The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [252]
The Raineys, Miss Katie and her daughter Virgie, still held on to the house beyond the pavement, on the MacLain Road. There on the ridge the tin roof shed the light under the crape myrtle and privet, gone to trees, that edged the porch. The cannas with their scorched edges, together with the well, made the three familiar islands in the whitened grass of the yard. Across and back again, with effort but bobbinlike, had moved Miss Katie, Mrs. Fate Rainey, in her dress the hard blue of a morning-glory.
In old age Miss Katie showed what a neat, narrow head she had under the hair no longer disheveled and flyaway. When she came outdoors, her carefully dressed and carefully held head was as silver-looking as a new mailbox. It was out of the autocracy of her stroke—she had suffered "a light stroke" five years ago, "while separating my cows and calves," she would recount it—that she'd begun ordering things done by set times. When it was time for Virgie to come home from work in the afternoon, Miss Katie fretted herself for fear she wouldn't be in time to milk before dark. She still had her two favorite Jerseys, pastured near. She stood out in the front yard, or moved the best way she could back and forth, waiting for Virgie.
A fiery streak of salvia that ran around the side of the house would turn darker in the leveling light. Though the shade broadened, she still walked her narrow path, not yielding even to the kind sun. She held up poorly there, propped by an old thornstick. Bleaching down by the roadside was a chair, an old chair she sold things from once, under the borrowed shade of the chinaberry across the road; but she didn't seem to want to sit down any more, or to be quite that near the trafficking. Clear up where she was, she felt the world tremble; day and night the loggers went by, to and from Morgan's Woods. That wore her out too. While she lived, she was going to wait—and she did wait, standing up—until Virgie her daughter, past forty now and too dressed up, came home to milk Bossy and Juliette the way she should. Virgie worked for the very people that were out depleting the woods, Mr. Nesbitt's company.
Miss Katie couldn't spare her good hand to put up and shade her eyes; yet after you passed, you saw her in that position, in your vision if not in your sight. She looked ready to ward you off, too, in case of pity, there in her gathered old-lady dress, sometimes in an old bonnety church-hat. There's the old lady that watches the turn of the road, thought the old countrymen, Sissums and Sojourners and Holifields, passing in trucks or wagons on Saturday, going home, lifting their hats. Young courting people, Little Sister Spights' crowd, giggled at her, but small children and Negroes did not; they took her for granted like the lady on the Old Dutch Cleanser can.
The old people in Morgana she reminded of Snowdie MacLain, her neighbor once, who watched and waited for her husband so long. They were reminded vaguely of themselves, too, now that they were old enough to see it, still watching and waiting for something they didn't really know about any longer, wouldn't recognize to see it coming in the road.
As she looked out from her hill in the creeping shade, Miss Katie Rainey might have liked to be argued with and prevailed upon to go back in the house; at the last she might have suffered contradiction, but from whom? Not from Virgie.
"Where's my girl? Have you seen my girl?"
Miss Katie thought she called to the road, but she didn't; shame drew down her head, for she could still feel one thing if she could feel little else coming to her from the outside world: lack of chivalry.
Waiting, she heard circling her ears like the swallows beginning, talk about lovers. Circle by circle it twittered,