Delta Wedding

46

IT WAS Dabney’s wedding day. Pinchy was setting the table and Aunt Mac was at the china closet loudly counting the glasses of each kind. Horace was hosing down the Summers car and in a mystifyingly high falsetto he was singing “Why?” Howard, with Maureen running about the foot of his ladder, was with almost imperceptible motions hanging paper lanterns in the trees, gradually moving across the yard like the movement of shade under the climbing sun. In the soft early air — Ellen stood at her window, with Battle asleep — in which there was a touch, today perhaps the first touch, of fall, the sounds of the busy fields came traveling up to the yard, the beat and sashay of a horse’s feet. Though by another hour the fields would seem to jump in the sight with heat, now there was over them — and would be later when evening would come — the distance and clarity of fall, out of which came a breath of cool. Ellen took it, the breath, and turned to wake Battle.

“ When does Primrose Fairchild think she can make that ton of chicken salad, if she doesn’t come on?” cried Tempe aloud in the kitchen as the clock was striking the dot of something. Some of the roast turkeys and the ham were lined up in the middle of the kitchen table, and the oven gave off waves of fire and fragrance. Roxie was cooking breakfast over a crowded little unused stove in another part of the kitchen, followed by Ranny begging sticks of bacon, and stamping her foot at the kittens that ran about over there. “I bet Jim Allen is trying to make mints. That can keep you running crazy all day, and with a wedding waiting on you. Roxie, where are the Memphis mints?”

“Great big pasteboard box yonder in de pantry, Miss lempe,” called Roxie. “Have to untie you de ribbon to git you a taste. But you ought to see dem Memphis ice slippers! Green!”

Tempe went from the pantry to the back porch icebox. “And hard as rocks — I know,” she said. “And slippery! People’ll lose them off their plates and they’ll slide across the floor from here to yonder, oh me. It’s an old story, Roxie, weddings to me.” She slammed the icebox door, after taking out a little piece of celery.

“Yes, ma’am, sure is. Old story.”

“Who’s going to make the beaten biscuit, Roxie? I have to have the kitchen to myself when the cornucopias are made! I’ll kill anybody making beaten biscuit around me.”

“Miss Tempe, you sure will. Miss Ellen say she make one or two ovens of biscuit while you all be taking your napses.”

“Good idea. Everything would be done more satisfactorily if you could do it with most people asleep. I don’t think that’s even remotely near the number of pickled peaches it will take for going around the hams and turkeys!” She started counting on her fingers. Ranny offered her a bite of bacon and she bent and took it.

The Memphis flowers had come down just right, on the Yellow Dog that morning, and Miss Thelma had sent them up on horseback, the boxes tied over Sammie McNair’s saddle, with Sammie holding Miss Thelma’s umbrella over them.

“Oh, mercy— the bride’s bouquet! We ought to look at it,” Tempe said darkly, as Sammie got off to have breakfast with them.

“Why?” asked India, appearing in her nightgown.

“Just to be sure.”

India in a moment had the bouquet out, and held it up at arm’s length over her head. “Are you sure, Aunt Tempe?”

“We’ll have to doctor it a little, just as I thought,” Aunt Tempe said, “take out those common snapdragons. Vi’let! You can take Miss Dabney’s bouquet and all these flower boxes to the springhouse, Vi’let, but keep their paper around them so not even your breath touches them.”

“Ain’t they pretty?” Vi’let cried. “Oh! Oh!”

“There’s a ladybug on Dabney’s,” said Bluet, gazing up. She had come out in her nightgown too.

“I bid it!” India went off with the ladybug on the back of her hand, Bluet following hopefully, asking the ladybug if the trip from Memphis wasn’t simply smothering.

In a little while here came bumping a wagon. “It’s the cake!” said Tempe clairvoyantly. It was the cake in the tallest box yet from Memphis.

“Now the cake will have to be lifted out by everybody, on the cutting board — there’s no two ways about that, if you don’t want a ruined toppling thing,” said Aunt Mac with spirit.

“One strong, sure-footed man might be the best,” said Tempe, “I would think.”

“Go to grass!” said Aunt Mac. Vi’let ran for the old cutting board in the attic, big as the head of a bed, and she, Howard, and Little Uncle began to get the cake on it and so down from the wagon. Old Man Treat, a passer-by who had driven the cake up specially for Miss Thelma at the post office, was not allowed to put in a word or move.

“Mercy! Open it first!” cried Tempe. “So it won’t rub off on the box! So we can see it!” They opened the box and stripped it back, like the petals of a flower. Mr. Treat looked over his shoulder. There it was, the tall white thing, shining before God in the light of day. It was a real fantasy! Only God knew if it was digestible.

Ellen already held the door, and some of the girls in their nightgowns and kimonos came out watching.

“It’s leaning! It’s leaning!” cried India, laughing and joining her hands.

“It looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” said Shelley critically.

“Well, it cost your father thirty-five dollars,” Ellen told her. “It’s no wonder it looks like something or other — do you think, Mr. Treat?" she threw in, for she remembered he was a distant cousin of the Reids.

“Talk about spun sugar!” said Tempe. She gave a little smack. In her arms, forgotten, were the earlycut flowers from the yard. “I think they did real well, considering it was all done by telephone. Now did they forget the ring and thimble and all inside?”

“That’s something we won’t know till the cake’s cut and eaten,” said Ellen. “That’s too late to tell Memphis about.”

“I’m going to cut the ring!” sang India.

“Who ’re you going to marry, child?” asked Aunt Tempe.

“Dickie Boy Featherstone! No, Red Boyne.”

“Red hair!” cried Aunt Tempe exasperated. “What has happened to this clan? Don’t you dare do it, India.”

“All my children will be ugly like Lady Clare.”

“And she upstairs with the chicken pox, shame,” said Ellen. “Stand here by me, India.”

“There will be no holding Lady Clare when they’re all in their dresses, I’m afraid,” said Aunt Tempe, flinching now as she watched the cake actually being lifted down. “I’m not saying she won’t fight her way to the wedding after all — you watch that cake, Howard! Do you know what’ll happen to you if you drop that?”

“Yes, ma’am. Dis cake not goin’ drop — no’m.”

“That’s what you say. You have to carry it straight up, too.”

“Little Uncle, you kind of go under — like that. Spread your arms out like a bird — now. That’s grand, Little Uncle.”

“I’m a wreck,” said Shelley. “I’m glad Dabney’s not here watching. Oh, Croesus, I wish old Troy Flavin would just quit wanting to marry Dabney!”

“Don’t frown like that, you’ll hurt your looks, Shelley. A fine time now for Troy Flavin to do a thing like that,” said Aunt Tempe. “You all set the cake where it’s going to go, on the middle of the diningroom table. We’ll just have to eat like scarecats all day and not do any shaking or stamping.”

“Can you all tell the middle of the table?” asked Ellen anxiously as the cake went in the door. “You run in, India, and show them with your finger — make them put it right in the center of that lace rose that’s the middle of the cloth. This was certainly nice of you, Mr. Treat. Run lightly, India, don’t shake the house, from now on.”

George coming downstairs held still with his eye on the cake — it was crossing the hall. Howard, Vi’let, and Little Uncle with the cake coming in were meeting Bitsy and some of the field Negroes, Juju and Zell, carrying a long side-table out.

“No collisions, I tell you!” cried Tempe, at the heels of the cake party.

“You’ve got to find a level place in the yard to set that down now, Bitsy,” said Ellen, in the voice of one who is not sure there are any level places in the Delta.

“Yes, ma’am! Dis table goin’ to go down in a level place.”

“Where’s Robbie, Georgie?”

“She’s still asleep,” said George, running down and kissing them. “All of you look beside yourselves!”

“I think Robbie’s going to sleep the day away! Like Dabney.”

“That’s all right, she was good and tired,” said Ellen.

“Well! It looks like she could show some interest.

After all, there’s a wedding in the house!” Tempe said. George grinned, and snapping off a Michaelmas daisy from her armful handed it to her.

“Where’s my pipe, girls?” he said.

Bluet went in and woke up Dabney, carrying her coffee, with her sisters watching in the door. “Wake up, Dabney, it’s your wedding day,” she said carefully.

“Oh!” Dabney sat bolt, upright. She seized the cup and drank off the coffee. Then she fell back, pulling Bluet up in the bed with her. She pressed the little girl to her.

“Precious! Precious!”

They all laughed and came in, and saw that she got up. They brought her down to the table and made her eat her breakfast. They all sat down around her wedding cake.

