by Eudora Welty
"And so what about Uncle Felix!" cried Kate, as if now she had her.
"The niggers helped, to get him back there, but it was mostly my fat little self," said Sister Anne. "Oh, you mean how come he consented? I expect I told him a story." She led us back to the hall, where a banjo hung like a stopped clock, and some small, white-haired children were marching to meet each other, singing "Here Comes the Duke A-Riding, Riding," in flat, lost voices. I too used to think that breezeway was as long as a tunnel through some mountain.
"Get!" said Sister Anne, and clapped her hands at them. They flung to the back, off the back porch into the sun, and scattered toward the barn. With reluctance I observed that Sister Anne's fingers were bleeding from the roses. Off in the distance, a herd of black cows moved in a light of green, the feathery April pastures deep with the first juicy weeds of summer.
There was a small ell tacked onto the back of the house, down a turn of the back porch, leading, as I knew, to the bathroom and the other little room behind that. A young woman and little boy were coming out of the bathroom.
"Look at that," shuddered Sister Anne. "Didn't take them long to find out what we've got."
I never used to think that back room was to be taken seriously as part of the house, because apples were kept in it in winter, and because it had an untrimmed, flat board door like a shed door, where you stuck your finger through a rough hole to lift up the latch.
Sister Anne stuck in her finger, opened the door, and we all three crowded inside the little room, which was crowded already.
Uncle Felix's side and back loomed from a featherbed, on an old black iron frame of a bedstead, which tilted downwards toward the foot with the sinking of the whole house from the brow of the hill toward the back. He sat white-headed as one of those escaping children, but not childlike—a heavy bulk, motionless, in a night-shirt, facing the window. A woven cotton spread was about his knees. His hands, turned under, were lying one on each side of him, faded from outdoor burn, mottled amber and silver.
"That's a nigger bed," said Kate, in one tone, one word. I turned and looked straight into her eyes.
"It—is—not" said Sister Anne. Her whole face shook, as if Kate could have made it collapse. Then she bowed her head toward us—that we could go on, now, if that was the spirit we had come in.
"Good evening, sir," said Kate, in a changed voice.
I said it after her.
Uncle Felix's long, mute, grizzly head poked around his great shoulder and, motionless again, looked out at us. He visited this gaze a long time on a general point among the three different feminine faces—if you could call Sister Anne's wholly feminine—but never exactly on any of them. Gradually something left his eyes. Conviction was what I missed. Then even that general focus altered as though by a blow, a rap or a tap from behind, and his old head swung back. Again he faced the window, the only window in the house looking shadeless and shameless to the West, the glaring West.
Sister Anne bore the roses to the window and set them down on the window sill in his line of sight. The sill looked like the only place left where a vase could safely be set. Furniture, odds and ends, useless objects were everywhere, pushed by the bed even closer together. There were trunks, barrels, chairs with the cane seats hanging in a fringe. I remembered how sometimes in winter, dashing in here where the window then blew icily upon us, we would snatch an apple from the washed heap on the floor and run slamming out before we would freeze to death; that window always stayed open, then as now propped with a piece of stovewood. The walls were still rough boards with cracks between. Dust had come in everywhere rolls of dust or lint or cottonwood fuzz hung even from the ceiling, glinting like everything else in the unfair light. I was afraid there might be dirt-daubers' nests if I looked. Our roses glared back at us as garish as anything living could be, almost like paper flowers, a magician's bouquet that had exploded out of a rifle to shock and amaze us.
"We'll enjoy our sunset from over the pasture this evening, won't we, Uncle Felix!" called Sister Anne, in a loud voice. It was the urgent opposite of her conspiratorial voice. "I bet we're fixing to have a gorgeous one—it's so dusty! You were saying last week, Cousin Felix, we already need a rain!"
Then to my amazement she came and rested her foot on a stack of mossy books by the bed—I was across from her there—and leaned her elbow on her lifted knee, and looked around the room with the face of a brand-new visitor. I thought of a prospector. I could look if she could. What must have been a Civil War musket stood like a forgotten broom in the corner. On the coal bucket sat an old bread tray, split like a melon. There was even a dress form in here, rising among the trunks, its inappropriate bosom averted a little, as though the thing might still be able to revolve. If it were spanked, how the dust would fly up!
