The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (87 page)

Now Miss Hattie dipped out of sight into a gully.

"Miss Hattie's making a beeline, ain't she," said Dewey's father. "Look at her go. Let's you and me take us a plain
path.
"

But as they came near the river in a little while, Dewey pointed his finger. Fairly close, through the trees, they saw a big strong purse with a handle on it like a suitcase, set down on the winter leaves. Another quiet step and they could see Miss Hattie. There on the ground, with her knees drawn up the least bit, skirt to her ankles, coat spread around her like a rug, hat over her brow, steel glasses in her hand, sat Miss Hattie Purcell, bringing rain. She did not even see them.

Miss Hattie brought rain by sitting a vigil of the necessary duration beside the nearest body of water, as everybody knew. She made no more sound at it than a man fishing. But something about the way Miss Hattie's comfort shoes showed their tips below her skirt and carried a dust of the dry woods on them made her look as though she'd be there forever: longer than they would.

His father made a sign to Dewey, and they got around Miss Hattie there and went on.

"This is where I had in mind the whole time," he said.

It was where there was an old, unrailed, concrete bridge across the Little Muscadine. A good jump—an impossible jump—separated the bridge from land, for the Old Road—overgrown, but still coming through the trees this far—fell away into a sandy ravine when it got to the river. The bridge stood out there high on its single foot, like a table in the water.

There was a sign, "Cross at Own Risk," and a plank limber as a hammock laid across to the bridge floor. Dewey ran the plank, ran the bridge's length, and gave a cry—it was an island.

The bearded trees hung in a ring around it all, the Little Muscadine without a sound threaded through the sand among fallen trees, and the two fishermen sat on the bridge, halfway across, baited their hooks from the can of worms taken out of a pocket, and hung their poles over the side.

They didn't catch anything, sure enough.

About noon, Dewey and his father stopped fishing and went into a lunch of biscuits and jelly the father took out of another pocket.

"This bridge don't belong to nobody," his father said, then. "It's just going begging. It's a wonder somebody don't stretch a tent over this good floor and live here, high and dry. You could have it clean to yourself. Know you could?"

"Me?" asked Dewey.

His father faintly smiled and ate a biscuit before he said, "You'd have to ask your ma about it first."

"There's another one!" said Dewey.

Another lady had dared to invade this place. Over the water and through the trees, on the same side of the river they'd come from, her face shone clear as a lantern light in nighttime. She'd found them.

"Blackie?" she called, and a white arm was lifted too. The sound was like the dove-call of April or May, and it carried as unsurely as something she had tried to throw them across the airy distance.

Blackie was his father's name, but he didn't answer. He sat just as he was, out in the open of the bridge, both knees pointed up blue, a biscuit with a bite gone out of it in his hand.

Then the lady turned around and disappeared into the trees.

Dewey could easily think she had gone off to die. Or if she hadn't, she would have had to die there. It was such a complaint she sent over, it was so sorrowful. And about what but death would ladies, anywhere, ever speak with such soft voices—then turn and run? Before she'd gone, the lady's face had been white and still as magic behind the trembling willow boughs that were the only bright-touched thing.

"I think she's gone," said Dewey, getting to his feet.

Turtles now lay on logs sticking up out of the low water, with their small heads raised. An old log was papped with baby turtles. Dewey counted fourteen, seven up one side and seven down the other. Just waiting for rain, said his father. On a giant log was a giant turtle, gray-tailed, the size of a dishpan, set at a laughable angle there, safe from everybody and everything.

With lunch over, they still didn't catch anything. And then the lady looked through the willow boughs again, in nearly the same place. She was giving them another chance.

She cupped her hands to her silent lips. She meant "Blackie!"

"Blackie!" There it was.

"You hold still," said his father. "She ain't calling you."

Nobody could hold so still as a man named Blackie.

That mysterious lady never breathed anything but the one word, and so softly then that it was all the word could do to travel over the water; still his father never said anything back, until she disappeared. Then he said, "Blackie yourself."

