Delta Wedding

  But Aunt Ellen, though she was late for everything, was now running out the screen door with open arms. She was the mother of them all. Something fell behind her, her apron, as she came, and she was as breathless as any of her children. Now she knelt and held Laura very firmly. "Laura—poor little motherless girl," she said. When Laura lifted her head, she kissed her. She sent India for a wringing-wet cloth.

  Laura put her head on Aunt Ellen's shoulder and sank her teeth in the thick Irish lace on the collar of her white voile dress which smelled like sweet peas. She hugged her, and touched her forehead, the steady head held so near to hers with its flying soft hair and its erect bearing of gentle, explicit, but unfathomed alarm. With the cool on her face, she could see clearer and clearer, though it was almost dark now, the pearl-edged side comb so hazardously bringing up the strands of Aunt Ellen's dark hair. She let her go, and if she could she would have smoothed and patted her aunt's hair and cleared the part with her own fingers, and said, "Aunt Ellen, you must never mind!" But of course she couldn't.

  Then she jumped up and ran after Orrin into the house, beating India to the table.

  "Where's Uncle George?" Laura asked, looking from Uncle Battle around to everybody at the long, broad table. At suppertime, since she had come, she was expecting to see everybody gathered; but Uncle George and his wife, Aunt Robbie, would not drive in from Memphis until tomorrow; Aunt Tempe and her husband Uncle Pinck Summers and their daughter Mary Denis's little girl, Lady Clare Buchanan, were not driving over from Inverness until Mary Denis had her baby; and the two aunts from the Grove, Aunt Primrose and Aunt Jim Allen, had not come up to supper tonight. There was just Uncle Battle's and Aunt Ellen's family of children at the table—besides of course the two great-aunts, Great-Aunt Shannon and Great-Aunt Mac, and Cousin Maureen who lived here with them, and only one visitor, Dabney's best friend, Mary Lamar Mackey of Lookback Plantation—it was she who played the piano.

  "Skeeta! Next!" called Uncle Battle resoundingly, fixing his eye on Laura. She passed her plate up to him. Uncle Battle, her mother's brother, with his corrugated brow, his planter's boots creaking under the table when he stood to carve the turkeys, was so tremendous that he always called children "Skeeta." His thick fair hair over his bulging brow had been combed with water before he came to the table, exactly like Orrin's, Roy's, Little Battle's, and Ranny's. As his eye roved over them, Laura remembered that he had broken every child at the table now from being left-handed. Laura was ever hopeful that she would see Uncle Battle the Fire-eater take up some fire and eat it, and thought it would be some night at supper.

  "How Annie Laurie would have loved this very plate!" Uncle Battle said softly just now, holding up Laura's serving. "Breast, gizzard, and wing! Pass it, boy."

  Even cutting up the turkeys at the head of his table, he was a rushing, mysterious, very laughing man to have had so many children coming up busy too, and he could put on a tender, irresponsible air, as if he were asking ladies and little girls, "Look at me! What can I do? Such a thing it all is!", and he meant Life—although he could also mention death and people's absence in an ordinary way. It was his habit to drive quickly off from the house at any time of the day or night—in a buggy or a car now. Automobiles had come in just as Uncle Battle got too heavy to ride his horse. He rode out to see work done or "trouble" helped; sometimes "trouble" came at night. When Negroes clear to Greenwood cut each other up, it was well known that it took Uncle Battle to protect them from the sheriff or prevail on a bad one to come out and surrender.

  "Now eat it all!" Uncle Battle called to her as the plate reached her. But it was a joke, his giving her the gizzard, she saw, for it was her mother that loved it and she could not stand that piece of turkey. She did not dare tell him what he knew.

  "Where is Dabney?" she asked, for it was Dabney they had been talking about ever since they sat down to the table, and her place by her father was empty.

  "She'll be down directly," said Aunt Ellen. "She's going to be married, you know, Laura."

  "Tonight?" asked Laura.

  "Oh!" groaned Uncle Battle. "Oh! Oh!" He always groaned three times.

  "Where is her husband now?" Laura asked.

