The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [261]
Only the same old Rainey came from Louisiana who had come to Fate's funeral years ago and hadn't sent word since. Again he brought his own coffee. Again he offered to fix the front porch and in time, and again was prevented. He was the only Rainey that made the trip. The Raineys were mostly all died out, or couldn't leave the fields, or were too far to buy a ticket. The old man explained it all again, and told what had happened to the French name with all the years.
"Yes, some are missing," Miss Perdita Mayo told Virgie when she arrived and saw the lined-up kin. "But you got in touch, or I did for you. If the funeral's small we can't reproach ourselves."
Screams surrounded the house. The little MacLain children and their nurse had gotten away from old Miss Lizzie, their grandmother, and come to play in the Rainey yard. Gradually other children, Loomis and Maloney, attracted by the magnetic MacLains, played there too, all drunk with the attractions of an untried place, and a place sinister for the day. The little Mayhews, every time they were gathered up and brought away from these into the house, cried. Blue jays were scolding the whole morning over the roof, and the logging trucks thundered by, shaking their chains and threatening the clean curtains.
Miss Perdita Mayo, who had got into the bedroom and formed a circle, was telling a story. "Sister couldn't get her new shoes back on after that funeral, because while she was in the cemetery—" Suddenly Miss Perdita appeared backing out of the room, thinking herself still telling her story, but mistaken. She had heard the coffin come, and ran to meet it. Mr. Holifield at the hardware store sent his grandsons, Hughie and Dewey Holifield, with it on their produce truck. The boys came inside and made it steady, the Mayhews watching.
"Where's all them Mayhews going to bed down?" old Mr. Rainey, with nothing to do, asked Virgie, indicating Mayhews with a thumb purpled like a fig.
"They won't stay. They're striking right out for Stockstill after the funeral, sir," said Virgie. "As soon as they've packed some lunch." And they were taking the bed, Katie's bed; they could set it right up in the truck, they said, looking at it detached from its owner who was lying on it; and the children could ride home on it instead of standing.
Mr. Rainey was shaking his head. "Pity. Never a chance to know those." He put up a little horned finger and touched a string on the old banjo of her father's, which hung on its nail in the hall, the head faintly luminous by morning light. But he didn't play the note. "He traveled around a bit," he said at length. "And settled hereabouts for the adventure of it."
The home-grown flowers came early, and the florist flowers late. Mr. Nesbitt sent word by the janitor in the barbershop, who wore gold-rimmed spectacles, that he must be out of town during the funeral, the Negro then bringing out from behind his back a large cross of gladiolas and ferns on a stand, evidently from Vicksburg, with Mr. Nesbitt's card tied on. The Mayhews moved upon it and placed it in front of all the other flowers—now steadily being made into wreaths on the back porch—where they could look at it during the service, to remember. The Sunday School chairs arrived by wagon, and the Mayhews took them at the door and set them in cater-cornered rows. Had Miss Lizzie Stark been able to come, people said, it wouldn't have happened quite the same way.
Old Mr. King MacLain did not appear happy over having to come to the Rainey house again today. He fumed, and went back to visit in the kitchen.
"Little conversation with your mother in '18, or along there," he said to Virgie, who was folding napkins with the Stark "S" on them. "You know in those days I was able to make considerable trips off, and only had my glimpses