The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [125]
When night was about to fall, the time came to bring out her most precious possession, the steamboat she had made from a shoe-box. In all boats the full-moon, half-moon, and new moon were cut out of each side for the windows, with tissue-paper through which shone the unsteady candle inside. She knew this journey ahead of time as if it were long ago, the hushing noise the boat made being dragged up the brick walk by the string, the leap it had to take across the three-cornered missing place over the big root, the spreading smell of warm wax in the evening, and the remembered color of the daylight turning. Coming to meet the boat was another boat, shining and gliding as if by itself.
Children greeted each other dreamily at twilight.
"Choo-choo!"
"Choo-choo!"
And something made her turn after that and see how Cornelia stood and looked across at them, all dressed in gauze, looking as if the street were a river flowing along between, and she did not speak at all. Josie understood: she could not. It seemed to her as she guided her warm boat under the brightening moon that Cornelia would have turned into a tree if she could, there in the front yard of the double-house, and that the center of the tree would have to be seen into before her heart was bared, so undaunted and so filled with hope....
"I'll shoot you dead!" screamed Will.
"Hush, hush," said their mother.
Her father held up his hand and said, "Listen."
Then their house was taken to the very breast of the storm.
Josie lay as still as an animal, and in panic thought of the future ... the sharp day when she would come running out of the held holding the ragged stems of the quick-picked goldenrod and the warm flowers thrust out for a present for somebody. The future was herself bringing presents, the season of gifts. When would the day come when the wind would fall and they would sit in silence on the fountain rim, their play done, and the boys would crack the nuts under their heels? If they would bring the time around once more, she would lose nothing that was given, she would hoard the nuts like a squirrel.
For the first time in her life she thought, might the same wonders never come again? Was each wonder original and alone like the falling star, and when it fell did it bury itself beyond where you hunted it? Should she hope to see it snow twice, and the teacher running again to open the window, to hold out her black cape to catch it as it came down, and then going up and down the room quickly, quickly, to show them the snow flakes?...
"Mama, where is my muff that came from Marshall Field's?"
"It's put away, it was your grandmother's present." (But it came from those far fields.) "Are you dreading?" Her mother felt of her forehead.
"I want my little muff to hold." She ached for it. "Mother, give it to me."
"Keep still," said her mother softly.
Her father came over and kissed her, and as if a new kiss could bring a memory, she remembered the night....It was that very night. How could she have forgotten and nearly let go what was closest of all?...
The whole way, as they walked slowly after supper past the houses, and the wet of sprinkled lawns was rising like a spirit over the streets, the locusts were filling the evening with their old delirium, the swell that would rise and die away.
In the Chautauqua when they got there, there