The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [306]
"I think she's gone," said Dewey, getting to his feet.
Turtles now lay on logs sticking up out of the low water, with their small heads raised. An old log was papped with baby turtles. Dewey counted fourteen, seven up one side and seven down the other. Just waiting for rain, said his father. On a giant log was a giant turtle, gray-tailed, the size of a dishpan, set at a laughable angle there, safe from everybody and everything.
With lunch over, they still didn't catch anything. And then the lady looked through the willow boughs again, in nearly the same place. She was giving them another chance.
She cupped her hands to her silent lips. She meant "Blackie!"
"Blackie!" There it was.
"You hold still," said his father. "She ain't calling you."
Nobody could hold so still as a man named Blackie.
That mysterious lady never breathed anything but the one word, and so softly then that it was all the word could do to travel over the water; still his father never said anything back, until she disappeared. Then he said, "Blackie yourself."
He didn't even bait his hook or say any longer what he would do to the fish if they didn't hurry up and change their minds. Yet when nothing came up on the hook, he looked down at his own son like a stranger cast away on this bridge from the long ago, before it got cut off from land.
Dewey baited his hook, and the first thing he knew he'd caught a fish.
"What is it, what is it?" he shouted.
"You got you a little goggle-eye there, son."
Dewey, dancing with it—it was six inches long and jumping on the hook—hugged his father's neck and said, "Well—ready to go?"
"No ... Best not to stay either too long or too little-bit. I favor tarrying awhile," said his father.
Dewey sat back down, and gazed up at his father's solemn side-face—then followed the look his father shot across the river like a fishing line of great length, one that took hold.
Across the river the lady looked out for the third time. She was almost out of the willows now, on the sand. She put the little shells of her hands up to her throat. What did that mean? It was the way she'd pull her collar together if she'd been given a coat around her. It was about to rain. She knew as well as they did that people were looking at her hard; but she must not feel it, Dewey felt, or surely people would have to draw their looks away, and not fasten her there. She didn't have even one word to say, this time.
The bay tree that began moving and sighing over her head was the tall slender one Dewey had picked as his marker. With its head in a stroke of sun, it nodded like a silver flower. There was a little gentle thunder, and Dewey knew that her eyes shut, as well as he would know even in his sleep when his mother put down the windows in their house if a rain was coming. That way, she stood there and waited. And Dewey's father—whose sweat Dewey took a deep breath of as he stood up beside him—believed that the one that lady waited for was never coming over the bridge to her side, any more than she would come to his.
Then, with a little sound like a mouse somewhere in the world, a scratch, then a patter like many mice racing—and then at last the splash on Dewey's cheek—it simply began raining. Dewey looked all around—the river was dancing.
"Run now, son! Run for cover! It's fixing to pour down! I'll be right behind you!" shouted his father, running right past him and then jumping over the side of the bridge. Arms and legs spread wide as surprise itself, he did a grand leap to the sand. But instead of sheltering under the bridge, he kept going, and was running up the bank now, toward Royals. Dewey resigned himself to go the same way. As for the lady, if she was still where they left her, about to disappear perhaps, she was getting wet.
They ran under the sounding trees and vines. It came down in earnest, feeling warm and cool