The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

by Eudora Welty

  Some of Miss Katie's people arrived by noon, in good time for the funeral—big dark people named Mayhew, men and women alike with square, cleft chins and blue eyes. A little string of tow-headed children made a row behind, finishing some bananas. Virgie couldn't remember all the Mayhews or tell them apart; they all came upon her at once; after knocking on the porch to bring her out, all kissed her in greedy turn and begged before they got through the door for ice water or iced tea or both. They had ridden in in several trucks, now drawn up by the porch, from the Stockstill and Lastingwell communities near the Tennessee line. The first thing the largest Mayhew man did, once inside the house, was to catch up a little child of Missie Spights', who was swatting flies, and tickle her violently, speaking soberly over her screams, "Now wait: you don't know who I am."

  Only the same old Rainey came from Louisiana who had come to Fate's funeral years ago and hadn't sent word since. Again he brought his own coffee. Again he offered to fix the front porch and in time, and again was prevented. He was the only Rainey that made the trip. The Raineys were mostly all died out, or couldn't leave the fields, or were too far to buy a ticket. The old man explained it all again, and told what had happened to the French name with all the years.

  "Yes, some are missing," Miss Perdita Mayo told Virgie when she arrived and saw the lined-up kin. "But you got in touch, or I did for you. If the funeral's small we can't reproach ourselves."

  Screams surrounded the house. The little MacLain children and their nurse had gotten away from old Miss Lizzie, their grandmother, and come to play in the Rainey yard. Gradually other children, Loomis and Maloney, attracted by the magnetic MacLains, played there too, all drunk with the attractions of an untried place, and a place sinister for the day. The little Mayhews, every time they were gathered up and brought away from these into the house, cried. Blue jays were scolding the whole morning over the roof, and the logging trucks thundered by, shaking their chains and threatening the clean curtains.

  Miss Perdita Mayo, who had got into the bedroom and formed a circle, was telling a story. "Sister couldn't get her new shoes back on after that funeral, because while she was in the cemetery—" Suddenly Miss Perdita appeared backing out of the room, thinking herself still telling her story, but mistaken. She had heard the coffin come, and ran to meet it. Mr. Holifield at the hardware store sent his grandsons, Hughie and Dewey Holifield, with it on their produce truck. The boys came inside and made it steady, the Mayhews watching.

  "Where's all them Mayhews going to bed down?" old Mr. Rainey, with nothing to do, asked Virgie, indicating Mayhews with a thumb purpled like a fig.

  "They won't stay. They're striking right out for Stockstill after the funeral, sir," said Virgie. "As soon as they've packed some lunch." And they were taking the bed, Katie's bed; they could set it right up in the truck, they said, looking at it detached from its owner who was lying on it; and the children could ride home on it instead of standing.

  Mr. Rainey was shaking his head. "Pity. Never a chance to know those." He put up a little horned finger and touched a string on the old banjo of her father's, which hung on its nail in the hall, the head faintly luminous by morning light. But he didn't play the note. "He traveled around a bit," he said at length. "And settled hereabouts for the adventure of it."

  The home-grown flowers came early, and the florist flowers late. Mr. Nesbitt sent word by the janitor in the barbershop, who wore gold-rimmed spectacles, that he must be out of town during the funeral, the Negro then bringing out from behind his back a large cross of gladiolas and ferns on a stand, evidently from Vicksburg, with Mr. Nesbitt's card tied on. The Mayhews moved upon it and placed it in front of all the other flowers—now steadily being made into wreaths on the back porch—where they could look at it during the service, to remember. The Sunday School chairs arrived by wagon, and the Mayhews took them at the door and set them in cater-cornered rows. Had Miss Lizzie Stark been able to come, people said, it wouldn't have happened quite the same way.

  Old Mr. King MacLain did not appear happy over having to come to the Rainey house again today. He fumed, and went back to visit in the kitchen.

  "Little conversation with your mother in '18, or along there," he said to Virgie, who was folding napkins with the Stark "S" on them. "You know in those days I was able to make considerable trips off, and only had my glimpses of the people back here."

  Miss Snowdie had come to stand folding napkins too.

