The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [265]
"Granddaddy's almost a hundred," said little King clearly. "When you get to be a hundred, you pop."
The old people did not think to say good-bye. Mr. MacLain pressed ahead, a white inch of hair in the nape of his neck curling over in the breeze.
Virgie was again seized by both arms, as if, in the open, she might try to bolt. Her body ached from the firm hand of—in the long run—Miss Lizzie Stark. She was escorted to the Stark automobile parked in the road, where Ran now waited in the driver's seat. The line of cars and trucks had started.
"Poor Mr. Mabry, he didn't show up." Miss Perdita Mayo's flushed face appeared a moment at the window. "He's down with a cold. It came on him yesterday: I saw it coming."
They had to drive the length of Morgana to the cemetery. It was spacious and quiet within, once they rolled over the cattle-guard; yet wherever Virgie looked from the Starks' car window, she seemed to see the same gravestones again, Mr. Comus Stark, old Mr. Tim Carmichael, Mr. Tertius Morgan, like the repeating towers in the Vicksburg park. Twice she thought she saw Mr. Sissum's grave, the same stone pulled down by the same vines—the grave into which Miss Eckhart, her old piano teacher whom she had hated, tried to throw herself on the day of his funeral. And more than once she looked for the squat, dark stone that marked Miss Eckhart's own grave; it would turn itself from them, as she'd seen it do before, when they wound near and passed. And a seated angel, first visible from behind with the stone hair spread on the shoulders, turned up later from the side, further away, showing the steep wings.
"Do you like it?" Cassie was asking from the front seat beside Ran (Jinny had to go home with the children).
So it was Mrs. Morrison's angel. After being so gay and flighty always, Cassie's mother went out of the room one morning and killed herself. "I was proud of it," said Cassie. "It took everything I had."
"Where's Loch these days?" Ran asked.
"Ran, don't you remember he's in New York City? Likes it there. He writes us."
Loch was too young for Virgie ever to have known well in Morgana—always polite, "too good," "too young," people said when he went to war, and she remembered him only as walking up the wooden staircase to his father's printing office. He gave a bent, intent nod of the head, too young and already too distant.—But he's not dead! she thought—it's something else.
"What did you say, Virgie?"
"Nothing, Cassie." Yet she must have hurt Cassie some way, if only by that moment's imagining that what was young was all gone—disappeared wholly.
Virgie leaned out to look for a certain blackened lamb on a small hump of earth that was part of her childhood. It was the grave of some lady's stillborn child (now she knew it must have been that baby sister of Miss Nell Loomis's), the Iamb flattened by rains into a little fairy table. There she had entertained a large imaginary company with acorn cups, then ridden away on the table.
"You staying on in Morgana, Virgie?" came Miss Nell's undertone. She talked on—the same in a moving car as she was in a parlor.
"Going away. In the morning," Virgie was saying.
"Auction off everything?"
Virgie said nothing more; she had decided to leave when she heard herself say so—decided by ear.
"Turn to the right and stop, Ran."
That was the first thing Miss Lizzie had said; perhaps she had felt too crowded in her own car to break silence.
Ran stopped, and lifted the ladies out. The group of three fat ones—Ran with Miss Lizzie and Miss Nell in arm—moved in hobbled walk ahead. The Rainey lot was well back under the trees. Cassie put her fingers in Virgie's. All around, the yuccas were full of bells, the angels were reared