The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [331]
Somehow, Kate and I must have expected everybody to rush out after us. Sister Anne's picture, the free one, had been the last. But nobody seemed to be leaving. Children were the only ones flying loose. Maddened by the hour and the scene, they were running barefoot and almost silent, skimming around and around the house. The others sat and visited on, in those clouds of dust, all holding those little tickets or receipts I remembered wilting in their hands; some of the old men had them stuck in their winter hats. At last, maybe the Lady Baltimore cake would have to be passed.
"Sister Anne, greedy and all as she is, will cut that cake yet, if she can keep them there a little longer!" said Kate in answer to my thoughts.
"Yes," I said.
"She'll forget what you said. Oh the sweet evening air!"
I took so for granted once, and when had I left for ever, I wondered at that moment, the old soft airs of Mingo as I knew them—the interior airs that were always kitchenlike, of oil-lamps, wood ashes, and that golden scrapement off cake-papers—and outside, beyond the just-watered ferns lining the broad strong railing, the fragrances winding up through the luster of the fields and the dim, gold screen of trees and the river beyond, fragrances so rich I once could almost see them, untransparent and Oriental? In those days, fresh as I was from Sunday School in town, I could imagine the Magi riding through, laden.
At other times—perhaps later, during visits back from the North—that whole big congregated outside smell, like the ripple of an animal's shining skin, used suddenly to travel across and over to my figure standing on the porch, like a marvel of lightning, and by it I could see myself, a child on a visit to Mingo, hardly under any auspices that I knew of, by myself, but wild myself, at the mercy of that touch.
"It's a wonder she didn't let the Negroes file in at the back and have theirs taken too. If you didn't know it was Sister Anne, it would be past understanding," Kate said. "It would kill Mama—we must spare her this."
"Of course!" Sparing was our family trait.
We were going down the walk, measuredly, like lady callers who had left their cards; in single file. That was the one little strip of cement in miles and miles—narrow as a ladder.
"But listen, who was Daisy, have you thought? Daisy," said Kate in front. She looked over her shoulder. "I don't believe it."
I smoothed out that brown page of the hymn book with the torn edge, that purple indelible writing across it where the print read "Round & Shaped Notes." Coming around, walking in the dampening uncut grass, I showed it to Kate. You could still make out the big bold D with the cap on.
"'Midnight!' But they always go to bed at dark, out here."
I put the letter back inside my pocket. Kate said, "Daisy must have been smart. I don't understand that message at all."
"Oh, I do," I lied. I felt it was up to me. I told Kate, "It's a kind of shorthand." Yet it had seemed a very long letter—didn't it take Uncle Felix a long time to write it!
"Oh, I can't think even out here, but mustn't Daisy be dead?... Not Beck?" Kate ventured, then was wordless.
"Daisy was Daisy," I said. It was the "please" that had hurt me. It was I who put the old iron ring over the gate and fastened it. I saw the Cape Jessamines were all in bud, and for a moment, just at the thought, I seemed to reel from a world too fragrant, just as I suspected Aunt Ethel had reeled from one too loud.
"I expect by now Uncle Felix has got his names mixed up, and Daisy was a mistake," Kate said.
She could always make the kind of literal remark, like this, that could alienate me, even when we were children—much as I love her. I don't know why, yet, but some things are too important for a mistake even to be considered. I was sorry I had showed Kate the message, and said, "Look, how