by Eudora Welty
"Cat's got her tongue," said Mr. Fatty.
"I'm an old man. But you're an old woman. I don't know why you done it. Unless of course it was for pure lack of good sense."
"Where you come from?" asked Mr. Fatty in his little tenor voice.
"You clowns."
Mr. Voight, who said that, now went lightly as a dragonfly around the porch and entered the house by the front door: it was not locked. He might have been waiting until all the beating about had been done by others—clowns—or perhaps he thought he was so valuable that he could burn up in too big a hurry.
Loch saw him step, with rather a flare, through the beads at the hall door and come into the parlor. He gazed serenely about the walls, pausing for a moment first, as though something had happened to them not that very hour but a long time ago. He was there and not there, for he alone was not at his wit's end. He went picking his feet carefully among the frills and flakes of burned paper, and wrinkled up his sharp nose; not from the smell, it seemed, but from wider, dissolving things. Now he stood at the window. His eyes rolled. Would he foam at the mouth? He did once. If he did not, Loch might not be sure about him; he remembered Mr. Voight best as foaming.
"Do you place her, Captain?" asked Old Man Moody in a cautious voice. "Who's this here firebug? You been places."
Mr. Voight was strolling about the room, and taking the poker he poked among the ashes. He picked up a seashell. The old lady advanced on him and he put it back, and as he came up he took off his hat. It looked more than polite. There close to the old lady's face he cocked his head, but she looked through him, a long way through Mr. Voight. She could have been a lady on an opposite cliff, far away, out of eye range and earshot, but about to fall.
The tick-tock was very loud then. Just as Mr. Fatty had forgotten Mr. Booney Holifield, Loch had forgotten the dynamite. Now he could go back to expecting a blast. The fire had had a hard time, but fire could manage to connect itself with an everlasting little mechanism that could pound like that, right along, right in the room.
("Do you hear something, Mr. Moody?" Loch could cry out right now. "Mr. Voight, listen."—"All right, say—do you want your bird this minute?" might be the reply. "We'll call everything off.")
"Man, what's that?" asked Mr. Fatty Bowles, and "Fatty boy, do you hear something ugly?" Old Man Moody asked at the same instant. At last they cocked their ears at the ticking that had been there in the room with them all this time. They looked at each other and then with hunched shoulders paraded around looking for the source of it.
"It's a rattlesnake! No, it ain't! But it's close," said Mr. Fatty.
They looked high and low all over the room but they couldn't see it right in front of their eyes and up just a little, on top of the piano. That was honestly not a fair place, not where most people would put a thing. They looked at each other harder and hurried faster, but all they did was run on each other's heels and tip the chairs over. One of the chair legs snapped like a chicken bone.
Mr. Voight only got in their way, since he did not move an inch. He was still standing before the eyes of the sailor's mother, looking at her with lips puckered. It could be indeed that he knew her from his travels. He looked tired from these same travels now.
At last Old Man Moody, the smarter one of those two, spied what they were looking for, the obelisk with its little moving part and its door open. Once seen, that thing was so surely it that he merely pointed it out to Mr. Fatty. Mr. Fatty tiptoed over and picked the obelisk up and set it down again quickly. So Old Man Moody stumped over and picked it up and held it up on the diagonal, posing, like a fisherman holding a funny-looking fish to have come out of Moon Lake.
The old woman lifted her head and walked around Mr. Voight to Old Man Moody. She reached up and took the ticking thing right out of his hand, and he turned it loose agreeably; Old Man Moody seemed not taken by surprise by women.
The old woman held her possession to her, drawn to her big gray breast. Her eyesight returned from far to close by. Then she stood looking at the three people fixedly, as if she showed them her insides, her live heart.
And then a little whir of her own voice: "See ... See, Mr. MacLain."
Nothing blew up, but Mr. Voight (but she called him MacLain) groaned.
"No, boys. I never saw her in my life," he said.
He walked stiffly out of the room. He walked out of the house and cater-cornered across the yard toward the MacLain Road. As he reached the road itself, he put his hat on, and then he did not look as shabby, or as poor.
