The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [323]
"We're together," said the old man.
"I've got everything under control," Sister Anne called over her shoulder to us, leaving us at once. "Luckily, I was always able to be in two places at the same time, so I'll be able to visit with you back yonder and keep things moving up front, too. Now, what was your name, sir?"
At the round table in the center of the breezeway, she leaned with the old man over a ledger opened there, by the tray of glasses and the water pitcher.
"But where could Uncle Felix be?" Kate whispered to me. As for me, I was still carrying the roses.
Sister Anne was guiding the old couple toward the curtain, and then she let them into the parlor.
"Sister Anne, where have you got him put?" asked Kate, following a step.
"You just come right on through," Sister Anne called to us. She said, behind her hand, "They've left the fields, dressed up like Sunday and Election Day put together, but I can't say they all stopped long enough to bathe, ha-ha! April's a pretty important time, but having your picture taken beats that! Don't have a chance of that out this way more than once or twice in a lifetime. Got him put back out of all the commotion," she said, leading the way. "The photographer's name is—let me see. He's of the Yankee persuasion, but that don't matter any longer, eh, Cousin Dicey? But I shouldn't be funny. Anyway, traveled all the way from some town somewhere since February, he tells me. Mercy, but it's hot as churchtime up there, with 'em so packed in! Did it ever occur to you how vain the human race can be if you just give 'em a chance?"
There was that blinding flash again—curtain or not, it came right around it and through it, and down the hall.
"Smells like gunpowder," said Kate stonily.
"Does," agreed Sister Anne. She looked flattered, and said, "May be."
"I feel like a being from another world," I said all at once, just to the breezeway.
"Come on, then," said Sister Anne. "Kate, leave her alone. Oh, Uncle Felix'll eat you two little boogers up."
Not such small haunches moved under that bell-like skirt; the skirt's hem needed mending where a point hung down. Just as I concentrated and made up my mind that Sister Anne weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds and was sixty-nine years old, she mounted on tiptoe like a little girl, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Kate was steering me by the elbow.
"Now how could she have moved him away back here," Kate marveled. Her voice might even have been admiring, with Sister Anne not there.
"Hold your horses while I look at this cake," said Sister Anne, turning off at the kitchen. "What I want to see is what kind"
She squealed as if she had seen a mouse. She took a lick of the icing on her finger before she covered the cake again and set it on the table. "My favorite. And how is Cousin Ethel?" Then she reached for my roses.
"Your ring!" she cried—a cry only at the last second subdued. "Your ring!"
She took my face between her fingers and thumb and shook my cheeks, as though I could not hear what she said at all. She could do this because we were kin to each other.
With unscratchable hands she began sticking the roses into a smoky glass vase too small for them, into which she'd run too little water. Of course there was plumbing. The well was abandoned.
"Well," she said, poking in the flowers, as though suddenly we had all the time in the world, "the other morning, I was looking out at the road, and along came a dusty old-time Ford with a trunk on the back, real slow, then stopped. Was a man. I wondered. And in a minute, knock knock knock. I changed my shoes and went to the door with my finger to my lips." She showed us.
"He was still there, on the blazing porch—eleven-fifteen. He was a middle-aged man all in hot black, short, but reared back, like a stove handle.