by Eudora Welty
There was Maideen Sumrall on the drugstore step waving a little green handkerchief. When I didn't remember to stop I saw the handkerchief pulled down. I turned again, to pick her up, but she'd caught her ride with Red Ferguson.
So I went to my room. Bella, Miss Francine Murphy's little dog, panted all the time—she was sick. I always went out in the backyard and spoke to her. Poor Bella, how do you do, lady? Is it hot, do they leave you alone?
Mother said on the phone, Have you been out somewhere, son?— Just to get a little air.—I can tell you're all peaked. And you keep things from me, I don't understand. You're as bad as Eugene Hudson. Now I have two sons keeping things from me.—I haven't been anywhere, where would I go?—If you came back with me, to MacLain Courthouse, everything would be all right. I know you won't eat at Miss Francine's table, not her biscuit.—It's as good as Jinny's, Mother.
But Eugene's safe in California, that's what we think.
When the bank opened, Miss Perdita Mayo came up to my window and hollered, "Randall, when are you going back to your precious wife? You forgive her, now you hear? That's no way to do, bear grudges. Your mother never bore your father a single grudge in her life, and he made her life right hard. I tell you, how do you suppose he made her life? She don't bear him a grudge. We're all human on earth. Where's little old Woodrow this morning, late to work or you done something to him? I still think of him a boy in knee britches and Buster Brown bob, riding that pony, that extravagant pony, cost a hundred dollars. Woodrow: a little common but so smart. Felix Spights never overcharged a customer, and Miss Billy Texas amounted to a good deal before she got like she is now; and Missie could always play the piano better than average; Little Sister too young to tell yet. Ah, I'm a woman that's been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then. But you march on back to your wife, Ran MacLain. You hear? It's a thing of the flesh not the spirit, it'll pass. Jinny'll get over this in three four months. You hear me? And you go back nice!."
"Still hotter today, isn't it?"
I picked up Maideen Sumrall and we rode up and down the street. She was from the Sissum community. She was eighteen years old. "Look! Citified," she said, and pushed both hands at me; she had new white cotton gloves on. Maideen would ride there by me and talk about things I didn't mind hearing about—the Seed and Feed where she clerked and kept the books, Old Man Moody that she worked for, the way working in Morgana seemed after the country and junior college. Her first job: her mother still didn't like the idea. And people could be so nice: getting a ride home with me sometimes like this, instead of with Red Ferguson in the Coca-Cola truck. So she told me now. "And I didn't think you were going to see me at first, Ran. I saved my gloves to wear riding home in a car."
I told her my eyes had gone bad. She said she was sorry. She was country-prim and liked to have something to put in words that she could be sorry about. I drove, idling along, up and down a few times more. Mr. Steptoe was dragging the mail sack into the post office—he and Maideen waved. In the Presbyterian church Missie Spights was playing "Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?," and Maideen listened. And on the street the same ones stood in doorways or rode in their cars, and waved at my car. Maideen's little blue handkerchief was busy waving back. She waved at them as she did at me.
"I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't hard on the eyes, to be cooped up and just count money all day, Ran"—to say something to me.
She knew what anybody in Morgana told her; and for four or five afternoons after the first one I picked her up and took her up and down the street a few turns, bought her a coke at Johnny Loomis's, and drove her home out by Old Forks and let her out, and she never said a word except a kind one, like about counting money. She was kind; her company was the next thing to being alone.
I drove her home and then drove back to Morgana to the room I had at Miss Francine Murphy's.
Next time, there at the end of the pavement, I turned up the cut to the Starks'. I couldn't stand it any longer.
Maideen didn't say a word till we reached the head of the drive and stopped.
"Ran?" she said. She wasn't asking anything. She meant just to remind me I had company, but that was what I knew. I got out and went around and opened her door.
"You want to take me in yonder?" she said. "Please, I'd just as soon you wouldn't." Her head hung. I saw the extra-white part in her hair.
I said, "Sure. Let's go in and see Jinny. Why not?"
