Delta Wedding (11 page)

"You couldn't stop me," the girl said, comfortably also, and a half-smile, sweet and incredibly maternal, passed over her face. It made what she said seem teasing and sad, final and familiar, like the advice a mother is bound to give her girls. Ellen let the little hand go.

In the stillness a muscadine fell from a high place into the leaves under their feet, burying itself, and like the falling grape the moment of comfort seemed visible to them and dividing them, and to be then, itself, lost.

They took a step apart.

"I reckon I was the scared one, not you," Ellen said. She gathered herself together. "I reckon you scared me—first coming, now going. In the beginning I did think I was seeing something in the woods—a spirit (my husband declares one haunts his bayou here)—then I thought it was Pinchy, an ignorant little Negro girl on our place. It was when I saw you were—were a stranger—my heart nearly failed me, for some reason."

The girl looked down at the red glass buttons on her dress as if she began to feel a kind of pleasure in causing confusion.

"Which way is the big road, please ma'am?" she asked.

"That way." Ellen pointed explicitly with her umbrella, then drew it back slowly. "Memphis," she said. When her voice trembled, the name seemed to recede from something else into its legendary form, the old Delta synonym for pleasure, trouble, and shame.

The girl made her way off through the trees, and Ellen could hear the fallen branches break softly under her foot. A fleeting resentment that she did not understand flushed her cheeks; she thought, I didn't give her this little soup. But still listening after her, she knew that the girl did not care what she thought or would have given, what Ellen might have cast away with her; that she never looked back.

"'Go in and out the window, go in and out the window ...'"

They held hands, high and then low, and Shelley, who was It because she was the big girl, ran stooping under their arms, in and out. They were playing in the shade of the pecan trees, after naps and a ride to Greenwood after the groceries, Shelley, India, Bluet, Maureen, Ranny, and Laura. Cousin Lady Clare was just now sent by Aunt Mac out to play with them too. She had come ahead of Aunt Tempe, her grandmother, to Shellmound, come by herself on the Yellow Dog, and now went around with her lower teeth biting her upper lip like William S. Hart. Little Uncle's little boys were up in the yard, crisscrossing with two lawn mowers cutting the grass for the wedding. Far in the back, Howard was beating the rugs with a very slow beat. The sound of the lawn mowers was pleading; they seemed to be saying "Please ... please." The children were keeping out of mischief so that other people could get something done; Shelley was obeying her mother too, and this lowered her some in the eyes of them all, white and colored.

"'...For we have gained the day.'"

Lady Clare said to Laura, "Ask Shelley can Troy French-kiss."

"I'm sure he can," Laura said loftily, for she had been here a day longer than Lady Clare, whatever French-kissing might be.

The song and the game were dreamlike to her. It was nice to have Shelley in the circle, but then it was lovely to have her out. It was funny how sometimes you wanted to be in a circle and then you wanted out of it in a rush. Sometimes the circle was for you, sometimes against you, if you were It. Sometimes in the circle you longed for the lone outsider to come in—sometimes you couldn't wait to close her out. It was never a good circle unless you were in it, catching hands, and knowing the song. A circle was ugly without you. She knew how ugly it was from the face Maureen would make to see it, and to change this she would let her in. Even if she did not, Maureen would get in. Maureen was a circle breaker. She was very strong. Once she had hold of you, she was so gentle and good at first, she would surprise you. She looked around with a soft, pink look on her face—in a minute it was a daring look, and the next minute she would try to break your finger bones. She liked to change a circle into "Crack the Whip," and with a jerk of her arm she could throw ten cousins to the ground and make them roll over.

They played "Running Water, Still Pond," "Fox in the Morning, Geese in the Evening," and then "Hide-and-Seek." Once Lady Clare was It, because she was carrying a little Chinese paper fan that folded back on tiny sticks, then Shelley was It again. Laura ran to her best hiding place, down on the ground behind the woodpile in the back yard. She waited a long time crouched over and nobody came to find her. From where she hid she could see the back of the house, hear the Negroes, and upstairs on the long sleeping porch she could see Uncle George walking up and down, up and down, smoking his pipe. She listened to the dark, dense rustling of the fig trees, and once she put a straw down a doodlebug hole and said the incantation in a very low voice.