“It didn’t break?” smiled Dabney, giving it a bright glance as she ate a plum. She and Shelley looked at each other, their kimono sleeves, pink and blue, fluttering together in the morning wind.

“Oh!” exclaimed Tempe, rising from her breakfast and running to the window. “Lady Clare’s out there talking to a mad dog!” She turned to George — and time was when he would have dashed out of the house to hear that, but not now. He smiled absently and ate a bite of his mackerel. Pattering out the door, Tempe sighed. She ran through the sun as she would run through a pounding rain, and took hold of Lady Clare, who was in her nightgown and all spots.

“Don’t you know strange dogs may be mad dogs?” she said, running in with her. “Probably are mad dogs. I fully expected something to happen to you, Lady Clare. A time like this and a house like this!”

The strange dog — mad or not. Lady Clare would never know — looked after their retreat and trotted off to the bayou bank.

47

How do I look, Aunt Ellen?” cried Laura, running into the parlor, where Ellen was getting the smilax hung. Mary Lamar Mackey, in a yellow kimono, was kneeling over the stool running her hands over the piano keys. Laura had on Lady Clare’s flowergirl dress, without the petticoat. “Shelley’s trying it on! ”

“Mercy, I see your knees. But Primrose can let out the hem for you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail when she ever gets here.”

“Do I look like a flower girl?” asked Laura. “Shelley wants to know.”

“Mama, will she do?" called Shelley’s voice from the upper regions. This was the calling-est house! thought Laura anxiously.

“You couldn’t look more like one,” Ellen said, and held her tight. “You’ll have to put a little of Dabney’s or Shelley’s face powder over those old bites — where have you been? — and let somebody turn your hair over their finger, and you’ll be splendid. Run back and tell Shelley to get the dress off you quick now. Would you like your hair up on old rags all day?”

“Oh, Aunt Ellen!”

“All right, I’ll tie you up myself. I wish you’d prevail on India to wear curls just for tonight. She won’t let anybody touch her.”

“Mama used to curl my hair in curls,” said Laura shyly. “Mary Lamar — what are you playing?” and she walked near the music wearing her dress.

“It’s not always anything,” said Mary Lamar in a soft voice. “I’m improvising.”

Up close, beautiful Mary Lamar’s arm showed great covering freckles below the chiffon sleeve her arms were leopard-like!

“Well, Pinchy,”said Dabney, frowning.

There stood Pinchy in the dining room, swatting an old September fly. For a few days a creature of mystery, now that she had come through she was gawking and giggling like the rest.

“You swat every fly, Pinchy. That’s what you’re for, now, this whole day,” she said sternly.

“I’ll git ‘em,” said Pinchy.

On the back porch, later, surrounded by firelesscooker pots and cake pans of cut flowers, Shelley and Dabney were making shiny bows. Battle wandered out.

“What are those made of, now?”

“Material,” said Dabney.

Nobody else seemed to be around, except Ranny, who sat on the back steps motionless, looking at his father over a bright beard of what seemed also to be material.

“Well, Dabney, little girl, I wanted to confer my blessing, my paternal blessing,” Battle said rather heartily.

“Two Princess baskets of pink and white Maman Cochet roses, Miss Tessie at the icehouse sent up, Dabney,” said Ellen carrying them onto the porch. “She sent them over by twins.”

“Then it was every one she had,” called Tempe’s voice from within. Her brother looked in the direction of her voice as if in a moment he would comprehend Tempe.

“Who sent these real late Cape jessamines — Miss Parnell Dortch?” Shelley leaned over and buried her face in them while Vi’let held them out.

“Yes, Miss Parnell.” Ellen whispered, “I don’t know what we’ll do with old Roxie’s nasturtiums — little bitty short stems, look, they don’t even peep over that shoe box. But it was every nasturtium Roxie had — she loves Dabney.”

“We can float them in an old card tray. She’ll he looking for them at the wedding,” Shelley said.

“She used to let me pick them, nasty-turliums,” said Dabney idly. “I’d pick them and eat them all the way from the stems up, when I was little.”

“Then you can eat these,” said Ellen with a little laugh. She leaned on the door.

“Come here and let me kiss you, Puddin, Battle said.

But, “Look at Miss Bonnie Hitchcock’s fern,” groaned Shelley.

Four little colored boys holding a tub in balance on the handle of a broom staggered up the back path. The tub and the boys were in the shade and glow of an enormous fern that tilted its weight over them and fluttered its fronds in every direction like a tree in a gale.000000

“Mama! She sent that up for Aunt Annie Laurie’s funeral!” Dabney said in an awe-struck voice.

“We almost never got it back to her filter that, Shelley said doubtfully. “Or did we?”

“I don’t want it where it was before, said Dabney.

“Dabney!” Battle said. “Come kiss me.”

“It can go behind Jim Allen and India serving punch,” said Ellen. “It will go fine there. It won’t do anything but hide the china closet. If we could put it by the outdoor table! But that would hurt Miss Bonnie’s feelings — it will have to come in the house.”

“Mama, I think it’s so tacky the way Troy comes in from the side door,”said Shelley all at once. “It s like somebody just walks in the house from the fields and marries Dabney.”

“You’re sure you woultln t rather have a trip to Europe than get married?” Battle remarked into the air off the porch. “Ranny, will you take off that beard or stop looking at me?”

Dabney ran to her father, the shiny material in hand, and laughed as his whispering lips tickled the nape of her neck. Or go back to college?" he said.

“Horrors, Papa,” she said.

“ You don’t have but one silver champagne bucket, I know that,” said Tempe stepping out dramatically from the kitchen. “Why didn’t I think to bring you mine! It would have been no trouble in the world. Mercy!” She spoke to the fern, which was at the door.

“It’s grown, Mama!” said Dabney, leaning back as the fern went by, vibrating and seemingly under its own power, up the steps and across the back porch. Battle pinned her backwards against him and kissed the crown of her head.

“Well, one thing,” said Tempe in a low voice to Shelley, looking after the fern with a sigh ol finality, “when people marry beneath them, its the woman that determines what comes. It’s the woman that coarsens the man. The man doesn’t really do much to the woman, I’ve observed.”

“You mean Troy’s not as bad for us as Robbie,” whispered Shelley intently.

“ Exactly! ”

“Don’t stop, don’t stop! This way!" Ellen hurried ahead of the fern and led it into the house.

“The crooks have come! The bridesmaids’ crooks have come!” cried Orrin, racing in. “Dabney, I brought your crooks! Watch!” He reached into Little Uncle’s arms as Little Uncle ran up with yellow sticks everywhere and began throwing them in the air like a juggler. All the children ran picking them up — each got one.

“Orrin! ”

“I was watching for the Dog! I saw them take everything off, and I wanted to bring you the crooks ahead of everything, Dabney! Only I went in swimming a minute— I was on Junie—”

“Oh, Orrin! Oh, I hate to go off and leave you and everybody!” Dabney kissed his smiling lips, and he untied her sash behind her.

“Give me one,” she said, looking at the running children. “Ranny, I want that one.”

“What’s that old Bojo brought on the mule?” asked Ellen.

“Aunt Primrose’s cheese straws,” said Shelley, rushing to lift the lid of the corset box. “From the secret recipe!”

“ I just have to have one,” said Aunt Tempe, putting in her hand. “Excuse me, you all.”

Dabney took the box, laughing, and ran to the kitchen.

Aunt Studney was in the kitchen taking a little coffee. Howard’s little boy, Pleas, who was on the back porch twisting smilax on the altar, came stealing in behind Roxie and tried to look in Aunt Studney’s sack. But Aunt Studney was up with a kettle off the stove and like lightning poured it over him, making him yell and run off as if the devil had him.

“Why, Aunt Studney,” said Dabney. “I wanted to invite you to my wedding!”

“Ain’t studyin’ you,” said Aunt. Studney. She lifted her coffee cup in her quick, horny hand that was bright pink inside, and drank. Then she was gone with her sack.

48

PRIMROSE and Jim Allen came up to Shellmound in time to sit down to dinner, to Battle’s teasing. And as it turned out, Primrose was making the chicken salad (which Roxie had luckily cut up for her), Ellen baking the beaten biscuit with Robbie (swallowed in a Fairchild apron) watching the pans, Tempe rolling out her cornucopias, and Roxie and Pinchy squeezing the fruit for the punch, all in the kitchen together. Jim Allen had spent the morning making green and white mints, which they all declared were better than the Memphis mints, so she lay down and dozed a little on a bed.

