The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [254]
Faster and faster, Mrs. Rainey thought: Red salvia, four-o'clock, pink Jacob's ladder, sweet geranium cuttings, sword fern and fortune grass, century plants, vase palm, watermelon pink and white crape myrtle, Christmas cactus, golden bell. White Star Jessamine. Snowball. Hyacinthus. Pink fairy lilies. White. The fairy white.
"Fan me. If you stop fanning, it's worse than if you never started."
And when Mama is gone, almost gone now, she meditated, I can tack on to my ad: the quilts! For sale, Double Muscadine Hulls, Road to Dublin, Starry Sky, Strange Spider Web, Hands All Around, Double Wedding Ring. Mama's rich in quilts, child.
Miss Katie lay there, carelessly on the counterpane, thinking, Crochet tablecloth, Sunburst design, very lacy. She knew Virgie stood over her, fanning her in rhythmic sweeps. Presently Miss Katie's lips shut tight.
She was thinking, Mistake. Never Virgie at all. It was me, the bride—with more than they guessed. Why, Virgie, go away, it was me.
She put her hand up and never knew what happened to it, her protest.
Virgie knelt, crouched there. She held her head, her mouth opened, and one by one the pins fell out on the floor. She was not much afraid of death, either of its delay or its surprise. As yet nothing in the place of fear came into her head; only something about her dress.
The bed, the headboard dark and ungiving as an old mirror on the wall, to her as a child a vast King Arthur shield that might have concealed a motto, cast its afternoon shadow down dark as muscadines, to her mother's waist. The old shadow, familiar as sleep the life long, always ran down over the bolster this time of year, the warm and knotty medallions of the familiar counterpane—the overworked, inherited, and personal pattern—from which her mother's black shoes now pointed up.
Behind the bed the window was full of cloudy, pressing flowers and leaves in heavy light, like a jar of figs in syrup held up. A humming bird darted, fed, darted. Every day he came. He had a ruby throat. The clock jangled faintly as cymbals struck under water, but did not strike; it couldn't. Yet a torrent of riches seemed to flow over the room, submerging it, loading it with what was over-sweet.
Virgie ran to the porch. Waiting on a passing Negro, she called, in a moment, "Go get me Dr. Loomis out of church!" The Negro began to sprint in his Sunday clothes.
By mid-afternoon the house was filling with callers and helpers. Each one who came seemed stopped by the enormous dead boxwood, like a yellow sponge, that stood by the steps; it had to be gone around. Coffee was being kept on the stove and iced tea in the pitcher in the hall. Virgie was dressed, in the dress she had ironed that morning for Monday, and at the front of the house. Moving around her, a lady watered the ferns and evened the shades in the parlor, then watered and evened again, as if some obscure sums were being balanced and checked. Every seat in the parlor and Virgie's room was taken, the porch and the steps creaked under the men who stood outside.
Cassie Morrison, her black-stockinged legs seeming to wade among the impeding legs of the other women, crossed the parlor to where Virgie sat in the chair at the closed sewing machine. Cassie had chosen the one thin, gold-rimmed coffee cup for herself, and balanced it serenely.
"Papa sent his sympathy. Let me sit by you, Virgie." She kissed her. "You know I know what it's like."
"Excuse me," Virgie was saying. All at once she slept, straight in the cane chair. When she opened her eyes, she watched and listened to the even fuller roomful as carefully, and as carelessly, as vacillating as though she were on the point of departure. Through their murmur she heard herself circle the room to speak to them and be kissed. She made the steps