Delta Wedding (15 page)

Aunt Tempe closed her eyes to see Mashula's dulcimer still hanging by that thin ribbon on the wall—did she know Shelley could take it down and play "Juanita" on it? India followed her gaze; it passed fleetingly over Uncle Pinck's coin collection from around the world, that Aunt Tempe had been tired of looking at in Inverness and taking out of little Shannon's mouth—and fell sadly on the guns that stood in the corner by the door and the pistols that rested on a little gilt and marble table in the bay window."Those firearms!" she murmured, freshly distressed at their very thought, as if in her sensitive hearing she could hear them all go off at once. That was Somebody's gun—he had killed twelve bears every Saturday with it. And Somebody's pistol in the lady's workbox; he had killed a man with it in self-defense at Cotton Gin Port, and of the deed itself he had never brought himself to say a word; he had sent the pistol ahead of him by two Indian bearers to his wife, who had put it in this box and held her peace, a lesson to girls. There (India sighed with Aunt Tempe) was Somebody's Port Gibson flintlock, and Somebody's fowling piece he left behind him when he marched off to Mexico, never to be laid eyes on again. There were the Civil War muskets Aunt Mac watched over, an old Minie rifle coming to pieces before people's eyes. Grandfather's dueling pistols, that had not saved his life at all, were on the stand in a hard velvet case, and lying loose was Grandmother Laura Allen's little pistol that she carried in her riding skirt over Marmion, with a flower scratched with a penknife along the pearl handle, and Battle's, her father's, little toothmarks in it.

"Bang bang!" said Ranny.

"No longer a baby," Aunt Tempe sighed. She sat down in a rocker, and Vi'let brought a pitcher of her lemonade—so strong it would bring tears to the eyes. "And poor Laura," she said, reaching out at her and kissing her again. To her, girls were as obvious as peony plants, and you could tell from birth if they were going to bloom or not—she said so.

"I've brought Dabney a forty-piece luncheon set for the time being," she said, seeming to address Ranny. "I couldn't put my
mind
to anything more."

"How is Mary Denis's little new baby?" Ranny asked. "Is it still a boy?"

"Mm-hmm, and he's the image of me—except he has Titian hair," said Aunt Tempe. "That he got from Mr. Buchanan. It took wild horses to drag me away from Mary Denis at such a time, but I was prevailed on. I felt compelled to come to you."

"How is Mary Denis?" asked Ranny. "I love her!" He was sitting like a lamb at Aunt Tempe's feet, and letting her pet him.

"As well as I ever expected her to be, precious. She gets along very well considering she's married to a Yankee that wants his windows washed three times a week."

"They aren't though, are they?" cried India staunchly.

"Look, look! Aunt Tempe, look!" Dabney whirled in laughing, with flimsy boxes and tissue paper and chiffon ruffles flying.

"I should say they're not!" Aunt Tempe opened her arms and kissed Dabney three times under her big hat. (In the back, Vi'let was crying, "Miss Dab, ain't you 'shamed, you bring my dresses on back here!") "Mercy! You've always just washed your hair! Don't ever let this husband of yours, whoever he is, know you can cook, Dabney Fairchild, or you'll spend the rest of your life in the kitchen. That's the first thing I want to tell you."

"He doesn't know anything about me at all," Dabney laughed, dancing away in her mules around the wreath on the floral rug, whirling with her white wedding dress held to her. Her hair hung like a bright cloud down over her eyes and when she danced she scattered drops everywhere, except on her dress.

"Bring those affairs here to me, Ranny child," said Aunt Tempe.

"Oughtn't we to wait and let Dabney open everything that comes?"

Aunt Tempe shook out a dress and held it at an authoritative angle with her head tilted to match. "I must say I never heard of a
red wedding
before."

"American Beauty, Aunt Tempe!" cried India, teasingly whisking it from her and beginning to dance about after Dabney, holding it high.

"I stand corrected," said Aunt Tempe.

"They fade out before they get to Shelley and Dabney," Laura told her consolingly.

Maureen ran in, got Aunt Tempe's hug and kiss—and took, as if for her prize, the rosy dress slightly less bright and danced with it, nicely. The little girls went delicately though gleefully, and soundlessly on their bare feet. Laura too, with a sudden spring, had gently extracted the next dress from Aunt Tempe's fingers, and slid 1, 2, 3 into a ballroom waltz, hidden behind her pink cloud.