“Mr. Horace,” Vi’let said coming through the shade in the yard with more napkins dry enough to iron, “you standin’ up pretty good.” All Horace had to do was wash cars and shine them, and get his flashlight ready for tonight, make sure it would burn. Preacher, the Grove chauffeur, who thought yesterday he had better not try to carry so much as a paper lantern in his old age, never do anything except drive an electric automobile, felt younger today and said he would be glad to fish seeds out of cook’s juice, give him a spoon.

Some wagons loaded with planks came up in the yard, and Howard was told to fix a dancing place as he saw fit — but hurry! — out of an old landing Mr. Battle was sending up from the river. “Mr. Battle sure love doin’ things at las’ minute, don t he, Miss Ellen?” laughed Howard from the top of his ladder, making it sound attractive, even irresistible, of Mr. Battle.

“Don’t you fall off that ladder, Howard, before you come down and nail those planks! Dancing on the platform’s what the lanterns are for.”

“No’m, I ain’t goin fall off dis ladder. Dance, yes, ma’amJ”

Laura heard behind the bathroom door sounds of great splashing, and in between the splashes Dabney’s voice, talking to Bluet.

“Now, Bluet, you mustn’t ever brag.”

“What’s brag?”

Splash, splash.

“And Bluet, you mustn’t ever tell a lie.”

“What’s tell a lie?”

Splash, splash.

Laura banged on the door. “Let me in! I have to get ready too!”

They let her in. There were all the girls— tall Shelley too, naked and splashing. And they had Ranny, so little and sweet still. There was water everywhere, even dotting the fireplace like beads on a forehead. Bluet was in the center of the big pedestaled bathtub and they were squeezing washrags over her and putting soap on her hands, which she stuck forward for them. Bluet, her long hair pinned up in a topknot, was very serious today, at the same time slithering like a fish.

“And Bluet,” said Laura comfortably, “you mustn’t ever steal.”

“Don’t you tell me,” said Bluet gently, “just Dabney,” and they all dashed her with water.

Finally, people began to come out in the halls or downstairs dressed. “Orrin! You look like a man!" cried Ellen. “Oh, the idea!”

“Mr. Ranny growin’ up too, in case nobody know it,” said Roxie. “Miss Ellen, did you know? That little booger every mornin’ befo’ six o’clock holler out de window fo’ me, ‘Roxie! I need my coffee!’ and make me come right up.”

“The idea!” said Ellen.

When the clock struck for seven, Laura in her flower-girl dress took the pipe out of the hat in which she had hidden it, and stood in the flower-filled hall with it until she saw George come through there. She followed him and confronted him at the watercooler on the back porch. Lizards were frolicking and scratching on the wire outside, being gazed at from inside by the old cat Beverly. Nobody else was around.

Bringing it slowly from behind her sash, she gave the pipe to him very slowly, inching it out to him to make the giving longer. At first he did not seem even to understand that he could take it, for she was so ceremonious.

“ I wanted to give you a present you really wanted to get, so I kept it away from you awhile,” explained Laura. He bent his handsome head. He listened to her closely — that was the way Uncle George always listened, as if everyone might tell him something like this. “I wanted to surprise you,” she said.

“Yes, honey.” He kissed her right between the eyes. He took the pipe. “Thank you,” he said. “ You’re growing up to be a real little Fairchild before you know it.”

She was filled with happiness. “ Is there any other thing I could give you after this, for a present?” she asked finally.

Instead of saying, “No,” he said gently, “Thanks, I’ll let you know, Laura.”

More happiness struck her like a, shower of rain. She looked at him dazzled. “Tonight?”

“It might be later,” he said. He pulled her hair a little then, her curls. When she waited shyly, he put the pipe in his mouth, lighted it, puffed out a strong cloud, and nodded his head at her to show her the pipe was nice to get back.

Then they both had a drink of water out of the spigot, he drinking from the tarnished cup, she from the ridgy glass.

“Why is smoke coming out of the hall chimney?” asked India, walking in the side door. She had been trying out her shepherdess crook.

“Smoke?”

In the hall Roy in his everyday clothes lay on the floor painting with water colors. Six or eight pictures

he finished them rapidly — were laid around the stove where his fire dried them as quickly as possible, though the heat did curl the older ones up tight.

“Roy!” cried Dabney in tears. “I’m going to get married in this house in fifteen minutes. Everybody will perish from the heat!”

“It was already as hot as it could be,” said Roy. “This fire feels cool to me.”

“Do you want your papa to stop Dabney’s wedding to give you a switching?” asked Ellen. “I thought you were all in your white suit.”

“I’ll be there when you look for me,” said Roy agreeably.

“Then run!”

“I thought you loved me,” said Dabney. She and Shelley and Mary Lamar were all three in tears.

“Shelley, hush crying, who’ll be next?” said Ellen, and Bluet came up and cried loudly.

“My God, girls!” shouted Battle, taking a step sideways. “Stop your tears! Can’t raise you, can’t even marry you, without the shillelagh all over the place.”

“What is the picture of, Roy?” asked India in practical tones.

“Lady Clare being hanged by the pirates. That’s her tongue sticking out.”

“Well, now, it’s through then,” said Ellen. “Run! Make Orrin part your hair. — It’s the first time he’s ever wanted to use the paints, as far as I know, Battle.”

49

THE bridesmaids came all of a company and flew upstairs to Shelley’s room to get into their bridesmaid dresses, with Vi’let and Pinehy to put them over their heads, warm from the iron. “Ever’body git a crook,” said Little Uncle, mincing it over and over, where they gathered in ihe upstairs hall. “Got you a crook, missy? Here a pretty one for you, " as if shepherdess crooks were the logical overflow from Fairchild bounty.

Old Partheny had come up just at the time she pleased — the time for Dabney to be putting on her wedding dress and be ready to stamp her foot at the way it looked — and now appeared at the head of the back stairs clothed from top to bottom in purple. She went straight and speaking to nobody to Dabney’s closed door and flung it open. “Git yourself here to me, child. Who dressin’ you? Git out, Nothin’ , and Roxie, Shelley, and Aunt Primrose all came backing out. The door slammed.

Downstairs, with all the boys in white suits gallantly running about, the family, gathering in the parlor around Ellen and Battle, greeted the arriving families of the wedding party and too early arrivers for the reception from the more distant plantations. Aunt Mac and Aunt Shannon came in on Orrin’s arm, one at a time. Aunt Mac wore her corsage of red roses and ferns on the shoulder opposite the side with her watch, so she could keep up with things. Aunt Shannon proceeded uncertainly and yet with pride, her little feet in their comfort slippers planted wide apart, as a year-old child walks, her hot little hand digging into Orrin’s arm. White sweet-peas were what Aunt Shannon wore, and she liked them.

“It’s time we were sitting down, now, as many as can,” said Ellen, and all at once sank, herself, into one of the straight chairs before the altar.

All the windows were full of black faces, but the family servants stood in a ring inside the parlor walls. Pinchy stole in, all in white, and she looked wild and subdued together now in that snowiness with her blue-black. Maureen went up to her and gave her a red rose from her basket, not being as a flower girl able to wait. Partheny stood at the front of all the Negroes, where the circle had its joining, making the circle a heart. Her head was high and purple, she was thistle-like there, and perhaps considered herself of all the Negroes the head and fount. Man-Son, Sylvanus, Juju, more than that were all in the hall, spellbound and shushing one another. Aunt Studney, wherever she was, was keeping out of sight.

Uncle Pinck, who was laughing at something, hushed suddenly. Mr. Rondo had taken his place, and music began. The groomsmen entered, and then people leaned backwards from the doorway, so that everybody could see what came down the stairs.

In twos the bridesmaids began coming, then entered and arranged themselves in front of the boys, fanning out from Howard’s altar, deep to pale, dark to light in their pairs, fading out to Shelley, who entered trembling and with excruciating slowness, her sleeves aquiver. Their crooks they held seriously in front of them in their right hands, each crook crowned with Memphis flowers tied on with streamers.

India came in, throwing petals, and Maureen, then Laura came in down the little path between people where she was supposed to walk; at last she was out before everybody, one of the wedding parly, dressed up like the rest in an identical flower-girl dress, and she scattered rose petals just as quickly as India, just as far as Maureen. Did it show, that her mother had only died in January? Mary Lamar, in place at the piano, played in that soft, almost surreptitious fashion of players of wedding music.

