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.
The eagerness with which she was now going to Marmion, entering her real life there with Troy, told her enough—all the cotton in the world was not worth one moment of life! It made her know that nothing could ever defy her enough to make her leave it. How sweet life was, and how well she could hold it, pluck it, eat it, lay her cheek to it—oh, no one else knew. The juice of life and the hot, delighting taste and the fragrance and warmth to the cheek, the mouth. She hated the duel for her grandfather, actively, while the little filly trembled with impatience under her hand and hated being kept standing still. Everybody in the family had nearly forgotten the old duel by now (it was "bad about Marmion," they "abandoned the place") except Dabney, whom it had lately come to horrify. She would not leave Marmion, having once come to it, if there were duels for any cause. What was the reason death could be part of a question about the crops, for instance?
Yes, honor—she had been told when she asked questions as a little girl, Marmion was empty out in the woods because Old Ronald McBane at Old Argyle had not protected his landing where some of the people's cotton for miles around was shipped from his gin; Grandfather, who had a gin too, had accused him of it, had been challenged, called out to pistols on the river bank, had been killed instantly. But both gins went on the same. Dabney had always resisted and pouted at the story when any of the boys told it—when they said "Bang bang!" she covered up her ears and wept, until they comforted her and gave her something for having made her cry. She knew, though—even the surrender of life was the privilege of fieriness in the blood. She felt it in herself, but would anything ever make her tell, ever find it out? Not while she could resist and lament the fact that dear life would surrender itself for anything.
The sun lifted over the trees and struck the face of Marmion; all the tints of cypress began to shine on it, the brightness of age like newness. Her house! And somehow the river always seemed swift here, though it was the same river that passed through Fairchilds under the bridge where the cotton wagons went over as noisily as a child beating a tin pan, and passed the Grove where the aunts sat on the porch and cried for a breeze from it. As a child she would run off here and throw sticks in, just at this spot, convinced that they would tear around the curve where the river looked fast, only to see them gently waltz and drift here and there.... She threw a stick in again, and once more it went slowly. The river was low now. In the spring it would be up over where she was now. The little filly turned with Dabney, willfully, and took the path back toward Shellmound.
"I will never give up anything!" Dabney thought, bending forward and laying her head against the soft neck. "Never! Never! For I am happy, and to give up nothing will prove it. I will never give up anything, never give up Troy—or to Troy!" She thought smilingly of Troy, coming slowly, this was the last day, slowly plodding and figuring, sprung all over with red-gold hairs.
Shelley couldn't stand him because he had hair in his ears. She called him Hairy Ears—Dabney smiled biting her lip at that small torment. The truth was, slowness made any Fairchild frantic, and Dabney delighted now again in Troy's slowness like a kind of alarm. "Papa never gave up anything," she was thinking. "I am the first thing Papa has ever given up. Oh, he hates it!" He would not tell her how he really felt about her going to Troy—nobody would. Nobody had ever told her anything—not anything very true or very bad in life.
Proud and outraged together for the pampering ways of the Fairchilds, she put the little switch to her filly where she had kissed her. The rehearsal was tonight. If they didn't say anything to her now, or try to stop her, it was their last chance.
And let them try! Just now, while they never guessed, she had seen Marmion—the magnificent temple-like, castle-like house, with the pillars springing naked from the ground, and the lookout tower, and twenty-five rooms, and inside, the wonderful free-standing stair—the chandelier, chaliced, golden in light, like the stamen in the lily down-hanging. The garden—the playhouse—the maze—they had all been before her eyes when she was all by herself, even her own boat landing!
Then after she got in and was living there married, she wanted it to rain, rain—sound on the roof like fall, like spring, bend the trees and the lightning to glare and show them trembling, lifted,
bent, come-alive, the way trees looked from windows during storms at night. She wanted this to be outside, and inside herself, sitting in dignity with her cheek on her hand.
She rode by the thick woods where the whirlpool lay, and something made her get off her horse and creep to the bank and look in—she almost never did, it was so creepy and scary. This was a last chance to look before her wedding. She parted the thonged vines of the wild grapes, thick as legs, and looked in. There it was. She gazed feasting her fear on the dark, vaguely stirring water.