Loch clasped a leafy armful of the tree and sank his head in the green cool.
"Let me see your play-pretty," Mr. Fatty Bowles was saying with his baby-smile. He took the obelisk away from the old woman, and with a sudden change on his face threw it with all his might out the open window. It came straight toward Loch, and fell into the weeds below him. And still it ticked.
"You could have been a little too quick there, Fatty boy," said Old Man Moody. "Flinging evidence."
"You ought to think about us. Listen and you'll hear it blow up. I'd rather have it blow up your wife's chickens."
"Well, I wouldn't."
And while they talked, the poor old woman tried it again. She was down on her knees cradling the lump of candle and the next moment had it lighted. She rose up, agitated now, and went running about the room, holding the candle above her, evading the men each time they tried to head her off.
This time, the fire caught her own hair. The little short white frill turned to flame.
Old Man Moody was so quick that he caught her. He came up with a big old rag from somewhere, and ran after the old woman with it. They both ran extraordinarily fast. He had to make a jump. He brought the cloth down over her head from behind, grimacing, as if all people on earth had to do acts of shame, some time. He hit her covered-up head about with the flat of his hand.
***
Old Man Moody and Mr. Bowles brought the old woman between them out on the porch of the vacant house. She was quiet now, with the scorched black cloth covering her head; she herself held it on with both hands.
"Know what I'm going to have to do with you?" Old Man Moody was saying gently and conversationally, but she only stood there, all covered in wrinkled cloth with her little hands up, clawed, the way a locust shell would be found clinging to that empty door in August.
"It don't signify nothing what your name is now, or what you intended, old woman," Mr. Bowles told her as he got the fishing canes. "We know where you belong at, and that's Jackson."
"Come on ladylike. I'm sure you know how," Old Man Moody said.
She came along but she did not answer either man anything.
"Maybe she aimed mischief at King MacLain after all," said Mr. Fatty Bowles. "She's a she, ain't she?"
"That'll be enough out of you for the rest of the day," said Old Man Moody.
Among the leaves, Loch watched them come down the walk and head towards town. They went slowly, for the old woman took short, hesitant steps. Where would they take her now? Not later, to Jackson, but now? After they passed, he let go his hands and jumped out of the tree. It made a good noise when he hit ground. He turned a forward and a backward somersault and started walking on his hands around the tree trunk. He made noises like a goat, and a bobwhite, like the silly Moody chickens, and like a lion.
On his hands he circled the tree and the obelisk waited in the weeds, upright. He stood up and looked at it. Its ticker was outside it.
He felt charmed like a bird, for the ticking stick went like a tail, a tongue, a wand. He picked the box up in his hands.
"Now go on. Blow up."
When he examined it, he saw the beating stick to be a pendulum that instead of hanging down stuck upwards. He touched it and stopped it with his finger. He felt its pressure, and the weight of the obelisk, which seemed about two pounds. He released the stick, and it went on beating.
Then he turned a little key in the side of the box, and that controlled it. The sti
ck stopped and he poked it into place within the box, and shut the door of the thing.
It might not be dynamite: especially since Mr. Fatty thought it was.
What was it?
He opened his shirt and buttoned it in. He thought he might take it up to his room. It was this; not a bird that knew how to talk.
The sand pile was before him now. He planed away the hot top layer and sat down. He held still for a while, while nothing was ticking. Nothing but the crickets. Nothing but the train going through, ticking its two cars over the Big Black bridge.
IV
Cassie moved to the front window, where she could see Old Man Moody and Mr. Fatty Bowles carrying off the old woman. The old woman was half sick or dazed. She held on her head some nameless kitchen rag; she had no purse. In a gray housedress prophetic of an institution she was making her way along, about to be touched, prodded, any minute, but not worrying about it. She wore shoes without stockings—and she had such white, white ankles. When she saw the ankles, Cassie flung herself in full view at the window and gave a cry.
No head lifted. Cassie rushed out of her room, down the stairs and out the front door.
To Loch's amazement his sister Cassie came running barefooted down the front walk in her petticoat and in full awareness turned towards town, crying, "You can't take her! Miss Eckhart!"
