The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [316]
"Look at the gilt edge," she said, shining it. "Isn't it remarkable about Sister Anne? I wonder what drawer she went into to find that to favor us with?... 'Had to drop—' watch?—no, 'water on his tongue—yesterday so he could talk ... Must watch him—day and night,' underlined. Poor old man. She insists, you know, Dicey, that's what she does."
"Buzzard," said Kate.
"Who," I sighed, for I thought she had said "sister," and there was no sister at all left of my Aunt Ethel's. But my mind had wandered for a moment. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, after an enormous dinner at which we had had company—six girls, chattering almost like ready-made bridesmaids—ending with wonderful black, bitter, moist chocolate pie under mountains of meringue, and black, bitter coffee. We could hear Rachel now, off in the distance, peacefully dropping the iced-tea spoons into the silver drawer in the pantry.
In this little courthouse town, several hours by inconvenient train ride from Jackson, even the cut grass in the yards smelled different from Northern grass. (Even by evidence of smell, I knew that really I was a stranger in a way, still, just at first.) And the spring was so much farther advanced—the birds so busy you turned as you would at people as they plunged by. Bloom was everywhere in the streets, wistaria just ending, Confederate jasmine beginning. And down in the gardens!—they were deep colored as old rugs in the morning and evening shade. Everybody grew some of the best of everybody else's flowers; by the way, if you thank a friend for a flower, it will not grow for you. Everywhere we went calling, Kate brought me out saying, "Here she is! Got off the train talking, and hasn't stopped yet." And everywhere, the yawning, inconvenient, and suddenly familiar rooms were as deep and inviting and compelling as the yawning big roses opening and shattering in one day in the heating gardens. At night, the moths were already pounding against the screens.
Aunt Ethel and Kate, and everybody I knew here, lived as if they had never heard of anywhere else, even Jackson—in houses built, I could judge now as a grown woman and a stranger, in the local version of the 1880's—tall and spread out at the bottom, with porches, and winged all over with awnings and blinds. As children, Kate and I were brought up across the street from each other—they were her grandfather's and my grandmother's houses. From Aunt Ethel's front window I could see our chinaberry tree, which Mother had always wanted to cut down, standing in slowly realized bloom. Our old house was lived in now by a family named Brown, who were not very much, I gathered—the porch had shifted, and the screens looked black as a set of dominoes.
Aunt Ethel had gone back to the beginning of her note now. "Oh-oh. Word has penetrated even Mingo, Miss Dicey Hastings, that you're in this part of the world! The minute you reached Mississippi our little paper had that notice you laughed at, that was all about your mother and me and your grandmother, so of course there's repercussions from Sister Anne. Why didn't we tell her! But honestly, she might be the remotest kin in the world, for all you know when you're well, but let yourself get to ailing, and she'd show up in Guinea, if that's where you were, and stay. Look at Cousin Susan, 'A year if need be' is the way she put it about precious Uncle Felix."
"She'll be coming to you next if you don't hush about her," said Kate, sitting bolt upright on the bed. She adored her mother, her family. What she had was company-excitement. And I guess I had trip-excitement—I giggled. My aunt eyed us and tucked the letter away.
"But who is she, pure and simple?" I said.
"You'd just better not let her in," said Aunt Ethel to Kate. "That's what. Sister Anne Fry, dear heart. Declares she's wild to lay eyes on you. I should have