The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [226]
I didn't dare say good-bye to Jinny any more. "All right, now you're ready for croquet," she told me. She went upstairs too.
Old' Tellie spat a drop of nothing into the stove and clanged the lid down as I went out through the kitchen. Maideen was out in the swing, sitting. I told her to come on down to the croquet yard, where we all played Jinny's game, without Jinny.
Going to my room, I saw Miss Billy Texas Spights outdoors in her wrapper, whipping the flowers to make them bloom.
Father! Dear God wipe it clean. Wipe it clean, wipe it out. Don't let it be.
At last Miss Francine caught hold of me in the hall. "Do me a favor, Ran. Do me a favor and put Bella out of her misery. None of these school teachers any better at it than I'd be. And my friend coming to supper too tenderhearted. You do it. Just do it and don't tell us about it, hear?"
Where have you been, Son, it's so late.—Nowhere, Mother, nowhere.—If you were back under my roof, Mother said, if Eugene hadn't gone away too. He's gone and you won't listen to anybody.—It's too hot to sleep, Mother.—I stayed awake by the telephone. The Lord never meant us all to separate. To go and be cut off. One from the other, off in some little room.
"I remember your wedding," old Miss Jefferson Moody said at my window, nodding on the other side of the bars. "Never knew it would turn out like this, the prettiest and longest wedding I ever saw. Look! If all that money belonged to you, you could leave town."
And I was getting tired, oh so tired, of Maideen waiting on me. I felt cornered when she told me, still as kind as ever, about the Seed and Feed. Because ever since I was born, Old Man Moody lined his sidewalk with pie pans full of shelled corn and stuff like bird-shot. The window used to be so clouded up it looked like stained glass. She'd scrubbed it for him, and exposed the barrels and canisters and the sacks and bins of stuff inside, and Old Man Moody in an eyeshade sitting on a stool, making cat's-cradles; and her poking food at the bird. There were cotton blooms across the window and door, and then it would be sugarcane, and she told me she was thinking already about the Christmas tree. No telling what she was going to string on Old Man Moody's Christmas tree. And now I was told her mother's maiden name. God help me, the name Sojourner was laid on my head like the top teetering crown of a pile of things to remember. Not to forget, never to forget the name of Sojourner.
And then always having to take the little Williams girl home at night. She was the bridge player. That was a game Maideen had never learned to play. Maideen: I never kissed her.
But the Sunday came when I took her to Vicksburg.
Already on the road I began to miss my bridge. We could get our old game now, Jinny, Woody, myself, and either Nina Carmichael or Junior Nesbitt, or both and sit in. Miss Lizzie of course would walk out on us now, never be our fourth, holding no brief for what a single one of us had done; she couldn't stand the Nesbitts to begin with. I always won—Nina used to win, but anybody could see she was pressed too much about Nesbitt to play her cards, and sometimes she didn't come to play at all, or Nesbitt either, and we had to go get the little Williams girl and take her home.
Maideen never put in a word to our silence now. She sat holding some women's magazine. Every now and then she'd turn over a page, moistening her finger first, like my mother. When she lifted her eyes to me, I didn't look up. Every night I would take their money. Then at Miss Francine's I would be sick, going outdoors so the teachers wouldn't wonder.
"Now you really must get these two home. Their mothers will be wondering." Jinny's voice.
Maideen would stand up with the little Williams girl to leave, and I thought whatever I let her in for, I could trust her.
She would get stupefied for sleep. She would lean farther and farther over in the Starks' chair. She would never have a rum