The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [260]
At a distance, two little boys lying naked in the red light on the sandbar looked at her as she disappeared into the leaves. They did not move or speak.
The moon, while she looked into the high sky, took its own light between one moment and the next. A wood thrush, which had begun to sing, hushed its long moment and began again. Virgie put her clothes back on. She would have given much for a cigarette, always wishing for a little more of what had just been.
She went back to the pasture, where the enormous ant hills shone, with long shadows, like pyramids on the other side of the world, and drove the cows home.
The crape myrtle had a last crown of bloom on top, once white, now faintly nutmegged. The ground below was littered with its shed bark, and the limbs shone like human limbs, lithe and warm, pink.
She went out to milk and came back to the house.
From the hall she looked into her mother's room. The window and the room were the one blue of first-dark. Only the black dress, the density of skirt, was stamped on it, like some dark chip now riding mid-air on blue lakes.
Miss Snowdie MacLain had elected to "sit up" the first hours of night. She slept in the bedroom rocker, in the luminous veil of her dress, the cocoon of her head hanging upon it, and the fan let fall from her fingers.
II
Virgie waked to see the morning star hanging over the fields. What had she meant to do so early? She made and drank her coffee, milked, drove the cows to pasture through mist, chopped wood, and at last she attacked the high grass in the yard. Yesterday cutting the Rainey grass in time for the funeral was considered a project so impossible that even if men could be spared and given scythes, success was never guaranteed. Virgie took her sewing scissors from the little bundle of plaid material in her room, and went outdoors. She crouched in the pink early light, clipping and sawing the heads off the grass—it had all gone to seed—a handful at a time. The choked-out roses scratched, surprised her, drew blood drops on her legs. She had to come in when Miss Snowdie, whose presence she had forgotten, stepped out on the porch and called her. As though for a long time she had been extremely angry and had wept many tears, she allowed Miss Snowdie to drive her inside the house and cook her breakfast.
Then Miss Lizzie Stark's Juba arrived, followed by a little stairsteps of Negro children bearing curtain stretchers, and Miss Snowdie and Juba began taking down all the curtains. In half an hour these were out in the backyard, stretched and set forth like the tents in the big Bible's Wilderness of Kadesh. The ladies soon were everywhere, radiating once more from the kitchen.
"First thing," Missie Spights told Virgie, "you called me Missie Spights yesterday. I'm married."
"Oh. Yes, I remember."
"I'm Missie Spights Littlejohn, and I've got three children. I married from off."
"I remember, Missie."
Some of Miss Katie's people arrived by noon, in good time for the funeral—big dark people named Mayhew, men and women alike with square, cleft chins and blue eyes. A little string of tow-headed children made a row behind, finishing some bananas. Virgie couldn't remember all the Mayhews or tell them apart; they all came upon her at once; after knocking on the porch to bring her out, all kissed her in greedy turn and begged before they got through the door for ice water or iced tea or both. They had ridden in in several trucks, now drawn up by the porch, from the Stockstill and Lastingwell