Delta Wedding (21 page)

Miss Thracia Leeds came into the store and fingered over the ribbon counter, like a pianist over trills. "Why, hello, Robbie, are you back at the store?"

"Well, George's right there at Shellmound in the porch hammock, if you want him," said Troy. "His wife? You look like you've been to Jericho and back, so dusty."

"I've been leaving him—that's what I've been doing. If anybody wondered!"

"In the porch hammock, he
was,
" said Troy, with some reserve in his voice. Then he added politely, "Dabney's who I'm carrying—you know, Mr. Battle's girl, not the oldest—the prettiest. High-strung sometimes, though!"

"High-strung!" said Miss Thracia with much sarcasm.

"But they're all high-strung. All ready to jump out of their skins if you don't mind out how you step. 'Course, it would be worse for a
girl,
marrying into them."

"I didn't
marry into
them! I married George!" And she beat his hat away, for he started that again—as though he had brought some insufferably old argument into her face.

"Well, it's a close family," Troy said laconically, catching his hat. "Too close, could be."

"A family
can't
be too close, young man," said a new voice. Miss Mayo Tucker had come in.

Robbie rocked gently on her stool, and like a courtesy Troy put his hand over her flushed forehead as if trying to feel there how dangerously close the Fairchilds were. Miss Maggie Kinkaid stood behind Miss Mayo and asked Robbie, if she had come back to work, if she would make good a nest egg, since the other one broke.

"I might have known! I might have known he wouldn't hunt for me—I could kill him! Right back at Shellmound in a hammock," Robbie cried. "I thought he might drag the river, even."

"Drag which river? Why, Dabney wanted George here, is why he's here," Troy said, looking down at her in concern. "
Dabney
sent for him. He's my what-you-call-it—best man. They didn't care for Buster Daggett, for that friend of mine over at the ice and coal."

"Buster Daggett, I don't wonder," remarked Miss Mayo. "Robbie, did I hear you'd run away, and George Fairchild used to beat you unmercifully in Memphis? Cut me off a yard of black sateen, child, you're right at it."

Robbie laughed and brushed at her eyes. "Dabney's marrying—marrying you? You're the overseer out there."

"Sure I am. How'd you know?"

"We've
met
" said Robbie with energy. "Don't you remember me on the trestle—that day? I remember you. All you did was keep looking up at the sky and saying, 'Why don't she storm?'"

"And she didn't?" Troy smiled in delight after a moment. "That day! I don't remember but one thing. I got engaged up yonder!"

"You got engaged, and George Fairchild missed by a hair letting the Yellow Dog run over him for the sake of a little old crazy! Never thinking of me!"

To her surprise, Troy Flavin became more dignified than before. "Yes, your husband'll make you worry-like," he said. "It'll come up."

Robbie with furious neatness cut off a yard of sateen, tied it up, and rang up thirty cents on the cash register.

"You're Robbie, George's wife. People've been no-rating about you, sure!" said Troy, watching her speed. "Well, you're just in time."

"I bet it's a big wedding and all. Did Miss Tempe make herself come? How's Mary Denis?" asked Miss Thracia.

"They've come from far and near, Fairchilds," said Troy. "You
could
have been too late." He momently reversed the fanning hat and fanned himself. "But now you'll see the wedding."

"Me! Who's going to invite me?"

"I invite you," said Troy. "Now I've invited me somebody." He stared at her appreciatively. Then he put his hat, carefully, over her head to make her laugh, and spread a big hand sprinkled with red hair over each of her shoulders.

"Which way is this? Set me straight, did you run off and leave George, or did he run off and leave you? I believe those Fairchild men are great consorters," said Miss Mayo. "Does he make any money in the law business? It's bad luck for a girl to put a man's hat on."

"It would be fun to walk in
during
it, and make George and everybody jump," Robbie said, looking up at Troy and smiling for the first time, under the yellow brim.

"What! Not during the wedding!"

"Oh, look at me forget about
you
being there."

"It would cause a stir," he said, and balanced a pencil on his finger. "Furthermore, I'd be scared of Aunt Mac. Why don't you go walk in now? What's keeping you, if you're going in the end? like I say to myself."

