The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [120]
They moved into the living room. The summer matting was down on the floor, cracked and lying in little ridges under their sandals, smelling of its stains and dust, of thin green varnish, and of its origin in China. The sheet of music open on the piano had caved in while they slept, and gleamed faintly like a shell in the shimmer and flow of the strange light. Josie's drawing of the plaster-cast of Joan of Arc, which it had taken her all summer to do for her mother, had rolled itself tightly up on the desk like a diploma. Were they all going away to leave that? They wandered separately for a moment looking like strangers at the wicker chairs. The cretonne pillows smelled like wet stones. Outside the beseeching cries rose and fell, and drew nearer. The curtains hung almost still, like poured cream, down the windows, but on the table the petals shattered all at once from a bowl of roses. Then the chorus of wildness and delight seemed to come almost into their street, though still it held its distance, exactly like the wandering wagon filled with the big girls and boys at night.
Will in his little shirt was standing straight up with his eyes closed, erect as a spinning top.
"He'll sleep through it," said their mother. "You take him, and I'll take the girl." With a little push, she divided the children; she was unlike herself. Then their mother and father sat down opposite each other in the wicker chairs. They were waiting.
"Is it a moonlight picnic?" asked Josie.
"It's a storm," said her father. He answered her questions formally in a kind of deep courtesy always, which did not depend on the day or night. "This is the equinox."
Josie gave a leap at that and ran to the front window and looked out.
"Josie!"
She was looking for the big girl who lived in the double-house across the street. There was a strange fluid lightning which she now noticed for the first time to be filling the air, violet and rose, and soundless of thunder; and the eyes of the double-house seemed to open and shut with it.
"Josie, come back."
"I see Cornelia. I see Cornelia in the equinox, there in her high-heeled shoes."
"Nonsense," said her father. "Nonsense, Josie."
But she stood with her back to all of them and looked, saying, "I see Cornelia."
"How many times have I told you that you need not concern yourself with—Cornelia!" The way her mother said her name was not diminished now.
"I see Cornelia. She's on the outside, Mama, outside in the storm, and she's in the equinox."
But her mother would not answer.
"Josie, don't you understand—I want to keep us close together," said her father. She looked back at him. "Once in an equinoctial storm," he said cautiously over the sleeping Will, "a man's little girl was blown away from him into a haystack out in a field."
"The wind will come after Cornelia," said Josie.
But he called her back.
The house shook as if a big drum were being beaten down the street.
Her mother sighed. "Summer is over."
Josie drew closer to her, with a sense of consolation. Her mother's dark plait was as warm as her arm, and she tugged at it. In the coming of these glittering flashes and the cries and the calling voices of the equinox, summer was turning into the past. The long ago...
"What is the equinox?" she asked.
Her father made an explanation. "A seasonal change, you see, Josie—like the storm we had in winter. You remember that."
"No, sir," she said. She clung to her mother.
"She couldn't remember it next morning," said her mother, and looked at Will, who slept up against his father with his hands in small fists.
"You mustn't be frightened, Josie," said her father again. "You have my word that this is a good strong house." He had built it before she was born. But in the equinox Josie stayed with her mother, though the lightning stamped the pattern of her father's dressing gown on the room.
With the pulse of the