It was Shelley that Ellen was watching anxiously. Ever since Dabney had announced that she would marry Troy, Shelley had been practicing, rather consciously, a kind of ragamuffinism. Or else she drew up, like an old maid. What could be so wrong in everything, to her sensitive and delicate mind? There was something not quite warm about Shelley, her first child. Could it have been in some way her fault? Ellen watched her anxiously, almost tensely, as if she might not get through the wedding very well. Primrose was whispering in Ellen’s ear. Shelley would not hold her shepherdess crook right — it should be straight in line with all the other girls’ crooks — look how her bouquet leaned over. Like a sleepy head, Ellen thought rather dreamily in her anxiety.

“Crook like the others, dear,” whispered Primrose from her front chair. She made a quick coaxing motion with her little lacy mitts (she had indulged herself with a pair just like the bridesmaids’).

Shelley with a face of contrition held her shepherdess crook like the others. Aunt Primrose had such an abundance of small, hopeful anxieties — the mere little ferns and flowers of the forest she had never guessed could be! Shelley was glad to hold her crook right.

Troy came in from the side door, indeed like somebody walking in from the fields to marry Dabney. His hair flamed. Had no one thought that American Beauty would clash with that carrot hair? Had no one thought of that? Jim Allen blinked her sensitive eyes.

Robbie looked up at George, who had entered with Troy and stood up beside him, listening and agaze at his family. In the confusion she had been seated a little toward the back. There was no one looking at him — except a bridesmaid to primp for a moment, push at a curl, or long-legged Laura that smiled— there was no one seeing him but herself.

George was not the one they all looked at, she thought in that moment, as he was always declared to be, but the eye that saw them, from right in their midst. Long ago they had seized on his sensitivity to love, for he loved love — she could not really, yet, tell whether they loved love or not — and they had used it. He was to be all in one their protector and their conscience — he was to look through them as well as to the right and left of them, before and behind them, watching out for and loving their weaknesses. And so he did. But she understood something a little further — that there was unlimited sweetness in him perhaps, but no forfeiture. And that he did not want her, Robbie, like the others. He wanted her blindly — just to hold. All would be dark — Robbie was back where she had first known that, back when he came in the store, home from the war, a lonely man that noticed wildflowers.

fHe turned his head a little now and glanced at her with that suddenness — curiosity, not quite hope— that tore her heart, like a stranger inside some house where he wanted to make sure she too had come, had really come. It was all right with her now, she thought, rising a little on her chair as if she would stand up, looking over Aunt Tempe’s hothouse corsage and meeting the dark look. Somehow it was all right. They were in the one place.

There was a groan from upstairs, as at a signal given perhaps by Mary Lamar’s rising music, and Battle, his skin fiery red against his white clothes, brought Dabney down and entered with her on his arm.

In the early morning, climbing out of bed, Dabney had looked out her windows, walked around her room; at her door she had looked out and down the sleeping hall, out through the little balcony under its ancient awning. There were soft beats in the air, which she dreamily identified as her father’s sleeping snorts. The sun, a red ball down East Field, sat on the horizon. Faint bands of mist, in the fading colors of the bridesmaids’ dresses, rose to the dome of clear sky. And that’s me, she had thought, pleased — that little white cloud. She had got back in bed and gone back to sleep. And she felt she had not yet waked up, though Partheny had just come up to her and seemed to shake at everybody and everything in her room, wild old nurse—the way a big spider can shake a web to get a little straw out, seeming to summon up all the anger in the world to keep the lure of the web intact.

“Never more beautiful!” whispered Primrose.

That is what will always be said about a bride, thought Tempe, suddenly agitating her fan. And they all look dead, to my observant eye, or like rag dolls — poor things! Dabney is no more herself than any of them.

Ellen looked at Battle as he sat down beside her, and took his hand.

Ranny in his white satin walked in on some kind of artificial momentum, bearing the ring on the pillow, never looking behind him though everyone was murmuring, “Sweet!”

Then the women put their handkerchiefs to their eyes. Mr. Rondo married Dabney and Troy.

50

ONE little glass of champagne and I don’t know bee from bumble!” cried Aunt Primrose. “And neither do you, Jim Allen!” India sprang up between them and joining hands swung the ladies off. Dr. Murdoch, smiling handsomely, merged with the champagne drinkers over in the fern corner, where Uncle Pinck welcomed him raising his glass.

“Well — it’s over, the wedding’s over. Did you hear how old Rondo threw in his prayer, ‘Lord, I know not many people in the Delta love thee’?” Battle said, stretching himself up and then slapping Mr. Rondo’s back as if he were congratulating him.

“Cut the cake! Cut the cake! Cut the cake!” cried Ranny running through.

“I’m tired of the cake! All day long in front of us!” glowered Roy. “Cut it and get it over.”

Dabney was brought in and given the knife, and she cut the first slice. Then the bridesmaids and all rushed to cut after her. “I’m cutting the ring!” India cried, and sure enough, she did. “I’m the next! ‘ ‘

“Here comes the picture taker, Aunt. Tempe!” For Tempe had said she had taken the liberty of giving permission to the Memphis paper to send down. Now she said, “Mercy!” and clutched her hair. “Oh, we’re all flying loose!”

Battle wanted the photograph taken of the whole family, not of simply the bride and groom. Taking absolute charge, he grouped his sons and daughters around him the way he wanted them. “Get in here, Ellen!” he roared through the room.

They posed, generally smiling. “Say cheese,” Aunt Primrose reminded them, and said it herself.

“Now we’re all still!” cried Battle. “I’m still!”

“Domesticated.” People still pointed at Battle Fairchild after twenty years of married life, as if he were a new wonder. Ellen stood modestly beside him, holding some slightly wilted bridesmaids’ flowers in front of her skirt. She herself, it occurred to Ellen as she stood frowning at the hooded man with his gadget, was an anomaly too, though no one would point at a lady for the things that made her one— for providing the tremendous meals she had no talent for, being herself indifferent to food, and had had to learn with burned hands to give the household orders about; or for living on a plantation when she was in her original heart, she believed, a town-loving, book-loving young lady of Mitchem Corners. She had belonged to a little choral society of unmarried girls there that she loved. Mendelssohn floated for a moment through the confused air like a veil upborne, and she could have sung it, “I Would That My Love ...”

The flashlight went off. Just as it did, Ranny saluted.

“That was almost a good one,” said the photographer. “Another picture of the same pose, except the little gentleman that saluted. Everybody looking at the bride and groom.”

“I’m holding it!” Battle cried, and the light flashed for the picture.

Ellen looked at the bride and groom. Then Battle was giving her a kiss. George and Robbie danced off, the group broke, and more and more people were arriving at the house. They had better be standing at the door.

Everybody for miles around came to the reception. Troy said he did not know there could be so many people in the whole Delta; it looked like it was cotton all the way. The mayor of Fairchilds and his wife were driven up with the lights on inside their car, and they could be seen lighted up inside reading the Memphis paper (which never quite unrolled when you read it); in the bud vases on the little walls beside them were real red roses, vibrating.

Shelley’s heart pounded as she smiled; indeed this was a grand occasion for everybody, their wedding was really eventful. Lady clare came down once — pitiful indeed, her spots all painted over with something, and for some reason in a nightgown with a long tear. “I’m exposing you! I’m exposing you all!” cried Lady Clare fiercely, but was rushed back upstairs. More champagne was open, the buffet supper was carried out, and all started being served under the trees.

Then Dabney changed from her wedding gown to a going-away dress and the new Packard was brought up to the door. Dabney began kissing the family and the bridesmaids all around. When she kissed Aunt Shannon, the old lady said, “Now, who do you think you are?”

A brown thrush in a tree, still singing, could be heard through all the wild commotion, as Dabney and Troy drove away, scattering the little shells of the road. Ellen waved her handkerchief, and ail the aunts lifted theirs and waved. Shelley began to cry, and Ranny ran down the road after the car and followed it as long as it was in hearing, like a little puppy. I nlike the mayor’s car that had come up alight like a boat in the night, it went away dark. The full moon had risen.

Then the party nearly all moved outdoors, where the lanterns burned in the trees. “I hear the music coming,” said Laura, coming up and taking Ellen around the knees for a moment. The band came playing—“Who?” coming out over the dark and brightening fields above the sound of their rackety car—a little river band, all very black Negroes in white coats, who were banjo, guitar, bass fiddle, trumpet, and drum — and of course saxophone; that was the owner. Horace flagged them down with his flashlight. Howard showed them their chairs, which he had fixed by the dance platform like a place for a select audience to come and watch a performance of glory. The dancing began.

