too."

  I says, "As a matter of fact, I was the one saw the ball of fire in the Ponder house, the day of the trouble. I saw it the closest-to of anybody."

  "Now that'n," he says. "Then you're the very one I ought to ask. Which-a-way did that'n get in, and which-a-way did it get out?"

  "You've never been inside our house, Mr. Gladney," I says. "But I'll try to tell you. In down the front chimney. Careened around the parlor a minute, and out through the hall. And if you've never seen a ball of fire go out through bead curtains, it goes as light as a butterfly with wings."

  "Do tell!—And what was Mrs. Bonnie Dee Ponder doing," he hollers, "while you was in the parlor with her, miratin' at a ball of fire that was supposed to be scarin' her to death? And who else was in there besides? Now the cat's out of the bag!"

  Would you have known what he was up to? I could have bitten my tongue off! But I didn't show it—I just gave a laugh.

  "I beg your pardon, Mr. Gladney," I says. "You aren't a bit straight. The ball of fire you keep going back to was coming out of the parlor when I saw it. That's how I knew where it had been. When Uncle Daniel and I were heading in through the front door of the house, it was heading out the parlor through the curtains—those bead curtains. We practically collided with it in front of the hatrack. I remember I said at the time, 'Whew, Uncle Daniel, did you see that? I bet that scared Bonnie Dee Peacock!' It skirted on down the hall and streaked out the back somewhere to scare the Negroes."

  And I sails from the witness stand. I wasn't going to hear another word about balls of fire that day.

  "Now they've found a witness!" says old Gladney to my back. "A fine witness! A ball of fire! I double-dog dare Mr. Clanahan to produce it after dinner!"

  Well, everybody had a good time over that. But when I sat down again by Uncle Daniel, he looked at me like he never saw me before in his life.

  "Speaking of dinner," says Judge Waite. "Recess!"—and I could have kissed him, and Ada's sister too, that stood in the door with her finger up.