The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [258]
Miss Snowdie sighed, as if she had forgotten her question with the asking, as if a reply would interrupt her. Across there was a place where she had lived a long time, the old deserted time, when Virgie played with Ran and Eugene under her trees, on her porch, under her house, along the river bank, and in Morgan's Woods. There were leggy cedars still lining the old property, their trunks white and knobbed like chicken bones. The old summerhouse was still back there, lattices leaning inward and not matching at the joinings, in the shadow like a place where long ago something had been kept that could peep out now; in the sun like a little temple raised to it. The big chinaberry tree had been cut down with the other lawn trees when the house burned, but its many suckers sprayed up from the stump like a fountain. Negroes had carried away most of the sides and roof that remained of the house, but had hardly made inroad on the chimney, surprisingly enough; it was its full height still, visible from here, dove-pink through the dust and leafiness. Little locusts and castor plants tall as a man had come up all around, the altheas had come back and made trees, shaggy as old giants holding twilit, flimsy little flowers up high. Vines had taken the yard and the walk, the brick cross of the foundation, and the trees and all.
Virgie removed herself from Miss Snowdie's arm which had gone around her waist. The two women stood quiet in the afternoon light.
"I said I'd want her to lay me out," the old lady said. She trembled very slightly but did not go back.
From around the big boxwood Mr. King MacLain, treading so lightly they didn't hear him, came up the steps.
"You know Virgie," Miss Snowdie murmured, still motionless.
"And Katie Blazes, that's what we used to call your mother," Mr. King nodded at Virgie. The little patch of hair under his lip—not silky, coarse, a pinkish white—shook in a ruminating way. Viola, their Negro, had driven him over after giving him his dinner; she could be seen going to the back now, to visit the kitchen.
"Sir?"
"I'll take that coffee if it's hot and you ain't drinking it. Katie Blazes. Didn't you ever hear your mother tell how she never took a dare to put a match to her stockings, girl? Whsst! Up went the blazes, up to her knee! Sometimes both legs. Cotton stockings the girls used to wear—fuzzy, God knows they were. Nobody else among the girls would set fire to their legs. She had the neighborhood scared she'd go up in flames at an early age."
"Did you eat your dinner?" Miss Snowdie turned to him.
Virgie watched the black coffee beginning to shake in the little cup. There was something terrifying about that old man—he was too old.
"In flames!"
He left them and went into the hall of men.
"I don't know what to do with him," Miss Snowdie said, in a murmur as quiet as the world around them now. She did not know she had spoken. When her flyaway husband had come home a few years ago, at the age of sixty-odd, and stayed, they said she had never gotten over it—first his running away, then his coming back to her. "He didn't want to come at all. Now he has her mixed up with Nellie Loomis."
"Virgie, we've got enough ready to feed an army," Missie Spights called up the hall. She was coming, untying Miss Katie's apron from her dress, her arms shining red. "Ham, chickens, potato salad, deviled eggs, and all the cake and folderol people send besides."
"Does there have to be so much?" Virgie asked, going in to meet her.
"Watch. The out-of-town relatives are always hungry!"
Her busyness gave Missie an air of abandon, quite impregnable. Parnell Moody stood behind her, drying every circle of the potato masher with care. The others were clattering the dishes, putting them in stacks, talking.
"My husband's been waiting on me an hour."
"Mr. King Maclain took himself a nap pretty as you please. Viola had to shriek in his ear to get him up."