The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [246]
Eugene gently pulled the Spaniard's arm, and pointed up the beach to the cliffs there. "Land's End!" he shouted, while the waves' sound drowned him out. He pulled gently.
The Spaniard looked affirmative, but first disengaged himself and made water toward the sea, throwing up a rampart, a regular castle, in the sand.
So they turned and their walk could still go on along shore, past the black pits of fires and the ubiquitous, ugly, naked sea onions, until they reached rocks; then it led up to the overlooking wall. A little boy up there on a velocipede with his yellow hair blown in points came riding dreamily between the men, even he with a tied-on sea onion tail dragging six feet behind him. The Spaniard soberly bent over and gave the tail a carefree, lariatlike swing. The little boy looked back, eyes and mouth all round, and the next instant screamed with delighted outrage, as if he saw himself mocked. Beyond the car barn was a black scraggly wood, and then there was something of a road that followed along the cliff interminably, or once there had been.
For there had been an occasion when Eugene and Emma had come this far, and picnicked here. They had drunk several bottles of red wine and gone to sleep in the hot sun on the rocks, lying on their backs, knees up, heads tipped together. Emma's fair skin had turned pink as a rose. Where was little Fan then? That hadn't bothered them that day.
The men walked and climbed along this road with the sea exploding straight under them at times—no beach now, only the brown rocks. From time to time another rock would move a little, or there would be a little rain of pebbly sound somewhere. Occasional paths wandered off down the sharp slopes through grass or over the bare rock to the boulders at the water's edge. The little bushes whipped, and the Spaniard's black coat leaped and danced. Eugene felt the Pacific wind like a fortification, he could storm it or lean onto it, just the same; it could stop his breath and keep him from falling too.
It blew the sea gulls back. A flock of them, collected points of light halfway up the sky, made a turn all at one time, and showed the facets of their flight clear as a diamond. Eugene sucked in the air—now it was rapture. He watched the birds fly out, blow back.
"Will you go in front, or behind?" he asked, but the Spaniard was already going in front.
"You know what you did," Eugene said. "You assaulted your wife. Do you say you didn't know you had it in you?"
The Spaniard up ahead made his way forward without turning around. By now the path had grown wild and narrow; it made slow going, or rather, the Spaniard's leisurely gaining of the cliff set the pace, not Eugene's backslidings and precarious scramblings.
All the while, as if they were borne independently of legs of any kind beneath, the heads of the two men kept turning calmly outward, eyes traveling over the view. But as if to mock that too, once the Spaniard's hands met on top of his head to clamp his hat, his elbows bent outward. It was the lumpy pose of a woman, a "nude reclining."
The deepening sky was divided in half as it often was at this hour, by a kind of spinal cloud. Ahead, the north was clear and the south behind was thickened with white. Under the clear portion of sky the sea rushed in dark to greenness and blackness,