At midnight, Shelley came in by herself for a drink of cool water. On the back porch the moths spread upon the screens,,the hard beetles knocked upon the radius of light like an adamant door. She drank still swaying a little to the distant music.

Only that morning, working at the wedding flowers with Dabney, she had thought to herself, hypnotically, as though she read it in her diary, “ Why do you look out thinking nothing will happen any more? Why are you thinking your line of trees the indelible thing in the world? There’s the long journey you’re going on, with Aunt Tempe, leading out, and you can’t see it now. Even closing your eyes, you see only the line of trees at Shellmound. Is it the world? If Shellmound were a little bigger, it would be the same as the world entirely.” Perhaps that was the real truth.

But she had been dancing with George, with his firm though (she was certain) reeling body so gayly leading her, so solicitously whirling her round. “Bridesmaid,” he called her. “Bridesmaid, will you dance?” She felt it in his cavorting body — though she danced seriously, always moved seriously— that he went even among the dancers with some vision of choice. Life lay ahead, he might do anything.

She followed; she herself had a vision of choice, or its premonition, for she was much like George. They played “Sleepy Time Gal,” turning it into “ Whispering.” Only the things had not happened to her yet. They would happen. Indeed, perhaps she would not be happy either, wholly, and she would live in waiting, sometimes in terror. But Dabney’s marriage, ceasing to shock, was like a door closing to her now. Entering into a life with Troy Flavin seemed to avow a remote, an unreal world — it came nearest to being real for Shelley only in the shock, the challenge to pride. It shut a door in their faces. Behind the closed door, what ? Shelley’s desire fled, or danced seriously, to an open place — not from one room to another room with its door, but to an opening wood, with weather — with change, beauty. . . .

There was a scratch at the back door, and Shelley unlatched it. Her old cat, Beverly of Graustark, came in. He had been hunting; he brought in a mole and laid it at her feet.

51

IN THE music room, with some of the lingering guests there, Tempe and Primrose sang two-part songs of their girlhood, arch, full of questions and answers — and Tempe was in tears of merriment at the foolishness she had lived down. Primrose with each song remembered the gestures — of astonishment, cajolery — and Tempe could remember them the next instant. The sisters sang beckoning and withdrawing like two little fat mandarins, their soft voices in gentle, yielding harmony still. But soon Tempe, who had only come inside looking for her fan, was back where the dancing was.

Ellen strolled under the trees, with Battle somewhere near, looking among the dancers for her daughters. The lanterns did not so much shine on the dancers as light up the mistletoe in the trees. She peered ahead with a kind of vertigo. It was the year — wasn’t it every year? — when they all looked alike, all dancers alike smooth and shorn, all faces painted to look like one another. It was too the season of changeless weather, of the changeless world, in a land without hill or valley.

How could she ever know anything of her own daughters, how find them, like this? Then in a turn of her little daughter India’s skirt as she ran partnerless through the crowd — so late! — as if a bar of light had broken a glass into a rainbow she saw the dancers become the McLeoud bridesmaid, Mary Lamar Mackey (freed from her piano and whirling the widest of all), become Robbie, and her own daughter Shelley, each different face bright and burning as sparks of fire to her now, more different and further apart than the stars.

She saw George among the dancers, walking through, looking for somebody too. Suddenly she wished that she might talk to George. It was the wrong time — she never actually had time to sit down and fill her eyes with people and hear what they said, in any civilized way. Now he was dancing, even a little drunk, she believed — this was a time for celebration, or regret, not for talk, not ever for talk.

As he looked in her direction, all at once she saw into his mind as if he had come dancing out of it leaving it unlocked, laughingly inviting her to the unexpected intimacy. She saw his mind — as if it too were inversely lighted up by the failing paper lanterns — lucid and tortuous: so that any act on his part might be startling, isolated in its very subtlety from the action of all those around him, springing from long, dark, previous abstract thought and direct apprehension, instead of explainable, Fairchild impulse. It was inevitable that George, with this mind, should stand on the trestle — on the track where people could indeed be killed. And she saw how it followed, the darker instinct of a woman was satisfied that he was capable of the same kind of love. Indeed, there danced Robbie, the proof of this. To all their eyes shallow, unworthy, she was his love; it was her ordinary face that was looking at him through the lovely and magic veil, little Robbie Reid’s from the store.

George made his way through the dancers now, sometimes caught up by one, sometimes not. Ellen thought that everything he did meant something. Not that it was symbolic — with all her young-girl love of symbols she could scorn them for their meagerness and her fallible grasp — everything he did meant something to him, it had weight. That seemed very rare! Everything he lost meant something. Of course. She did not need to know each little thing about him any more—to be a mother to him any more.

She recognized him as far from kin to her, scarcely tolerant of her understanding, never dependent on hers or anyone’s, or on compassion (how merciless that could be!). He appeared, as he made his way alone now and smiling through the dancing couples, infinitely simple and infinitely complex, stretching the opposite ways the self stretches and the selves of the ones we love (except our children) may stretch; but at the same time he appeared very finite in that he was wholly singular and dear, and not promisingly married, tired of being a lawyer, a smiling, intoxicated, tender, weather-worn, late-tired, beard-showing being. He came forward through a crowd and anybody’s hand might beckon or reach after him. He had, and he gave, the golden acquiescence which Dabney the bride had in the present moment — which Ranny had. “Are you happy, Dabney?” Battle had kept asking her over and over. How strange! Passionate, sensitive, to the point of strain and secrecy, their legend was happiness. “The Fairchilds are the happiest people!” They themselves repeated it to each other. She could hear the words best in Primrose’s gentle, persuading voice, talking to Battle or George or one of the little boys; or to Laura.

“Will you dance this with me, Ellen?” George asked. He hummed the tune— “Linger Awhile.”

“Don’t you dare, Ellen,” said Battle. “Do you want to kill yourself?”

Clumsily, with care, she put up her arms and took hold of his. She pressed his arms tenderly a moment, as if she could express it, that he had not been harmed after all and had been ready for anything all the time. She loved what was pure at its heart, better than what was understood, or even misjudged, or afterwards forgiven; this was the dearest thing.

“I would always dance with you as quick as anything,” she told him. She felt lucky — cherished, and somehow pretty (which she knew she never was). There were some people who lived a lifetime without finding the one who relieved the heart’s overflow. She bore a little heavily on George’s arm. They danced silently. She would not know in her life, or ask, whether he had found the one. She was his friend and loved him. But starting new, she thought as the waltz played and they moved by a tree where a golden lantern hung, and without one regret for her life with Battle, she might have been the one. There was the mistletoe in the tree. It was like a tree, too — a tree within a tree.

“You’re tired,” he said.

“No, not tired, I haven’t danced in a long time, I guess, and when now again?”

They danced, the music progressed, changed, and slowed. It was “Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot”— it was good night.

52

THEN they were waiting for Dabney and Troy to come back, and for George and Robbie to go, for Laura to go — three days.

The first morning, they were all beating their aching heads, Battle and George groaning out pitifully, waked up by Ranny and Bluet with the birds. Mary Denis telephoned from Inverness that Baby George had gained an ounce, and asked, Did Dabney get off? Mary Lamar was driven home. The house was more or less silent, and Uncle Pinck sat meditating all atone out by the sundial.

Ellen in the morning cool walked in the yard in her old dress, her scissors on a ribbon around her neck, and one of the children’s school gloves on in case she wanted to poke around or pull much.

“Howard! Start the water running out here. Let it run from the open hose, soak everything.” She reached down and pulled up, light as down, a great straggly petunia bush turned white every inch. In those few days, when she had forgotten to ask a soul to water things, how everything had given up, or hung its head. And that little old vine that always wanted to take everything had taken everything she pulled at a long thread of it and unwound it from the pomegranate tree.

The camellia bushes had all set their buds, choosing the driest and busiest time, and if they did not get water they would surely drop them, temperamental as they were. The grass all silver now showed its white roots underfoot, and was laced with ant beds up and down and across. And in just those few days, she must warn Battle, some caterpillar nests had appeared on the pecan trees down in the grove — he would have to get those burned out or they would take his trees.

