Delta Wedding

  "Mama dreamed about a thing she lost long time ago before you were born. It was a little red breastpin, and she wanted to find it. Mama put on her beautiful gown and she went to see. She went to the woods by James's Bayou, and on and on. She came to a great big tree."

  "Great big tree," breathed the child.

  "Hundreds of years old, never chopped down, that great big tree. And under the tree was sure enough that little breastpin. It was shining in the leaves like fire. She went and knelt down and took her pin back, pinned it to her breast and wore it. Yes, she took her pin back—she pinned it to her breast—to her breast and wore it—away—away..."

  Bluet's eyelids fell and her dancing leg was still. Her lips suddenly parted, but with a soft sigh and a rapid taking back of the lost breath she was past the moment when she could have protested. She was asleep for the afternoon.

  The dream Ellen told Bluet was an actual one, for it would never have occurred to her to tell anything untrue to a child, even an untrue version of a dream. She often told dreams to Bluet at bedtime and nap time, for they were convenient—the only things she knew that were not real. Ellen herself had always rather trusted her dreams. It was her weakness, she knew, and it was right for the children as they grew up to deride her, and so she usually told them to the youngest. However, she dreamed the location of mistakes in the accounts and the payroll that her husband—not a born business man—had let pass, and discovered how Mr. Bascom had cheated them and stolen so much; and she dreamed whether any of the connection needed her in their various places, the Grove, Inverness, or the tenants down the river, and they always did when she got there. She dreamed of things the children and Negroes lost and of where they were, and often when she looked she did find them, or parts of them, in the dreamed-of places. She was too busy when she was awake to know if a thing was lost or not—she had to dream it.

  It was the night before that she had the dream she lured Bluet to sleep with. Actually, it had been in the form of a warning; she had left that out, for Bluet's domestic but bloodthirsty little heart would have made her get up and dance on the bed to learn what a warning was. She was warned that her garnet brooch, a present in courting days from her husband, that had been lying around the house for years and then disappeared, lay in the leaves under a giant cypress tree on the other side of the bayou. She had certainly forgotten it during the confusion of the morning and of dinnertime, and since, when Dabney burst into tears and ran out crying, "Excuse me for living!" Now the feeling of being warned returned, rather pleasantly than not, to Ellen's bosom. She put a little sugared almond on Bluet's pillow, for her fairies' gift, and left the sleeping porch on tiptoe.

  Then, while she was rubbing the silver and glass with a whole kitchen and back porch full of Negroes, Sylvanus, old Partheny's son, came to the door.

  "Miss Ellen. Partheny send for you. Say please come."

  "Has she had a spell?"

  "She in one," said Sylvanus. "Say please Miss Ellen come. Not me stay with her, Mr. Troy git me."

  "Run on back to the fields, Sylvanus, I'll go."

  She took off her apron, after first filling a small pot with some of Aunt Shannon's broth, for she might as well stop at Little Uncle's, she thought, where his wife Sue Ellen was going to have another one and not doing well, and speak in person to Oneida too about helping to dress all the chickens.

  She put her head in at the dining-room door. There were just the two old aunts awake and about; Aunt Shannon was downstairs now, calmly sewing a bit of stuff.

  "I'm going out a little while," she said.

  "The more fool you," said Aunt Mac.