  "Now don't, Battle," said Aunt Ellen anxiously. "Laura naturally wants to know how soon Dabney will marry Troy. Not till Saturday, dear."

  "This is only Monday," Laura told her uncle consolingly.

  "Oh, Papa's really proud of Dabney, no matter how he groans, because she won't wait till cotton picking's over," said Shelley. She was sitting beside Laura, and looked so seriously even at her, that the black grosgrain ribbon crossing her forehead almost indented it.

  "I am, am I?" said Battle. "Suppose you help your mother serve the pickled peaches at your end."

  When Laura looked at her plate, the gizzard was gone. She almost jumped to her feet—she almost cried to think of all that had happened to her. Next she was afraid she had eaten that bite without thinking. But then she saw Great-Aunt Shannon calmly eating the gizzard, on the other side of her. She had stolen it—Great-Aunt Shannon, who would talk conversationally with Uncle Denis and Aunt Rowena and Great-Uncle George, who had all died no telling how long ago, that she thought were at the table with her. But just now, after eating a little bit of something, the gizzard and a biscuit or so—"No more than a bird!" they protested—she was escorted, by Orrin, up to bed without saying a word. Great-Aunt Mac glared after her; Great-Aunt Mac was not dead at all. "Now be ashamed of yourself!" she called after her. "For starving yourself!"

  The boys all looked at each other, and even unwillingly, they let smiles break out on their faces. The four boys were all ages—Orrin older than Laura, Roy, Little Battle, and Ranny younger—and constantly seeking one another, even at the table with their eyes, seeking the girls only for their audience when they hadn't one another. They were always rushing, chasing, flying, getting hurt—only eating and the knot of their napkins could keep them in chairs. All their knickerbockers, and Ranny's rompers, had fresh holes for Aunt Ellen in both knees every evening. They ate turkey until they bit their fingers and cried "Ouch!" They were so filled with their energy that once when Laura saw some old map on the wall, with the blowing winds in the corners, mischievous-eyed and round-cheeked, blowing the ships and dolphins around Scotland, Laura had asked her mother if they were India's four brothers. She loved them dearly. It was strange that it was India who had to be Laura's favorite cousin, since she would have given anything if the boy cousins would let her love them most. Of course she expected them to fly from her side like birds, and light on the joggling board, as they had done when she arrived, and to edge her off when she climbed up with them. That changed nothing.

  The boys were only like all the Fairchilds, but it was the boys and the men that defined that family always. All the girls knew it. When she looked at the boys and the men Laura was without words but she knew that company like a dream that comes back again and again, each aspect familiar and longing not to be forgotten. Great-Great-Uncle George on his horse, in his portrait in the parlor—the one who had been murdered by the robbers on the Natchez Trace and buried, horse, bridle, himself, and all, on his way to the wilderness to be near Great-Great-Grandfather—even he, she had learned by looking up at him, had the family trait of quick, upturning smiles, instant comprehension of the smallest eddy of life in the current of the day, which would surely be entered in a kind of reckless pleasure. This pleasure either the young men copied from the older ones or the older ones always kept. The grown people, like the children, looked with kindling eyes at all turmoil, expecting delight for themselves and for you. They were shocked only at disappointment.

  But boys and men, girls and ladies all, the old and the young of the Delta kin—even the dead and the living, for Aunt Shannon—were alike—no gap opened between them. Laura sat among them with her eyes wide. At any moment she might expose her ignorance—at any moment she might learn everything.

  All the Fairchilds in the Delta looked alike—Little
Battle, now, pushing his bobbed hair behind his ears before he took up a fresh drumstick, looked exactly like Dabney the way she would think at the window. They all had a fleetness about them, though they were tall, solid people with "Scotch legs"—a neatness that was actually a readiness for gaieties and departures, a distraction that was endearing as a lack of burdens. Laura felt their quality, their being, in the degree that they were portentous to her. For Laura found them all portentous—all except Aunt Ellen, who had only married into the family—Uncle George more than Uncle Battle for some reason, Dabney more than Shelley.

