The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [227]
Vicksburg: nineteen miles over the gravel and the thirteen little bridges and the Big Black. And suddenly all sensation returned.
Morgana I had looked at too long. Till the street was a pencil mark on the sky. The street was there just the same, red-brick scallops, two steeples and the water tank and the branchy trees, but if I saw it, it was not with love, it was a pencil mark on the sky that jumped with the shaking of the gin. If some indelible red false-fronts joined one to the other like a little toy train went by, I didn't think of my childhood any more. I saw Old Man Holifield turn his back, his suspenders looked cross, very cross.
In Vicksburg, I stopped my car at the foot of the street under the wall, by the canal. There was that dazzling light, watermarked light. I woke Maideen and asked her if she was thirsty. She smoothed her dress and lifted her head at the sounds of a city, the traffic on cobblestones just behind the wall. I watched the water taxi come to get us, chopping over the canal strip, babyish as a rocking horse.
"Duck your head," I told Maideen.
"In here?"
It was sunset. The island was very near across the water—a waste of willows, yellow and green strands loosely woven together, like a basket that let the light spill out uncontrollably. We all stood up and bent our heads under the ceiling in the tiny cabin, and shaded our eyes. The Negro who ran the put-put never said a word, "Get in" or "Get out." "Where is this we're going?" Maideen said. In two minutes we were touching the barge.
Nobody was inside but the barkeep—a silent, relegated place like a barn, old and tired. I let him bring some rum cokes out to the card table on the back where the two cane chairs were. It was open back there. The sun was going down on the island side while we sat, and making Vicksburg all picked out on the other. East and West were in our eyes.
"Don't make me drink it. I don't want to drink it," Maideen said.
"Go on and drink it."
"You drink it if you like it. Don't make me drink it."
"You drink it too."
I looked at her take some of it, and sit shading her eyes. There were wasps dipping from a nest over the old screen door and skimming her hair. There was a smell of fish and of the floating roots fringing the island, and of the oilcloth top of our table, and endless deals. A load of Negroes came over on the water taxi and stepped out sulphur-yellow all over, coated with cottonseed meal. They disappeared in the colored barge at the other end, in single file, carrying their buckets, like they were sentenced to it.
"Sure enough, I don't want to drink it."
"Look, you drink it and then tell me if it tastes bad, and I'll pour 'em both in the river."
"It will be too late."
Through the screen door I could see into the dim saloon. Two men with black cocks under their arms had come in. Without noise they each set a muddy boot on the rail and drank, the cocks absolutely still. They got off the barge on the island side and were lost in a minute in a hot blur of willow trees. They might never be seen again.
The heat shook on the water and on the other side shook along the edges of the old white buildings and the concrete slabs and the wall. From the barge Vicksburg looked like an image of itself in some old mirror—like a portrait at a sad time of life.
A short cowboy and his girl came in, walking alike. They dropped a nickel in the nickelodeon, and came together.
There weren't any waves visible, yet the water did tremble under our chairs. I was aware of it like the sound of a winter fire in the room.
"You don't ever dance, do you," Maideen said.
It was a long time before we left. A good many people had come out to the barge. There was old Gordon Nesbitt, dancing. When we left, the