Delta Wedding

  She might go see what the men wanted for dinner. They were gone, except for poor Pinck, but she would go stand at the empty icebox and see if something would come to her. Battle, after having the bell beat on, had addressed a back yard full of Negroes that morning, all sleepy and holding their heads. "This many of you all are going over to Marmion today, right now—start in on it. Men clear off and clear out, women do sweeping—and so forth. Want you all to climb over the whole thing and see what has to be done—I imagine the roof's not worth a thing. Don't you go falling through, and skittering down the stairs, haven't got the time to fool with any broken necks, Miss Dabney wants Marmion now. Take your wagons, shovels, axes, everything—now shoo. Orrin, you go stand over this.—I believe we can do it in three days," he said to Ellen.

  "Three days!"

  "Sure. I could get it done in one day, if I could spare that many Negroes—all but the fine touches!"

  "It is hard on you," she had said, watching him sink groaningly into his hammock.

  "The weather's liable to change any day now," he agreed, shutting his eyes. "Then the rains."

  George had wanted to plunge straight into fishing again, set off for Drowning Lake down the railroad track, and wanted Robbie to go with him—the minute he was out of bed. George—men—expected a resilience in women that exasperated Ellen while she wanted to laugh. Robbie had reached up and rapped him over the head—he stood in his pyjamas in the kitchen casually taking a bacon bone from Roxie's fingers. Robbie made him take her to Greenwood after breakfast, to buy her a little dress and some kind of little hat, saying that then they might fish somewhere, if he had to fish, and it wasn't too late. He would tolerate exactly that treatment, that was what he wanted, and they went off cheerfully together, in Tempe's car.

  Pinchy, passing by, looked at Ellen stupidly. When Pinchy was coming through, she had not looked at her at all, but simply turned up her face, dark-purple like a pansy, that no more saw her nor knew her than a pansy. Now, speaking primly, back in her relationship on the place, she was without any mystery to move her. She was all dressed up in her glittering white.

  "Pinchy! Where are you going, Pinchy?"

  "To church, Miss Ellen," said Pinchy, with a soft, lush smile. "This is Sunday!"

  Sunday! What has come over Aunt Mac? Ellen wondered, stricken. She'll never forgive herself, when she gets to the bank. Or us! We have every one lost track of the day of the week.

  Laura liked to go along for the groceries, because in the Delta all grocery keepers seemed to be Chinese gentlemen. The car moved rapidly through the white fields toward Greenwood. A buzzard hung up in the deeps of sky, as if on a planted fish pole. Not another living creature was in sight.

  "Is it still Shellmound?" she asked, but nobody answered her. Shelley must be thinking. Laura looked with speculation at the pure profile, the flying hair bound at the temples. She had thought Shelley perhaps knew more than anybody in the family, until Dabney's wedding night came, and Shelley was scorned a little, out in the hall—she had heard it.

  She and India had gone to bed in an opened-out cot outside their room, because Dickie Boy Featherstone and Red Boyne had been put in their bed. One of the McLeouds had the place downstairs on the settee, and she thought Uncle Pinck might have stayed where last she saw him, in the hammock out under the stars.

  Shelley had come down the hall barefooted, with her hair down, in her white nightgown. "Oh, Papa," she had said, standing in the door. "How could you keep getting Mama in this predicament?"

  "How's that?" Uncle Battle asked drowsily.

  "You'll catch cold, Shelley, come in out of that hall draft," Aunt Ellen said.

  "I said how could you keep getting Mama in this predicament—again and again?"

  "A predicament?"

  "Like you do."

  "I told you we were going to have another little girl, or boy. It won't be till Christmas," Aunt Ellen said sleepily in the voice she used to India, and Shelley hearing it said, "I'm not India!"

  "Mama, we don't need any more." Shelley gave a reason: "We're perfect the way we are. I couldn't love any more of us."

  "I've heard that before," said Aunt Ellen. "And what would you do without Bluet now?"

  "What do you mean—a predicament?" said Uncle Battle once more.

