The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [259]
"We'll all be back early for the funeral, Virgie—wish you'd let us stay." Cassie drew her delicate brows, surveying the kitchen which she had never got to. "Everybody who would, I let stay with me."
"It's a good thing we cut all our flowers," Missie called, fastening her corset behind the door. "Virgie, you haven't a solitary one."
She saw them all, except Miss Snowdie who stayed, get into their cars in the yard, or walk down the path and into the road. As they went, they seemed to drag some mythical gates and barriers away from her view. She looked at the lighted distance, the little last crescent of hills before the country of the river, and the fields. The world shimmered. Cotton fields look busy on Sunday even; while they are not being picked they push out their bloom the same. The frail screens of standing trees still measured, broke, divided—Stark from Loomis from Spights from Holifield, and the summer from the rain. Each tree like a single leaf, half hair-fine skeleton, half gauze and green, let the first suspicious wind through its old, pressed shape, its summertime branches. The air came smelling of what it was, the end of September.
Down the settling dust of the road came an ancient car. It would turn in here. Old Plez, up until his death, had stopped by to milk and feed the chickens for Miss Katie Rainey on his way to and from the Starks'. His grandchildren, still country people, would come today. The car pounded up the hill to her. It was cracked like some put-together puzzle of the globe of the world. Its cracks didn't meet from one side across to the other, and it was all held together with straightened-out baling wire, for today. Next day, next year, it would sit in the front yard for decoration, at rest on its axles, the four wheels gone and the tires divided up between women and children: two for flowerbeds and two for swings.
They had brought the flowers from their dooryard, princess feathers, snow-on-the-mountain. It took them a long time to turn around and get a start back. A little boy ran back with the pan of butterbeans and okra.
"All come to the funeral if you can get away!" she called after them, too late.
Virgie walked down the hill too, crossed the road, and made her way through the old MacLain place and the pasture and down to the river. She stood on the willow bank. It was bright as mid-afternoon in the openness of the water, quiet and peaceful. She took off her clothes and let herself into the river.
She saw her waist disappear into reflectionless water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All was one warmth, air, water, and her own body. All seemed one weight, one matter—until as she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instant. The iron taste of the old river was sweet to her, though. If she opened her eyes she looked at blue-bottles, the skating waterbugs. If she trembled it was at the smoothness of a fish or snake that crossed her knees.
In the middle