Delta Wedding (17 page)

"I wish I could make something like that," said Aunt Primrose gallantly.

"Not everybody can," said Troy. "But 'Delectable Mountains,' that's the one I aim for Dabney and me to sleep under most generally, warm
and
pretty."

Aunt Tempe gave Ellen a long look.

"I think they are beautiful, useful wedding presents," said Ellen. "Dabney will treasure them, I know. Dabney, you must write and thank Troy's mother tonight."

"Let her wait till she tries them out, Mrs. Fairchild," said Troy. "That's what will count with Mammy. She might come if we have a baby, sure enough."

Aunt Primrose darted her little hand out, as if the quilt were hot and getting hotter, and Ellen and Dabney and Troy pulled it out taut in the air. The pattern shone and the ladies and Dabney all fluttered their eyelids as if the simple thing revolved while they held it.

"Look," said Ellen. "Troy, there's a paper pinned to this corner."

"Oh, that's Ma's wish," said Troy. "I noticed it."

"She says here, 'A pretty bride. To Miss Dabney Fairchild. The disappointment not to be sending a dozen or make a bride's quilt in the haste. But send you mine. A long life. Manly sons, loving daughters, God willing.'"

"That's Ma. She'll freeze all winter."

"Your pretty bride," said Dabney, going around. "How did she know I was pretty?"

"I don't know," said Troy. "I didn't give her much of a notion." He bent to her disbelieving kiss. "I guess you'd better get these off the floor and fold them nice, Dabney. And lay them on a long table with that other conglomeration for folks to come see."

The dinner bell rang. Battle and the boys came in rosy and slicked, playing with the barking dogs. Orrin had on his pompadour cap. George came down with Ranny riding him, knees on his shoulders. Ranny had the family telescope up to his eye, and turned it with both hands about the room, exclaiming.

"Who do you see in this room?" George was asking him quietly. "Do you see Mama having secrets with Aunt Primrose and Aunt Tempe and Aunt Jim Allen?" They went toward them.

"Yes, sir!"

"I always thought Robbie was a very
strenuous
girl," said Aunt Primrose hesitantly, looking up at George.

"She's
direct
" said Ellen.

"She has her cheek," Tempe snapped, while Jim Allen was still asking pleadingly, "Who, who?"

"She has the nerve of a brass monkey," said George, and Ranny crowed from his head. George's forehead, nose, and cheeks still fiery from the sun, he seemed to be beaming now at the sight of his sisters all gathered, with a midday fragrance of stuffed green peppers and something else floating over them like a spicy cloud.

They're both as direct as two blows on the head of a nail, George and Robbie, Ellen was thinking with surprise. George was so tender-hearted, his directness was something you forgot; when he was far away, in Memphis, she thought of him—as she always thought of the man or the woman—as at Robbie's
mercy.
Robbie, anywhere, was being direct.

"I've racked my brains to think of something we can tell the Delta," Tempe declared, with Ranny's telescope turned on her. "Mary Denis named her
baby
for you, George, and you yell and run off like a maniac when I try to inform you."

"How's Mary Denis?" said George. "Tell the Delta about what?"

"About Robbie Reid, your wife," said Tempe. "You have to tell the Delta something when your wife flies off and you start losing your Fairchild temper. Right at the point of another wedding! You should have thought of it when you married her, woke up the night. Ranny, is that the manners your Uncle George teaches you? That's staring."

"I don't see Robbie," Ranny said, turning George with his digging knees. He looked through the front window, out at the glare. "I just see Maureen chasing a bird, and Laura turning round and round in the yard."

"Call them in," growled Battle.

"Tell the Delta to go to Guinea," said Ellen stoutly.

Aunt Mac came up the hall, her strong voice singing, belligerently sad, "'O where hae ye been, Lord Randall my son?...O mother, mother, mak my bed soon. ...'"

"Of course Mary Denis is thin as a rail. Mercy," Tempe said to Lady Clare, who appeared too and circled round her, ecstatically walking on her knees and drinking something green. "Don't you drink that in here—ink? Take it on out, I can't watch you."

"Well, is everything all pretty near ready now?" Troy's voice was asking.

"I see Dabney kissing Troy," Ranny announced.

"Oh, Troy, the altar rocks!" Dabney cried.

"Put a hammer in my hand, I'll knock it into shape before we sit down to dinner!"