Toward the gate the little dogwoods she had brought in out of the woods, or saved, hung every heart-shaped leaf. She knew the little turret buds were going brown, but they were beyond help that far from the house they would have to get along the best they could waiting for rain; that was something she had learned. Dabney loved them, too. A bumblebee with dragging polleny legs went smotheringly over the abelia bells, making a snoring sound. The old crape myrtle with its tiny late old bloom right at the top of the tree was already beginning to shed all its bark; its branches glowed silver-brown and amber, brighter than its green. Well, the cypresses in the bayou were touched with flame in their leaves, early to meet fall as they were early to meet spring and with the same wild color. The locust shells clung to the tree trunks, the birds were flying over every day now. and Roy said he heard them calling in the night.

And there was that same wonderful butterfly, yellow with black markings, that she had seen here yesterday. It was spending its whole life on this one abelia.

The Elaeagnus had overnight, it seemed, put out shoots as long as a man. “Howard, bring your shears too! Did this look this way for the wedding? It’s a wonder Tempe didn’t get after us for that.”

The robins fed like chickens in the radius of the hose. A whole tree was suddenly full of warblers — strange small greedy birds from far away that would be gone tomorrow. The Shellmound bluejays fussed at them furiously. Old Beverly opened his eyes, closed them again. A Dainty Bess that wanted to climb held a cluster of five blooms in the air. “I can’t reach,” Ellen remarked firmly. She needed to take up some things that would go in the pit for winter; she wanted to flower some bulbs too. When, when? And the spider lilies were taking everything.

Her chrysanthemums looked silver and ragged, their few flowers tarnished and all their lower leaves hanging down black, like scraggly pullets, and Howard would have to tie them up again too. “Howard, remind me to ask Mr. Battle for three or four loads of fertilizer tomorrow.” The dead iris foliage curled and floated wraith like over everything. “Howard, you get the dead leaves away from here and be careful, if I let you put your hands any further in than the violets, do you hear?”

“I ain’t goin’ pull up anything you don’t want me pullin’ up, no’m. Not this time.”

She looked at the tall grass in her beds, as if it knew she could no longer bend over and reach it. What would happen to everything if she were not here to watch it, she thought, not for the first time when a child was coming. Of all the things she would leave undone, she hated leaving the.garden untended — sometimes as much as leaving Bluet or Battle.

“Now those dahlias can just come up out of there,” she said, pausing again. “They have no reason for being in there at all, that I can see.” She wanted to separate the bulbs again too, and spread the Roman hyacinths out a little under the trees —they grew so thick now they could hardly bloom last spring. “Howard, don’t you think breath-of-spring leans over too much to look pretty?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Howard, look at my roses! Oh, what all you’ll have to do to them.”

“I wish there wasn’t no such thing as roses,” said Howard. “If I had my way, wouldn’t he a rose in de world. Catch your shirt and stick you and prick you and grab you. Got thorns.”

“Why, Howard. You hush!” Ellen looked back over her shoulder at him for a minute, indignant. “You don’t want any roses in the world?”

“Wish dev was out of de world, Miss Ellen,” said I Ioward persistent ly.

“Well, just hush, then.”

She cut the few flowers, Etoiles and Lady Hillingdons (to her astonishment she was trembling at Howard’s absurd, meek statement, as at some impudence), and called the children to run take them in the house. Bluet and Runny and Howard’s little boy had three straws down a doodlebug hole and were all calling the doodlebug, each using a separate and ardent persuasion.

In the house she could hear India and Roxie laughing in a wild duet. Roxie turning the ice cream, and at an upper window Aunt Shannon singing. Poor Lady Clare was calling that she was going to drop her comb and brush out the window if nobody came to make her look pretty and sweet. Shelley had taken Maureen and Laura with her to Greenwood for the groceries — they were out of everything. (Should she keep Laura? Billie McRaven was solid and devoted, but he had no imagination — should she take Laura and keep her at Shellmound?)

Aunt Mac, driven by Little Uncle, had set off to Fairchilds for the payroll, as she had decided to wash and iron it this morning — too much had happened, said Aunt Mac, and it seemed a little cool. Ellen had no idea where Roy and Little Battle had gone, racing out by themselves; she hoped and prayed they were all right and on the place. But Dabney. If only she could see Dabney, if Dabney would be home soon. The time that she had wanted to stand still in the garden, waiting for her to catch up, if only it would fly and bring Dabney home. Memphis for three days even sounded like Forever.

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 pajamas in the kitchen casually taking a ham 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 or 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.

53

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 plant ed fish-pole. Not another living creature was in sight.

When Shelley got the groceries from a nice Chinese man who immediately unlocked the store for her even though 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.

“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 wais 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,” she said calmly, after she let out her breath, ”l’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 deprecat i ugly.

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 underside 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 Shellmound, 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 of 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.

“You see! She’ll have none of us!” said Shelley, in her light voice that had the catch in it.

Mr. Rondo, probably remembering he had already been asked not to mention one thing, looked polite, taking t he shortest glance at Virgie Lee. If he seemed to recognize her at all, it was as a Baptist. Shelley whirled off up the street and across the bridge, and they put Mr. Rondo down at the Methodist stile, where he thanked them and took out his watch, which, Laura told Shelley, seemed to have stopped.

54

POOR Ellen,” said Tempe, clasping her softly, her delicate, fragrant face large and serious as it pressed Ellen’s close. “This has nearly killed you. I know! But child, it’s what mothers are for.” They embraced in the kitchen, with Ranny pulling his mother’s skirt — only a baby still.

“Tempe, I couldn’t have done it without you.” It was true, and she held Tempe the longer for being tired, from everything, from waiting — from mentally taking out shrubbery, from trying to make Howard love roses, from trying to make Bluet not want chicken pox or anything else because Lady Clare had it, from letting Aunt Mac get clear to the bank on a Sunday morning. Look at me, am I sorry for myself? she thought, shaken, seeing a mist in Tempo’s eyes.

Aunt Mac as a matter of fact had long since returned from her trip, without announcing whether it was successful or not. She came sitting as straight as she sat going out, in the pony cart under its wide flounced umbrella, and alighted at the carriage block without the slightest remark or notice of the world. She made her way into the house, Roy running up from somewhere like a flash, with a cut on his foot bleeding (he was the most courteous of her boys!), and escorting her, holding her elbow on the flat of his hand as if on a fine tray. No word would ever be said to her about money! Sunday money or any other kind.

Battle woke up, Jim Allen and Primrose were driven home, and the boys who had stayed over from the dance last night ate breakfast and departed, Red Boyne leaving Shelley a wild note which India read out loud. George and Robbie — who had gone off hours ago to buy a little dress and hat — came back in two cars, with the joke between them that it was Sunday. “We bought a car, though!” said Robbie. “The man opened up everything for George, and sold him a Hudson Super-Six.” Shelley and the children came in starved from Greenwood, but bringing groceries from some charitable man, thank goodness.

Then Ellen was saying, catching the little girl in the hall, “Laura, there’s something to tell you. We want you to stay, to live with us at Shellmound. Until you go to Marmion, perhaps. Would you be happy? Your papa would listen to reason, he hopes you’d be happy too. India would be glad. Something’s got all the curl out of your poor hair!”

The visit, the round-trip ticket on the Dog, had been just a premonition — now they told her what would really be. Shellmound! The real thing might always dawn upon her slowly, Laura felt, hanging her head while Aunt Ellen sadly stretched a straight strand of her hair out on her finger. That feeling that came over her — it was of having been cheated a little, not told at once. And so she answered oversoon, over-brightly, “Oh, I want to! I want to stay!” Then she cried, “But I don’t want to go to Marmion!”

“Marmion’ll be yours, you know, when you want it. I reckon some day you’ll live there like your Aunt Ellen here, with all your children,” said Uncle Battle, looking around Aunt Ellen and stepping out from behind her.

“I will?” said Laura. “It’s big — isn’t it?”

“Now, Battle, that’s all too complicated to think of now, here in the hall,” said Aunt Tempe passing by. “You let Dabney have Marmion now, she wants it!”

“Besides — do you ever trust Virgie Lee not to Hare up?” Aunt Ellen seemed to brood for a moment; her fingers went still in Laura’s hair. “She’ll have none of us now, but—”

“Did you have a dream about Virgie Lee?” Uncle Battle laughed.

Laura felt that in the end she would go — go from all this, go back to her father. She would hold that secret, and kiss Uncle Battle now.

Uncle Battle laughed and gave her a little dressing on her skirt. “Big? You’ll grow, Skeeta,” he said. “But no need to hurry.”

And there was Aunt Shannon.