"Well, he's not going to even know me today," said Sister Anne, teasing me. "Well! I mustn't stay away too long at a time. Excuse me, Uncle Felix! I'll be right back," she said, taking down her tomboy foot. At the door she turned, to look at us sadly.
Kate and I looked at each other across the bed.
"Isn't this just—like—her!" said Kate with a long sigh.
As if on second thought she pulled open the door suddenly and looked off after her. From the other part of the house came the creakings of that human tiptoeing and passing going on in the breezeway. A flash of light traveled around the bend. Very close by, a child cried. Kate shut the door.
Back came Sister Anne—she really was back in a minute. She looked across at me. "Haven't you spoken? Speak! Tell him who you are, child! What did you come for?"
Instead—without knowing I was going to do it—I stepped forward and my hand moved out of my pocket with my handkerchief where the magnolia-fuscata flowers were knotted in the corner, and I put it under Uncle Felix's heavy brown nose.
He opened his mouth. I drew the sweet handkerchief back. The old man said something, with dreadful difficulty.
"Hide," said Uncle Felix, and left his mouth open with his tongue out for anybody to see.
Sister Anne backed away from us all and kept backing, to the front of the paper-stuffed fireplace, as if she didn't even know the seasons. I almost expected to see her lift her skirt a little behind her. She ^ave me a playful look instead.
"Hide," said Uncle Felix.
We kept looking at her. Sister Anne gave a golden, listening smile, as golden as a Cape Jessamine five days old.
"Hide," gasped the old man—and I made my first movement. "And I'll go in. Kill 'em all. I'm old enough I swear you Bob. Told you. Will for sure if you don't hold me, hold me."
Sister Anne winked at me.
"Surrounded ... They're inside." On this word he again showed us his tongue, and rolled his eyes from one of us to the other, whoever we were.
Sister Anne produced a thermometer. With professional motions, which looked so much like showing off, and yet were so derogatory, she was shaking it down. "All right, Cousin Felix, that's enough for now! You pay attention to that sunset, and see what it's going to do!—Listen, that picture made twenty-six," she murmured She was keeping some kind of tally in her head, as you do most exactly out of disbelief.
Uncle Felix held open his mouth and she popped the thermometer straight in, and he had to close it. It looked somehow wrong, dangerous—it was like daring to take the temperature of a bear.
"I don't know where he thinks he is," she said, nodding her head gently at him, Yes—yes.
Before I knew it, his hand raked my bare arm down. I felt as if I had been clawed, but when I bent toward him, the hand had fallen inert again on the bed, where it looked burnished with hundreds of country suns and today's on top of them all.
"Please, ma'am," said a treble voice at the door. A towheaded child looked in solemnly; his little red tie shone as his hair did, as with dewdrops. "Miss Sister Anne, the man says it's one more and then you."
"Listen at that. My free picture," said Sister Anne, drawing breath like a little girl going to recite, about to b
e martyrized.
For whom! I thought.
"Don't you think I need to freshen up a little bit?" she said with a comical expression. "My hair hasn't been combed since four o'clock this morning."
"You go right ahead," said Kate. "Right ahead."
Sister Anne bent to sight straight into Uncle Felix's face, and then took the thermometer out of his lips and sighted along it. She read off his temperature to herself and almost sweetly firmed her lips. That was hers, what he gave her.
Uncle Felix made a hoarse sound as she ran out again. Kate moved to the trunk, where on a stack of old books and plates was a water pitcher that did not look cold, and a spoon. She poured water into the spoon, and gave the old man some water on his tongue, which he offered her. But already his arm had begun to stir, to swing, and he put the same work-heavy, beast-heavy hand, all of a lump, against my side again and found my arm, which this time went loose in its socket, waiting. He groped and pulled at it, down to my hand. He pulled me all the way down. On my knees I found the pencil lying in the dust at my feet. He wanted it.