She was too late for anybody to hear her, of course, but he creaked up out of the sand pile and ran out after her as if they had heard. He caught up with her and pulled at her petticoat. She turned, with her head still swimming high in the air, and cried softly, "Oh, Mother!"
They looked at each other.
"Crazy."
"Crazy yourself."
"Back yonder," said Loch presently, "I can show you how ripe the figs are." They withdrew as far as the tree. But it was only in time to see the sailor and Virgie Rainey run out, trying to escape by the back way. Virgie and the sailor saw them. Back into the house they ran, and then, in utter recklessness, out the front, the sailor first. The Morrisons had nowhere to go.
Old Man Moody's party was only now progressing again, for the old woman had fallen down and they had to hold her on her feet. Farther along, the ladies' Rook party was coming out of Miss Nell's with a pouring sound. The sailor faced both these ranks.
The marshal tagged him but he ran straight on into the wall of ladies, most of whom cried "Why, Kewpie Moffitt!"—an ancient nickname he had outgrown. He whirled about-face and ran the other way, and since he was carrying his blouse and was naked from the waist up, his collar stood out behind him like the lowest-hung wings. At the Carmichael corner, he tried east and took west, and ran into the shadows of the short-cut to the river, where he would just about meet with Mr. King MacLain, if he was not too late.
"Look at that!" Miss Billy Texas Spights called clearly. "I see you, Virgie Rainey!"
"Mother!" Cassie called, just as clearly. She and Loch found themselves out in front again.
The front door of the empty house fell to with a frail sound behind Virgie Rainey. A haze of the old smoke lifted unhurryingly over her, brushed and hid her for a moment like a gauzy cloud. She was coming right out, though, in a home-made dress of apricot voile, carrying a mesh bag on a chain. She ran down the steps and walked clicking her heels out to the sidewalk—always Virgie clicked her heels as if nothing had happened in the past or behind her, as if she were free, whatever else she might be. The ladies hushed, holding on to their prizes and folded parasols. Virgie faced them as she turned towards town.
It was the hour, of course, for her to go to work. Once past the next corner, she could drink a Coca-Cola and eat a box of cakes at Loomis's drug store, as she did every evening for her supper; then she could vanish inside the Bijou.
She passed Cassie and Loch, cutting them, and kept going and caught up, as she had to, with the marshal, Fatty Bowles, and the old woman.
"You're running the wrong way!" Miss Billy Texas Spights called loudly. "Better run after that sailor boy!"
"Isn't he visiting the Flewellyns out in the country?" Miss Perdita Mayo was pleading to everybody. "What ever became of his mother? I'd forgotten all about him!"
Pinning Loch tightly by the arms in front of her, Cassie could only think: we were spies too. And nobody else was surprised at anything—it was only we two. People saw things like this as they saw Mr. MacLain come and go. They only hoped to place them, in their hour or their street or the name of their mothers' people. Then Morgana could hold them, and at last they were this and they were that. And when ruin was predicted all along, even if people had forgotten it was on the way, even if they mightn't have missed it if it hadn't appeared, still they were never surprised when it came.
"She'll stop for Miss Eckhart," breathed Cassie.
Virgie went by. There was a meeting of glances between the teacher and her old pupil, that Cassie knew. She could not be sure that Miss Eckhart's eyes closed once in recall—they had looked so wide-open at everything alike. The meeting amounted only to Virgie Rainey's passing by, in plain fact. She clicked by Miss Eckhart and she clicked straight through the middle of the Rook party, without a word or the pause of a moment.
Old Man Moody and Fatty Bowles, dirty, their faces shining like the fish they didn't catch, took advantage of the path Virgie cut through the ladies and walked Miss Eckhart, unprotesting, on. Then the ladies brought their ranks safely to, and Miss Billy Texas, suddenly beside herself, cried once more, "He went the other way, Virgie!"
"That's enough, Billy Texas," said Miss Lizzie Stark. "As if her mother didn't have enough on her, just burying her son."
The noise of tin pans being beaten came from the distance, then little children's and Negro nurses' cries, "Crazy! Crazy!"