He didn't even bait his hook or say any longer what he would do to the fish if they didn't hurry up and change their minds. Yet when nothing came up on the hook, he looked down at his own son like a stranger cast away on this bridge from the long ago, before it got cut off from land.

Dewey baited his hook, and the first thing he knew he'd caught a fish.

"What is it, what is it?" he shouted.

"You got you a little goggle-eye there, son."

Dewey, dancing with it—it was six inches long and jumping on the hook—hugged his father's neck and said, "Well—ready to go?"

"No ... Best not to stay either too long or too little-bit. I favor tarrying awhile," said his father.

Dewey sat back down, and gazed up at his father's solemn side-face—then followed the look his father shot across the river like a fishing line of great length, one that took hold.

Across the river the lady looked out for the third time. She was almost out of the willows now, on the sand. She put the little shells of her hands up to her throat. What did that mean? It was the way she'd pull her collar together if she'd been given a coat around her. It was about to rain. She knew as well as they did that people were looking at her hard; but she must not feel it, Dewey felt, or surely people would have to draw their looks away, and not fasten her there. She didn't have even one word to say, this time.

The bay tree that began moving and sighing over her head was the tall slender one Dewey had picked as his marker. With its head in a stroke of sun, it nodded like a silver flower. There was a little gentle thunder, and Dewey knew that her eyes shut, as well as he would know even in his sleep when his mother put down the windows in their house if a rain was coming. That way, she stood there and waited. And Dewey's father—whose sweat Dewey took a deep breath of as he stood up beside him—believed that the one
that
lady waited for was never coming over the bridge to her side, any more than she would come to his.

Then, with a little sound like a mouse somewhere in the world, a scratch, then a patter like many mice racing—and then at last the splash on Dewey's cheek—it simply began raining. Dewey looked all around—the river was dancing.

"Run now, son! Run for cover! It's fixing to pour down! I'll be right behind you!" shouted his father, running right past him and then jumping over the side of the bridge. Arms and legs spread wide as surprise itself, he did a grand leap to the sand. But instead of sheltering under the bridge, he kept going, and was running up the bank now, toward Royals. Dewey resigned himself to go the same way. As for the lady, if she was still where they left her, about to disappear perhaps, she was getting wet.

They ran under the sounding trees and vines. It came down in earnest, feeling warm and cool together, a real spring shower.

"Trot under here!" called a pre-emptory voice.

"Miss Hattie! Forgot she was anywhere near," said Dewey's father, falling back. "Now we got to be nice to
her.
"

"Good evening, Lavelle."

At that name, Dewey fell back, but his father went on. Maybe he was getting used to being called, today, and it didn't make any difference what name he got, by now.

Something as big as a sail came out through the brambles.

"Did you hear me?" said Miss Hattie—there she stood. "Get you both under this umbrella. I'm going straight back to town, and I'll take you with me. Can't take your fishing poles, unless you drag'em."

"Yes'm," they said, and got under.

Starting forward, Miss Hattie held her own umbrella, a man with her or not, branches of trees coming or not, and the harder the rain fell the more energetically she held to the handle. There were little cowlicks of damp standing up all around the black fur of her collar. Her spectacles were on her nose, and both windows had drops all over them like pearls. Miss Hattie's coat tapered up like one tent, and the umbrella spread down like another one. They marched abreast or single file, as the lay of the land allowed, but always politely close together under the umbrella, either despising paths or taking a path so fragrant and newly slick it didn't seem familiar. But there was an almost forgotten landmark of early morning, boarded twin towers of a colored church, set back closet-like in the hanging moss. Dewey thought he knew where he was. Suddenly frogs from everywhere let loose on the world, as if they'd been wound up.

In no time, Miss Hattie brought them to the edge of the woods. Next they were at the gravel road and walking down the middle of it. The turn was coming where Royals could be seen spread out from Baptist church to schoolhouse.

Dewey, keeping watch around Miss Hattie's skirt, saw the lady appear in the distance behind them, running like a ghost across the road in the shining rain—shining, for the sun had looked through.

