The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [255]
"She can't help it," Cassie Morrison was saying to the person beside her in the gentle tones of a verdict. "She can't take in what's happened quite yet and she doesn't really know us."
The unnaturally closed door led from Miss Katie's room out to the parlor. Behind it, they all knew—waiting as they were for it to open—Miss Snowdie MacLain was laying Miss Katie out. She washed and dressed her herself, tolerating only two old Loomis Negroes to wait on her, and Miss Snowdie was nearly seventy too, and had come seven miles from MacLain. There was something about it nobody liked, perhaps a break in custom. Miss Lizzie Stark, whose place they felt it to be to supervise the house while old Miss Emmy Holifield laid out the dead, had felt too weak today, and sent word she had had to lie down. And old Emmy herself was gone.
It was true that none of the callers except Miss Snowdie had been inside the Rainey house since Mr. Fate Rainey's funeral. No wonder Virgie looked at them now, staring, at moments.
Always in a house of death, Virgie was thinking, all the stories come evident, show forth from the person, become a part of the public domain. Not the dead's story, but the living's.
She could see Ran MacLain, standing at the door shaking hands with Mr. Nesbitt who was coming in. And didn't it show on Ran, that once he had taken advantage of a country girl who had died a suicide? It showed at election time as it showed now, and he won the election for mayor over Mr. Carmichael, for all was remembered in his middle-age when he stood on the platform. Ran was smiling—holding on to a countryman now. They had voted for him for that—for his glamour and his story, for being a MacLain and the bad twin, for marrying a Stark and then for ruining a girl and the thing she did. Old Man Moody found her on the floor of his store—the place she worked—and walked out into the street with her in his arms. They voted for the revelation; it had made their hearts faint, and they would assert it again. Ran knew that every minute, there in the door he stood it.
"Cheer up, now, cheer up," Mr. Nesbitt was saying to her, seeming to lift her to her feet by running his finger under her chin. His eyes—so willed by him, she thought—ran tears and dried. "Come here," he called over his shoulder.
"Virgie, tell Mr. Thisbee who's your best friend in this town." He had brought the new man in the company.
"You, Mr. Bitts," Virgie said.
"Everybody in Morgana calls me Mr. Bitts, Thisbee; you can too. Now wait. Tell him who hired you when nobody else was in the hiring mood, Virgie. Tell him. And was always kind to you and stood up for you."
She never turned away until it was finished; today this seemed somehow brief and easy, a relief.
"Hurry up, Virgie. Got to cheer my daughter up next."
Nina Carmichael, Mrs. Junior Nesbitt heavy with child, was seated where he could see her, head fine and indifferent, one puffed white arm stretched along the sewing machine. He winked at her across the room.
"You, Mr. Bitts."
"Tell him how long you've been working for old Mr. Bitts."
"A long time."
"No, tell him how long it's been—my my my, tell him. I've been in three different businesses, Thisbee. How long?"
"Since 1920, Mr. Bitts."
"And if you ever made any mistakes in your letters and figgers, who was it stood behind you with the company?"
"I'm very sorry for you in your sorrow," Mr. Thisbee said suddenly, letting go her hand. She almost fell.
"But who? Who stood behind you?"
Mr. Nesbitt extended his arms overly wide, as he did when asking her to dance with him in Vicksburg. Abruptly he wheeled and went off; he was hurt, disappointed in her for the hundredth time. She saw Mr. Nesbitt's fat, hurt back as he wandered as if lost and stood a long time contemplating and cheering up Nina Carmichael.
Food—two banana cakes and a baked ham, a platter of darkly deviled eggs, new rolls—and flowers kept arriving at the back, and the kitchen filled