My Great-uncle Felix, without his right hand ever letting me go, received the pencil in his left. For a moment our arms crossed, but it was not awkward or strange, more as though we two were going to skate off, or dance off, out of here. Still holding me, but without stopping a moment, as if all the thinking had already been done, he knocked open the old hymnbook on top of the mossy stack at the bedside and began riding the pencil along over the flyleaf; though none of the Jerrolds that I ever heard of were left-handed, and certainly not he. I turned away my eyes.
There, lying on the barrel in front of me, looking vaguely like a piece of worn harness, was an object which I slowly recognized as once beloved to me It was a stereopticon. It belonged in the parlor, on the lower shelf of the round table in the middle of the room, with the Bible on the top. It belonged to Sunday and to summertime.
My held hand pained me through the wish to use it and lift that old, beloved, once mysterious contraption to my eyes, and dissolve my sight, all our sights, in that. In that delaying, binding pain, I remembered Uncle Felix. That is, I remembered the real Uncle Felix, and could hear his voice, respectful again, asking the blessing at the table. Then I heard the cataract of talk, which I knew he engendered; that was what Sunday at Mingo began with.
I remembered the house, the real house, always silvery, as now, but then cypressy and sweet, cool, reflecting, dustless. Sunday dinner was eaten from the table pulled to the very head of the breezeway, almost in the open door. The Sunday air poured in through it, and through the frail-ribbed fanlight and side lights, down on the island we made, our cloth and our food and our flowers and jelly and our selves, so lightly enclosed there—as though we ate in pure running water. So many people were gathered at Mingo that the Sunday table was pulled out to the limit, from a circle to the shape of our race track. It held my mother, my father and brother; Aunt Ethel; Uncle Harlan, who could be persuaded, if he did not eat too much, to take down the banjo later; my Jerrold grandmother, who always spoke of herself as "nothing but a country bride, darling," slicing the chicken while Uncle Felix cut the ham; Cousin Eva and Cousin Archie; and Kate, Kate everywhere, like me. And plenty more besides; it was eating against talking, all as if nobody would ever be persuaded to get up and leave the table: everybody, we thought, that we needed. And some were so pretty!
And when they were, the next thing, taking their naps all over the house, it was then I got my chance, and there would be, in lieu of any nap, pictures of the world to see.
I ran right through, with the stereopticon, straight for the front porch steps, and sitting there, stacked the slides between my bare knees in the spread of my starched skirt. The slide belonging on top was "The Ladies' View, Lakes of Killarney."
And at my side sat Uncle Felix.
That expectation—even alarm—that the awareness of happiness can bring! Of any happiness. It need not even be yours. It is like being able to prophesy, all of a sudden. Perhaps Uncle Felix loved the stereopticon most; he had it first. With his coat laid folded on the porch floor on the other side of him, sitting erect in his shirtsleeves for this, he would reach grandly for the instrument as I ran bringing it out. He saddled his full-size nose with the stereopticon and said, "All right, Skeeta." And then as he signaled ready for each slide, I handed it up to him.
Some places took him a long time. As he perspired there in his hard collar, looking, he gave off a smell like a cut watermelon. He handed each slide back without a word, and I was ready with the next. I would no more have spoken than I would have interrupted his blessing at the table.
Eventually they—all the rest of the Sunday children—were awake and wanting to be tossed about, and they hung over him, pulling on him, seeking his lap, his shoulders, pinning him down, riding on him. And he with his giant size and absorption went on looking his fill. It was as though, while he held the stereopticon to his eye, we did not see him. Gradually his ear went red. I thought all the blood had run up to his brain then, as it had run to mine.
It's strange to think that since then I've gone to live in one of those picture cities. If I asked him something about what was in there, he never told me more than a name, never saw fit. (I couldn't read then.) We passed each other those sand-pink cities and passionate fountains, the waterfall that rocks snuffed out like a light, islands in the sea, red Pyramids, sleeping towers, checkered pavements on which strollers had come out, with shadows that seemed to steal further each time, as if the strollers had moved, and where the statues had rainbow edges; volcanoes; the Sphinx, and Constantinople; and again the Lakes, like starry fields—brought forward each time so close that it seemed to me the tracings from the beautiful face of a strange coin were being laid against my brain. Yet there were things too that I couldn't see, which could make Uncle Felix pucker his lips as for a kiss.