Cassie turned on Loch, pulled him to her and shook him by the shoulders. He was wet as a dishrag. A row of those big salt-and-pepper-colored mosquitoes perched all along his forehead. "What were you doing out of your bed, anyway?" she asked in a matter-of-fact, scolding voice. Loch gave her a long, gratified look. "What have you got there inside your nighties, crazy?"
"None of your business."
"Give it to me."
"It's mine."
"It is not. Let go."
"You make me."
"All right, I know what it is."
"What is it? You do not."
"You can't have that."
"Get away from me."
"I'll tell Mama and Papa.—You hit me! You hit a girl where she's tender."
"Well, you know you can't have it."
"All right then—did you see Mr. MacLain? He's been gone since you were born."
"Why, sure," said Loch. "I saw Mr. MacLain."
"Oh, Loch, why don't you beat off those mosquitoes!" She wept. "Mother!" Even Loch flew from her, at once.
"Well, here I am," said her mother.
"Oh!" After a moment she raised her head to say, "And Mr. King MacLain was here, and now he's gone."
"Well. You've seen him before," said her mother after a moment, breaking from her. "That's no excuse for coming outdoors in your petticoat to cry."
"You knew it would be this way, you were with them!"
There was no answer then either, and Cassie trudged through the yard. Loch stood near the sand pile. His lips damped down, he held his bulging nightie and regarded it. She ran him back under the tree and into the house by the back door.
"What orphan-lookin' children is these here?" said Louella. "Where yawl orphan come from? Yawl don't live here, yawl live at County Orphan. Gawn back."
Cassie pushed Loch through the kitchen and then pulled him to a stop in the back hall. It was their father coming home.
"What's going on here! The house is on fire, the MacLain house! I see smoke!"
They could see him coming up the front walk, waving the rolled-up Bugle he brought home every night.
"Holifield! Holifield!"
Mr. Holifield must have come to the window, for they heard, "Did I hear my name called?" and they sighed
with foreboding.
"It's gone out, Wilbur," said their mother at the door.
"That house has been on fire and gone out, sir." Their father was speaking loudly as he did from the platform at election time. "You can read about it in tomorrow's Bugle."
"Come in, Wilbur."
They could see her finger tracing a little pattern on the screen door as she stood there in her party dress. "Cassie says King MacLain was here and gone. That's as interesting as twenty fires."
Cassie shivered.
"Maybe this will bestir Francine Murphy to take a step. There's a public guardian for you: Booney Holifield."
Cassie was glad her father kept on. If there was anything that unsettled him it was for people not to be on the inside what their outward semblances led you to suppose. "MacLain came to the wrong place this time. It might have caught our house: Booney Holifield!"
Their mother laughed. "That old monkey," she said. As far as she was concerned, the old man next door had just come alive, redeemed himself a little from being a Holifield.
The six-o'dock summer light shone just as usual on their father and mother meeting at the door.
"Come on."
Cassie and Loch running up the back stairs heard the sigh of the door and the old, muffled laugh that came between their parents at this moment. No matter what had happened, or had started to happen, around them, they could come in the house and laugh about the old thing. Theirs was a laugh that hinted of some small but interesting object, a thing even their deliberate father could find—something that might be seizable and holdable as well as findable, as ridiculous and forbidden to children, as alive, as a stray kitten or a rabbit.
The children kept on going up the steep dark backstairs, so close on each other they prodded and nudged each other, both punishing and petting.
"Get back in bed like you were never out," Cassie advised. "Pull the beggarlice off you."
"But I think Mother saw me," he said over his shoulder, going.
Cassie didn't answer.
She shivered and walked into her room. There was the scarf. It was an old friend, part enemy. She brought it to her face, touched her lips to it, breathed its smoky dye-smell, and passed it up her cheeks and over her eyes. She pressed it against her forehead. She might have lost it, might have run out with it ... for she had visions of poor Miss Eckhart wearing it away over her head; of Virgie waving it, brazenly, in the air of the street; of too-knowing Jinny Love Stark asking, "Couldn't you keep it?"
