The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [171]
Cassie saw that Miss Eckhart, who might once have been formidable in particular to any Mr. Voights, was helpless toward him and his antics—as helpless as Miss Snowdie MacLain would have been, helpless as Miss Snowdie was, toward her own little twin sons—all since she had begun giving in to Virgie Rainey. Virgie kept the upper hand over Miss Eckhart even at the moment when Mr. Voight came out to scare them. She only played on the stronger and clearer, and never pretended he had not come out and that she did not know it, or that she might not tell it, no matter how poor Miss Eckhart begged.
"Tell a soul what you have seen, I'll beat your hands until you scream," Miss Eckhart had said. Her round eyes opened wide, her mouth went small. This was all she knew to say. To Cassie it was as idle as a magic warning in a story; she criticized the rhyme. She herself had told all about Mr. Voight at breakfast, stood up at the table and waved her arms, only to have her father say he didn't believe it; that Mr. Voight represented a large concern and covered seven states. He added his own threat to Miss Eckhart's: no picture show money.
Her mother's laugh, which followed, was as usual soft and playful but not illuminating. Her laugh, like the morning light that came in the window each summer breakfast time around her father's long head, slowly made it its solid silhouette where he sat against the day. He turned to his paper like Douglas Fairbanks opening big gates; it was indeed his; he published the Morgana-MacLain Weekly Bugle and Mr. Voight had no place in it.
"Live and let live, Cassie," her mother said, meaning it mischievously. She showed no repentance, such as Cassie felt, for her inconsistencies. She had sometimes said passionately, "Oh, I hate that old MacLain house next door to me! I hate having it there all the time. I'm worn out with Miss Snowdie's cross!" Later on, when Miss Snowdie finally had to sell the house and move away, her mother said, "Well, I see Snowdie gave up." When she told bad news, she wore a perfectly blank face and her voice was helpless and automatic, as if she repeated a lesson.
Virgie told on Mr. Voight too, but she had nobody to believe her, and so Miss Eckhart did not lose any pupils by that. Virgie did not know how to tell anything.
And for what Mr. Voight did there were no ready words—what would you call it? "Call it spontaneous combustion," Cassie's mother said. Some performances of people stayed partly untold for lack of a name, Cassie believed, as well as for lack of believers. Mr. Voight before so very long—it happened during a sojourn home of Mr. MacLain, she remembered—was transferred to travel another seven states, ending the problem; and yet Mr. Voight had done something that amounted to more than going naked under his robe and calling alarm like a turkey gobbler, it was more belligerent; and the least describable thing of all had been a look on his face; that was strange. Thinking of it now, and here in her room, Cassie found she had bared her teeth and set them, trying out the frantic look. She could not now, any more than then, really describe Mr. Voight, but without thinking she could be Mr. Voight, which was more frightening still.
Like a dreamer dreaming with reservations, Cassie moved over and changed the color for her scarf and moved back to the window. She reached behind her for a square of heavenly-hash in its platter and bit down on the marshmallow.
There was another man Miss Eckhart had been scared of, up until the last. (Not Mr. King MacLain. They always passed without touching, like two stars, perhaps they had some kind of eclipse-effect on each other.) She had been sweet on Mr. Hal Sissum, who clerked in the shoe department of Spights' store.
Cassie remembered him—who didn't know Mr. Sissum and all the Sissums? His sandy hair, parted on the side, shook over his ear like a toboggan cap when he ambled forward, in his long lazy step, to wait on people. He teased people that came to buy shoes, as though that took the prize for the vainest, most outlandish idea