There were more eyes than hers here—frog eyes—snake eyes? She listened to the silence and then heard it stir, churn, churning in the early morning. She saw how the snakes were turning and moving in the water, passing across each other just below the surface, and now and then a head horridly sticking up. The vines and the cypress roots twisted and grew together on the shore and in the water more thickly than any roots should grow, gray and red, and some roots too moved and floated like hair. On the other side, a turtle on a root opened its mouth and put its tongue out. And the whirlpool itself—could you doubt it? Doubt all the stories since childhood of people white and black who had been drowned there, people that were dared to swim in this place, and of boats that would venture to the center of the pool and begin to go around and everybody fall out and go to the bottom, the boat to disappear? A beginning of vertigo seized her, until she felt herself leaning, leaning toward the whirlpool.
But she was never as frightened of it as the boys were. She looked in while she counted to a hundred, and then ran. Behind her the little filly had been stamping her foot. She climbed on her and kissed her neck, and galloped back into the fields, the Deadening, Far Field, Mound Field, back to Shellmound. When she went under Troy's window she drew the reins a moment and cried out rapidly, tauntingly, all run together like one word,
Wake up, Jacob, day is breaking!
Pea's in the pod and the hoe-cake's baking!
Mary, get your ash-cake done, my love—!
Was he awake? Did he hear? She rode flying home, and began calling "Mama! Roxie! Roxie! Papa!" How hungry she was!
II
"Shelley!" Ellen called at the foot of the stairs.
"Ma'am?" came Shelley's ladylike voice from around several corners in the upper regions. Where on earth was she?
"She's painting her name on her trunk to go to Europe," India said at her mother's feet. She kept her informed about what everybody was doing at all times, which she knew though she herself, as now, might be cutting paper dolls out of the Delineator on the hall floor with Laura and Roxie's little Sudie; she seemed truly the only one who knew.
"I want you to go to the store for me and get me a spool of strong string, for Howard's altar!" called Ellen in a patiently high voice. "The pony cart's out front now, while it's still a little cool! And go to Brunswick-town and take Partheny a cup of that broth Roxie's pouring off and tell her if she's over being mindless to come up without fail to help in the kitchen! What else? Oh, my old garnet pin, Shelley! Tell Partheny Miss Ellen wonders if she could think what happened to it—you might try her memory a little! She came up and cooked for your papa's birthday and I had it on my dress. But tell her to be here tomorrow morning with the birds!—You can take Laura and India with you," she added in her normal voice. "Where's Lady Clare?"
"On the joggling board, joggling," said India.
"Yes'm, Mama! In a minute," called Shelley. "I'm all covered with black!"
"Oh, gracious," called Ellen perfunctorily. "Mind you invite Partheny to the wedding! She loves Dabney!"
Tempe was coming in the side door, they had heard her exclaiming in the yard. ("Poor Tempe, if there's a flower, she wants it!" Primrose always sighed.)
"Did the mosquitoes get you, Tempe?"
"I'm peppered!"
"We can go see Partheny without Shelley," said India, her face close to Laura's. She poked her scissors at Laura's heart. "We'll go with each other."
"Let me at the phone," said Aunt Tempe. "Pinck's going to have to get me some little fluted-paper salted-nut holders! It occurred to me in the garden—twelve silver ones won't go anywhere. I'll catch him at the Peabody!"
Nothing tired Ellen herself more than the spectacle of marital bullying, but it was the breath of life to Tempe, spectacle and all. She sailed among the children to the telephone, while little India smiled in the wake of her pleasure in demanding one more little old thing from Pinck.
"Oh, Mama," cried Shelley, running down the stairs into her mother's arms, as though something dreadful had that moment happened. "It's the only pin you ever really had. I don't count your sunburst! Oh, Mama, and it's lost!"
"Tragedy," remarked Tempe, turning from Pinck's voice at the receiver, "I'm surprised more things aren't lost around here than there are."
