The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [191]
"None of your business."
"Give it to me."
"It's mine."
"It is not. Let go."
"You make me."
"All right, I know what it is."
"What is it? You do not."
"You can't have that."
"Get away from me."
"I'll tell Mama and Papa.—You hit me! You hit a girl where she's tender."
"Well, you know you can't have it."
"All right then—did you see Mr. MacLain? He's been gone since you were born."
"Why, sure," said Loch. "I saw Mr. MacLain."
"Oh, Loch, why don't you beat off those mosquitoes!" She wept. "Mother!" Even Loch flew from her, at once.
"Well, here I am," said her mother.
"Oh!" After a moment she raised her head to say, "And Mr. King MacLain was here, and now he's gone."
"Well. You've seen him before," said her mother after a moment, breaking from her. "That's no excuse for coming outdoors in your petticoat to cry."
"You knew it would be this way, you were with them!"
There was no answer then either, and Cassie trudged through the yard. Loch stood near the sand pile. His lips damped down, he held his bulging nightie and regarded it. She ran him back under the tree and into the house by the back door.
"What orphan-lookin' children is these here?" said Louella. "Where yawl orphan come from? Yawl don't live here, yawl live at County Orphan. Gawn back."
Cassie pushed Loch through the kitchen and then pulled him to a stop in the back hall. It was their father coming home.
"What's going on here! The house is on fire, the MacLain house! I see smoke!"
They could see him coming up the front walk, waving the rolled-up Bugle he brought home every night.
"Holifield! Holifield!"
Mr. Holifield must have come to the window, for they heard, "Did I hear my name called?" and they sighed with foreboding.
"It's gone out, Wilbur," said their mother at the door.
"That house has been on fire and gone out, sir." Their father was speaking loudly as he did from the platform at election time. "You can read about it in tomorrow's Bugle."
"Come in, Wilbur."
They could see her finger tracing a little pattern on the screen door as she stood there in her party dress. "Cassie says King MacLain was here and gone. That's as interesting as twenty fires."
Cassie shivered.
"Maybe this will bestir Francine Murphy to take a step. There's a public guardian for you: Booney Holifield."
Cassie was glad her father kept on. If there was anything that unsettled him it was for people not to be on the inside what their outward semblances led you to suppose. "MacLain came to the wrong place this time. It might have caught our house: Booney Holifield!"
Their mother laughed. "That old monkey," she said. As far as she was concerned, the old man next door had just come alive, redeemed himself a little from being a Holifield.
The six-o'dock summer light shone just as usual on their father and mother meeting at the door.
"Come on."
Cassie and Loch running up the back stairs heard the sigh of the door and the old, muffled laugh that came between their parents at this moment. No matter what had happened, or had started to happen, around them, they could come in the house and laugh about the old thing. Theirs was a laugh that hinted of some small but interesting object, a thing even their deliberate father could find—something that might be seizable and holdable as well as findable, as ridiculous and forbidden to children, as alive, as a stray kitten or a rabbit.
The children kept on going up the steep dark backstairs, so close on each other they prodded and nudged each other, both punishing and petting.
"Get back in bed like you were never out," Cassie advised. "Pull the beggarlice off you."
"But I think Mother saw me," he said over his shoulder, going.
Cassie didn't answer.
She shivered and walked into her room. There was the scarf. It was an old friend, part enemy. She brought it