The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [190]
Old Man Moody's party was only now progressing again, for the old woman had fallen down and they had to hold her on her feet. Farther along, the ladies' Rook party was coming out of Miss Nell's with a pouring sound. The sailor faced both these ranks.
The marshal tagged him but he ran straight on into the wall of ladies, most of whom cried "Why, Kewpie Moffitt!"—an ancient nickname he had outgrown. He whirled about-face and ran the other way, and since he was carrying his blouse and was naked from the waist up, his collar stood out behind him like the lowest-hung wings. At the Carmichael corner, he tried east and took west, and ran into the shadows of the short-cut to the river, where he would just about meet with Mr. King MacLain, if he was not too late.
"Look at that!" Miss Billy Texas Spights called clearly. "I see you, Virgie Rainey!"
"Mother!" Cassie called, just as clearly. She and Loch found themselves out in front again.
The front door of the empty house fell to with a frail sound behind Virgie Rainey. A haze of the old smoke lifted unhurryingly over her, brushed and hid her for a moment like a gauzy cloud. She was coming right out, though, in a home-made dress of apricot voile, carrying a mesh bag on a chain. She ran down the steps and walked clicking her heels out to the sidewalk—always Virgie clicked her heels as if nothing had happened in the past or behind her, as if she were free, whatever else she might be. The ladies hushed, holding on to their prizes and folded parasols. Virgie faced them as she turned towards town.
It was the hour, of course, for her to go to work. Once past the next corner, she could drink a Coca-Cola and eat a box of cakes at Loomis's drug store, as she did every evening for her supper; then she could vanish inside the Bijou.
She passed Cassie and Loch, cutting them, and kept going and caught up, as she had to, with the marshal, Fatty Bowles, and the old woman.
"You're running the wrong way!" Miss Billy Texas Spights called loudly. "Better run after that sailor boy!"
"Isn't he visiting the Flewellyns out in the country?" Miss Perdita Mayo was pleading to everybody. "What ever became of his mother? I'd forgotten all about him!"
Pinning Loch tightly by the arms in front of her, Cassie could only think: we were spies too. And nobody else was surprised at anything—it was only we two. People saw things like this as they saw Mr. MacLain come and go. They only hoped to place them, in their hour or their street or the name of their mothers' people. Then Morgana could hold them, and at last they were this and they were that. And when ruin was predicted all along, even if people had forgotten it was on the way, even if they mightn't have missed it if it hadn't appeared, still they were never surprised when it came.
"She'll stop for Miss Eckhart," breathed Cassie.
Virgie went by. There was a meeting of glances between the teacher and her old pupil, that Cassie knew. She could not be sure that Miss Eckhart's eyes closed once in recall—they had looked so wide-open at everything alike. The meeting amounted only to Virgie Rainey's passing by, in plain fact. She clicked by Miss Eckhart and she clicked straight through the middle of the Rook party, without a word or the pause of a moment.
Old Man Moody and Fatty Bowles, dirty, their faces shining like the fish they didn't catch, took advantage of the path Virgie cut through the ladies and walked Miss Eckhart, unprotesting, on. Then the ladies brought their ranks safely to, and Miss Billy Texas, suddenly beside herself, cried once more, "He went the other way, Virgie!"
"That's enough, Billy Texas," said Miss Lizzie Stark. "As if her mother didn't have enough on her, just burying her son."
The noise of tin pans being beaten came from the distance, then little children's and Negro nurses' cries, "Crazy! Crazy!"
Cassie turned on Loch, pulled him to her and shook him by the shoulders. He was wet as a dishrag.