The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [253]
"So long as the old lady's alive, it's all behind her back."
"Daughter wouldn't run off and leave her, she's old and crippled."
"Left once, will again."
"That fellow Mabry's been taking out his gun and leaving Virgie a bag o' quail every other day. Anybody can see him go by the back door."
"I declare."
"He told her the day she got tired o' quail, let him know and he'd quit and go on off, that's what I heard."
"Do tell."
"Furthermore, I reckon it would be possible for a human being, a woman, to live off them rich birds for the remaining space of time. Her ma can help her eat 'em. Her ma ain't lost her appetite!"
"Hush."
"Guess it wouldn't be polite for her or him neither one to stop on the quails. Even if he heard. Got to keep on now."
"Oh, sure. Fate Rainey's a clean shot, too."
"But ain't he heard?"
Not Fate Rainey at all; but Mr. Mabry. It was just that the talk Miss Katie heard was in voices of her girlhood, and some times they slipped.
Then, in an odd set way, for she lied badly, she would lie to Virgie when she came. "I asked Passing. And not one of 'em said they could tell me where you were, what kept you so long in town."
But it's my last summer, and she ought to get back here and milk on time, the old lady thought, stubbornly and yet pityingly, the two ways she was.
"Look where the sun is," she called, as Virgie did drive up in the yard in the old coupe Miss Katie kept forgetting she had, the battered thing she took in trade for the poor little calf.
"I see it, Mama."
Virgie's long, dark, too heavy hair swung this way and that as she came up in her flowered voile dress, on her high heels through the bearded grass.
"You have to milk before dark, after driving them in, and there's four little quails full of shot for you to dress, lying on my kitchen table."
"Come on back in the house, Mama. Come in with me."
"I been by myself all day."
Virgie bent and gave her mother her evening kiss.
Miss Katie knew then that Virgie would drive the cows home and milk and feed them and deliver the milk on the road, and come back and cook the little quails.
"It's a wonder, though," she thought. "A blessed wonder to see the child mind."
The day Miss Katie died, Virgie was kneeling on the floor of her bedroom cutting out a dress from some plaid material. She was sewing on Sunday.
"There's nothing Virgie Rainey loves better than struggling against a real hard plaid," Miss Katie thought, with a thrust of pain from somewhere unexpected. Whereas, there was a simple line down through her own body now, dividing it in half; there should be one in every woman's body—it would need to be the long way, not the cross way—that was too easy—making each of them a side to feel and know, and a side to stop it, to be waited on, finally.
But she wanted to drop to her knees there where Virgie's plaid spread out like a pretty rug for her. Her last clear feeling as she stood there, holding herself up, was that she wanted to be down and covered up, in, of all things, Virgie's hard-to-match-up plaid. But she turned herself around by an act of strength which tore her within and walked, striking her cane, the width of the hall and two rooms and lay down on her own bed.
"Stop and fan me a minute," she called aloud. She was thinking rapidly to herself, though, that Virgie had said, "I aim to get married on my bulb money."
Virgie, who worked in her gown, came in with pins in her mouth and her thumb marked green from the scissors, and stood over her. She brought a paper up and down over her mother's face. She fanned her with the Market Bulletin.
Dying, Miss Katie went rapidly over the list in it, her list. As though her impatient foot would stamp at each item, she counted it, corrected it, and yet she was about to forget the seasons, and the places things grew. Purple althea cuttings, true box, four colors of cannas for 150, moonvine seed by teaspoonful, green and purple jew. Roses: big white