  "I thought that was what people call it," Shelley faltered. "I think in Virginia—"

  "Maybe they do. And maybe they're right! But it's damn well none of your concern tonight, girlie," said Uncle Battle. "Waking up the house that's just getting to sleep."

  But Shelley hung there as if she had nowhere to go. Robbie and George were sleeping in her room, its door pulled to, and one of Robbie's shoes had been dropped in the hall, as though George had picked her up and carried her in barefooted. This was Dabney's wedding night and the clock was striking. "The gas machine," Shelley tried to say, through the noise. "I'm so sorry, Mama—"

  "Get in out of the draft, Shelley," said Aunt Ellen. "Even on a still night like tonight there's always a draft in that hall. Come in or go out."

  "I'm going," said Shelley.

  "Skedaddle," said her father. "Come kiss me."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You've got a bed."

  "I can see you shivering right through your nightgown—standing with your back to the moon," said Aunt Ellen reproachfully, and Shelley folded her arms across herself and ran out on tiptoe.

  "I hear people!" called Bluet from the sleeping porch. "I hear fairies and elves and gnomes! I hear pretty little babies fixing to dance!"

  "Lie back down, Bluet!" yelled her father from his bed. "Go back to sleep or I'm coming to break your neck!"

  "Are they going to dance by the light of the moon?" Bluet softly called a very subdued question.

  "Yes, they are" Ranny could be heard answering her in an aerial voice.

  "I'm going to move to a raft on the river where I can sleep!" shouted Orrin—though it sounded a bit like Little Battle too.

  Then there was only the murmur of the night, the gin. There was once the cry of a hound far off, and Laura thought, Roy heard that too, and shivered in his bed. She would tell him that there was no mention of Aunt Studney's sack, and another baby was coming; that would stop him as he flitted by.

  When Shelley got the groceries from a nice Chinese man who immediately unlocked the store for her (for it was Sunday) she saw Mr. Rondo forlorn on a corner and invited him to ride back to Fairchilds; something or other had delayed him, they could not follow other people's profuse talk, and he wanted by all means to get to church. He insisted that Maureen was the very one he wanted to sit by, though she did not want him to pat her, it was plain to see. He even drove her to try to steal Laura's doll.

  "Give my darling back to me!"

  Laura lay back in the whizzing car, her head gently rolling against the soft seat and Shelley's arm, and brought Marmion, her stocking doll, up to her cheek. She held him there, though he was hot—hotter than she was—and smelled his face which became, quite gently, fragrant of a certain day to her; his breath was the wind and rain of her street in Jackson.

  It was a day they—her mother, father, and herself—were home from the summer's trip. With the opening of the front door which swung back with an uncustomary shiver, a sudden excitement made Laura run in first, pushing ahead of her father who had turned the key. She ran pounding up the stairs, striking the carpet flowers with the flat of her hands. The house was so close, so airless, that it gave out its own breath as she stirred it to life, the scents of carpet and matting and the oily smell of the clock and the smell of the starch in the curtains. It was morning, just before a rain. Through the window on the landing, the street was in the shadow of a cloud as close as a wing, fanning their tree and rolling sycamore balls over the roof of the porch.

  Her mother, delighting in the threat of storm, went about opening the windows and on the landing leaning out on her hand as though she were all alone or nothing distracted her from the world outside. Her father was at
the hall clock, standing with his driving cap and his goggles still on, reaching up to wind it. "I always like to know what time it is." She listened for her mother's familiar laugh at these words, and could imagine even without looking around at her how she flickered her eyelids as she smiled, so her father would not appear too bragging of his virtues or herself too unappreciative. The loud ticks and the hours striking to catch up responded to him and rose to the upper floor, accompanying Laura as she ran from room to room, in and out, flinging up shades, passing and looking in the mirrors.

  Before the storm broke, before they were barely settled or had more than their faces washed, Laura cried, "Mother, make me a doll—I want a doll!"

