The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [308]
He marched ahead of them, still in step with his father, but out in the open rain, with his fish now let up high on its pole behind him. He felt the welcome plastering down of his hair on his forehead, and the relentless way the raindrops hit and bounced on him.
Opal Purcell had a look, to Dewey, as if she didn't know whether she was getting wet or not. It was his father's fishing look. And Miss Hattie's rainmaking look. He was the only one—out here in the rain itself—that didn't have it.
Like a pretty lady's hand, to tilt his face up a little and make him smile, deep satisfaction, almost love came down and touched him.
"Miss Hattie," he turned walking and said over his shoulder, "I caught me a goggle-eye perch back yonder, see him? I wish I could give him to you—for your supper!"
"You good and wet, honey?" she said back, marching there in the middle.
The brightest thing in Royals—rain was the loudest, on all the tin roofs—was the empty school bus drawn up under the shed of the filling station. The movie house, high up on its posts, was magnesia-bottle blue. Three red hens waited on the porch. Dewey's and Opal's eyes together looked out of their corners at the "Coming Saturday" poster of the charging white horse. But Miss Hattie didn't dismiss them at the movie house.
They passed the Baptist church getting red as a rose, and the Methodist church getting streaky. In the middle of the first crossing, the water tank stood and they walked under; water from its bottom, black and cold as ice, fell a drop for each head as always. And they passed along the gin, which alone would sleep the spring out. All around were the well-known ditches and little gullies; there were the chinaberry trees, and some Negroes and some dogs underneath them; but it all looked like some different place to Dewey—not Royals. There was a line of faces under the roof of the long store porch, but they looked, white and black, like the faces of new people. Nevertheless, all spoke to Miss Hattie, Blackie, Opal, and Dewey by name; and from their umbrella—out in the middle of the road, where it was coming down hardest—Miss Hattie did the speaking back.
"It's the beginning!" she called. "I'd a heap rather see it come this way than in torrents!"
"We're real proud of you, Miss Hattie!"
"You're still a credit to Royals, Miss Hattie!"
"Don't you drown yourself out there!"
"Oh, I won't," said Miss Hattie.
At the bank corner, small spotty pigs belonging to nobody, with snouts as long as corncobs, raced out in a company like clowns with the Circus, and ran with Dewey and Miss Hattie and all, for the rest of the way. There was one more block, and that was where the post office was. Also the Seed & Feed, and the schoolhouse beyond, and the Stave Mill Road; and also home was that way.
"Well, good-by, everybody," said Miss Hattie, arrived at the post office tree.
Dewey's father—the blackest-browed Coker of the family, much blacker-browed than Uncle Lavelle, who had run off a long time ago, by Dewey's reckoning—bowed himself out backward from under the umbrella and straightened up in the rain.
"Much obliged for the favor, Miss Hattie," he said. With a reminding hand he turned over his fishing pole to Dewey, and was gone.
"Thank you, ma'am, I enjoyed myself," said Dewey.
"You're wet as a drowned rat," said Miss Hattie admiringly.
Up beyond, the schoolhouse grew dim behind its silver yard. The bell mounted at the gate was making the sound of a bucket filling.
"I'll leave you with the umbrella, Opal. Opal, run home," said Miss Hattie, pointing her finger at Opal's chest, "and put down the south windows, and bring in the quilts and dry them out again before the fire. I can't tell you why I forgot clean about my own windows. You might stand on a chair and find a real pretty quart of snapbeans and put them on with that little piece of meat out of the safe. Run now. Where've you been?"
"Nowheres.