  Aunt Mac was three years younger than Aunt Shannon. She had dyed black hair that she pulled down, spreading its thin skein as far as it would go, about her tiny, rosy-lobed ears. Little black ringlets bounced across her forehead as if they alone were her hair and the rest were a cap, an old-fashioned winter toboggan with a small fuzzy ball at the peak, which was her impatient knot. She was little with age. Somewhere, in mastering her dignity over life, she had acquired the exaggerated walk of a small boy, under her long black skirt, and went around Shellmound with her old, wine-colored lip stuck out as if she invited a dare. Her cheekbones, like little gossamer-covered drums, stood out in her face, on which rice powder twinkled when she sat in her place under the brightest lamp. Her sharp, bright features looked out (though she was quite deaf now) as if she were indeed outdoors in her new cap, a bright boy or young soldier, stalking the territory of the wide world, looking for something to catch or maybe let get away, this time. She watched out; but very exactingly she dressed herself in mourning for her husband Duncan Laws, killed in the Battle of Corinth sixty years ago. A watch crusted with diamonds was always pinned to the little hollow of her breast, and she would make the children tell her the time by it, right or wrong. She whistled a tune sometimes, some vaguely militant or Presbyterian air that sounded archaic and perverse in a pantry, where she would sometimes fling open the cupboard doors to see how nearly starving they were. Her smile, when it came—often for India—was soft. She gave a trifling hobble sometimes now when she walked, but it seemed to be a flourish, just to look busy. Her eyes were remarkable, stone-blue now, and with all she had to do, she had read the Bible through nine times before she ever came to Shellmound and started it there. She and her sister Shannon had brought up all James's and Laura Allen's children, when they had been left, from Denis aged twelve to George aged three, after their dreadful trouble; were glad to do it—widows! And though Shannon drifted away sometimes in her mind and would forget where she was, and speak to Lucian as if he had not started out to war to be killed, or to her brother Battle the same way, or to her brother George as if he had been found and were home again, or to dead young Denis she had loved best—she, Mac, had never let go, never asked relenting from the present hour, and if anything should, God prevent it, happen to Ellen now, she was prepared to do it again, start in with young Battle's children, and bring them up. She would start by throwing Troy Flavin in the bayou in front of the house and letting the minnows chew him up.

  But Aunt Shannon, when she would look around the room and know it, would catch her breath and ask for something—for a palmetto fan, anything; as if life were so piteous that all people had better content themselves with was to be waited on hand and foot; tend or be tended, the wave would fall, and it was better to be tended.

  Ellen took one of the big black cotton umbrellas out of the stand and went out. The sun did press down, like a hot white stone. The whole front yard was dazzling; it was covered with all the lace curtains of the house drying on stretchers. Just then here came Roy, riding on his billy goat, in and out, just not touching all the curtains.

  "Oh, Roy! I did think you were asleep! Are you being careful?"

  "I'll never touch a curtain or make the tiniest hole, Mama. Want to watch me?"

  "No, I trust you."

  "Can I ride along behind you, Mama, where you're going?"

  "Not this time," she said.

  She crossed the bayou bridge, almost treading on the butterflies lighting and clinging on the blazing, fetid boards, and walked leisurely down the other side on the old Marmion path (when there had been a river bridge up this far) through the trees. She had been weary today until now. It seemed to her that Dabney's wedding had made everybody feel a little headstrong this week, the children flying out of the house without even pretending to ask permission and herself not being able as well as usual to keep up with any of it.

  It was a clamorous family, Ellen knew, and for her, her daughter Dabney and her brother-in-law George were the most clamorous. She knew George was importunate—how much that man hoped for! Much more than Battle. They should all fairly shield their eyes against that hope. Dabney did not really know yet for how much she asked. But where George was importunate, Dabney was almost greedy. Dabney was actually, at moments, almost selfish, and he was not. That is, she thought, frowning, George had not Dabney's kind of unselfishness which
is a dread of selfishness, but the thoughtless, hasty kind which is often cheated of even its flower, like a tender perennial that will disregard the winter earlier every year.... The umbrella was in her way now that she had come to the shade, and she could wish she had brought a little Negro along to carry it or the soup.

  She noticed how many little paths crisscrossed and disappeared in here, the deeper she went. Who had made them? There had been more woods left standing here than she had remembered. The shade was nice. Moss from the cypresses hung deep overhead now, and by the water vines like pediments and arches reached from one tree to the next. She walked abstractedly, gently moving her extended hand with the closed umbrella in it from side to side, clearing the vines and mosquitoes from her path. There were trumpet vines and passion flowers. The cypress trunks four feet thick in the water's edge stood opened like doors of tents in Biblical engravings. How still the old woods were. Here the bayou banks were cinders; they said it was where the Indians burned their pottery, at the very last. The songs of the cotton pickers were far away, so were the hoofbeats of the horse the overseer rode (and once again, listening for them in spite of the quiet, she felt as if the cotton fields so solid to the sight had opened up and swallowed her daughter). Even inside this narrow but dense wood she found herself listening for sounds of the fields and house, walking along almost anxiously enough to look back over her shoulder—wondering if something needed her at home, if Bluet had waked up, if for some unaccountable reason Dabney had flown back from a party, calling her mother.

