The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [192]
"Listen and I'll tell you what Miss Nell served at the party," Loch's mother said softly, with little waits in her voice. She was just a glimmer at the foot of his bed.
"Ma'am."
"An orange scooped out and filled with orange juice, with the top put back on and decorated with icing leaves, a straw stuck in. A slice of pineapple with a heap of candied sweet potatoes on it, and a little handle of pastry. A cup made out of toast, filled with creamed chicken, fairly warm. A sweet peach pickle with flower petals around it of different-colored cream cheese. A swan made of a cream puff. He had whipped cream feathers, a pastry neck, green icing eyes. A pastry biscuit the size of a marble with a little date filling." She sighed abruptly.
"Were you hungry, Mama?" he said.
It was not really to him that his mother would be talking, but it was he who tenderly let her, as they watched and listened to the swallows just at dark. It was always at this hour that she spoke in this voice—not to him or to Cassie or Louella or to his father, or to the evening, but to the wall, more nearly. She bent seriously over him and kissed him hard, and swayed out of the room.
There was singing in the street. He saw Cassie, a lesser but similar gleam, go past his door. The hay wagon was coming up the street to get her. He heard the girls and boys hail her, and her greeting the same as theirs, as if nothing had happened up until now, heard them pull her up. Ran MacLain from MacLain Courthouse, or was it his brother Eugene, always called to Mrs. Morrison, teasing, "Come on! You come with us!" Did they really want to take her? He heard the wagon creak away. They were singing and playing on their ukuleles, some song of which he couldn't be sure.
Presently Loch lifted up and gazed through the same old leaves, dark once more, and saw the vacant house looking the same as it ever did. A cloud lighted anew, low in the deep sky, a single long wing. The mystery he had felt like a golden and aimless bird had waited until now to fly over. Until now, when all else had been driven out. His body shook. Perhaps the fever would go now, and the chill come.
But Louella brought him his supper, and waited while he ate it, sitting quietly. She had made him chicken broth that sparkled like diamonds in the evening light, and then there would be the junket he hated, turning to water under his tongue.
"Louella, I don't want junket tonight. Louella, listen. Do you hear a thing ticking?"
"Hear it plain."
She took his tray and sat down again, and he lay on his back, looking upward. High in the sky the quarter moon was bright. "Reckon it's going to blow up in the night? You can see it. Look on the washstand." All by itself, of its own accord, it might let fly its little door and start up. He thought he heard it now. Or was it his father's watch in the next room, already laid on the dresser for the night?
"I 'spec' it will, Loch, if you wants it to," she said readily, and sat on in the dark. She added, "Blow up? If it do, I'll wrang your neck. Next time you scoot down that tree and come back draggin' sompm. Listen that big bullfrog in the swamp, you want to listen to sompm might blow up."
He listened, lying stretched and pointed in the four directions. His heart pumping the secret anticipation that parted his lips, he fell into space and floated. Even floating, he felt the pressure of his frown and heard his growling voice and the gnashing of his teeth. He dreamed close to the surface, and his dreams were filled with a color and a fury that the daytime that summer never held.
Later, in her moonlit bed, Cassie lay thinking. Her hair and the inner side of her arms still smelled