"Do you mean to say, Robbie Reid, you had gone off and
left
George Fairchild and now you're just
coming back
?" said Miss Thracia. "I know what he ought to do to you."

"Must I go now, and push him out of the hammock?" said Robbie softly. Her eyelids fell, as if she were being lulled to sleep. She thought Troy was very kind, and clever. Tears ran down her face.

"That sounds better than the other," said Troy. She jumped off the stool. "And considering we're next thing to kin,—go wash your face."

She gave him back his hat and he stood holding it politely.

"And to tell you the truth," he said when she came in from the little back porch with a clean face, "I feel without doubt you ought to be getting somewhere near your husband, not sitting here baking by yourself in this hot store."

Robbie went out, past Miss Thracia, Miss Maggie, and Miss Mayo, fluffing her hair. "See if you think she's going to have a baby," said Miss Maggie. "I wonder if it will be a boy or girl and how they'll divide up the land in that case."

"She's not," said Miss Mayo definitely.

With a start Troy went to the door and looked up and down the street. "I forgot to wonder how she'd get there," he said.

India was walking up the sidewalk eating ice, with her eyes shut. She opened her eyes and saw Troy.

"Troy Flavin! I've got something for you," she said, her face alight. She put something in his hands. "A cake! Dabney baked it with her own hands, just for you."

"Well, it surprises me," Troy told her, accepting it. "I didn't know she could even make light bread."

India turned a handspring and looked back over her shoulder at him—it was a look so much like Dabney's that he started again, and he called after her, "Much obliged!" But she too had got out of sight.

Robbie saw it would be a long hot walk in the boiling sun. But Troy Flavin had been right, though highhanded, for somebody that came from "away"—anything was better than that oven of a store. She couldn't stand it any longer. And, oh, George must have known he could come and get her, Shelley must have tattletaled, and when she had come as far as Fairchilds, as far even as the store—! She passed the shade of the cemetery and took the road. Off there was the bayou, but if she was going back to George in the hot sun, then she was going in the hot sun. She glanced through the distant trees; the whirlpool was about there. She and George had once or twice gone swimming in that, once at night, playing at drowning, first he and then she sinking down with a hand up. There were people she would like to see go down in that, and a snake look good at them.

She was in the road through the Fairchild Deadening. What a wide field! All this was where the old Fairchilds had started, deadened off the trees to take the land a hundred years ago. She could hardly see across. The white field in the heat darted light like a prism edge. She put a hand over her eyes, but the light came red through her fingers. She knew she was a small figure here, and went along with a little switch of elderberry under the straight-up sun.

Caught in marriage you were then supposed to fling about, to cry out and ask for something—to expect something—what was the look in all unmarried girls' eyes but the challenging look of knowing what? But Robbie—who was greatly in love and so would freely admit everything—did not know what. It was not this!

In the depths of her soul she had at first looked for one of two blows, or magic touches, to fall—unnerving change or beautiful transformation; she had been practical enough to expect alternate eventualities. But even now—unless the old bugaboo of pregnancy counted—there was no eventuality. Here she was—Robbie, making her way, stamping her feet in the pink Fairchild dust, at a very foolish time of day to be out unprotected. There was not one soul to know she was desperate and angry.

The Fairchild women asked a great deal of their men—competitively. Miss Tempe in particular was a bully, or would have been, without the passive, sweet Miss Primrose and Miss Jim Allen to compete with another way. Naturally, the Fairchild women knew what to ask, because in their kind of people, the Fairchild kind, the women always ruled the roost; Robbie believed in her soul that men should rule the roost. (George, showing how simple and difficult he was in a Fairchild man's way, did not betray it that there
were
two kinds of people.) It was notoriously the women of the Fairchilds who since the Civil War, or—who knew?—since the Indian times, ran the household and had everything at their fingertips—not the men. The women it was who inherited the place—or their brothers, guiltily, handed it over.

