The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [172]
Miss Eckhart had pretty ankles for a heavy lady like herself. Mrs. Stark said what a surprise it was for Miss Eckhart, of all people, to turn up with such pretty ankles, which made it the same as if she didn't have them. When she came in she took her seat and put her foot earnestly up on Mr. Sissum's stool like any other lady in Morgana and he spoke to her very nicely. He generally invited the bigger ladies, like Miss Nell Loomis or Miss Gert Bowles, to sit in the children's chair, but he held back, with Miss Eckhart, and spoke very nicely to her about her feet and treated them as a real concern; he even brought out a choice of shoes. To most ladies he brought out one box and said, "There's your shoe," as though shoes were something predestined. He knew them all so well.
Miss Eckhart might have come over to his aisle more often, but she had an incomprehensible habit of buying shoes two or even four pairs at a time, to save going back, or to take precaution against never finding them again. She didn't know how to do about Mr. Sissum at all.
But what could they either one have done? They couldn't go to church together; the Sissums were Presbyterians from the beginning of time and Miss Eckhart belonged to some distant church with a previously unheard-of name, the Lutheran. She could not go to the picture show with Mr. Sissum because he was already at the picture show. He played the music there every evening after the store closed—he had to; this was before the Bijou afforded a piano, and he could play the cello. He could not have refused Mr. Syd Sissum, who bought the stable and built the Bijou.
Miss Eckhart used to come to the political speakings in the Starks' yard when Mr. Sissum played with the visiting band. Anybody could see him all evening then, high on the fresh plank platform behind his cello. Miss Eckhart, the true musician, sat on the damp night grass and listened. Nobody ever saw them really together any more than that. How did they know she was sweet on Mr. Sissum? But they did.
Mr. Sissum was drowned in the Big Black River one summer—fell out of his boat, all alone.
Cassie would rather remember the sweet soft speaking-nights in the Starks' yard. Before the speakings began, while the music was playing, Virgie and her older brother Victor ran wild all over everywhere, assaulting the crowd, where couples and threes and fives of people joined hands like paperdoll strings and wandered laughing and turning under the blossoming China trees and the heavy crape myrtles that were wound up in honeysuckle. How delicious it all smelled! Virgie let herself go completely, as anyone would like to do. Jinny Love Stark's swing was free to anybody and Virgie ran under the swingers, or jumped on behind, booting and pumping. She ran under sweethearts' twining arms, and nobody, even her brother, could catch her. She rolled the country people's watermelons away. She caught lightning bugs and tore out their lights for jewelry. She never rested as long as the music played except at last to throw herself hard and panting on the ground, her open mouth smiling against the trampled clover. Sometimes she made Victor climb up on the Starks' statue. Cassie remembered him, white face against dark leaves, a baseball cap turned backwards with the bill behind, and long black-stockinged legs wound over the snowy limbs of the goddess, and slowly, proudly sliding down.
But Virgie would not even watch him. She whirled in one direction till she fell down drunk, or turned about more slowly when they played Vienna Woods. She pushed Jinny Love Stark into her own lily bed. And all the time, she was eating. She ate all the ice cream she wanted. Now and then, in the soft parts of Carmen or before the storm in William Tell—even during dramatic pauses in the speaking—Mrs. Ice Cream Rainey's voice could be heard quickly calling, "Ice cream?" She had brought a freezer or two on Mr. Rainey's wagon to the foot of the yard. This time of year it might be fig. Sometimes Virgie whirled around with a fig ice cream cone in