The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [325]
Sister Anne stuck in her finger, opened the door, and we all three crowded inside the little room, which was crowded already.
Uncle Felix's side and back loomed from a featherbed, on an old black iron frame of a bedstead, which tilted downwards toward the foot with the sinking of the whole house from the brow of the hill toward the back. He sat white-headed as one of those escaping children, but not childlike—a heavy bulk, motionless, in a night-shirt, facing the window. A woven cotton spread was about his knees. His hands, turned under, were lying one on each side of him, faded from outdoor burn, mottled amber and silver.
"That's a nigger bed," said Kate, in one tone, one word. I turned and looked straight into her eyes.
"It—is—not" said Sister Anne. Her whole face shook, as if Kate could have made it collapse. Then she bowed her head toward us—that we could go on, now, if that was the spirit we had come in.
"Good evening, sir," said Kate, in a changed voice.
I said it after her.
Uncle Felix's long, mute, grizzly head poked around his great shoulder and, motionless again, looked out at us. He visited this gaze a long time on a general point among the three different feminine faces—if you could call Sister Anne's wholly feminine—but never exactly on any of them. Gradually something left his eyes. Conviction was what I missed. Then even that general focus altered as though by a blow, a rap or a tap from behind, and his old head swung back. Again he faced the window, the only window in the house looking shadeless and shameless to the West, the glaring West.
Sister Anne bore the roses to the window and set them down on the window sill in his line of sight. The sill looked like the only place left where a vase could safely be set. Furniture, odds and ends, useless objects were everywhere, pushed by the bed even closer together. There were trunks, barrels, chairs with the cane seats hanging in a fringe. I remembered how sometimes in winter, dashing in here where the window then blew icily upon us, we would snatch an apple from the washed heap on the floor and run slamming out before we would freeze to death; that window always stayed open, then as now propped with a piece of stovewood. The walls were still rough boards with cracks between. Dust had come in everywhere rolls of dust or lint or cottonwood fuzz hung even from the ceiling, glinting like everything else in the unfair light. I was afraid there might be dirt-daubers' nests if I looked. Our roses glared back at us as garish as anything living could be, almost like paper flowers, a magician's bouquet that had exploded out of a rifle to shock and amaze us.
"We'll enjoy our sunset from over the pasture this evening, won't we, Uncle Felix!" called Sister Anne, in a loud voice. It was the urgent opposite of her conspiratorial voice. "I bet we're fixing to have a gorgeous one—it's so dusty! You were saying last week, Cousin Felix, we already need a rain!"
Then to my amazement she came and rested her foot on a stack of mossy books by the bed—I was across from her there—and leaned her elbow on her lifted knee, and looked around the room with the face of a brand-new visitor. I thought of a prospector. I could look if she could. What must have been a Civil War musket stood like a forgotten broom in the corner. On the coal bucket sat an old bread tray, split like a melon. There was even a dress form in here, rising among the trunks, its inappropriate bosom averted a little, as though the thing might still be able to revolve. If it were spanked, how the dust would fly up!
"Well, he's not going to even know me today," said Sister Anne, teasing me. "Well! I mustn't stay away too long at a time. Excuse me, Uncle Felix! I'll be right back," she said, taking down her tomboy foot. At the door she turned, to look at us sadly.
Kate and I looked at each other across the bed.