In the Delta the land belonged to the women—they only let the men have it, and sometimes they tried to take it back and give it to someone else. The Grove had been left to Miss Tempe and she married Mr. Pinckney Summers (a terrible drinker) and moved to Inverness, presenting it to George—and George had told his unmarried sisters, Primrose and Jim Allen, that they could live there. Marmion belonged by rights to that little Maureen, for whom Miss Annie Laurie Fairchild had felt that wild concern some ladies feel for little idiot children, even the wicked ones—though if she knew, she would be sorry now, with her own child cheated. She had given Marmion to Denis when she married and went out of the Delta, and now of the two children would it in all strictness be Maureen's? A joke on the Fairchilds. And Shellmound—Miss Rowena, the quiet one, the quiet old maid, had let Mr. Battle have it before she ever lived in it herself; no one could ever be grateful enough to Rowena! Not then, not now, when she was dead and triumphantly beyond gratitude, but Robbie would tell anybody that Miss Rowena
was forgotten,
if a Fairchild could be. She let all her brothers take from her so, she
let
them! Robbie shivered for Miss Rowena. All the men lived here on a kind of sufferance!

She had never thought it strange in her life before, having no land or possessions herself—Reids and Swan-sons had never become planters—but now she did. It was as if the women had exacted the place, the land, for something—for something they had had to give. Then, so as to be all gracious and noble, they had let it out of their hands—with a play of the reins—to the men....

She remembered all at once a picture of some old-time Fairchild lady down at the Grove. On a picnic, playing, Robbie had got wet in the river and Miss Jim Allen had not been able to rush her into the house fast enough, to get the river off her—she had put her in a little parlor to sit on a plaid while she readied a bedroom that couldn't have helped but look as perfect as possible already—and looking down at Robbie was the old-time Fairchild lady with the look on her face. It was obviously turned upon her husband, upon a Fairchild, and it was condemning. Robbie had been caught staring up at it (she still knew the outside of the Fairchild houses better than the inside) when Miss Jim Allen ran back in. "That's Mary Shannon," Miss Jim Allen had said, as though she told her the name of a star, like Venus, so generally known that only poor little visitors come up from holes in the river bank would need to be told. "That's Mary Shannon when she came to the wilderness."

And of course those women knew what to ask of their men. Adoration, first—but least. Then, small sacrifice by small sacrifice, the little pieces of the whole body! Robbie, with the sun on her head, could scream to see the thousand little polite expectations in their very smiles of welcome. "He would do anything for me!" they would say, airily and warningly, of a brother, an uncle, a cousin. "Dabney thinks George hung the moon," with a soft glance at George, and so, George, get Dabney the moon! Robbie was not that kind of woman. Maybe she was just as scandalous, but she was born another kind. She did want to ask George for something indeed, but not for the moon—not even for a child; she did not want to, but she had to ask him for something—life waited for it. (Here he lay in a hammock, just waiting for her to walk this whole distance!) What do you ask for when you love? If it was urgent to seek after something, so much did she love George, that that much the less did she know the right answer.

Then, at the head of a railroad trestle, in high heels, fuming and wondering then if she had a child inside her, complaining to him that she worshiped his life, she had tried and been reproved, denied and laughed at, teased. When she jumped up for him to look back at and heed, not knowing how love, anything, might have transformed her, it was in terror that she had held the Fairchilds' own mask in front of her. She cried out for him to come back from his danger as a favor to her. And in his forthright risk of his life for that crazy child, she had seen him thrust it, the
working
of the Fairchild mask, from him, on his face was an elation of throwing it back at her. He reached out for Maureen that demanded not knowing any better....

In Robbie's eyes all the Fairchild women indeed wore a mask. The mask was a pleading mask, a kind more false than a mask of giving and generosity, for they had already got it all—everything that could be given—all solicitude and manly care. Unless—unless nothing was ever enough—and they knew. Unless pleading must go on forever in life, and was no mask, but real, for longer than all other things, for longer than winning and having.

She shaded her eyes and turned looking for one tree. She was so little she could take refuge in an inch of shade. Finally she saw a cotton shed that looked not too far to get to before she dropped in the heat. She had had the foresight to bring a sack of pickles and a box of cakes.