  Without a primary beauty, with only a fairness of color (a thin-skinnedness, really) and an ease in the body, they had a demurring, gray-eyed way about them that turned out to be halfway mocking—for these cousins were the sensations of life and they knew it. (Why didn't Uncle George come on tonight—the best loved? Why wasn't Dabney on time to supper—the bride?) Things waited for them to appear, laughing to one another and amazed, in order to happen. They were forever, by luck or intuition, opening doors, discovering things, little or cherished things, running pell-mell down the stairs to meet people, ready to depart for vague and spontaneous occasions. Though everything came to Shellmound to them. All the girls got serenaded in the summertime—though Shelley last summer had said it pained her for Dabney to listen that way. They were never too busy for anything, they were generously and almost seriously of the moment: the past (even Laura's arrival today was past now) was a private, dull matter that would be forgotten except by aunts.

  Laura from her earliest memory had heard how they "never seemed to change at all." That was the way her mother, who had been away from them down in Jackson where they would be hard to believe, could brag on them without seeming to. And yet Laura could see that they changed every moment. The outside did not change but the inside did; an iridescent life was busy within and under each alikeness. Laughter at something went over the table; Laura found herself with a picture in her mind of a great bowerlike cage full of tropical birds her father had shown her in a zoo in a city—the sparkle of motion was like a rainbow, while it was the very thing that broke your heart, for the birds that flew were caged all the time and could not fly out. The Fairchilds' movements were quick and on the instant, and that made you wonder, are they free? Laura was certain that they were compelled—their favorite word. Flying against the bad things happening, they kissed you in rushes of tenderness. Maybe their delight was part of their beauty, its flicker as it went by, and their kissing of not only you but everybody in a room was a kind of spectacle, an outward thing. But when they looked at you with their lighted eyes, picked you out in a room for a glance, waiting for you to say something in admiration or "conceit," to ask the smallest favor, of any of them you chose, and so to commit yourself forever—you could never question them again, you trusted them, that nothing more inward preoccupied them, for you adored them, and only wanted to be here with them, to be let run toward them. They are all as sweet as Ranny, she thought—all sweet right down to Ranny—Ranny being four and the youngest she could see at her end of the table, now angelically asleep in his chair with a little wishbone in his fist.

  Just as Roxie was about to clear the table, Dabney gently but distractedly came in—dressed in blue, drying tears from her eyes, and murmuring to her mother as she passed her chair, "Oh, Mama, that was just because my brain isn't working; why did you bring up your children with faulty brains?"

  "She ought to have drowned you when you were little," said Uncle Battle, and this was their extravagant way of talk. "Sit down, I saved you a wishbone and a heart besides what poor pickings is left."

  "Run some more biscuit in the oven, Roxie," Ellen said. "I think too you'd better bring Miss Dabney a little ham, there's such a dearth of turkey to tempt her."

  "Say it again, Mama," said Ranny, opening his eyes. Then he smiled at Dabney.

  "What were you crying about—the worry you're bringing down on your father?" Battle said.

  Holding out her plate for her father to serve (she sat close by him, at his right), Dabney smiled too, and waited. How beautiful she was—all flushed and knowing. Now they would tease her. An only child, Laura found teasing the thing she kept forgetting about the Delta cousins from on‹ summer to the next. Uncle Battle might put the heart on Dabney's plate yet, knowing she could not bear to look at the heart; though Dabney would know what to do. Was it possible that it was because they loved one another so, that it made them set little traps to catch one another? They looked with shining eyes upon their kin, and all their abundance of love, as if it were a devilment, was made reckless and inspired or was belittled in fun, though never, so far, was it said out. They had never told Laura they loved her.

  She sighed. "Where's Aunt Primrose and Aunt Jim Allen?"

  "Why don't you ask any questions about who's here?" said India.

  "They said I had to come see them and tell them first," said Dabney, beginning to eat hungrily. "Touchy, touchy."

  "I'm touchy too," said Uncle Battle.

  "Oh, Laura!" cried Dabney delightedly. "I didn't know you'd got here! Why, honey!" She flew around the table and kissed her.

  "I came to your wedding," said Laura, casting pleased, shy glances all around.

  "Oh, Laura, you want me to marry Troy, don't you? You approve, don't you?"