  Then she heard a step, a starting up in the woods.

  "Who's that?" she called sharply. "Come here to me."

  There was no answer, but she saw, the way she moved in the woodsy light, it was a girl.

  "Whose girl are you? Pinchy?" Pinchy, Roxie's helper, was coming through these days, and wandered around all day staring and moaning until she would see light. But Pinchy would answer Miss Ellen still.

  "Are you one of our people? Girl, are you lost then?"

  Still there was no answer, but no running away either. Ellen called, "Come here to me; I could tell, you are about the size of one of my daughters. And if you belong somewhere, I'm going to send you back unless they're mean to you, you can't hide with me, but if you don't belong anywhere, then I'll have to think. Now come out. My soup's getting cold here for an old woman."

  Then since the girl remained motionless where she had been discovered, Ellen patiently made her way through the pulling vines and the old spider webs toward her. She was dimly aware of the chimney to the overseer's house stuck up through the trees, but in here it seemed an ancient place and for a moment the girl was not a trespasser but someone who lived in the woods, a dark creature not hiding, but waiting to be seen, careless on the pottery bank. Then she saw the corner of a little torn skirt poking out by the tree, almost of itself trembling.

  "Come out, child.... It's luck I found you—I was just looking for a little pin I lost," she said.

  "I haven't seen no pin," the girl said behind her tree.

  When she heard the voice, Ellen stopped still. She peered. All at once she cried, "Aren't you a Negro?"

  The girl still only waited behind a tree, but a quick, alert breath came from her that Ellen heard.

  So she was white. A whole mystery of life opened up. Ellen waited by a tree herself, as if she could not go any farther through the woods. Almost bringing terror the thought of Robbie Reid crossed her mind. Then the girl seemed to become the more curious of the two; she looked around the tree. Ellen said calmly, "Come out here in the light."

  She came out and showed herself, a beautiful girl, fair and nourished, round-armed. Not long ago she had been laughing or crying. She had been running. Her skin was white to transparency, her hazel eyes looking not downward at the state of her skirt but levelly into the woods around and the bayou.

  "Stand still," said Ellen.

  It was a thing she said habitually, often on her knees with pins in her mouth. She herself was sternly still, as if she expected presently to begin to speak—and speech at such a time would likely be stern questions that perhaps would find no answers. Yet at her side her arms slowly felt light and except for their burdens her hands would have gone out to the shadowy girl—she caught the motion back, feeling a cool breath as if a rabbit had run over her grave, or as if someone had seen her naked. She felt sometimes like a mother to the world, all that was on her! yet she had never felt a mother to a child this lovely.

  The faint wind from the bayou blew in the girl's hair she had shaken out, marking somehow the time going by in the woods. None of her daughters stood this still in front of her, they tore from her side. Or even in the morning when she went to their beds to wake them, they never had a freshness like this, which the soiled cheek, the leafy hair, the wide-awake eyes made almost startling. None of her daughters, even Dabney, had a beauty which seemed to go out from them, as they stood still—every time she had ever said "Stand still," had she hoped for this beauty? In Ellen's mind dimly was that poetic expression to shed beauty. Now she comprehended it, as if a key to all the poetry Denis once read had been given to her here in the bayou woods when this girl without pouting or curiosity waited when told.

  "Way out here in the woods!" said Ellen. "You'll bring mistakes on yourself that way." She waited a moment. "You're no Fairchilds girl or Inverness girl or Round Bayou or Greenwood girl. You're a stranger to me." The girl did not give her any answer and she said, "I don't believe you even know who I am."

  "I haven't seen no pin" said the girl.

  "You're at the end of the world out here! You're purely and simply wandering in the woods. I ought to take a stick to you."

  "Nobody can say I stole no pin."

