The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [222]
"You're by far the freshest one here, my dear."
Who else had Maideen ever known to talk about but herself?
But she looked like Jinny. She was a child's copy of Jinny. Jinny's first steady look at me, coming just then, made that plain all at once. (Oh, her look always made contamination plain. Or plainer.) That resemblance I knew post-mortem, so to speak—and it made me right pleased with myself. I don't mean there was any mockery in Maideen's little face—no—but there was something of Maideen in Jinny's, that went back early—to whatever I knew my Jinny would never be now.
The slow breeze from that ceiling fan—its old white blades frosted like a cake, with the flies riding on it—lifted the girls' hair like one passing hand, Maideen's brown hair shoulder-long and Jinny's brown hair short, ruined—she ruined it herself, as she liked doing. Maideen was even more polite than she'd ever been to me, and making intervals in the quiet, like the ferns dripping, she talked about herself and the Seed and Feed; but she glowed with something she didn't know about, yet, there in the room with Jinny. And Jinny sat not rocking, yet, with her clever, not-listening smile.
I looked from Jinny to Maideen and back to Jinny, and almost listened for some compliment—a compliment from somewhere—Father!—for my good eyes, my vision. It took me, after all, to bring it out. There was nothing but time between them.
There were those annoying sounds keeping on out there—people and croquet. We finished the cokes. Miss Lizzie just sat there—hot. She still held the crochet hook, straight up like a ruler, and nobody was rapped, done to death. Jinny was on her feet, inviting us out to play croquet.
But it had been long enough.
They were slowly moving across the shade of the far backyard—Woody, Johnnie and Etta Loomis, Nina Carmichael and Jinny's cousin Junior Nesbitt, and the fourteen-year-old child that they let play—with Woody Spights knocking his ball through a wicket. He was too young for me—I'd never really looked at him before this year; he was coming up in the world. I looked down through the yard and the usual crowd seemed to have dwindled a little, I could not think who was out. Jinny went down there. It was myself.
Mother said, Son, you're walking around in a dream.
Miss Perdita came and said, "I hear you went back yesterday and wouldn't open your mouth, left again. Might as well not go at all. But no raring up now and doing anything we'll all be sorry to hear about. I know you won't. I knew your father, was crazy about your father, glad to see him come every time, sorry to see him go, and love your mother. Sweetest people in the world, most happily mated people in the world, long as he was home. Tell your mother I said so, next time you see her. And you march back to that precious wife. March back and have you some chirren. My Circle declares Jinny's going to divorce you, marry Woodrow. I said, Why? Thing of the flesh, I told my Circle, won't last. Sister said you'd kill him, and I said Sister, who are you talking about? If it's Ran MacLain that I knew in his buggy, I said, he's not at all likely to take on to that extent. And little Jinny. Who's going to tell Lizzie to spank her, though? I couldn't help but laugh at Jinny: she says, It's my own business! We was in Hardware, old Holifield just scowling his head off. I says, How did it happen, Jinny, tell old Miss Perdita, you monkey, and she says, Oh, Miss Perdita, do like me. Do like me, she says, and just go on like nothing's happened. I declare, and she says I have to write my checks on the Morgana bank, and Woody Spights works in it, there's just him and Ran, so I go up to Woody and cash them. And I says, Child—how could you all get away from each other if you tried? You couldn't. It's a pity you had to run to a Spights,