Then she saw Maureen running by, and Maureen saw her. With a leap Maureen was up on her woodpile. She did not say a word. She looked over from the top, and then after a strange pause, as if she could think, she pushed the whole of the piled logs down on Laura, upsetting herself too."Choo choo," said Maureen, and then she ran away.

Laura at first was surprised, and then with great effort she began to extricate herself. The surprise, the heavy weight, and the uncertainty of getting out kept her so busy that at first she did not miss them coming to look for her. She had on her next-best white dress, and long tears showed in it, and long scratches marked up her legs and arms. She had the taste of bark in her mouth and kept spitting on the ground, though the taste was still there. Inside the house the light, tinkling sounds went on; Roxie's high laugh, like a dove cry, rose softly and hung over the yard. And from farther away the sigh of the compress reminded her of Dabney, who had gone somewhere.

Harm—that was what Maureen intended, that was what she meant by her speechless gaze. That was what made her stay so close to them all, what drove her flying over the house, over the fields that way, after the others. That was what put extra sounds in her mouth. It was the harm inside her.

"She likes to spoil things," India had explained matter-of-facdy, and matter-of-factly Laura had accepted it. But the cousins were a clan. They all said things, and they all kissed one another, and yet they all had secret, des-piting ways to happiness. At hide-and-seek a trick could be played on Laura, for she was still outside. She herself would never mean from the start to push down and overwhelm, or withhold any secret intention or hope in relish and delight.

Pushing the heavy logs from her, she felt shorn of pleasure in her cousins and angry in not having known that this was how the Fairchilds wanted things to be, and how they would make things be, when it pleased them. Uncle George was nowhere to be seen, and she thought she heard Shelley laughing and calling his name down in the house. A feeling of their unawareness of her came over Laura and crushed her more heavily than the harm of Maureen and the logs of wood, and she thought surely her mother would cry in Heaven to see her now, if she had not cried so far.

She licked the blood away clean from her arms, and looked at her knees to see if some old scabs had come off—yes. She was as black and ugly as a little Negro. She tied her sash tight around her hips. Without looking up she crept around the yard, with her locket in her mouth, around the cistern on her hands and knees, keeping low not to be seen, her feet dragging numbly. Under the snowball bush she hit both feet with her fists until she could feel the sting, and then, picking all the cinders one by one out of her elbows and skirt and out of her Roman sandals, she walked around the house and darted in to Home, which was the trunk of a tree, without being caught.

At that moment, touching Home, her finger to the tree, she was not happy, not unhappy. "Free!" she called, looking around, not seeing the others anywhere, but she had them every one separate in her head.

Then she saw Uncle George walk out of the house and stare out into the late day. She wanted to call out to him, but something would not let her. Something told her, ever since the look he gave her, that it was right for him to stand apart, and that when he opened an envelope in a room no one should enter. Now she felt matter-of-factly intimate with it, with his stand and his predicament. She thought of herself as growing up beside Uncle George, the way some little flowers and vines have picked their tree, and so she felt herself sure of being near him. She knew quite objectively that
he
would not disown her and uproot her, that he loved any little green vine leaf, and now she felt inner warnings that this was a miracle of safety, strange in any house, and in her this miracle was guarded from the contamination even of thinking.

As if by smell, by the smell of his pipe, she knew that he out of all the Delta Fairchilds had kindness and that it was more than an acting in kindness, it was a waiting, a withholding, as if he could see a fire or a light, when he saw a human being—regardless of who it was, kin or not, even Aunt Ellen, to whom he called and waved now—and had never done the first thing in his life to dim it. This made him seem young—as young as she. On the other hand, when all night she could hear coming up the dark stair well his voice soft and loud with Uncle Battle's bark after it, chasing, she gathered that he was hard to please in some things and therefore old. Uncle George and Uncle Battle would argue or talk until Uncle Battle hollered out the window for Roxie or Ernest to come up to the house and fix them their nightcaps.