"The Devil is beating his wife," said Miss Hattie in a professional voice.

There ran the figure that the rain sheathed in a spinning cocoon of light—as if it ran in peril. It was cutting across Mr. Jep Royal's yard, where the Royals were all sitting inside the house and some cows as black as blackbirds came close and watched her go.

"Look at that, to the side," said Miss Hattie suddenly. "Who's that, young eyes?"

Dewey looked shyly under her forward sleeve and asked his father, "Reckon it's the lady?"

"Well,
call
her," said Miss Hattie. "Whoever she is, she can trot under this umbrella just as easy as we can. It's good size."

"La-dy!"

That was Dewey, hollering.

They stood and waited for the lady to come across the pasture, though his father looked very black, trapped under the umbrella. Had Miss Hattie looked at him, that showed what his name was and how he got it, looking like thunder.

But the lady, now opposite, in a whole field of falling light, was all but standing still. Starting here, starting there, wavering, retreating, she made no headway at all. Then abruptly she disappeared into the Royals' pear orchard—this time for good.

"Maybe somebody new has escaped from the lunatic asylum," said Miss Hattie. "March."

On they went in the rain.

Opal Purcell slipped sideways through the elderberry bushes at the creek bank, with both hands laid, like a hat, on top of her head, and waited for them.

"Why, it's only my own niece," said Miss Hattie. "Trot under here, Opal. How do you like this rain?"

"Hey, Aunt Hat. Hey," said Opal to Dewey.

She was grown. Sometimes she waited on people in the Seed & Feed. She was plump as ever. She didn't look far enough around her aunt to speak to his father.

Miss Hattie touched Opal on the head. "Has it rained that much?" she said in a gratified way.

"I thought I saw you in the post office, Aunt Hat," objected Opal.

"I expect you did. I had the mail to tie up. I'm a fast worker when the case demands."

They were all compelled, of course, to keep up with Miss Hattie and stay with her and be company all the way back to town. Her black cotton umbrella lacked very little of being big enough for four, but it lacked some. Dewey gave Opal his place.

He marched ahead of them, still in step with his father, but out in the open rain, with his fish now let up high on its pole behind him. He felt the welcome plastering down of his hair on his forehead, and the relentless way the raindrops hit and bounced on him.

Opal Purcell had a look, to Dewey, as if she didn't know whether she was getting wet or not. It was his father's fishing look. And Miss Hattie's rainmaking look. He was the only one—out here in the rain itself—that didn't have it.

Like a pretty lady's hand, to tilt his face up a little and make him smile, deep satisfaction, almost love came down and touched him.

"Miss Hattie," he turned walking and said over his shoulder, "I caught me a goggle-eye perch back yonder, see him? I wish I could give him to you—for your supper!"

"You good and wet, honey?" she said back, marching there in the middle.

The brightest thing in Royals—rain was the loudest, on all the tin roofs—was the empty school bus drawn up under the shed of the filling station. The movie house, high up on its posts, was magnesia-bottle blue. Three red hens waited on the porch. Dewey's and Opal's eyes together looked out of their corners at the "Coming Saturday" poster of the charging white horse. But Miss Hattie didn't dismiss them at the movie house.

They passed the Baptist church getting red as a rose, and the Methodist church getting streaky. In the middle of the first crossing, the water tank stood and they walked under; water from its bottom, black and cold as ice, fell a drop for each head as always. And they passed along the gin, which alone would sleep the spring out. All around were the well-known ditches and little gullies; there were the chinaberry trees, and some Negroes and some dogs underneath them; but it all looked like some different place to Dewey—not Royals. There was a line of faces under the roof of the long store porch, but they looked, white and black, like the faces of new people. Nevertheless, all spoke to Miss Hattie, Blackie, Opal, and Dewey by name; and from their umbrella—out in the middle of the road, where it was coming down hardest—Miss Hattie did the speaking back.

"It's the beginning!" she called. "I'd a heap rather see it come this way than in torrents!"

"We're real proud of you, Miss Hattie!"

"You're still a credit to Royals, Miss Hattie!"