  "I'd come and I'd go again, only I ended up at the wrong end, wouldn't you say?" He suddenly smiled, rather fiercely, but at neither woman. He wore the stiffest-starched white suit Virgie ever saw on any old gentleman; it looked fierce too—the lapels alert as ears. "Saw your mother in a pink sunbonnet. Rosy-cheeked. 'Hello!'—'I declare, King MacLain, you look to me as you ever did, strolling here in the road. You rascal.'—'Just for that, what would you rather have than anything?

  I'm asking because I'm going to get it for you.'—'A swivel chair. So I can sit out front and sell crochet and peaches, if my good-for-nothing husband'll let me.' Ah, we all knew sweet old Fate, he was a sweet man among us. 'Shucks, that's too easy. Say something else. I'd have got you anything your living heart desired.'—'Well, I told you. And you mischief, I believe you.'

  "Three niggers up to the house in a wagon, bang-up noon next day. Up to the door, pounding.

  "'Oh, King MacLain! You've brought it so quick-like!'

  "But I! I was no telling where by that time. Looked to her, I know, like I couldn't wait long enough to hear her pleasure. So bent, so bent I was on all I had to do, on what was ahead of me.

  "She told me how she flew around the yard. 'Watch out, now, don't set that down a minute till I tell you where it'll go!' Had niggers carrying here, carrying there. Then she put it spang by the road, close as she could get.

  "And her chair always too big for her, little heels wouldn't touch ground. It was big enough for a man, big enough for Drewsie Carmichael, 'cause it was his. I prevailed on the widow. Oh, Katie Rainey was a sight, I saw her swing her chair round many's the time, to hear me coming down the road or starting out, waving her hand to me. And sold more eggs than you'd dream. Oh, then, she could see where Fate Rainey had fallen down, and a lovely man, too; never got her the thing she wanted. I set her on a throne!"

  "Mr. King, I never knew the chair came from you," Virgie said, smiling.

  He looked all at once inconsolable, but Miss Snowdie shook her head.

  "Have a little refreshments, sir. There's ham and potato salad—"

  "Oh, is there ham?"

  Virgie led him down the hall. The Negroes stood by the table with fly swatters. She laid a little piccalilli with the ham on his plate, which he held for her as long as she'd help it.

  When Virgie returned to the parlor, Jinny MacLain came forward to greet her: as if their positions were reversed.

  Jinny, who in childhood had seemed more knowing than her years, was in her thirties strangely childlike; was it old perversity or further tactics? She too arrived at close range, looked at the burns and scars on Virgie's hands, as Missie Spights had done, making them stigmata of something at odds in her womanhood.

  "Listen. You should marry now, Virgie. Don't put it off any longer," she said, making a face, any face, at her own words. She was grimacing out of the iron mask of the married lady. It appeared urgent with her to drive everybody, even Virgie for whom she cared nothing, into the state of marriage along with her. Only then could she resume as Jinny Love Stark, her true self. She was casting her eye around the room, as if to pick Virgie some husband then and there; and her eyes rested over Virgie's head on—Virgie knew it—Ran MacLain. Virgie smiled faintly; now she felt, without warning, that two passionate people stood in this roomful, with their indifferent backs to each other.

  A great many had gathered now. People sat inside and outside, listening and not listening. Young people held hands, all of them taking seats early to reserve the back row. Then some of the Mayhews carried the coffin into the
parlor and placed it over the hearth on the four chairs from around the table. The wreaths were stood on edge to hide the chair legs.

  "What are my children up to?" Jinny whispered hurriedly, and swept a curtain aside to expose the front yard. "My daughter has chosen today to catch lizards. She's wearing lizard earrings! How can she stand those little teeth in her!" Jinny laughed delightedly as she settled herself by the window.

  "Sit by me, Virgie," said Cassie Morrison, who began to put her handkerchief to her eyes. "This is when it's the worst, or almost."

  There was a new arrival just before the service. Brother Dampeer from Goodnight, whose father was the preacher when Mrs. Rainey was a child and baptized her as a girl in Cold Creek, in North Mississippi, couldn't let her go without one more glimpse, he said. Virgie had never seen Brother Dampeer; he sized her up and kissed her. There was a tuning fork in his shirt pocket that showed when he walked sideways back of the coffin and leaned over it full front to scrutinize the body.