  What made this different from any other time? Her father for some reason did not ask "Why another?" or remind her of how many dolls she had or of when she last said she was tired of dolls and never wanted to play with one again. And this time was the most inconvenient that she could have chosen. Her mother, though, simply smiled—as if she shared the same excitement. As though Laura had made a perfectly logical request, her mother said, "Would you like a stocking doll?" And she began to turn things out of her basket, a shower of all kinds of colorful things, saved as if for the sheer pleasure of looking through.

  Laura gazed at her mother, who laughed as she pulled the colored bits out and flung them on the floor. She was wearing a blue dress—"too light for traveling"—her hair was flying from the wind of riding and the breath of outside, fair long hair with the bone hairpins slipping loose. She was excited, smiling, young—as the cousins were always, but as she was not always—for the air at Shellmound was pleasure and excitement, pleasure that did not need to be explained, tears that could go a nice long time unsilenced, and the air of Jackson was different.

  It was like a race between the creation of the doll and the bursting of the storm. In its summer location on the sleeping porch, the sewing machine whirred as if it spoke to the whirring outside. "Oh, Mother, hurry!"

  "Just enough to stuff him!" She put every scrap in—every bright bit she had, all in one doll.

  Now she was sewing on the head with her needle in her fingers. Then with the laundry ink she was drawing a face on the white stocking front. Laura leaned on her mother's long, soft knee, with her chin in her palm, entirely charmed by the drawing of the face. She could draw better than her mother could and the inferiority of the drawing, the slowly produced wildness of the unlevel eyes, the nose like a ditto mark, and the straight-line mouth with its slow, final additions of curves at the end, bringing at maddening delay a kind of smile, were like magic to watch.

  Her mother was done. The first drop of rain had not fallen.

  "What's his name?" Laura cried.

  "Oh—he can be Marmion," said her mother casually Had she been, after all, tired? Had she wanted to do something else, first thing on getting home—something of her own? She spoke almost grudgingly, as if everything, everything in that whole day's fund of life had gone into the making of the doll and it was too much to be asked for a name too.

  Laura snatched Marmion from her mother and ran out. She did not say "Thank you." She flew down the stairs and out the front door.

  The stormy air was dark and fresh, like a mint leaf. It smelled of coming rain and leaves sailed in companies through the middle air. Jackson to come back to was filled with a pulse of storm and she stood still and felt it, the forgotten heartbeat, for of course it had not rained on them visiting. The ground shook to some thunder not too far to hear, or of which only one note could be heard, like the stroke of a drum as far as Smitn Park on band-concert nights. She ran to the corner, which was down a hill, down a brick sidewalk, and at the cornet house she called Lucy Bell O'Malley. Sometimes it is needful to show our dearest possessions to a comparative stranger. Lucy Bell was not a very good friend of Laura's, being too little. Last Christmas Laura had been taken calling on Lucy Bell by a neighbor in order that she might see something Santa Claus had brought her—a Teddy bear with electric eyes. The O'Malley parlor had had curtains and shades drawn—it was still and dark, almost as if a member of the family had died. And on the library table glittered, on and off, two emerald-green eyes. The Teddy bear lay there, on his back. But he could never be taken up from the library table and loved, for out of his stomach a cord attached him to the lamp, and Lucy Bell could only stand by and touch him. His eyes were as hot as fire.

  "Lucy Bell! Look at my doll! We just came back from a car trip!" (Why, they had been to the Delta—been here! To Shellmound. And come home from it—it was under its momentum that her mother had been so quick and gay.) "His name is Marmion!"

  She did not remember a thing Lucy Bell said to that. But as she cried it all out to her she knew that the reason she felt so superior was that she had gotten Marmion the minute she wished for him—it wasn't either too soon for her wish or too late. She had not even known, herself, that she wanted Marmion before that moment when she had implored her mother, "Make me a doll!"

  She turned around and ran back in the winglike dark, holding Marmion high, so that Lucy Bell's eyes could follow. She got home and watched it storm, she and her mother standing quietly at the windows.