"I see Lady Clare drinking Shelley's ink," said Ranny dreamily.

"Lady Clare, you know what happens when you show off," Aunt Primrose said, putting her finished bridesmaid's mit to her lips and biting the thread.

"She doesn't care," said Ranny, smiling, at the telescope. "She doesn't care."

"I seem to hear the dinner bell," said Aunt Jim Allen.

"Roy, close your book." Ellen kissed the top of his head, and he looked up with sucked-in breath.

"Laura and Maureen," said Battle, with the condensed roar in his fatherly voice carrying out the window, "will you obey me and come to the table before I skin you alive and shake your bones up together and throw the sack in the bayou? And Mary Lamar Mackey," he said, to the other direction, "will your ditty wait?"

"Oh, Papa, you're so
hot
" said Shelley. She pulled at his starched coat sleeve and tried to kiss him, and he spanked her ahead of him to the table.

"Miss Priss! Do you love your papa, not forget him?"

"Naturally," said Aunt Tempe, when Roy with his eyes bright told what George did, about the Yellow Dog on the trestle, "he did it for Denis."

She smiled and fanned with the Chinese, fan she brought from Inverness, nodding at them. Dabney, who loved her father and adored George, knew beyond question when Aunt Tempe came and stated it like a fact of the weather, that it was Denis and always would be Denis that they gave the family honor to. She held Troy's hand under the table and accepted it with a feeling not far from luxuriousness: Denis was the one that looked like a Greek god, Denis who squandered away his life loving people too much, was too kind to his family, was torn to pieces by other people's misfortune, married beneath him, threw himself away in drink, got himself killed in the war. It was Denis who gambled the highest, who fell the hardest when thrown by the most dangerous horse, who was the most delirious in his fevers, who went the farthest on his travels, who was the most beset. It was Denis who had read everything in the world and had the prodigious memory—not a word ever left him. Denis knew law, and could have told you the way Mississippi could be made the fairest place on earth to live, all of it like the Delta. It was Denis that was ahead of his time and it was Denis that was out of the pages of a book too. Denis could have planted the world, and made it grow. Denis knew what to do about high water, could have told you everything about the Mississippi River from one end to the other. Denis could have been anything and done everything, but he was cut off before his time.

He could have one day married some beautiful girl worthy of him (Mary Lamar Mackey would have grown up to him), leaving Virgie Lee (Denis's choice was baffling, not to be too much brooded on) to somebody she would better have tried to live with; he would have had a beautiful child—a son—a second Denis, though not his father's equal. It was a shame on earth that Maureen, though George would naturally risk his life for her, was the only remnant of his body; she bore no more breath of resemblance to him than she did to, as Aunt Jim Allen always remarked, the King of Siam; if anything, she took after her mother, though her hair was light. It would be wrong to see in her dancing up and down any bit of Denis's tender mischief or marvelous cavorting.

"These fields and woods are still full of Denis, full of Denis," Tempe said firmly. "If I were to set foot out there by myself, though catch me!—I'd meet the spirit of Denis Fairchild first thing, I know it."

She looked pleased, Dabney thought, as if she were mollified that Denis was dead if his spirit haunted just where she knew. Not at large, not in transit any more, as in life, but fixed—tied to a tree. She pressed Troy's hand, and he pressed back. Poor Denis! she thought all at once, while Maureen, eyeing her, stuck out her tongue through her smiling and fruit-filled mouth.

It was morning, the day of the rehearsal. Roy ran out of the house and scattered some crumbs to the birds. Ellen saw him from her window—his face tender-eyed under the blocky, serious forehead and the light slept-on hair pushed to the side, with a darker shadow the size of a guinea egg under the crest. Alone in the yard, he said something to a bird. This was her last day with her daughter Dabney before she married. How she loved her sons though!

"This is Dabney's wedding rehearsal day," Ellen said, turning to the old great-aunts, with Roxie by her offering them a second cup of black coffee while breakfast was getting ready.

"Gordon, dear, I'm hot," said Aunt Shannon fretfully. She lay back with her soft black Mary Jane slippers crossed, on Aunt Mac's chaise longue, frowning slightly at the mounted blue butterflies on the wall.

"She thinks none of the rest of us know it's September," growled Aunt Mac. She snapped her watch onto her bosom. "Nobody but Brother Gordon killed in the Battle of Shiloh. Foot!"