  "Come up to my crossroads church some pretty Sunday, ever' one of y'all," was all he said, straightening up and addressing the living. With him, it seemed marked, as if he found nothing sufficiently remarkable about the dead to give him anything flattering to say. "I guarantee nobody'll bite you if you put in at the collection for the piano, either," he added, rocking sidewise off.

  "Where were his manners! But of course, he couldn't be turned away," Miss Snowdie, back of Virgie, was whispering. "Coming was his privilege." She drew her fan deeply back and forth, with the pressure of a heavy tail on the air. "A perfect stranger, and he handed out fans from Katie's deer horns out there, because he was a preacher; gave one to everybody."

  "It's not time for the Last Look," Parnell Moody said in her natural, school voice. But the little Mayhews had to follow right behind Brother Dampeer. There came the prompting voice of Mrs. Junie Mayhew, "Chirren? Want to see your cousin Kate? Go look in, right quick. She raised your Uncle Berry. Take hands and go now, while there's nobody else; so you'll have her to remember." And they came in dipping their heads and pulling one another. The oldest little boy came hopping; it was remembered that at one point during the day he had run a nail in his foot.

  "Brothers and sisters." Dr. Williams was facing the room.

  Virgie rose right up. In the pink china jar on the mantel shelf, someone had placed her mother's old stick—like a peach branch, as though it would flower. Brother Dampeer cleared his throat: his work. Before his eyes and everybody's she marched over, took the stick out of the vase, and carried it away to the hall, where she placed it in the ring on the hatrack. When she was back in her chair, Dr. Williams opened the book and held the service.

  Every now and then Mr. King, his tender-looking old head cocked sideways, his heels lifted, his right hand pricking the air, tiptoed down the hall to the table to pick at the ham—all as if nobody could see him. While Mamie C. Loomis, a child in peach, sang "O Love That Will Not Let Me Go," Mr. King sucked a little marrow bone and lifted his wobbly head and looked arrogantly at Virgie through the two open doors of her mother's bedroom. Even Weaver Loomis and Little Sister Spights, holding hands on the back row, were crying by now, listening to music, but Mr. King pushed out his stained lip. Then he made a hideous face at Virgie, like a silent yell. It was a yell at everything—including death, not leaving it out—and he did not mind taking his present animosity out on Virgie Rainey; indeed, he chose her. Then he cracked the little bone in his teeth. She felt refreshed all of a sudden at that tiny but sharp sound.

  She sat up straight and touched her hair, which sprang to her fingers, as always. Turning her head, looking out of the one bright window through which came the cries of the little MacLains playing in the yard, she knew another moment of alliance. Was it Ran or King himself with whom she really felt it? Perhaps that confusion among all of them was the great wound in Ran's heart, she was thinking at the same time. But she knew the kinship for what it was, whomever it settled upon, an indelible thing which may come without friendship or even too early an identity, may come even despisingly, in rudeness, intruding in the middle of sorrow. Except in a form too rarefied for her, it lacked future as well as past; but she knew when even a rarefied thing had become a matter of loyalty and alliance.

  "Child, you just don't know yet what you've lost," said Miss Hattie Mayo through the words of the service. It was the only thing Virgie remembered ever hearing Miss Hattie say; and then it was a thing others had been saying before her.

  Miss Lizzie Stark—for she had, after all, been able to come to the funeral—waved her own little fan—black chiffon—at Virgie's cheeks from a jet chain. Miss Lizzie looked very rested, and had succeeded in exchanging seats with Cassie Morrison. She let a hand fall plumply on Virgie's thigh, and did not lift it again.

  Down the hall, with the blue sky at his back, Mr. King MacLain sent for coffee, tasted it, and put out his tongue in the air to cool, a bright pink tongue wagging like a child's while they sang "Nearer, My God, to Thee."

  "Go back," they told Virgie as they all moved out of the parlor. "Be alone with her before you come with us."

  "You're the onliest one now," a Mayhew said. The Mayhews had asked to carry Katie home to Lastingwell Church to bury her, but acknowledged that Mr. Fate, whom the Raineys had wanted likewise to take back to their home place, was in Morgana ground, and Victor—"And so will you be," they had concluded to Virgie.