I couldn't stand it any longer, that was why.
"I'm going and taking you."
It wasn't as if Mr. Drewsie Carmichael didn't say to me every afternoon, "Come on home with me, boy"—argue, while he banged that big Panama—like yours, Father—down on his head, "no sense in your not sleeping cool, with one of our fans turned on you. Mamie's mad at you for roasting in that room across the street from us—you could move in five minutes. Well, Ran, look: Mamie has something to say to you: I don't." And he'd wait a minute in the door before he left. He'd stand and hold his cane—the one Woody Spights and I had bought him together when he was elected Mayor—up by his head, to threaten me with comfort, till I answered him, "No thanks, sir."
Maideen was at my side. We walked across the Starks' baked yard to the front porch, passing under the heavy heads of those crape myrtles, the too bright blooms that hang down like fruits that might drop. My wife's mother—Miss Lizzie Morgan, Father—put her face to her bedroom window first thing. She'd know it first if I came back, all right. Parting her curtains with a steel crochet hook, she looked down at Randall MacLain coming to her door, and bringing who-on-earth with him.
"What are you doing here, Ran MacLain?"
When I didn't look up, she rapped on the window sill with her hook.
"I've never been inside the Stark home," Maideen said, and I began to smile. I felt curiously light-hearted. Lilies must have been in bloom somewhere near, and I took a full breath of their ether smell: consciousness could go or not. I pulled open the screen door. From above, inside somewhere, Miss Lizzie was calling, "Jinny Love!" like Jinny had a date.
Jinny—not out playing croquet—stood with her legs apart, cutting off locks of her hair at the hall mirror. The locks fell at her feet. She had on straw sandals, the kind that would have to be ordered, boy's shorts. She looked up at me, short range, and said "Just in time, to tell me when to stop." She'd cut bangs. Her smile reminded me of the way a child will open its mouth all right, but not let out the cry till it sees the right person.
And turning to the mirror she cut again. "Obey that impulse—" She had seen Maideen then, and she went right on cutting her hair with those stork-shaped scissors. "Come in too, take off your gloves."
That's right: she would know, with her quickness like foreknowledge, first that I would come back when the summer got too much for me, and second that I'd just as soon bring a stranger if I could find one, somebody who didn't know any better, to come in the house with me when I came.
Father, I wished I could go back.
I looked at Jinny's head with the ragged points all over it, and there was Miss Lizzie coming down; she had just stopped to change her shoes, of course. For the kind that came down stairs like a march. As we all fell in together, we were leaving where we met too, starting down the hall with nobody pairing, and over each other's names or whatever we said, Jinny's voice hollered at Tellie for cokes. She counted us with her finger. That lightness came right back. Just to step on the matting, that billows a little anyway, and with Jinny's hair scattered like feathers on it, I could have floated, risen and floated.
In rockers—we sat on the back porch—we were all not rocking. The chairs, white wicker, had a new coat of paint—their thousandth-and-first, but one new coat since I left Jinny. The outside—a sheet of white light—was in my eyes. The ferns close around us were hushing on their stands, they had just been watered. I could listen to women and hear pieces of the story, of what happened to us, of course—but I listened to the ferns.
Telling what she was told she saw, repeating what she listened to—young girls are outlandish little birds that talk. They can be taught, some each day, to sing a song people have made.... Even Miss Lizzie put her head on one side, to let Maideen be.
