Delta Wedding

  "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 litt
le 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."

  In the music room there was a stir as if Lady Clare roused out of some trance. "Did you hear me playing 'Country Gardens,' Aunt Ellen?" she cried, running in.

  "Yes, dear, I was listening out in the hall," Ellen said. "You're a big strong girl, rounding out a little, I believe."

  "I'm bigger than Laura," said Lady Clare. "I'm going out and turn around in the yard until it makes me drunk and I fall down and crack my head open."

  "Now, Lady Clare—just because you're visiting!" said Aunt Tempe.

  "I'm not going to tell Dabney you know what," said India as she walked out.

  "That's a good girl, honey." Ellen looked at her proudly.

  "She's got so many secrets from me, I'm not going to tell her mine! Maybe I'll tell her years later."

  "Now! Straighten me out," Tempe said to Ellen, leaning not forward, but back.

  "I can't imagine how India finds out things." Ellen was brooding. "It's just like magic."

  "I don't worry about India!"

  Ellen sighed. "I guess not yet.—Well, Dabney's going to marry Troy Flavin, just as we told you, and Robbie has run away from George and he won't say a word or go after her. Not connected, of course, but—"

  "Two things always happen to the Fairchilds at once. Three! Have you forgotten Mary Denis having a baby at Inverness at the very moment all this was descending on you here?"

  "No, I didn't forget," said Ellen. "I reckon there're enough Fairchilds for everything! But we're hoping this trouble of George's will blow over."

  "Blow over! That's Battle's talk, I can hear him now. How, in the world?"

  "Robbie might still come to the wedding."

  "I'd like to see her! She'll get no welcome from me, flighty thing," said Tempe. "Bless George's heart! He lost his Fairchild temper." She smiled.

  "Oh, Tempe, I think he's hurt," Ellen said. "You know George and Battle and all those men can't stand anybody to be ugly and cruel to them!"

  "I know. And how can people hurt George?" Tempe asked. She turned up her soft face with a constricted look that was wonder, and searched Ellen's face.

  "I don't know.... Remember Robbie's the one among us all we don't know very well," Ellen said, and then she faltered as if somehow she had conspired with Tempe's first thought, her surface of curiosity that had stopped her as she came into the room. "Vi'let, bring the sugar!" she called. "It's too late now for cake, isn't it, Tempe?"

  "I don't think so. I know George's headstrong," said Tempe, piteously showing the palm of her little hand. "Nobody knows better than I do—the oldest sister! He's headstrong. Nobody has a bit of influence over him at all! But how can she think she's fit to take him down, Old Man Swanson's granddaughter? I could pull her eyes out this minute."

  "I had led myself to believe they were happy," Ellen said. Vi'let was bringing the sugar on an unnecessarily big silver tray and Ellen watched her treat Tempe very specially and tell her how young and pretty she looked, not like no grandma, and she was going to bring her some of that cake...."We're not telling Dabney about this until the wedding's over," she said, as Tempe sipped her lemonade.

  "Pshaw! If Dabney's old enough to marry the overseer out of her father's fields, she's old enough to know what George and every other man does or is capable of doing. I'll tell her, the next time she dances in here."

  "Tempe," said Ellen softly, "wait. Give Robbie just a little more time!"

  "Robbie? Whose side are you on?"

  "I'm on George's side! And Dabney's side ... George is the sweetest boy in the world, but I think now it's up to Robbie—I think he's left it up to her. Tempe—we don't know—we don't know anything."

  "All I know is Denis would have been in here begging my pardon half an hour ago—if he had yelled out 'That's enough!' like that with no warning, and my palpitations."

  "Plate of cake, Miss Tempe," said Vi'let at her elbow.

  "Here come me and Aunt Primrose!" India cried, singing her warning.

  "Oh, Ellen—did you see how George tracked up your floor? It breaks my heart to see it. After Roxie spent the morning on her knees—now it all has to be done over.—Of course he don't know any better." She and Tempe kissed each other in a deprecatory, sisterly fashion. "He don't mean to. Tempe, we're getting fat. How is Mary Denis today?"

  "Well, Mr. Buchanan thinks she looks 'just dandy!'" said Tempe.

  "Tch!"

  "He wants to raise up a lot of little Yankees in Illinois, regardless."

  "Mary Denis is the prettiest thing that ever went out of the Delta."

  "Have some cake, Primrose."

  "It's a precious baby, too," Tempe sighed. "Looks so much like me, you'd catch your breath. (Oh, Mashu
la's coconut!) And you ought to see little Shannon—she's delighted. She can stamp her foot and say 'Scat!'"

  "Oh, that little thing! I'd give anything if you could have brought her—the baby too!" cried Ellen.

  "There is a limit on what I am able to do," Tempe said, and Ellen as if to make amends said, "Dabney will want to ask you all kinds of things, Tempe! I'm not much use to her, I'm afraid. She cried because the altar rocks—and I couldn't do a thing about it. Howard's banging on it, doing his best—I just wish somebody'd come by."

  "And Battle is as helpless as a child with machinery Well, everybody says Mary Denis's wedding was the most outstanding that has ever occurred in our part of the Delta. I won't say prettiest, because it was planned al fresco and it poured down—drenched the preacher—but it was the most outstanding once we'd moved inside."

  "I remember it was," Ellen said. "Shelley and Dabney had such a good time being flower girls, scampering around. I couldn't come, being about to have—could it have been India?"

  "Ha, ha," gloated India.

  "Mr. Buchanan said he never saw so many cousins in his life, all scattering rose petals."

  "Dabney's going to have shepherdess crooks, Aunt Tempe," said India.

  "Good, good."

  "Have you ever heard of such a thing?" Ellen said, marveling. "They haven't come, though. They're up there in Memphis still. Dabney makes Battle phone every day, the crook people and the cake people, and bless them out, but it doesn't do a bit of good."

  "Let me at the phone," said Tempe, clutching the arms of her chair as though she were held back. "I'll call Pinck immediately and have him go to Memphis and bring the cake and the crooks in his own hands when he comes. Ah, and the flowers, are you sure of those?"

  "We're not sure of anything," Ellen said. "Oh, Tempe, could you? The poor child will soon be beside herself."

  "I couldn't do less."

  "Pinck will wear himself out! But he's so wonderfully smart about everything in Memphis."

  "He ought to be." Aunt Tempe went out to the telephone.