The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [270]
"Always see it when I pass your yard," Virgie called back.
"Virgie! I know how you feel. You'll never get over it, never!"
They called from car to car, running parallel along the road with the loose gravel from the unpaved part knocking loudly, bounced from one car to the other.
"Well. You come."
"I guess it takes a lot of narcissus to spell Catherine," Virgie called, when Cassie still did not pass her.
"Two hundred and thirty-two bulbs! And then Miss Katie's hyacinthus all around those, and I've got it bordered in violets, you know, to tell me where it is in summer!" Cassie's voice, growing louder, grew at the same time more anxious and more reverent. She was not hurt, not suspecting, only anxious. But it was for Cassie that Virgie had turned her car toward town, to not let her see. "Now you come. We were friends that summer—" (Virgie remembered Cassie and herself in the revival tent, pulling light bugs off each other's shoulders while singing "Throw Out the Life Line.") "You could come play my piano, nobody does but my pupils."
Virgie, and Cassie too, circled the cemetery and drove back the length of Morgana. Then, "Where are you going? Are you going somewhere, Virgie?"
Virgie slowed for a minute as Cassie turned in at her own house. The Morrisons' looked the same as always, except, as the MacLain house had had before it—when Miss Eckhart was there—it now had a flylike cluster of black mailboxes at its door; it had been cut up for road workers and timber people. In the upstairs corner room, where they tried to keep poor Mr. Morrison, the shade was still down, but she felt him look out through his telescope. Across the front yard stretched the violet frame in which Mama's Name was planted against the coming of spring.
Virgie lifted her hand, and the girls waved.
"You'll go away like Loch," Cassie called from the steps. "A life of your own, away—I'm so glad for people like you and Loch, I am really."
Virgie drove on, the seven winding miles to MacLain, and stopped the car in front of the courthouse.
She had often done this, if only to turn around and go right back after a rest of a few moments and a Coca-Cola standing up in Billy Hudson's drugstore. MacLain pleased her—the uncrowded water tank, catching the first and last light; the old iron bell in the churchyard looking as heavy as a fallen meteor. The courthouse pleased her—space itself, with the columns standing away from its four faces, and the pea-green blinds flat to the wall, and the stile rising in pepper grass over the iron fence to it—and a quail just now running across the yard; and the live oaks—trunks flaky black and white now, as if soot, not rain, had once fallen from heaven on them, and the wet eyes of cut-off limbs on them; and the whole rainlighted spread roof of green leaves that moved like children's lips in speech, high up.
Virgie left the car and running through the light drops reached the stile and sat down on it in the open shelter of trees. She touched the treads, worn not by feet so much as by their history of warm, spreading seats. At this distance the Confederate soldier on the shaft looked like a chewed-on candle, as if old gnashing teeth had made him. On past him, pale as a rainbow, the ancient circus posters clung to their sheds, they no longer the defacing but the defaced.
There was nobody out in the rain. The land across from the courthouse used to be Mr. Virgil MacLain's park. He was old Mr. King's father; he used to keep deer. Now like a callosity, a cataract of the eye over what was once transparent and bright—for the park racing with deer was an idea strangely transparent to Virgie—was the line of store fronts and the MacLain Bijou, and the cemetery that was visible on the cedar hill.
Here the MacLains buried, and Miss Snowdie's people, the Hudsons. Here lay Eugene, the only MacLain man gone since her memory, after old Virgil himself. Eugene, for a long interval, had lived in another part of the world, learning while he was away that people don't have to be answered