  "Yes," said Laura. "I approve, Dabney!"

  "You be in my wedding! You be a flower girl!"

  "I can't," said Laura helplessly. "My mother died."

  "Oh," cried Dabney, as if Laura had slapped her, running away from her and back to her place at the table, hiding her face. "It's just so hard, everything's just so hard...."

  "Here's your little ham, Miss Dab," said Roxie, coming in. "Do you good."

  "Oh, Roxie, even you. No one will ever believe me, that I just can't swallow until Saturday. There's no use trying any more."

  "You can bring the ice cream and cake then, Roxie," Aunt Ellen said. "It's Georgie's favorite cake, I do wish they could be here a day sooner!"

  They sat sighing, eating cake, drinking coffee. The throb of the compress had never stopped. Laura could feel it now in the handle of her cup, the noiseless vibration that trembled in the best china, was within it.

  ***

  It was hard to ever quite leave the dining room after supper. It would be still faintly day, and not much cooler. They all still sat, until the baby, who had hung teasing crumbs and coffee out of them from her highchair ("Mama, let Bluet eat at the table!") wilted over like a little flower in her kimono with the butterfly sleeves and was kissed all around and carried up in flushed sleep in Dabney's overeager arms.

  The table was in the middle of the large room, and there was little tendency to leave even that. But besides the old walnut-and-cane chairs (Great-Grandfather made them) there were easy chairs covered with cotton in a faded peony pattern, and rockers for the two great-aunts, sewing stands and fire shields beside them, all near the watery-green tile hearth. A spready fern stood in front of the grate in summertime, with a cricket in it now, that nobody could do anything about. Along the wall the china closets reflected the windows, except for one visible shelf where some shell-pattern candlesticks shone, and the Port Gibson epergne, a fan of Apostle spoons, and the silver sugar basket with the pierce-work in it and its old cracked purplish glass lining. At the other end of the room the Victrola stood like a big morning-glory and there, laid with somebody's game, was the card table Great-Grandfather also made out of his walnut trees when he cut his way in to the Yazoo wilderness. A long ornate rattan settee, upslanting at the ends, with a steep scrolled back, was in the bay alcove. In the half-moon of space behind it were marble pedestals and wicker stands each holding a fern of advanced size or a little rooted cutting, sometimes in bloom. Overhead, over the loaded plate rails, were square oil paintings of splitmelons and cut flowers by Aunt Mashula as a young girl.

  This evening there was nobody but Uncle Battle to take cherry bounce, and hating anything alone he woul
d not have it but with a groan sat down and took Bluet's doll out of his chair onto his knee. Dabney wandered in, Aunt Ellen wandered out, Mary Lamar Mackey wandered across the hall into the music room and began to play softly to herself, but nobody else, Great-Aunt Mac or anybody, could be persuaded to stir. Maureen, gentle now, sat on a stool and listened, listened for the cricket. In a little while Dabney and Shelley and Mary Lamar would have to go dress for a dance in Glen Alan, but now the two sisters stretched on the settee, each with her head at an elevated end and her stockinged feet in her sister's hair. Catching the light like drops of a waterfall the fronds of a maidenhair fern hung from a dark tub over them.

  "Fan us, fan us, India," said Dabney, though the big overhead fan turned too.

  "Ranny will fan you, before he goes to bed," India said, and Ranny came radiantly forward with Great-Aunt Shannon's palmetto.

  "Ho hum," said Dabney. "You'd think I had nothing to do. I wonder if Troy is in from the fields."

  "There's one speck of light left," said Shelley.

  "Cousin Laura," said Orrin kindly, looking up from his book at her. He leaned on the table. "You weren't here, but Uncle George and Maureen nearly got killed."

  "Uncle George?" Laura alone had not reclined; she stood looking into the big mirror over the sideboard which reflected the whole roomful of cousins.

  "Ranny, you fan too hard. They nearly let the Yellow Dog run over them on the Dry Creek trestle." Dabney softly laughed from her prone position.

  India moaned from the chair she was leaning over to read a book on the floor.

  "It was almost a tragedy," said Shelley. She lifted up her head, then let it fall back.