The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [263]
"Sit by me, Virgie," said Cassie Morrison, who began to put her handkerchief to her eyes. "This is when it's the worst, or almost."
There was a new arrival just before the service. Brother Dampeer from Goodnight, whose father was the preacher when Mrs. Rainey was a child and baptized her as a girl in Cold Creek, in North Mississippi, couldn't let her go without one more glimpse, he said. Virgie had never seen Brother Dampeer; he sized her up and kissed her. There was a tuning fork in his shirt pocket that showed when he walked sideways back of the coffin and leaned over it full front to scrutinize the body.
"Come up to my crossroads church some pretty Sunday, ever' one of y'all," was all he said, straightening up and addressing the living. With him, it seemed marked, as if he found nothing sufficiently remarkable about the dead to give him anything flattering to say. "I guarantee nobody'll bite you if you put in at the collection for the piano, either," he added, rocking sidewise off.
"Where were his manners! But of course, he couldn't be turned away," Miss Snowdie, back of Virgie, was whispering. "Coming was his privilege." She drew her fan deeply back and forth, with the pressure of a heavy tail on the air. "A perfect stranger, and he handed out fans from Katie's deer horns out there, because he was a preacher; gave one to everybody."
"It's not time for the Last Look," Parnell Moody said in her natural, school voice. But the little Mayhews had to follow right behind Brother Dampeer. There came the prompting voice of Mrs. Junie Mayhew, "Chirren? Want to see your cousin Kate? Go look in, right quick. She raised your Uncle Berry. Take hands and go now, while there's nobody else; so you'll have her to remember." And they came in dipping their heads and pulling one another. The oldest little boy came hopping; it was remembered that at one point during the day he had run a nail in his foot.
"Brothers and sisters." Dr. Williams was facing the room.
Virgie rose right up. In the pink china jar on the mantel shelf, someone had placed her mother's old stick—like a peach branch, as though it would flower. Brother Dampeer cleared his throat: his work. Before his eyes and everybody's she marched over, took the stick out of the vase, and carried it away to the hall, where she placed it in the ring on the hatrack. When she was back in her chair, Dr. Williams opened the book and held the service.
Every now and then Mr. King, his tender-looking old head cocked sideways, his heels lifted, his right hand pricking the air, tiptoed down the hall to the table to pick at the ham—all as if nobody could see him. While Mamie C. Loomis, a child in peach, sang "O Love That Will Not Let Me Go," Mr. King sucked a little marrow bone and lifted his wobbly head and looked arrogantly at Virgie through the two open doors of her mother's bedroom. Even Weaver Loomis and Little Sister Spights, holding hands on the back row, were crying by now, listening to music, but Mr. King pushed out his stained lip. Then he made a hideous face at Virgie, like a silent yell. It was a yell at everything—including death, not leaving it out—and he did not mind taking his present animosity out on Virgie Rainey; indeed, he chose her. Then he cracked the little bone in his teeth. She felt refreshed all of a sudden at that tiny but sharp sound.
She sat up straight and touched her hair, which sprang to her fingers, as always. Turning her head, looking out of the one bright window through which came the cries of the little MacLains playing in the yard, she knew another moment of alliance. Was it Ran or King himself with whom she really felt it? Perhaps that confusion among all of them was the great wound in Ran's heart, she was thinking at the same time. But she knew the kinship for what it was, whomever it settled upon, an indelible thing which may come without friendship or even too early an identity, may come even despisingly, in rudeness, intruding