He walked out on her and took his clothes down to the other end of the street. Now everybody's waiting to see how soon he'll go back. They say Jinny MacLain invites Woody out there to eat, a year younger than she is, remember when they were born. Invites, under her mama's nose. Sure, it's Woodrow Spights she invites. Who else in Morgana would there be for Jinny Stark after Ran, with even Eugene MacLain gone? She's kin to the Nesbitts. They don't say when it started, can anybody tell? At the Circle, at Miss Francine's, at Sunday School, they say, they say she will marry Woodrow: Woodrow'd jump at it but Ran will kill somebody first. And there's Ran's papa and the way he was and is, remember, remember? And Eugene gone that could sometimes hold him down. Poor Snowdie, it's her burden. He used to be sweet but too much devil in him from Time was, that's Ran. He'll do something bad. He won't divorce Jinny but he'll do something bad. Maybe kill them all. They say Jinny's not scared of that. Maybe she drinks and hides the bottle, you know her father's side. And just as prissy as ever on the street. And oh, don't you know, they run into each other every day of the world, all three. Sure, how could they help it if they wanted to help it, how could you get away from it, right in Morgana? You can't get away in Morgana. Away from anything at all, you know that.
Father! You didn't listen.
And Tellie was mad at all of us. She still held the tray, she held it about an inch and a half too high. When Maideen took her coke in her white glove, she said to Miss Lizzie, "I look too tacky and mussed when I work in the store all day to be coming in anybody's strange house."
"You're by far the freshest one here, my dear."
Who else had Maideen ever known to talk about but herself?
But she looked like Jinny. She was a child's copy of Jinny. Jinny's first steady look at me, coming just then, made that plain all at once. (Oh, her look always made contamination plain. Or plainer.) That resemblance I knew post-mortem, so to speak—and it made me right pleased with myself. I don't mean there was any mockery in Maideen's little face—no—but there was something of Maideen in Jinny's, that went back early—to whatever I knew my Jinny would never be now.
The slow breeze from that ceiling fan—its old white blades frosted like a cake, with the flies riding on it—lifted the girls' hair like one passing hand, Maideen's brown hair shoulder-long and Jinny's brown hair short, ruined—she ruined it herself, as she liked doing. Maideen was even more polite than she'd ever been to me, and making intervals in the quiet, like the ferns dripping, she talked about herself and the Seed and Feed; but she glowed with something she didn't know about, yet, there in the room with Jinny. And Jinny sat not rocking, yet, with her clever, not-listening smile.
I looked from Jinny to Maideen and back to Jinny, and almost listened for some compliment—a compliment from somewhere—Father!—for my good eyes, my vision. It took me, after all, to bring it out. There was nothing but time between them.
There were those annoying sounds keeping on out there—people and croquet. We finished the cokes. Miss Lizzie just sat there—hot. She still held the crochet hook, straight up like a ruler, and nobody was rapped, done to death. Jinny was on her feet, inviting us out to play croquet.
But it had been long enough.
They were slowly moving across the shade of the far backyard—Woody, Johnnie and Etta Loomis, Nina Carmichael and Jinny's cousin Junior Nesbitt, and the fourteen-year-old child that they let play—with Woody Spights knocking his ball through a wicket. He was too young for me—I'd never really looked at him before this year; he was coming up in the world. I looked down through the yard and the usual crowd seemed to have dwindled a little, I could not think who was out. Jinny went down there. It was myself.
Mother said, Son, you're walking around in a dream.
Miss Perdita came and said, "I hear you went back yesterday and wouldn't open your mouth, left again. Might as well not go at all. But no raring up now and doing anything we'll all be sorry to hear about. I know you won't. I knew your father, was crazy about your father, glad to see him come every time, sorry to see him go, and love your mother. Sweetest people in the world, most happily mated people in the world, long as he was home. Tell your mother I said so, next time you see her. And you march back to that precious wife. March back and have you some chirren. My Circle declares Jinny's going to divorce you, marry Woodrow. I said, Why? Thing of the flesh, I told my Circle, won't last. Sister said you'd kill him, and I said Sister, who are you talking about? If it's Ran MacLain that I knew in his buggy, I said, he's not at all likely to take on to that extent. And little Jinny. Who's going to tell Lizzie to spank her, though? I couldn't help but laugh at Jinny: she says, It's my own business! We was in Hardware, old Holifield just scowling his head off. I says, How did it happen, Jinny, tell old Miss Perdita, you monkey, and she says, Oh, Miss Perdita, do like me. Do like me, she says, and just go on like nothing's happened. I declare, and she says I have to write my checks on the Morgana bank, and Woody Spights works in it, there's just him and Ran, so I go up to Woody and cash them. And I says, Child—how could you all get away from each other if you tried? You couldn't. It's a pity you had to run to a Spights, though. Oh, if there'd just been some Carmichael hoys, I often say! No matter who you are, though, it's an endless circle. That's what a thing of the flesh is, endless circle. And you won't get away from that in Morgana. Even our little town.
