The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [264]
"Child, you just don't know yet what you've lost," said Miss Hattie Mayo through the words of the service. It was the only thing Virgie remembered ever hearing Miss Hattie say; and then it was a thing others had been saying before her.
Miss Lizzie Stark—for she had, after all, been able to come to the funeral—waved her own little fan—black chiffon—at Virgie's cheeks from a jet chain. Miss Lizzie looked very rested, and had succeeded in exchanging seats with Cassie Morrison. She let a hand fall plumply on Virgie's thigh, and did not lift it again.
Down the hall, with the blue sky at his back, Mr. King MacLain sent for coffee, tasted it, and put out his tongue in the air to cool, a bright pink tongue wagging like a child's while they sang "Nearer, My God, to Thee."
"Go back," they told Virgie as they all moved out of the parlor. "Be alone with her before you come with us."
"You're the onliest one now," a Mayhew said. The Mayhews had asked to carry Katie home to Lastingwell Church to bury her, but acknowledged that Mr. Fate, whom the Raineys had wanted likewise to take back to their home place, was in Morgana ground, and Victor—"And so will you be," they had concluded to Virgie.
Virgie drew back while they marked time, and then she wasn't alone in the parlor. There was little Jinny MacLain, shoes and socks in hand, quietly bent over the coffin, looking boldly in. She had prized open the screen and climbed in the window. Green lizards hung like tiny springs at her ears, their eyes and jaws busy. At any other house today, Virgie knew, more care would have been exercised by them all; here a child could slip through.
Jinny looked up at Virgie; the expression on her face was disappointment.
"Hi, Jinny."
"This doesn't look like a coffin. Did you have to use a bureau drawer?"
"They haven't put the lid down, that's all."
"Well, will you put the lid down for me?"
"Run on. Go the back way," said Virgie. "Wait—how is it that you make lizards catch on to your ears?"
"Press their heads," Jinny said languidly, over her shoulder. She walked out beating her shoes softly together with her hands.
Virgie walked over and pressed her forehead against the broken-into screen. She looked far out, over the fields, down to the far, low trees—the old vision belonging to this window. It was the paper serpent with the lantern lights through whose interior was flowing the Big Black.
"So here you are," said Miss Perdita Mayo.
The procession—the coffin passing through their ranks and now going before—marched humped and awkward down the path. They were like people waked by night, in the shimmering afternoon.
This was the children's dispensation: what they'd been waiting for. Little Jinny, her face bright and important, stood by little King, who—he was exactly timing the funeral—sucked a four-o'clock. "Move, Clara," she was saying to the nurse. They adored seeing beyond dodging aprons and black protecting arms (except Clara at the moment was smoking) the sight of grown people streaming tears and having to be held up. They liked coffins carried out because of the chance they could perceive that coffins might be dropped and the dead people spilled right out. But the chance would fade a little more with today. No dead people had ever been spilled while any of them watched, just as no freight train had ever wrecked while they prayed for it to, so they could get the bananas.
"But mainly, Mr. MacLain, you should remember to keep off rich food," Miss Snowdie said, leading her husband down a divergent path. They were not going to the cemetery with the rest; no one expected it of them. Their Negro girl chauffeur waited with their car turned the other way. "At home we've got that nice Moody fish from Moon Lake."
Virgie watched the mysterious, vulnerable back of the old man. Even as Miss Snowdie, unmysterious, led him away, he was eating still. At some moment today