"Play, Lady Clare! Play till you drop," India's voice called.

Ranny leaped up and got under the wedding dress Dabney was holding, and then dancing frantically cried, "Let me out, let me out!"

"Slower, Lady Clare! Vi'let!" Aunt Tempe called, and Vi'let came and stood in the door with her hands on her hips. "If you don't press these dresses right away, you won't get a chance! They'll be worn out completely!"

"I
can't
go slower!" cried Lady Clare.

Outside, Bitsy and his little boy rubbed round peepholes in the window polish to see in, and laughed so appreciatively that they nearly fell out of the window, to India's ever-watchful delight as she pony-trotted.

"Well, of course I can't talk," said Aunt Tempe, looking fixedly at the bride dancing and the three dresses without any heads dancing around her, with Vi'let beginning to chase them. "My own daughter married a Yankee.—Naturally, I bring her to Memphis and Inverness to have her babies—
and
name them."

"It's not like Dabney was going out of the Delta," called the pale pink waltzing dress.

"Poor Mary Denis went clear to Illinois."

"Oh, Aunt Tempe, how's Mary Denis?" Dabney cried, coming to a momentary stop. "I did so want her for a bridesmaid!"

"She's thin as a rail and white as a ghost now!"

"I bet she's beautiful as ever! How much did her baby weigh?"

"Ten pounds, child: little George."

"Oh, how could you tear yourself away?" asked Dabney in a painful voice, holding a pose before the long mirror. She bent her arm and looked tenderly down over imaginary flowers. Vi'let smiled.

"I was prevailed on," said Aunt Tempe, but Dabney had run lightly out of the parlor again, snatching a flight of dresses and letting them fall over Vi'let, covering her as she giggled, with a bright cascade. Bluet, Maureen, Ranny, and Laura reeled after her, still under the spell, and Lady Clare was still playing "Country Gardens."

"The overseer," announced Aunt Tempe, nodding as if to imaginary people on both sides of the room, the tiniest smile on her face. India sat down and looked up at it.

***

They danced out, and Laura at the tail end would have danced her way upstairs too, dancing as if she were going to be in the wedding. The whole house was shaking like the joggling board or the compress, with dancing and "Country Gardens." Only in the hall Aunt Ellen stood leaning by the stairpost, leaning as if faint, her eyes and cheeks luminous. Just back of her, Roxie stood with a plate of coconut cake, erect and murmuring.

Uncle George, who had gone fishing before breakfast, had come in at that moment with a slam of the side door, stamping across the hall against the beat of bare feet. His face was burned and streaming, his white pants spotted with swamp mud. Behind him walked Howard's little boy, holding a string of fish—not very many and not very big.

Aunt Ellen and Uncle George, their gazes meeting, fell back while the laughing parade pushed and passed between them—Dabney gave George her passing kiss, and drops from her hair went in his eyes. Laura slowed down, and instead of going between them she waltzed from side to side; somehow she could not go between them, like the cousins. Her tingling feet were dancing but her body held her still in place, at a blind alley of desperation, as paralyzed from escape as a rabbit in sudden light.

It was the last thing she would have thought of—to pity Aunt Ellen or Uncle George at Shellmound, or to pity Maureen, just going around the turn of the stairs, dancing so sweetly today without fighting, or to pity Dabney who would always kiss just as quick as she saw. Where could she go just to hold out her arms and be taken, quickly—what other way, dark, out of sight of what was here and going by? She suddenly considered snatching Roxie's cake and running out the back.... She waltzed in a kind of crisis of agitation. People that she might even hate danced so sweetly just at the last minute, going around the turn, they made her despair. She felt she could never be able to hate anybody that hurt her in secret and in confidence, and that she was Maureen's secret the way Maureen was hers. Maureen! Dabney! Aunt Ellen! Uncle George! She almost called them, all—pleading. There was too much secrecy, too much pity at the stairs, she could not get by.

Uncle George suddenly shouted at the top of his voice, "That's enough!"

There was silence everywhere at Shellmound, prompt as India's gasps of half-distress, half-delight; then only Lady Clare's wistful complaint, "I don't know how to
ever
end it!" Wide-eyed, Roxie suddenly reached for Howard's little boy's hand, and he yielding George the fish they bolted. Where the clamor had been, Uncle George's two words shot out like one bird, then beat about the walls, struck in the rooms upstairs. Could Dabney bear it? Laura, who could not stop even then shuffling her foot, moved helplessly up and down in one place, wondering if Uncle George would kill her. Poor Aunt Primrose, who would not hurt anything on earth, appeared blinking at the library door, holding her little lace mit, nearly finished, before her breast.