"All right, I said to Old Man Moody while ago, look. Jinny was unfaithful to Ran—that's the up-and-down of it. There you have what it's all about. That's the brunt of it. Face it, I told Dave Moody. Like Lizzie Stark does, she's brave. Though she's seven miles south of here, Snowdie MacLain's another brave one. Poor Billy Texas Spights is beyond knowing. You're just a seed and feed man and the marshal here, you don't form opinions enough to suit me.
"Jinny was never scared of the Devil himself as a growing girl, so she certainly shouldn't be now, she's twenty-five. She's Lizzie's own. And Woodrow Spights won't ever quit at the bank, will he? It's so much cleaner than the store, and he'll get the store too. So it's up to you, Ran, looks like.
"And I'd go back to my lawful spouse!" Miss Perdita puts both hands on the bars of my cage and raises her voice. "You or I or the Man in the Moon got no business sleeping in that little hot upstairs room with a western exposure at Miss Francine Murphy's for all the pride on earth, not in August! And even if it is the house you grew up in, it's a different room. And listen here to me. Don't you ruin a country girl in the bargain. Make what you will of that."
She backs away leaving her hands out, pulling-like at the air, like I'm floating on my ear suspended, hypnotized, and she can leave. But she just goes as far as the next window—Woody Spights'.
I went back to the room I had at Miss Francine Murphy's. Father, it used to be the trunk room. It had Mother's pieced quilts and her wedding dress and all the terrible accumulation of a long time you wouldn't have known about.
After work I would cut the grass or something in Miss Francine's backyard so it would be cooler for Bella. It kept the fleas away from her to some extent. It didn't do much good. The heat held on.
I tried going to Jinny's a little later in the afternoon. The men were playing, still playing croquet with a little girl, and the women had taken off to themselves, on the porch. I tried without Maideen.
It was the long Mississippi evening, the waiting till it was cool enough to eat. The voice of Miss Lizzie carried. Like the hum of the gin, it was there, but the evening was still quiet, still very hot and quiet.
<
br /> Somebody called to me, "You're dead on Woody." It was just a little Williams girl in pigtails.
I may have answered with a joke. I felt light-headed, not serious at all, really doing it for a child when I lifted my mallet—the one with the red band that had always been mine. But I brought Woody Spights down with it. He toppled and shook the ground. I felt the air rush up. Then I beat on him. I went over his whole length, and cracked his head apart with that soft girl's hair and all the ideas, beat on him without stopping till every bone, all the way down to the numerous little bones in the foot, was cracked in two. I didn't have done with Woody Spights till then. And I proved the male human body—it has a too positive, too special shape, you know, not to be hurt—it could be finished up pretty fast. It just takes one good loud blow after another—Jinny should be taught that.
I looked at Woodrow down there. And his blue eyes were just as unharmed. Just as unharmed as bubbles a child blows, the most impervious things—you've seen grass blades go through bubbles and they still reflect the world, give it back unbroken. Woodrow Spights I declare was dead. "Now you watch," he said.
He spoke with no sign of pain. Just that edge of competition was in his voice. He was ever the most ambitious fool. To me ambition's always been a mystery, but now it was his try to deceive us—me and him both. I didn't know how it could open again, the broken jawbone of Woody Spights, but it could. I heard him say, "Now you watch."
He was dead on the ruined grass. But he had risen up. Just to call attention to it, he gave the fat little Williams girl a spank. I could see the spank, but I couldn't hear it—the most familiar sound in the world.
