The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [189]
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Old Man Moody and Mr. Bowles brought the old woman between them out on the porch of the vacant house. She was quiet now, with the scorched black cloth covering her head; she herself held it on with both hands.
"Know what I'm going to have to do with you?" Old Man Moody was saying gently and conversationally, but she only stood there, all covered in wrinkled cloth with her little hands up, clawed, the way a locust shell would be found clinging to that empty door in August.
"It don't signify nothing what your name is now, or what you intended, old woman," Mr. Bowles told her as he got the fishing canes. "We know where you belong at, and that's Jackson."
"Come on ladylike. I'm sure you know how," Old Man Moody said.
She came along but she did not answer either man anything.
"Maybe she aimed mischief at King MacLain after all," said Mr. Fatty Bowles. "She's a she, ain't she?"
"That'll be enough out of you for the rest of the day," said Old Man Moody.
Among the leaves, Loch watched them come down the walk and head towards town. They went slowly, for the old woman took short, hesitant steps. Where would they take her now? Not later, to Jackson, but now? After they passed, he let go his hands and jumped out of the tree. It made a good noise when he hit ground. He turned a forward and a backward somersault and started walking on his hands around the tree trunk. He made noises like a goat, and a bobwhite, like the silly Moody chickens, and like a lion.
On his hands he circled the tree and the obelisk waited in the weeds, upright. He stood up and looked at it. Its ticker was outside it.
He felt charmed like a bird, for the ticking stick went like a tail, a tongue, a wand. He picked the box up in his hands.
"Now go on. Blow up."
When he examined it, he saw the beating stick to be a pendulum that instead of hanging down stuck upwards. He touched it and stopped it with his finger. He felt its pressure, and the weight of the obelisk, which seemed about two pounds. He released the stick, and it went on beating.
Then he turned a little key in the side of the box, and that controlled it. The stick stopped and he poked it into place within the box, and shut the door of the thing.
It might not be dynamite: especially since Mr. Fatty thought it was.
What was it?
He opened his shirt and buttoned it in. He thought he might take it up to his room. It was this; not a bird that knew how to talk.
The sand pile was before him now. He planed away the hot top layer and sat down. He held still for a while, while nothing was ticking. Nothing but the crickets. Nothing but the train going through, ticking its two cars over the Big Black bridge.
IV
Cassie moved to the front window, where she could see Old Man Moody and Mr. Fatty Bowles carrying off the old woman. The old woman was half sick or dazed. She held on her head some nameless kitchen rag; she had no purse. In a gray housedress prophetic of an institution she was making her way along, about to be touched, prodded, any minute, but not worrying about it. She wore shoes without stockings—and she had such white, white ankles. When she saw the ankles, Cassie flung herself in full view at the window and gave a cry.
No head lifted. Cassie rushed out of her room, down the stairs and out the front door.
To Loch's amazement his sister Cassie came running barefooted down the front walk in her petticoat and in full awareness turned towards town, crying, "You can't take her! Miss Eckhart!"
She was too late for anybody to hear her, of course, but he creaked up out of the sand pile and ran out after her as if they had heard. He caught up with her and pulled at her petticoat. She turned, with her head still swimming high in the air, and cried softly, "Oh, Mother!"
They looked at each other.
"Crazy."
"Crazy yourself."
"Back yonder," said Loch presently, "I can show you how ripe the figs are." They withdrew as far as the tree. But it was only in time to see the sailor and Virgie Rainey run out, trying to escape by the back way. Virgie and the sailor