  Now she held Marmion close, looking out across his crooked flat eye at the flying cotton, the same white after white, the fire-bright morning. She could kiss his fragrant face and know, Never more would she have this, the instant answer to a wish, for her mother was dead.

  "Ah," said Mr. Rondo from the back seat. "The Yellow Dog!" as if he knew that subject interested the Fairchilds.

  The track ran beside them on its levee through the fields and swamps, with now and then some little road, like the Shellmound road, climbing over the track to go off into the deep of the other side. Laura and Maureen waved at the Dog as it came down going back to Yazoo City. The engineer looked out of his window. "Mr. Doolittle," said Mr. Rondo.

  "Mit-la Doo-littla can-na get-la by!" called Maureen.

  Laura looked up at Shelley, her head with the band around it, as if she thought so much that she had to tie her brain in, like Faithful John and his heart and the iron band. It was good that Shelley had not that kind of heart too.

  At that moment, with no warning, Shelley took one of the little crossing roads and drove the car up over the track, in front of the Yellow Dog, and down the other side.

  "If you tell what I did, Laura," Shelley said calmly, after she let out her breath, "I'll cut you to pieces and hang you up for the buzzards. Are you going to tell?"

  "No," said Laura, before she was through. Shelley's desperate qualities, out of the whole family, were those in which she unreservedly believed.

  "I hope you won't speak of this, Mr. Rondo."

  "Oh, no, no...!"

  "Or Papa'd break my bones," Shelley said deprecatingly.

  With her chin high, she drove along this side of the tracks where no road followed, taking the ruts, while the wildflowers knocked up at the under side of the car. It had struck her all at once as so fine to drive without pondering a moment onto disaster's edge—she would not always jump away! Now she was wrathful with herself, she despised what she had done, as if she had caught herself contriving. She flung up her head and looked for the Dog.

  "Run home, Miss Shelley Fairchild!" called Old Man Doolittle.

  Oh, horrors, he had stopped the Dog again! There it waited on the track, before the crossing, as if politely! How patronizing—coming to a stop for them a second time. Who on earth did Old Man Doolittle think he was, that he could even speak to a Fairchild out of that little window! The Yellow Dog started up again and came on by, inching by, its engine, with Mr. Doolittle saluting, and four cars, freight, white, colored, and caboose, its smoke like a poodle tail curled overhead, an inexcusable sight.

  "Damn the Yellow Dog!" cried Shelley. "Excuse me, Mr. Rondo."

  "Quite understand," said that foolish little man; even Laura knew he would have been the last person knowingly to let prudence, and respect for the spoiled young ladies of Shellmo
und, be damned, and on a Sunday morning.

  They rode, one way or another, into Fairchilds. "Is that Aunt Virgie Lee?" cried Laura.

  Shelley slowed the car down and spoke to Virgie Lee. Usually she would have tried to pass without seeming to notice—the wild way Virgie Lee looked in the face, her cheeks painted red as if she were going to meet somebody, and in the back, with her hair tied up in a common rope.

  Virgie Lee Fairchild, shaking her hair, going along in the ripply shade under the corrugated iron awning over the walk, rustled a green switch in their faces. As a matter of fact, she was going toward the church, fighting off the dogs—the Baptist Church.

  "Go away! Go away! Don't tamper with me! Go home to your weddings and palaver," she said throatily. In her other hand she carried a purse by its strap (the way no lady would), a battered contraption like a shrunken-up suitcase. She might never end up in church, at all. When she swung the purse and danced the leafy branch, her long hair seemed to move all over in itself, like a waterfall.

  Maureen leaned out over the side of the car and laughed aloud at her mother.

  The sight and sound of that so terrified Laura that she flung herself over the back of the seat and threw her arms around Maureen as if to pull her back from fire, and held her, calling her as if she were deaf, "Maureen, Maureen!"

  Virgie Lee, who had never stopped for them, emerged in the naked sun of the road and went on, her black hair seeming if possible to spread in the morning light, growing under eyes that hardly believed it, like a stain.