“Aunt Shannon,” said Battle gruffly, sent in. His softened voice was always hoarse; India listened as she passed with her doll. “There’s a plenty of everything. There’s a plenty all around you. All in the world to eat, no need at all hiding bread crusts in your room. And nobody is dreaming they could get you or harm you. I’m here. See me?”

She nodded her head, gently and then sharply, and regarded him; India leaned in the door. “My little old boy,” she said, and patted him. “Oh, you have a great deal to learn. Oh, Denis, I wish you wouldn’t go out in the world unshielded and unprotected as you are. I have a feeling, I have a feeling, something will happen to you.”

“If it isn’t the Reconstruction, it’s things just as full of trouble to you, isn’t it?” Battle said softly, letting her pat her little hand on his great weight, holding still. He changed the level of his voice. “I’ll stay, Aunt Shannon. I’m here. Here I am.”

“Good-bye, my darling,” she said.

55

IT WAS the first night Dabney and Troy were back, and George’s and Robbie’s last night at the place. They would have a little family picnic.

“I don’t see a bit of use trying to sit down to a big supper tonight, after all we’ve been eating, wedding food, company food. We’ll just have a little picnic,” said Ellen at the dinner table.

“Come to the Grove!” cried Primrose. The aunts were on hand at Shellmound for the welcomes and good-byes, of course.

“Marmion!” said Battle. “By God, it’s not too hot for a barbecue. Not if we keep good and away from the fire.”

“Troy loves a barbecue,” said Dabney gravely. It was Tuesday. They had just been away three days, on account of the picking.

But it was too hot for a barbecue, as could be seen by four o’clock, and they took a cold supper.

“Let’s try out your new car, Dabney,” said Orrin. “See how it takes the ruts. I’ll drive.”

“Oh, you will? Child, no. Robbie, you have a new car too.” She turned an earnest look on Robbie.

“We just got it in Greenwood, on Sunday,” smiled Robbie.

But they went in buggies and wagons when the time came, prevailed on for the sake of the tangles and brambles across the river.

“You know, old Rondo’s quite a fellow,” said Battle. “Let’s invite him on the picnic!”

“No, then we’d have to go to church some Sunday,” Ellen pointed out. She said she had better stay home and keep Aunt Mac and Aunt Shannon company, and poor Lady Clare, who would know something was going on, but Battle and George would not hear of that. Ranny and Bluet went nicely to sleep at dark (Bluet still wearing her wedding shoes in bed part of the night) never knowing about any of it, though Lady Clare tore some of her red hair as she watched them go, pulled it out by the roots to see a picnic start off without her, and screamed that she would tell her papa.

It was a starry night — truly a little cool: that was hard to believe! Laura and India, in the back of the buggy with the food, rode at the head, Little Uncle, invisible, driving. A little black horse-mule was pulling them. They dangled their feet, over the track, looking at the rest of the procession. With them rode a freezer of ice cream, the huddled napkins of chicken, turkey, and sandwiches, the covered plates with surprises, the boxes with the caramel and the coconut cakes and Aunt Tempe’s lemon chiffon pie. The jug of iced tea was somewhere — they could hear it shake and splash.

It was a beautiful night. “Still powder-dry!” called Battle, out into it. “How much longer?” They were taking the plantation road into Fairchilds, to cross the river and follow the old track to Marmion. Cotton was everywhere, as far as the sky —the soft and level fields. Here and there little cabins nestled, far away, and dark as hen roosts. In some wagon they were singing “Some Sweet Day.”

Laura was sleepy, very sleepy. By night the Delta looked just like a big bed, the whiteness in the luminous dark. It was like the clouds that spread around the east for the moon, that the horses walked through and the buggies rolled over.

“The bayou ghost didn’t cry once at Dabney’s wedding,” said Shelley’s voice as they went by trees. “Did you notice her not crying, anybody?”

“If she held back, us Fairchilds consider that as lucky as you’d want.” That was George.

“Listen— is that the crying now?”

But it was some night bird.

Dabney kept telling of how they went to New Orleans, not Memphis, and fooled everybody.

“We watched the river, the sea gulls.”

“It’s the same river, Memphis and New Orleans,” said Laura, opening her eyes and speaking from the back of their leading buggy. “My papa has taken me on trips — I know about geography.”But in the great confines of Shellmound, no one listened.

The night insects all over the Delta were noisy; a kind of audible twinkling, like a lowly starlight, pervaded the night with a gregarious radiance.

Ellen at Battle’s side rode looking ahead: they were comfortable and silent, both with their great weight breathing a little heavily, in a rhythm that brought them sometimes together. The repeating fields, the repeating cycles of season and her own life— there was something in the monotony itself that was beautiful, rewarding — perhaps to what was womanly within her. No, she bad never had time — much time at all to contemplate, but she knew. Well, one moment told you the’ great things; one moment was enough for you to know the greatest thing.

They rolled on and on. It was endless. The wheels rolled, but nothing changed. Only the heartheat played its little drum, skipped a beat, played again.

“Is all of this Shellmound?” called little Laura McRaven.

“Remains to be seen!” called Battle gayly back.

From the last wagon came a chorus that started at Dabney’s high pitch and changed in the middle: —

They were crossing the river, rolling across the bridge, which groaned only lightly under their buggy wheels and the hoofs of the little horse-mule.

They went through the tangles and brambles, singing, and India took Laura around the waist—they held each other in.

“ My secret is,” India said in her ear, “ I’m going to have another little brother before very long, and his name shall be Denis Fairchild.”

Another wagon began its soft singing: —

“Oh, ye’ll tak’ the high road an’ I’ll tak’ the low road, An I’ll be in Scotland before ye.”

“My secret is,” Laura murmured, “I’ve been in Marmion before ye. I’ve seen it all afore. It’s all happened before.” They leaned their heads together.

“But me and my true love will never meet again —”

They’re singing to Uncle George that his wife has left him, Laura thought sleepily but open-eyed. And to Dabney that she and Troy will never meet again. It was a picnic night. All secrets were being canceled out, sung out. Uncle George’s wagon came in view. Robbie and Maureen and George made a jolted but steady triangle, with little black boys hanging on and spilling off and catching up behind. And George was left still the adored one for the picnic, loved by the whole long procession with a love going farther than the love for Dabney though she was the girl and the bride.

The picnic was to tell Dabney hello but George good-bye. She gazed back at him, a figure in white clothes, face and throat dark by the starlight and in the brambly road looking up at that, moment as if something wonderful might happen to him tonight, where he was going in the wagon. Maureen, now in all contrariness tame as a pigeon, squatted at his knee. She was mostly gentle, Laura dreamily realized. It was only now and then that she showed what she could do — just like most people. And Uncle George was singing — not “Loch Lomond,” or “Some Sweet Day,”bul something. He was not really singing any song that she knew. It was something different and playful. He could not carry the tune—or he was improvising. It was that. She listened to it.

That picnic night she felt part of her cousins’ life — part of it all. She was familiar at last with that wonderful, special anticipation that belonged to the Fairchilds, only to the Fairchilds in the whole world. A kind of wild, cousinly happiness surged through her and went out again, leaving her on India’s shoulder.

She heard Uncle George’s soft tune climb and fall, learned it — and then he changed to a whistle, just like a bird.

Marmion’s grove rose up ahead, but Laura was asleep.

56

THEY had eaten everything they could, everything there was, and lay back groaning on the plaids and rugs. Battle had indeed cleared all the brambles away; it was a picnic place now by the riverside. There was a smell of cut green wood. And a smell of smoke — Howard was wafting it gently over them from a distant fire, aided by six or eight. George lighted his pipe to drive away the mosquitoes Tempe could tell were still after her. The dogs had the bones, those good for them and not, and worked contentedly by the water, now and then lifting up, listening. Overhead, showing it was the first cool night on the Delta, the Milky Way came out and wound like a bright river among the stars.

Troy handed a muscadine to his wife, like a present, and she gave him a weak tap and lay still with it in her teeth. Troy wore a new seersucker suit whose stripes in the house had seemed as vibrant as if lightning were playing around him, but out here he looked like any other man in an old costume. Somebody sighed deeply. Once somebody said, “Too bad Pinck had to go to Memphis today.” Little Battle was asleep, his cheek on his fist. Roy sat wordless, his gaze passing with the pure contact of starlight over all around. Orrin wandered off, first one way, then another, whistling like a whippoorwill.

“Did you all know Rowena wanted to be buried over here?” Jim Allen said once, out into the night. “Well, she did. But she wasn’t.”

“Wake up, Laura!”

“Oh, let her sleep.”

