The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [320]
I jumped up beside her and said, pleadingly somehow, to them both, "Do you know—I'd forgotten the Milky Way!"
My aunt didn't see any use answering that either. But Kate and I were suddenly laughing and running out together as if we were going to the party after all.
Before we set out, we tiptoed back into Aunt Ethel's room and made off with the roses. Rachel had darkened it. Again I saw us in the mirror, Kate pink and me blue, both our dresses stiff as boards (I had gone straight into Kate's clothes) and creaking from the way Rachel starched them, our teeth set into our lips, half-smiling. I had tried my hat, but Kate said, "Leave that, it's entirely too grand for out there, didn't you hear Mama?" Aunt Ethel stayed motionless, and I thought she was bound to look pretty, even asleep. I wasn't quite sure she was asleep.
"Seems mean," said Kate, looking between the thorns of the reddest rose, but I said, "She meant us to."
"Negroes always like them full blown," said Kate.
Out in the bright, "Look! Those crazy starlings have come. They always pick the greenest day!" said Kate.
"Well, maybe because they look so pretty in it," I said.
There they were, feeding all over the yard and every yard, iridescently black and multiplied at our feet, bound for the North. Around the house, as we climbed with our loads into the car, I saw Rachel looking out from the back hall window, with her cheek in her hand. She watched us go, carrying off her cake and her flowers too.
I was thinking, if I always say "still," Kate still says "always," and laughed, but would not tell her.
Mingo, I learned, was only nine miles and a little more away. But it was an old road, in a part the highway had deserted long ago, lonely and winding. It dipped up and down, and the hills felt high, because they were bare of trees, but they probably weren't very high—this was Mississippi. There was hardly ever a house in sight.
"So green," I sighed.
"Oh, but poor," said Kate, with her look of making me careful of what I said. "Gone to pasture now."
"Beautiful to me!"
"It's clear to Jericho. Looks like that cake would set heavy on your knees, in that old tin Christmas box."
"I'm not ever tired in a strange place. Banks and towers of honeysuckle hanging over that creek!" We crossed an iron bridge.
"That's the Hushomingo River."
We turned off on a still narrower, bumpier road. I began to see gates.
Near Mingo, we saw an old Negro man riding side saddle, except there was no saddle at all, on a slow black horse. He was coming to meet us—that is, making his way down through the field. As we passed, he saluted by holding out a dark cloth cap stained golden.
"Good evening, Uncle Theodore," nodded Kate. She murmured, "Rachel's his daughter, did you know it? But she never comes back to see him."
I sighed into the sweet air.
"Oh, Lordy, we're too late!" Kate exclaimed.
On the last turn, we saw cars and wagons and one yellow wooden school bus standing empty and tilted to the sides up and down the road. Kate stared back for a moment toward where Uncle Theodore had been riding so innocently away. Primroses were blowing along the ditches and between the wheelspokes of wagons, above which empty cane chairs sat in rows, and some of the horses were eating the primroses. That was the only sound as we stood there. No, a chorus of dogs was barking in a settled kind of way.
From the gate we could look up and see the house at the head of the slope. It looked right in size and shape, but not in something else—it had a queer intensity for afternoon. Was every light in the house burning? I wondered. Of course: very quietly out front, on the high and sloping porch, standing and sitting on the railing between the four remembered, pale, square cypress posts, was stationed