  Ellen dropped the old black umbrella and took hold of the young girl's hand. It was small, calloused, and warm. "I wasn't speaking about any little possession to you. I suppose I was speaking about good and bad, maybe. I was speaking about men—men, our lives. But you don't know who I am."

  The warm, quiet hand was not attempting to withdraw and not holding to hers either. How beautiful the lost girl was.

  "I'm not stopping you," Ellen said. "I ought to turn you around and send you back—or make you tell me where you're going or think you're going—but I'm not. Look at me, I'm not stopping you," she said comfortably.

  "You couldn't stop me," the girl said, comfortably also, and a half-smile, sweet and incredibly maternal, passed over her face. It made what she said seem teasing and sad, final and familiar, like the advice a mother is bound to give her girls. Ellen let the little hand go.

  In the stillness a muscadine fell from a high place into the leaves under their feet, burying itself, and like the falling grape the moment of comfort seemed visible to them and dividing them, and to be then, itself, lost.

  They took a step apart.

  "I reckon I was the scared one, not you," Ellen said. She gathered herself together. "I reckon you scared me—first coming, now going. In the beginning I did think I was seeing something in the woods—a spirit (my husband declares one haunts his bayou here)—then I thought it was Pinchy, an ignorant little Negro girl on our place. It was when I saw you were—were a stranger—my heart nearly failed me, for some reason."

  The girl looked down at the red glass buttons on her dress as if she began to feel a kind of pleasure in causing confusion.

  "Which way is the big road, please ma'am?" she asked.

  "That way." Ellen pointed explicitly with her umbrella, then drew it back slowly. "Memphis," she said. When her voice trembled, the name seemed to recede from something else into its legendary form, the old Delta synonym for pleasure, trouble, and shame.

  The girl made her way off through the trees, and Ellen could hear the fallen branches break softly under her foot. A fleeting resentment that she did not understand flushed her cheeks; she thought, I didn't give her this little soup. But still listening after her, she knew that the girl did not care what she thought or would have giv
en, what Ellen might have cast away with her; that she never looked back.

  III

  "'Go in and out the window, go in and out the window ...'"

  They held hands, high and then low, and Shelley, who was It because she was the big girl, ran stooping under their arms, in and out. They were playing in the shade of the pecan trees, after naps and a ride to Greenwood after the groceries, Shelley, India, Bluet, Maureen, Ranny, and Laura. Cousin Lady Clare was just now sent by Aunt Mac out to play with them too. She had come ahead of Aunt Tempe, her grandmother, to Shellmound, come by herself on the Yellow Dog, and now went around with her lower teeth biting her upper lip like William S. Hart. Little Uncle's little boys were up in the yard, crisscrossing with two lawn mowers cutting the grass for the wedding. Far in the back, Howard was beating the rugs with a very slow beat. The sound of the lawn mowers was pleading; they seemed to be saying "Please ... please." The children were keeping out of mischief so that other people could get something done; Shelley was obeying her mother too, and this lowered her some in the eyes of them all, white and colored.

  "'...For we have gained the day.'"

  Lady Clare said to Laura, "Ask Shelley can Troy French-kiss."

  "I'm sure he can," Laura said loftily, for she had been here a day longer than Lady Clare, whatever French-kissing might be.

  The song and the game were dreamlike to her. It was nice to have Shelley in the circle, but then it was lovely to have her out. It was funny how sometimes you wanted to be in a circle and then you wanted out of it in a rush. Sometimes the circle was for you, sometimes against you, if you were It. Sometimes in the circle you longed for the lone outsider to come in—sometimes you couldn't wait to close her out. It was never a good circle unless you were in it, catching hands, and knowing the song. A circle was ugly without you. She knew how ugly it was from the face Maureen would make to see it, and to change this she would let her in. Even if she did not, Maureen would get in. Maureen was a circle breaker. She was very strong. Once she had hold of you, she was so gentle and good at first, she would surprise you. She looked around with a soft, pink look on her face—in a minute it was a daring look, and the next minute she would try to break your finger bones. She liked to change a circle into "Crack the Whip," and with a jerk of her arm she could throw ten cousins to the ground and make them roll over.