She stored love for Uncle George fiercely in her heart, she wished Shellmound would burn down and she could run in and rescue him, she prayed for God to bless him—for she felt they all crowded him so, the cousins, rushed in on him so, they smiled at him too much, inviting too much, daring him not to be faultless, and she would have liked to clear them away, give him room, and then—what? She would let him be mean and horrible—horrible to the horrible world.

Would she? She leaned her forehead against the tree, with some shimmering design about him in her head coming like a dream, in which she was clinging, protecting, fighting all in one, a Fairchild flourishing and flailing her arms about. Of course it was all one thing—it was one feeling. It was need. Need pulled you out of bed in the morning, showed you the day with everything crowded into it, then sang you to sleep at night as your mother did, need sent you dreams. Need did all this—when would it explain? Oh, some day. She waited now, and then each night fell asleep in the vise of India's arms. She imagined that one day—maybe the next, in the Fairchild house—she would know the answer to the heart's pull, just as it would come to her in school why the apple was pulled down on Newton's head, and that it was the way for girls in the world that they should be put off, put off, put off—and told a little later; but told, surely.

Uncle George came down the steps and walked slowly over the fresh-cut grass, not seeing her for she was behind the big pecan tree. All his secret or his problem, or what was in the blue letter, though she did not know what it was, was sharp to her to see him go by, weighty and real and as cutting (and perhaps as filled with dreaded life) as a seashell she had once come on, on the seashore, and unwittingly seized.

"Don't cry out here, Laura," said a soft voice.

It was Little Battle, in his overalls. He poked a cold biscuit with a little ham in it into her mouth, and because she was startled stood by while she swallowed it. Then they ran into the house. "Oh, Little Battle!"

Laura wanted so badly to be taken to their hearts (never wondering if she had not been, at any time before her own wish) that she almost knew what the Fairchilds were like, what to expect; but her wish was steadier than her vision and that itself kept her from knowing. Ellen saw it.

While she held supper for Dabney, late now at some bridesmaid's party, Ellen had walked out in the yard to feel the cool. It was first-dark, and the thrushes were singing tirelessly from the trees. She had walked through the yard where the children were playing and Vi'let was gathering in the curtains, past the flower beds, down toward the bayou. The evening was hot; it was the fragrance of the lemon lilies that was cool, like the breath from a mountain well. From the house came a momentary discord on the piano keys. That was Shelley passing through the music room, putting her hands down over Mary Lamar Mackey's. Then the slow, dwelling melody went on.

Ellen looked down the road for Dabney. Stretching away, the cotton fields, slowly emptying, were becoming the color of the sky, a deepening blue so intense that it was like darkness itself. There was a feeling in the infinity of the Delta that even the bounded things, waiting, for instance, could go on forever. Over and over from the bayou woods came the one high note, then the three low notes of the dove.

At her feet the bayou ran, low, long since cleared of trees here, and all but motionless. She thought it was like a mirror that was time-darkened, no longer reflecting very much, but an entity in itself. She remembered old, disparaging Partheny when she got to her, going so ill-advised on foot. In Partheny's house in Brunswicktown she had bent over the cot where the old woman lay out straight with her long toes pointing up and her eyes looking at the ceiling. "Partheny, do you hear me? Are you in a spell, Partheny?" Partheny was her nurse when her oldest children were little.

"Oh, I done had it," Partheny had said. "It over by this time. I were mindless, Miss Ellen. I were out of my house. I were looking in de river. I were standing on Yazoo bridge wid dis foot lifted. I were mindless, didn't know my name or name of my sons. Hand stop me. Mr. Troy Flavin he were by my side, gallopin' on de bridge. He laugh at me good—old Partheny! Don't you jump in dat river, make good white folks fish you out! No, sir, no, sir, I ain't goin' to do dat! Guides me home. You can go on back now, go on back, Miss Ellen, to your little girl puttin' on her weddin' veil. But don't set your heels down! Go real still."

She heard someone coming from the house, and saw from the glimmer of white clothes and the tall strolling walk of "company" that it was George—he waved briefly. He looked thin. Poor boy, he had not even eaten any to speak of, of the good coconut cake she tried to tempt him with. The noise of the children made him bite his lip, and he did not like Mary Lamar Mackey, this time.