The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [317]
"Oh, curses!" cried Kate to me. Kate had told them at the bank she was not working while I was here. We had planned something.
"Mama, what is she?" asked Kate, standing down in her cotton petticoat with the ribbon run in. She was not as tall as I. "I may be as bad as Dicey but I don't intend to go out there today without you and not have her straight."
Aunt Ethel looked patiently upwards as if she read now from the roof of the tester, and said, "Well, she's a remote cousin of Uncle Felix's, to begin with. Your third cousin twice removed, and your Great-aunt Beck's half-sister, my third cousin once removed and my aunt's half-sister, Dicey's—"
"Don't tell me!" I cried. "I'm not that anxious to claim kin!"
"She'll claim you! She'll come visit you!" cried Kate.
"I won't be here long enough." I could not help my smiles.
"When your mother was alive and used to come bringing you, visits were different," said my Aunt Ethel. "She stayed long enough to make us believe she'd fully got here. There'd be time enough to have alterations, from Miss Mattie, too, and transplant things in the yard if it was the season, even start a hook-rug—do a morning glory, at least—even if she'd never really see the grand finale.... Our generation knew more how to visit, whatever else escaped us, not that I mean to criticize one jot."
"Mama, what do you want?" said Kate in the middle of the floor. "Let me get you something."
"I don't want a thing," said her mother. "Only for my girls to please themselves."
"Well then, tell me who it was that Sister Anne one time, long time ago, was going to marry and stood up in the church? And she was about forty years old!" Kate said, and lightly, excitedly, lifted my hat from where I'd dropped it down on the little chair some time, to her own head—bare feet, petticoat, and all. She made a face at me.
Her mother was saying, "Now that is beyond me at the moment, perhaps because it didn't come off. Though he was some kind of off-cousin, too, I seem to recall ... I'll have it worked out by the time you girls get back from where you're going.—Very becoming, dear."
"Kate," I said, "I thought Uncle Felix was old beyond years when I was a child. And now I'll be old in ten years, and so will you. And he's still alive."
"He was old!" cried Kate. "He was!"
"Light somewhere, why don't you," said her mother.
Kate perched above me on the arm of my chair, and we gently rocked.
I said, "He had red roses on his suspenders."
"When did he ever take his coat off for you to see that?" objected my aunt. "The whole connection always went out there for Sundays, and he was a very strict gentleman all his life, you know, and made us be ladies out there, more even than Mama and Papa did in town."
"But I can't remember a thing about Sister Anne," I said. "Maybe she was too much of a lady."
"Foot," said my aunt.
Kate said in a prompting, modest voice, "She fell in the well."
I cried joyously, "And she came out! Oh, I remember her fine! Mournful! Those old black drapey dresses, and plastered hair."
"That was just the way she looked when she came out of the well," objected Kate.
"Mournful isn't exactly the phrase," said my aunt.
"Plastered black hair, and her mouth drawn down, exactly like that aunt in the front illustration of your Eight Cousins," I told Kate. "I used to think that was who it was."
"You're so bookish," said my aunt flatly.
"This is where all the books were.!"—and there were the same ones now, no more, no less.
"On purpose, I think she fell," continued Kate. "Knowing there were plenty to pull her out. That was her contribution to Cousin Eva's wedding celebrations, and snitching a little of her glory. You're joggling