The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [160]
Loch squinted; he was waiting for the day when the sailor took the figs. And see what the girl would hurry him into. Her name was Virgie Rainey. She had been in Cassie's room all the way through school, so that made her sixteen; she would ruin any nice idea. She looked like a tomboy but it was not the truth. She had let the sailor pick her up and carry her one day, with her fingers lifting to brush the leaves. It was she that had showed the sailor the house to begin with, she that started him coming. They were rusty old fig trees but the figs were the little sweet blue. When they cracked open, their pink and golden flesh would show, their inside flowers, and golden bubbles of juice would hang, to touch your tongue to first. Loch gave the sailor time, for it was he, Loch, who was in command of leniency here; he was giving him day after day.
He swayed on his knees and saw the sailor and Virgie Rainey in a clear blue-and-white small world run sparkling to the back door of the empty house.
And next would come the old man going by in the blue wagon, up as far as the Starks' and back to the Carmichaels' corner.
"Buttermilk?
Buttermilk.
Fresh dewberries and—
Buttermilk."
That was Mr. Fate Rainey and his song. He would take a long time to pass. Loch could study through the telescope the new flower in his horse's hat each day. He would go past the Starks' and circle the cemetery and niggertown, and come back again. His cry, with a song's tune, would come near, then far, and near again. Was it an echo—was an echo that? Or was it, for the last time, the call of somebody seeking about in a deep cave, "Here—here! Oh, here am I!"
There was a sound that might have been a blue jay scolding, and that was the back door; they were just now going in off the back porch. When he saw the door prized open—the stretched screen billowing from being too freely leaned against—and let the people in, Loch felt the old indignation rise up. But at the same time he felt joy. For while the invaders did not see him, he saw them, both with the naked eye and through the telescope; and each day that he kept them to himself, they were his.
Louella appeared below on their steps and with a splash threw out the dirty dishwater in the direction of the empty house. But she would never speak, and he would never speak. He had not shared anybody in his life even with Louella.
After the door fell to at the sailor's heel, and the upstairs window had been forced up and propped, then silence closed over the house next door. It closed over just as silence did in their house at this time of day; but like the noisy waterfall it kept him awake—fighting sleep.
In the beginning, before he saw anyone, he would just as soon have lain there and thought of wild men holding his house in thrall, or of a giant crouched double behind the window that corresponded to his own. The big fig tree was many times a magic tree with golden fruit that shone in and among its branches like a cloud of lightning bugs—a tree twinkling all over, burning, on and off, off and on. The sweet golden juice to come—in his dream he put his tongue out, and then his mother would be putting that spoon in his mouth.
More than once he dreamed it was inside that house that the cave had moved, and the buttermilk man went in and out the rooms driving his horse with its red rose and berating its side with a whip that unfurled of itself; in the dream he was not singing. Or the horse itself, a white and beautiful one, was on its way over, approaching to ask some favor of him, a request called softly and intelligibly upward—which he was not decided yet whether to grant or deny. This call through the window had not yet happened—not quite. But someone had come.
He turned away. "Cassie!" he cried.
Cassie came to his room. She said, "Didn't I tell you what you could do? Trim up those Octagon Soap coupons and count them good if you want that jack-knife." Then she