The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [188]
("Do you hear something, Mr. Moody?" Loch could cry out right now. "Mr. Voight, listen."—"All right, say—do you want your bird this minute?" might be the reply. "We'll call everything off.")
"Man, what's that?" asked Mr. Fatty Bowles, and "Fatty boy, do you hear something ugly?" Old Man Moody asked at the same instant. At last they cocked their ears at the ticking that had been there in the room with them all this time. They looked at each other and then with hunched shoulders paraded around looking for the source of it.
"It's a rattlesnake! No, it ain't! But it's close," said Mr. Fatty.
They looked high and low all over the room but they couldn't see it right in front of their eyes and up just a little, on top of the piano. That was honestly not a fair place, not where most people would put a thing. They looked at each other harder and hurried faster, but all they did was run on each other's heels and tip the chairs over. One of the chair legs snapped like a chicken bone.
Mr. Voight only got in their way, since he did not move an inch. He was still standing before the eyes of the sailor's mother, looking at her with lips puckered. It could be indeed that he knew her from his travels. He looked tired from these same travels now.
At last Old Man Moody, the smarter one of those two, spied what they were looking for, the obelisk with its little moving part and its door open. Once seen, that thing was so surely it that he merely pointed it out to Mr. Fatty. Mr. Fatty tiptoed over and picked the obelisk up and set it down again quickly. So Old Man Moody stumped over and picked it up and held it up on the diagonal, posing, like a fisherman holding a funny-looking fish to have come out of Moon Lake.
The old woman lifted her head and walked around Mr. Voight to Old Man Moody. She reached up and took the ticking thing right out of his hand, and he turned it loose agreeably; Old Man Moody seemed not taken by surprise by women.
The old woman held her possession to her, drawn to her big gray breast. Her eyesight returned from far to close by. Then she stood looking at the three people fixedly, as if she showed them her insides, her live heart.
And then a little whir of her own voice: "See ... See, Mr. MacLain."
Nothing blew up, but Mr. Voight (but she called him MacLain) groaned.
"No, boys. I never saw her in my life," he said.
He walked stiffly out of the room. He walked out of the house and cater-cornered across the yard toward the MacLain Road. As he reached the road itself, he put his hat on, and then he did not look as shabby, or as poor.
Loch clasped a leafy armful of the tree and sank his head in the green cool.
"Let me see your play-pretty," Mr. Fatty Bowles was saying with his baby-smile. He took the obelisk away from the old woman, and with a sudden change on his face threw it with all his might out the open window. It came straight toward Loch, and fell into the weeds below him. And still it ticked.
"You could have been a little too quick there, Fatty boy," said Old Man Moody. "Flinging evidence."
"You ought to think about us. Listen and you'll hear it blow up. I'd rather have it blow up your wife's chickens."
"Well, I wouldn't."
And while they talked, the poor old woman tried it again. She was down on her knees cradling the lump of candle and the next moment had it lighted. She rose up, agitated now, and went running about the room, holding the candle above her, evading the men each time they tried to head her off.
This time, the fire caught her own hair. The little short white frill turned to flame.
Old Man Moody was so quick that he caught her. He came up with a big old rag from somewhere, and ran after the old woman with it. They both ran extraordinarily fast. He had to make a jump. He brought the cloth down over her head from behind, grimacing, as if all people on earth had to do acts of shame, some time. He hit her covered-up