“George,” said Battle from where he lay on Ellen’s blanket, “did I ever hear you say what you’d do if you came back and took possession of the Grove again?”

“Sure I’d change things.”

The silence drifted.

“Why, George,” Tempe remarked, she alone sitting erect, and wielding her own little fan, “that’s where Primmy and Jim Allen Fairchild are counting on living. If you came back, would you run your sisters away?”

There were little sounds never far away — the river and the woods. Their picnic had scared up the peafowls and peacocks, very fierce, long since gone to the wild, and now and then they ran in the viny ways to the river. The tower of Marmion was there over the trees.

“Let’s go in,” said Shelley, rising up. “ Who wants to go in Marmion?”

“Nobody!” said Battle. “You can’t go in. I’ve had that door locked for just such as you.”

“Oh, if I took over, they could stay with us as long as they enjoy it,” George said. “Or 1 could build them their own house near-by. Or they could move in Shelimound — Dabney’ll be here, and Orrin soon off to school — old She! ley’ll not be long with us, I imagine,” and he gave her ribbon a touch and it came off.

“I think you’d be right to, George,” said Primrose, trying to make her voice carry. “And it’s been such a responsibility! ”

“Further than cotton, I might try fruit trees, might try some horses, even cattle,” said George, smiling in the star light.

“You’re crazy, man,” Battle roared delightedly.

“Who knows, I might try a garden. Vegetables!”

“Vegetables!” They all cried together. “What would the Delta think.'” Tempe demanded.

“And melons where all that sand was deposited on the bottom there.”

“Is it what Robbie wants?” asked Shelley.

“Robbie wouldn’t want any at all, I’m afraid,” George said. “Robbie’s our city girl born.”

“I’d probably hate it,” said Robbie dreamily. She laughed softly where she lay on her back beside him, looking up at the sky. The lady moon, with a side of her hair gone, was rising.

“George,” said Primrose, her voice shaking a little. “I forgot to tell you until now — there are rats at the Grove.”

George laughed out. “Afraid to tell me!” He got up from Robbie’s side and walked over to where Primrose sat on her little stool to keep “the damp” from her. “Primmy. Yes, I know, it has rats, and a lot of things — a ghost to keep you awake, and also it’s the place Denis was going to come back to and enjoy a long, voracious old age and raise a houseful of healthy offspring. Now what if I want in, and others out, even you, Primmy?” He spoke softly.

“Georgie!”

“George said, What if he took the Grove?” Tempe called to Jim Allen.

The Grove? Robbie was thinking. Well, for her, it would be that once more they would laugh and chase by the river. Once more she and Mary Shannon, well-known as that star Venus, would be looking at each other in that house. Things almost never happened, almost never could be, for one time only! They went back again, started over.

“Robbie,” said India, “are you going to have a baby?”

“India!” said Ellen, shocked. “What do you know about babies?”

“ I won’t tell you,”said Robbie in a clear voice, still lying on her back, one arm flung out, looking up at the sky.

Battle laughed uproariously.

“Excuse my back, please, ma’am,” said Troy to Tempe. He pivoted around and kissed Dabney. “Do we have to kiss in front of your whole family from now on, Dabney, now that we’re married?” He set her up straight again like something he had knocked over and was putting back so that no one could tell the difference.

“ Yes! ” She looked on him beaming, maternally — to tease him.

How quickly she had known she loved Troy! Only she had not known how she could reach the love she felt already in her knowledge. In catching sight of love she had seen both banks of a river and the river rushing between — she saw everything but the way down. Even now, lying in Troy’s bared arm like a drowned girl, she was timid of the element itself. Troy set her up again, and she smiled, looking at him all over and around him, up at the two rising horns of his parted hair.

They had fooled everybody successfully about their honeymoon, because instead of going to the Peabody in Memphis they had gone to the St. Charles in New Orleans. Walking through the two afternoons down st reels narrow as hallways, they had had to press back against the curb, against uncertain dark-green doors, to let the streetcars get through. The streetcars made an extraordinary clangor at such close quarters, as they did in the quiet of night, and some of them had “Desire” across the top. Could that have been the name of a street? She had not asked then; she did not much wonder now.

“Old Georgie. If you took possession of the Grove, you’d change it, eh?” said Battle. Ellen was leaning against him; she rubbed his arm tenderly. “ Well — Shellmound’s open, Prim, bear it in mind.”

“Uncle Denis would never do this, said India dramatically.

“India,” said Ellen, “you don’t even remember your Uncle Denis, and why are you so wide-awake? Laura’s asleep.”

“No I’m not!”

“Well, Denis wouldn’t,” said Tempe. “Selfish, selfish! Spoiling the picnic. I don’t understand George—he was always supposed to be so unselfish, unspoiled, never do anything but kind things. Now listen, he’s as spoiled as any of us!”

“Oh, foot, Tempe,” said Primrose. “Can’t you listen to man-talk without getting upset? Can’t you listen to George and Battle talking?”

“What would Jim Allen think? Battle said, yawning.

“She hates rats.”Primrose laughed breathlessly. “We’re two old maids, all right!”

“Well, take it then!” said Jim Allen all at once.

Ellen sighed. Poor deaf sister, she could not listen to herself, hear how grudging she sounded.

“I’d let George build Jim Allen and me a little house quick as anything,” said Primrose. “And furniture there’s enough beds and all in the attic for a world of houses here.”

“Your night light will be gone,”said India. “Dabney broke it for good, carrying it away.”

There was another silence, but gentler, more restful.

“Come back, George,” said Robbie.

“Bless your hearts, Primrose,” said George. He kissed her and Jim Allen.

“It’s got fats!" said Jim Allen, and she sank back, restfully, as if there were comforts, after all, in a little spitefulness.

“But I don’t understand George at all,” Tempe began again, as if George himself were not there, and he kissed her too. “You just want to provoke your sisters, you’re just teasing.”

“It’s his house,” said Ellen. (Had she started interfering with the Fairchilds again — this far along? She sounded to herself for a moment like herself as a bride.)

“But I didn’t dream he wanted it,” Battle said. “‘Here, take the Grove,’ he said to the girls, when they wanted to fool with a house. Did that sound like he wanted it?”

“Why not?” said Primrose proudy. “Anyway — he only said tonight ‘If— then maybe.’”

“Oh, my.” Dabney yawned in luxury. “I’m glad that he doesn’t want to take Marmion away from me.”

“Shame on you, pussy,” said Troy sharply, and she was quiet.

“Watermelons and greens!” Tempe still fumed softly. “Sisters out in the cold. George, sometimes I don’t think you show the most perfect judgment.” Then they both laughed gently at each other.

“Oft, in the stilly night.

Ere slumber’s chain has bound me —”

They began to sing, softly, wanderingly, each his way. But Jim Allen, whose voice rose strongest, stretched tilted on her small plump elbow on the grassy blanket, was looking at Robbie Reid as if she were for the first time quite aware that her brother was married — not hopelessly, like the dead Denis, but problematically, not promisingly!

“Oft, in the stilly night —”

“1 like your idea, George,” Troy said with deliberation through the song. “Growing greens and getting some cows around. I love a little Jersey, more than anything.”

George with his left-handed throw put pebbles in the Yazoo. “We’ll keep in touch.”

One great golden star went through the night falling.

“Oh!” cried Laura aloud. “Oh, it was beautiful, that star!”

“I saw it, I saw it !” cried India.

Dabney reached over and put her arm around her, drew her to her. “Yes. Beautiful!” India smiled faintly, leaning on Dabney’s beating heart, the softness of her breast.

Then, “Oh, India, you still look so tacky!” cried Dabney breathlessly. “I thought you’d be changed, some! Oh, Mama, look at her!”

“Stand still, India,” said Ellen. But India darted off and ran to look in the river. She stood showily, hands on hips, as if she saw some certain thing, neither marvelous nor terrible, but simply certain, come by in the Yazoo River.

Laura lifted on her knees and took her Aunt Ellen around the neck. She held her till they swayed together. Would Aunt Ellen remember it against her, that she had run away from her when she fainted? Of course Aunt Ellen would never find out about the rosy pin. Should she tell her, and suffer? Yes. No. She touched Aunt Ellen’s cheek with three anxious, repaying kisses.

“Oh, beautiful!” Another star fell in the sky.

Laura let go and ran forward a step. “I saw that one too.”

“Did you?” said somebody — Uncle George.

“I saw where it fell,” said Laura, bragging and in reassurance.

She turned again to them, both arms held out to the radiant night.