"Why, Shelley," Ellen said in surprise. "You mustn't start taking things that hard."
"Maybe I lost it!" said Shelley.
"Straighten your shoulders, dear. Just ask Partheny—she won't know anything, very likely. It's only a pin. Don't forget the string. Don't let the children go off without you. Oh, and bring Ranny back! Battle set his heart on getting Ranny's hair cut to show a little of his ears, so they won't think he's a girl at the wedding, and nobody with him but Tippy."
"Let's sneak off from Shelley," said India to Laura. They threw down their scissors and paper dolls and trailed toward the door.
George walked through, and the children all swept around him. Tempe took hold of him. Caught in their momentum, he looked out at Ellen perfectly still, as if from a train window.
"No, I'm going to the Grove and have dinner with Jim Allen and Primrose," he was saying.
"Today?" Tempe exclaimed.
"Has the wedding anything to do with today? That's tomorrow." He teased Tempe, but went out the front door. Through the side lights Ellen saw him stretch out in the porch hammock and lie prone as if asleep when Troy rode Isabelle up in the yard and called "Hi, George!" with his arm raised in that rather triumphant way. She waited a moment watching him, feeling that there was something radical in George, or that some devastating inner picture of their unnecessary ado would flash before his vision now and then. There was a kind of ascetic streak in him, even, she felt timidly. Left to himself, he might not ask for anything of any of them—not necessarily.... No, she could not think that for more than a moment. He was too good. He would not wish them any way but the way they were. But she, herself, wished they could all be a little different on occasion, more aware of one another when they were all so close. They should know of one another's rebellions, consider them. Why, children and all rebelled!
Laura and India were hunching down the steps like dwarfs together under the big black umbrella that completely obliterated their shadows down to their trotting feet.
"Wait-wait-wait!" cried Shelley. She ran flying out the door lacing her fresh middy, and tying it with the impatient knot of a tomboy. Her hair from under her tight headband blew straight back in the wind. Her cheeks were both smudged with shiny black lacquer. She pretended not to see Uncle George, for she did not beg him to come or tell him good-bye.
"I had to finish my name," she said to India and Laura. "Looks like you all could wait that long."
"She wants her name in black. When will it be ready?" cried India.
"It won't be dry until eleven o'clock tonight," said Shelley. "Do I smell?"
"Uh-huh."
She dipped between them and took the umbrella up to her height and tilted it stylishly. Three pairs of leg shadows jiggled on the grass. Above them, Roy was sitting on the roof and singing, "'My name is Samuel Hall and I hate you one and all, damn your eyes!'"
"Just don't look at him and he'll come down," said Shelley. "Now you can come with me, but don't touch me." They sat in the pony cart and Shelley drove Tiny down the road. India and Laura carefully held the umbrella over her and made faces behind her back. "I'm still full of breakfast," Laura ventured to say.
No one on the street
of Fairchilds spoke any way but beautifully-mannered to Shelley, all the men promptly swept off their hats. No one told her her face was dirty, and India was waiting until they got home to make her look in the glass. They drove up and down the street three times and had Coca Colas, speaking to people over and over, with all the men's hats going up and down. India cried joyously, "Hi, Miss Thracia! Hi, Miss Mayo!—Oh, I'm so lonesome at Shellmound!" she sighed to Laura. "Miss Mayo has an oil painting that winks its eye."
Laura remembered Fairchilds—the notice nailed to the post-office wall warning people not to be defrauded by the Spanish swindle, the blind man standing up singing with his face to the Yazoo River, the sign, "Utmost Solitude," in Gothic letters over the door of a lady dying with T. B., who would not let Dr. Murdoch in. When they went in the post office, she saw the notice still there—and so the swindle was still going on—and recognized the cabinet photographs of the postmistress's family sitting around her ledge, and the framed one hanging over the window. At the barber shop they stopped and laughed. All wrapped up, Ranny was getting his hair cut, biting his lip. Sue Ellen's little girl Tippy was holding his hand, and swinging her foot. They threw him an encouraging kiss.
They passed the store by.
"Later," said Shelley.
***