"Now! Dicey! I want you to tell me how I look!"
Sister Anne had opened the door, to a flash from the front. A low growl filled the room.
"You look mighty dressed up," said Kate for me.
Sister Anne had put on a hat—a hat from no telling where, what visit, what year, but it had been swashbuckling. It was a sort of pirate hat—black, of course.
"Thank you. Oh! Everything comes at once if it comes at all!" she said, looking piratically from one to the other of us. "So you can't turn around fast enough! You come on Mr. Dolollie's day! Now what will I do for Sunday!"
Under that, I heard an inching, delicate sound. Uncle Felix had pulled loose the leaf of the book he had labored over. Now he let me go, and took both swollen fists and over the lump of his body properly folded his page. He nudged it into my tingling hand.
"He'll keep you busy!" said Sister Anne nodding. "That table looks ready to go to market!" Her eyes were so bright, she was in such a state of excitement and pride and suspense that she seemed to lose for the moment all ties with us or the house or any remembrance of where anything was and what it was for. The next minute, with one blunder of her hatbrim against the door, she was gone.
I had slipped the torn page from the book, still folded, into my pocket, working it down through the starch-stuck dimity. Now I leaned down and kissed Uncle Felix's long unshaven, unbathed cheek. He didn't look at me—Kate stared, I felt it—but in a moment his eyes pinched shut.
Kate turned her back and looked out the window. The scent was burrowing into the roses, their heads hung. Out there was the pasture. The small, velvety cows had come up to the far fence and were standing there looking toward the house. They were little, low, black cows, soot-black, with their calves among them, in a green that seemed something to drink from more than something to eat.
Kate groaned under her breath, "I don't care, I've got to see her do it."
"She's doing it now," I said.
We stood on either side of the bed. Again Uncle Felix's head poked forward and held still, the western light full and late on him now.
"Never mind, Uncle Feli
x. Listen to me, I'll be back," Kate said. "It's nothing—it's all nothing—"
I felt that I had just showed off a good deal in some way. She bent down, hands on knees, but his face did not consult either of us again, although his eyes had opened. Tiptoeing modestly, we left him by himself. In his bleached gown he looked like the story-book picture of the Big Bear, the old white one with star children on his back and more star children following, in triangle dresses, starting down the Milky Way.
We saw Sister Anne at the table signing the book. We hid in the front bedroom before she saw us.
The overflow from outside was sitting in here. Thick around the room, on the rocking chair, on parlor chairs and the murmurous cane chairs from the dining room, our visitors were visiting. A few were standing or sitting at the windows to talk, and leaning against the mantel. The four-poster held, like a paddock, a collection of cleaned-up little children, mostly girls, some of them mutinous and tearful, one little girl patiently holding a fruit jar with something alive inside.
"Writing herself in, signing herself out all in one," Kate whispered, watching. "No! She mustn't forget that."
She gripped my wrist wickedly and we tiptoed out across the breezeway, and stood by the parlor curtain until Kate lifted it, and I saw her smile into the parlor to make watching all right; and perhaps I did the same.
Sister Anne was shaking out her skirt, and white crumbs scattered on the rug. She had managed a slice of that cake. The parlor in its plush was radiant in the spectacular glare of multiplied lights brought close around. The wallpaper of course was red, but now it had a cinnamon cast. Its design had gone into another one—it, too, faded and precise, ringed by rain and of a queerly intoxicating closeness, like an old trunk that has been opened still again for the children to find costumes. White flags and amaryllis in too big a vase, where they parted themselves in the middle and tried to fall out, were Sister Anne's idea of what completed the mantel shelf. The fireplace was banked with privet hedge, as for a country wedding. I could almost hear a wavery baritone voice singing "0 Promise Me."
