The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [117]
"But at the end of the street there was one door where Miss Sabina had never entered," said Phoebe. "The door of the post office. She acted as if the post office had no existence in the world, or else she called it a dirty little room with the door standing wide open to the flies. All the hate she had left in her when she was old went out to a little four-posted whitewashed building, the post office. It was beyond her domain. For there we might still be apart in a dream, and she did not know what it was."
"But in the end, she came in," said Irene.
"We were there," she said. "It was mail time, and we each had a letter in our hands. We heard her come to the end of the street, the heavy staggering figure coming to the beat of the cane. We were silent all at once. When Miss Sabina is at the door, there is no other place in the world but where you stand, and no other afternoon but that one, past or future. We held on to our letters as on to all far-away or ephemeral things at that moment, to our secret hope or joy and our despair too, which she might require of us."
"When she entered," said Cora, "and took her stand in the center of the floor, a little dog saw who it was and trotted out, and alarm like the vibration from the firebell trembled in the motes of the air, and the crowded room seemed to shake, to totter. We looked at one another in greater fear of her than ever before in our lives, and we would have run away or spoken to her first, except for a premonition that this time was the last, this demand the final one."
"It was as if the place of the smallest and the longest-permitted indulgence, the little common green, were to be invaded when the time came for the tyrant to die," said Phoebe.
The three old maids sighed gently. The grapes they held upon their palms were transparent in the light, so that the little black seeds showed within.
"But when Miss Sabina spoke," said Irene, "she said, 'Give me my letter.' And Miss Sabina never got a letter in her life. She never knew a soul beyond the town. We told her there was no letter for her, but she cried out again, 'Give me my letter!' We told her there was none, and we went closer and tried to gather her to us. But she said, 'Give me that.' And she took our letters out of our hands. 'Your lovers!' she said, and tore them in two. We let her do just as she would. But she was not satisfied. 'Open up!' she said to the postmistress, and she beat upon the little communicating door. So the postmistress had to open up, and Miss Sabina went in to the inner part. We all drew close. We glanced at one another with our eyes grown bright, like people under a spell, for she was bent upon destruction."
"A fury and a pleasure seemed to rise inside her, that went out like lightning through her hands," said Cora. "She threw down her stick, she advanced with her bare hands. She seized upon everything before her, and tore it to pieces. She dragged the sacks about, and the wastebaskets, and the contents she scattered like snow. Even the ink pad she flung against the wall, and it left a purple mark like a grape stain that will never wear off.
"She was possessed then, before our eyes, as she could never have been possessed. She raged. She rocked from side to side, she danced. Miss Sabina's arms moved like a harvester's in the field, to destroy all that was in the little room. In her frenzy she tore all the letters to pieces, and even put bits in her mouth and appeared to eat them.
"Then she stood still in the little room. She had finished. We had not yet moved when she lay toppled on the