The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [268]
After she was in bed and her own light out, there was a peremptory pounding on the porch floor.
She walked to the open front door, her nightgown blowing about her in the moist night wind. She was trembling, and put on a light in the hall.
From the gleam falling over the transom behind her she could see an old lady in a Mother Hubbard and clayed boots, holding out something white in a dark wrapping.
"It's you," the old lady said abruptly. "Child, you don't know me, but I know you and brought you somethin'. Mighty late, ain't it? My night-blooming cereus throwed a flower tonight, and I couldn't forbear to bring you it. Take it—unwrop it."
Virgie looked at the naked, luminous, complicated flower, large and pale as a face on the dark porch. For a moment she felt more afraid than she had coming to the door.
"It's for you. Keep it—won't do the dead no good. And tomorrow it'll look like a wrung chicken's neck. Look at it enduring the night."
A horse stamped and whimpered from the dark road. The old woman declined to come in.
"No, oh no. You used to play the pi-anna in the picture show when you's little and I's young and in town, dear love," she called, turning away through the dark. "Sorry about your mama: didn't suppose anybody make as pretty music as you ever have no trouble.—I thought you's the prettiest little thing ever was."
Virgie was still trembling. The flower troubled her; she threw it down into the weeds.
She knew that now at the river, where she had been before on moonlit nights in autumn, drunken and sleepless, mist lay on the water and filled the trees, and from the eyes to the moon would be a cone, a long silent horn, of white light. It was a connection visible as the hair is in air, between the self and the moon, to make the self feel the child, a daughter far, far back. Then the water, warmer than the night air or the self that might be suddenly cold, like any other arms, took the body under too, running without visibility into the mouth. As she would drift in the river, too alert, too insolent in her heart in those days, the mist might thin momentarily and brilliant jewel eyes would look out from the water-line and the bank. Sometimes in the weeds a lightning bug would lighten, on and off, on and off, for as long in the night as she was there to see.
Out in the yard, in the coupe, in the frayed velour pocket next to the pistol, was her cache of cigarettes. She climbed inside and shielding the matchlight, from habit, began to smoke cigarettes. All around her the dogs were barking.
III
"I'll sell the cows to the first man I meet in the road," Virgie thought, waking up.
After she had milked them and driven them to pasture and come back, she saw Mrs. Stark's Juba back at the kitchen door.
"Leavin'? One thing, I seen your mama's ghost already," Juba said. She picked up a plate. As she began wrapping the china in newspaper, she explained that Virgie's goods must be packed in papers and locked in trunks before Virgie left, or Mrs. Stark would not think it fitting to the dead or to departure either. Virgie was to come up to the house and bid Mrs. Stark good-bye—before noon.
"Still in the house," Juba said. "Ghost be's."
"Well, I don't want to hear about ghosts," Virgie said. They were now crouched together over a shelf in the china closet.
"Don't?"
Juba courteously ignored Virgie's clashing two plates together. Things? Miss Virgie must despise things more than the meanest people, more than any throwing ghosts.
"I don't. I don't like ghosts."
"Now!" Juba said, by way of affirmation. "However, this'n, your mama, her weren't in two pieces, or