Presently Dabney's light, excited laugh floated back at them from above, and then her face, bright and mischievous under the sparkling hair, looked smiling down over the rail, as if disembodied. Aunt Ellen looked up at her a minute and then said, "Dabney, you're supposed to be in Greenwood getting the groceries, dear," and walked serenely toward the parlor. Uncle George, his burned face still shining, came past Laura and she felt that she would turn to stone, but his fishy, tobacco-y hand came down ever so gently over her hair, and she stopped dancing.

Aunt Tempe's voice rose. "Why, bless your heart! George Fairchild! Come here and kiss your sister!"

Uncle George ran from her and from poor Aunt Primrose who looked after him without words. (The Fairchild men would just run from you sometimes.) He went to the back, holding out his fish. "Give them to the Negroes," Laura heard him tell somebody. Then Aunt Mac's voice: "Georgie, you look like Sin on Earth, wash your face at the kitchen sink!"

But I'm a poor little motherless girl, she thought, and sat down on the bottom step and cried a tear into the hem of her skirt, for herself. Before long she thought she'd go back to the kitchen and see what Aunt Mac would say to her.

"Ho hum," said India. She fell back on the floor and set a glass of lemonade on her diaphragm. "Aunt Tempe, I bet you don't know something you wish you did."

"What, child?" asked Aunt Tempe sharply.

"I bet you didn't know Aunt Robbie ran away from Uncle George and never is coming back."

"Hush your mouth, child."

"Yes, she did!"

"The nerve!" Aunt Tempe suddenly reached up and took off her hat. Her fine hair with the Memphis permanent wave sprang to life about her temples, like kitten ears.

India was not ever quite sure whose nerve Aunt Tempe spoke of—perhaps now her mother (she heard her coming) for not writing the news. Aunt Tempe carried the notion that her mother was snooty—the only one of her father's sisters who did; because her mother didn't write. "Rate," her mother said, in her Virginia accent, "I never rate." It was her Virginia snootiness that she would never "rate" anything, Aunt Tempe thought—people had to drop everything and come to Shellmound to find out.

"Ah! What has he done?" Aunt Tempe said, with her sisterly face alive to brotherly mischief. Then, "Oh, the mortification! Who told you, baby? And when?"

"I'm nine," said India. "No
-body
told me, but I
knew
way back this morning."

"You knew what?" called Ellen warningly from the hall. "You did get here!" she said to Aunt Tempe in that warm, marveling voice with which she always welcomed people, no matter how late she was doing it, as if some planet had mysteriously entered a fresh orbit and appeared at Shellmound. She kissed Aunt Tempe's cheek—the softest cheek of the Fairchilds, which Aunt Tempe offered in a temporary manner like a very expensive possession. After all (India could read her mind as Aunt Tempe kissed back), she had been invited over long-distance telephone, and she had been only barely able to make out what
one
bolt from the blue was, that Dabney was engaged—and then it was very unsatisfactory information; they had let Bluet tell her the wedding day.

"Aunt Primrose and Aunt Jim Allen still don't know you know what," India said, putting her arm soothingly around Aunt Tempe's neck. "They don't even dream."

"Get away from me, India, you're always such a
hot
child!—
Well-madam?
"

"How's Mary Denis?" asked Ellen as if the "Well-madam?" were not Aunt Tempe's question first.

'Thin as a rail, white as a ghost. Only wild horses—The baby's my image—Has Mr. Buchanan's Titian hair, Mr. Buchanan's the same Yankee he ever was, demands the impossible.... Oh, the mortification of
life
, Ellen!"

"Now, Tempe, you're always further beside yourself than you need to be," Ellen said. With the hand Aunt Tempe couldn't see, she was very gently patting India's bare foot.

"Of course I am! And events come along and bear me out! But nobody tells me!" Aunt Tempe poured out another glass of lemonade and asked pitifully for a little tiny bit of sugar. "Of course I know George and Battle both try to spare me—Denis always spared me everything. It would kill me to know all poor George must have gone through, what it's driven him to!"

"India—you run out and tell Vi'let to stop whatever she's doing and come sweeten Aunt Tempe's lemonade to suit her—and take Lady Clare with you."