The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [309]
"Then dry yourself," said Miss Hattie. "What's that?"
"It's the train whistle," said Dewey.
Far down, the mail train crossed the three long trestles over Little Muscadine swamp like knocking three knocks at the door, and blew its whistle again through the rain.
Miss Hattie never let her powers interfere with mail time, or mail time interfere with her powers. She had everything worked out. She pulled open the door of her automobile, right there. There on the back seat was her mail sack, ready to go.
Miss Hattie lived next door—where Opal had now gone inside—and only used her car between here and the station; it stayed under the post office tree. Some day old Opal was going to take that car, and ride away. Miss Hattie climbed up inside.
The car roared and took a leap out into the rain. At the corner it turned, looking two stories high, swinging wide as Miss Hattie banked her curve, with a lean of her whole self deep to the right. She made it. Then she sped on the diagonal to the bottom of the hill and pulled up at the station just in time for Mr. Frierson to run out in his suspenders and hang the mail as the train rushed through. It hooked the old sack and flung off the new to Royals.
The rain slacked just a little on Miss Hattie while she hauled the mail uphill. Dewey stamped up the post office runway by her side to help her carry it in—the post office used to be a stable. He held the door open, they went inside, and the rain slammed down behind them.
"Dewey Coker?"
"Ma'am?"
"Why aren't you in school?"
In a sudden moment she dropped the sack and rubbed his head—just any old way—with something out of her purse; it might have been a dinner napkin. He rubbed cornbread crumbs as sharp as rocks out of his eye. Across the road, while this drying was happening, a wonderful white mule that had gotten into the cemetery and rolled himself around till he was green and white like a marble monument, got up to his feet and shivered and shook the raindrops everywhere.
"I may can still go," he said dreamily. "Excalibur—"
"Nonsense! Don't you see that rain?" cried Miss Hattie. "You'll stay here in this post office till I tell you."
The post office inside was a long bare room that looked and smelled like a covered bridge, with only a little light at the other end where Miss Hattie's window was. Dewey had never stayed inside here more than a minute at a time, in his life.
"You make yourself at home," said Miss Hattie, and disappeared into the back.
Dewey stood the poles by the front door and kept his fish in his hand on the bit of line, while Miss Hattie put up the mail. After she had put it all up as she saw fit, then she gave it out: pretty soon here came everybody. There was a lot of conversation through the window.
"Sure is a treat, Miss Hattie! Only wish it didn't have to stop."
"It looks like a gully washer to me, Miss Hat!"
"It's a beginning," was all Miss Hattie would say. "I'll go back out there tomorrow, if I have the time, and if I live and don't nothing happen, and do some more on it. But depends on the size of the mail."
And someone leaned down and said to Dewey, "Hi, Dewey! I saw you! And what was you up to this evening?"
After everybody had shed their old letters and papers on the floor and tracked out, there would have been silence everywhere but for the bombardment on the roof. Miss Hattie still didn't come out of her little room back there, of which Dewey could see nothing but the reared-back honeycomb of her desk with nine letters in the holes.
Out here, motes danced lazily as summer flies in the running green light of the cracks in the walls. The hole of a missing stovepipe high up was blocked with a bouquet of old newspapers, yellow as roses. It was a little chilly. It smelled of rain, of fish, of pocket money and pockets. Whether the lonely dangling light was turned on or off it was hard to see. Its bulb hung