The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [9]
Then she would die; her life would stop right there.
She lay silently for a moment, composing her face into a look which would be beautiful, desirable, and dead.
Clyde would have to buy her a dress to bury her in. He would have to dig a deep hole behind the house, under the cedar, a grave. He would have to nail her up a pine coffin and lay her inside. Then he would have to carry her to the grave, lay her down and cover her up. All the time he would be wild, shouting, and all distracted, to think he could never touch her one more time.
She moved slightly, and her eyes turned toward the window. The white rain splashed down. She could hardly breathe, for thinking that this was the way it was to fall on her grave, where Clyde would come and stand, looking down in the tears of some repentance.
A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
Then Clyde was standing there, with dark streams flowing over the floor where he had walked. He poked at Ruby with the butt of his gun, as if she were asleep.
"What's keepin' supper?" he growled.
She jumped up and darted away from him. Then, quicker than lightning, she put away the paper. The room was dark, except for the firelight. From the long shadow of his steamy presence she spoke to him glibly and lighted the lamp.
He stood there with a stunned, yet rather good-humored look of delay and patience in his face, and kept on standing there. He stamped his mud-red boots, and his enormous hands seemed weighted with the rain that fell from him and dripped down the barrel of the gun. Presently he sat down with dignity in the chair at the table, making a little tumult of his rightful wetness and hunger. Small streams began to flow from him everywhere.
Ruby was going through the preparations for the meal gently. She stood almost on tiptoe in her bare, warm feet. Once as she knelt at the safe, getting out the biscuits, she saw Clyde looking at her and she smiled and bent her head tenderly. There was some way she began to move her arms that was mysteriously sweet and yet abrupt and tentative, a delicate and vulnerable manner, as though her breasts gave her pain. She made many unnecessary trips back and forth across the floor, circling Clyde where he sat in his steamy silence, a knife and fork in his fists.
"Well, where you been, anyway?" he grumbled at last, as she set the first dish on the table.
"Nowheres special."
"Don't you talk back to me. You been hitchhikin' again, ain't you?" He almost chuckled.
She gave him a quick look straight into his eyes. She had not even heard him. She was filled with happiness. Her hand trembled when she poured the coffee. Some of it splashed on his wrist.
At that he let his hand drop heavily down upon the table and made the plates jump.
"Some day I'm goin' to smack the livin' devil outa you," he said.
Ruby dodged mechanically. She let him eat. Then, when he had crossed his knife and fork over his plate, she brought him the newspaper. Again she looked at him in delight. It excited her even to touch the paper with her hand, to hear its quiet secret noise when she carried it, the rustle of surprise.
"A newspaper!" Clyde snatched it roughly and with a grabbing disparagement. "Where'd you git that? Hussy."
"Look at this-here," said Ruby in her small singsong voice. She opened the paper while he held it and pointed gravely to the paragraph.
Reluctantly, Clyde began to read it. She watched his damp bald head slowly bend and turn.
Then he made a sound in his throat and said, "It's a lie."
"That's what's in the newspaper about me," said Ruby, standing up straight. She took up his plate and gave him that look of joy.
He put his big crooked finger on the paragraph and poked at it.
"Well, I'd just like to see the place I shot you!" he cried explosively. He looked up, his face blank and bold.
But she drew herself in, still holding the empty plate, faced him straightened and hard, and