  Virgie drew back while they marked time, and then she wasn't alone in the parlor. There was little Jinny MacLain, shoes and socks in hand, quietly bent over the coffin, looking boldly in. She had prized open the screen and climbed in the window. Green lizards hung like tiny springs at her ears, their eyes and jaws busy. At any other house today, Virgie knew, more care would have been exercised by them all; here a child could slip through.

  Jinny looked up at Virgie; the expression on her face was disappointment.

  "Hi, Jinny."

  "This doesn't look like a coffin. Did you have to use a bureau drawer?"

  "They haven't put the lid down, that's all."

  "Well, will you put the lid down for me?"

  "Run on. Go the back way," said Virgie. "Wait—how is it that you make lizards catch on to your ears?"

  "Press their heads," Jinny said languidly, over her shoulder. She walked out beating her shoes softly together with her hands.

  Virgie walked over and pressed her forehead against the broken-into screen. She looked far out, over the fields, down to the far, low trees—the old vision belonging to this window. It was the paper serpent with the lantern lights through whose interior was flowing the Big Black.

  "So here you are," said Miss Perdita Mayo.

  The procession—the coffin passing through their ranks and now going before—marched humped and awkward down the path. They were like people waked by night, in the shimmering afternoon.

  This was the children's dispensation: what they'd been waiting for. Little Jinny, her face bright and important, stood by little King, who—he was exactly timing the funeral—sucked a four-o'clock. "Move, Clara," she was saying to the nurse. They adored seeing beyond dodging aprons and black protecting arms (except Clara at the moment was smoking) the sight of grown people streaming tears and having to be held up. They liked coffins carried out because of the chance they could perceive that coffins might be dropped and the dead people spilled right out. But the chance would fade a little more with today. No dead people had ever been spilled while any of them watched, just as no freight train had ever wrecked while they prayed for it to, so they could get the bananas.

  "But mainly, Mr. MacLain, you should remember to keep off rich food," Miss Snowdie said, leading her husband down a divergent path. They were not going to the cemetery with the rest; no one expected it of them. Their Negro girl chauffeur waited with their car turned the other way. "At home we've got that nice Moody fish from Moon Lake."

  Virgie watched the mysterious, vulnerable back of the old man. Even as Miss Snowdie, unmysterious, le
d him away, he was eating still. At some moment today she had said, "Virgie, I spent all Mama and Papa had tracing after him. The Jupiter Detective Agency in Jackson. I never told. They never found or went after the right one. But I'll never forgive myself for tracing after him." Virgie had wanted to say, "Forgive yourself, yes," but could not speak the words. And they would not have mattered that much to Miss Snowdie.

  "Granddaddy's almost a hundred," said little King clearly. "When you get to be a hundred, you pop."

  The old people did not think to say good-bye. Mr. MacLain pressed ahead, a white inch of hair in the nape of his neck curling over in the breeze.

  Virgie was again seized by both arms, as if, in the open, she might try to bolt. Her body ached from the firm hand of—in the long run—Miss Lizzie Stark. She was escorted to the Stark automobile parked in the road, where Ran now waited in the driver's seat. The line of cars and trucks had started.

  "Poor Mr. Mabry, he didn't show up." Miss Perdita Mayo's flushed face appeared a moment at the window. "He's down with a cold. It came on him yesterday: I saw it coming."

  They had to drive the length of Morgana to the cemetery. It was spacious and quiet within, once they rolled over the cattle-guard; yet wherever Virgie looked from the Starks' car window, she seemed to see the same gravestones again, Mr. Comus Stark, old Mr. Tim Carmichael, Mr. Tertius Morgan, like the repeating towers in the Vicksburg park. Twice she thought she saw Mr. Sissum's grave, the same stone pulled down by the same vines—the grave into which Miss Eckhart, her old piano teacher whom she had hated, tried to throw herself on the day of his funeral. And more than once she looked for the squat, dark stone that marked Miss Eckhart's own grave; it would turn itself from them, as she'd seen it do before, when they wound near and passed. And a seated angel, first visible from behind with the stone hair spread on the shoulders, turned up later from the side, further away, showing the steep wings.