The two old sisters were not too congenial, had never been except for a little while when Battle's generation were growing up and absorbing their time, and in recent years the belief on Aunt Shannon's part that she was conversing with people whom Aunt Mac knew well to be dead seemed a freer development of the schism. Far back in Civil War days, Ellen had been told or had gathered, some ineradicable coolness had come between them—it seemed to have sprung from a jealousy between the sisters over which one agonized the more or the more abandonedly, over the fighting brothers and husbands. With the brothers and husbands every man killed in the end, the jealousy did not seem canceled by death, but extended by it; memory of fear and the keeping up of loyalty had its rivalries too—made them endless and now wholly desperate, for no good was ever to come of anguish any more and so it never had when anguish was fresh.

Aunt Shannon now, with her access to their soldier brothers Battle, George, and Gordon, as well as to James killed only thirty-three years ago in the duel, to her husband Lucian Miles and even to Aunt Mac's husband Duncan Laws, was dwelling without shame in happiness and superiority over her sister. Poor Aunt Mac did indeed seem to think less of her husband now, in spite of herself (she made little flung-off remarks about his family, "Columbus new-comers") when Aunt Shannon spoke casually to "Duncan, dearie," and bent her head, as if he had come up behind her while she was knitting to give her a little kiss on the back of the neck, as indeed he had done often long ago.

"The wedding's right here. Are we ready, Aunt Mac?"

"Duncan, dearie, there's a scrap of nuisance around here ought to be shot," said Aunt Shannon, glancing sideways without stirring. "You'll see him. Pinck Summers, he calls himself. Coming courting here."

"Duncan Laws will shoot who I tell him, thank you," said Aunt Mac. "Shannon, be ashamed of yourself for getting your time so mixed up. Vainest of the Fairchilds!—Well, then, Ellen, go on to Dabney! Wake her up!"

But Dabney had ridden out on her red filly before any of them were awake, out through the early fields. Vi'let had not yet swept the night cobwebs from the doors, and she had dashed through shuddering, with fighting hands, and pushed open the back gate into the early eastern light which already felt warm and lapping against her face and arms. In her stall the little filly looked at her as if she were waiting for her early, there was a tremor to go in her neck and side. Howard's little boy was sitting in the hay and he saddled the filly and put Dabney on and held the gate. She rode out looking back with her finger to her lips—Howard's boy put finger to lips too, and jumped over the ditch watching her go. She thought she would ride out by herself one time. She had even come out without her breakfast, having eaten only what was in the kitchen, milk and biscuits and a bit of ham and a chicken wing, and a row of plums sitting in the window.

Flocks of birds flew up from the fields, the little filly went delightedly through the wet paths, breasting and breaking the dewy nets of spider webs. Opening morning-glories were turned like eyes on her pretty feet. The occasional fences smelled sweet, their darkened wood swollen with night dew like sap, and following her progress the bayou rustled within, ticked and cried. The sky was softly blue all over, the last rim of sunrise cloud melting into it like the foam on fresh milk.

With her whip lifted Dabney passed Troy's house, and passed through Mound Field and Far Field, through the Deadening, and on toward the trees, where the Yazoo was. Turning and going along up here, looking through the trees and across the river, you could see Marmion. Around the bend in the early light that was still night-quiet in the cypressy place, the little filly went confidently and fastidiously as ever.

Dabney bent her head to the low boughs, and then saw the house reflected in the Yazoo River—an undulant tower with white wings at each side, like a hypnotized swamp butterfly, spread and dreaming where it alights. Then the house itself reared delicate and vast, with a strict tower, up from its reflection, and Dabney gazed at it counting its rooms.

Marmion had been empty since the same year it was completed, 1890—when its owner and builder, her grandfather James Fairchild, was killed in the duel he fought with Old Ronald McBane, and his wife Laura Allen died broken-hearted very soon, leaving two poor Civil War-widowed sisters to bring up the eight children. They went back, though it crowded them, to the Grove, Marmion was too heart-breaking. Honor, honor, honor, the aunts drummed into their ears, little Denis and Battle and George, Tempe and Annie Laurie, Rowena, Jim Allen and Primrose. To give up your life because you thought that much of your
cotton
—where was love, even, in that?
Other
people's cotton. Fine glory! Dabney would not have done it.