Delta Wedding (32 page)

"Now we're all still!" cried Battle. "I'm still!"

"Domesticated." People still pointed at Battle Fairchild after twenty years of married life, as if he were a new wonder. Ellen stood modestly beside him, holding some slightly wilted bridesmaids' flowers in front of her skirt. She herself, it occurred to Ellen as she stood frowning at the hooded man with his gadget, was an anomaly too, though no one would point at a lady for the things that made her one—for providing the tremendous meals she had no talent for, being herself indifferent to food, and had had to learn with burned hands to give the household orders about—or for living on a plantation when she was in her original heart, she believed, a town-loving, book-loving young lady of Mitchem Corners. She had belonged to a little choral society of unmarried girls there that she loved. Mendelssohn floated for a moment through the confused air like a veil upborne, and she could have sung it, "I Would that My Love..."

The flashlight went off. Just as it did, Ranny saluted.

"You all moved," announced the photographer, looking out from his black hood. "Try again! You know what's in my satchel?" He patted it until they all attended. "Train victim. I got a girl killed on the I.C. railroad. My train did it. Ladies, she was flung off in the blackberry bushes. Looked to me like she was walking up the track to Memphis and met Number 3."

"Change the subject," commanded Aunt Tempe, who was the right-end figure of the group.

"Yes, ma'am. Another picture of the same pose, except the little gentleman that saluted. Everybody looking at the bride and groom."

"I'm holding it!" Battle cried, and the light flashed for the picture.

Ellen looked at the bride and groom, but if the first picture showed her a Mitchem Corners choral singer, then the second showed her seeing a vision of fate; surely it was the young girl of the bayou woods that was the victim this man had seen. Then Battle was giving her a kiss. George and Robbie danced off, the group broke, and more and more people were arriving at the house. They had better be standing at the door.

Everybody for miles around came to the reception. Troy said he did not know there could be so many people in the whole Delta; it
looked
like it was cotton all the way. The mayor of Fairchilds and his wife were driven up with the lights on inside their car, and they could be seen lighted up inside reading the Memphis paper (which never quite unrolled when you read it); in the bud vases on the little walls beside them were real red roses, vibrating, and the chauffeur's silk cap filled with air like a balloon when they drove over the cattle guard. Shelley's heart pounded as she smiled; indeed this was a grand occasion for everybody, their wedding was really eventful.... Lady Clare came down once—pitiful indeed, her spots all painted over with something, and for some reason clad in a nightgown with a long tear. "I'm exposing you! I'm exposing you all!" cried Lady Clare fiercely, but was rushed back upstairs. More champagne was opened, buffet was carried out, and all started being served under the trees.

Then Dabney changed from her wedding gown to a going-away dress and the new Pierce-Arrow was brought up to the door. Dabney began kissing the family and the bridesmaids all around; she ran up and kissed Lady Clare. When she kissed Aunt Shannon, the old lady said, "Now who do you think you are?"

A brown thrush in a tree still singing could be heard through all the wild commotion, as Dabney and Troy drove away, scattering the little shells of the road. Ellen waved her handkerchief, and all the aunts lifted theirs and waved. Shelley began to cry, and Ranny ran down the road after the car and followed it as long as it was in hearing, like a little puppy. Unlike the mayor's car that had come up alight like a boat in the night, it went away dark. The full moon had risen.

Then the party nearly all moved outdoors, where the lanterns burned in the trees. "I hear the music coming," said Laura, coming up and taking Ellen around the knees for a moment. The band came playing—"Who?" coming out over the dark and brightening fields above the sound of their rackety car—a little river band, all very black Negroes in white coats, who were banjo, guitar, bass fiddle, trumpet, and drum—and of course saxophone, that was the owner. Horace flagged them down with his flashlight. Howard showed them their chairs which he had fixed by the dance platform like a place for a select audience to come and watch a performance of glory. The dancing began.

At midnight, Shelley came in by herself for a drink of cool water. On the back porch the moths spread upon the screens, the hard beetles knocked upon the radius of light like an adamant door. She drank still swaying a little to the distant music. "Whispering" turned into "Linger Awhile."

Only that morning, working at the wedding flowers with Dabney, she had thought to herself, hypnotically, as though she read it in her diary, Why do you look out thinking nothing will happen any more? Why are you thinking your line of trees the indelible thing in the World? There's the long journey you're going on, with Aunt Tempe, leading out ... and you can't see it now. Even closing your eyes, you see only the line of trees at Shellmound. Is it the world? If Shellmound were a little bigger, it would be the same as the world entirely.... Perhaps that was the real truth. But she had been dancing with George, with his firm, though (she was certain) reeling body so gaily leading her, so solicitously whirling her round. "Bridesmaid," he called her. "Bridesmaid, will you dance?" She felt it in his cavorting body—though she danced seriously, always moved seriously—that he went even among the dancers with some vision of choice. Life lay ahead, he might do anything.... She followed, she herself had a vision of choice, or its premonition, for she was much like George. They played "Sleepy Time Gal," turning it into "Whispering." Only the things had not happened to her yet. They would happen. Indeed, she might not be happy either, wholly, and she would live in waiting, sometimes in terror. But Dabney's marriage, ceasing to shock, was like a door closing to her now. Entering into a life with Troy Flavin seemed to avow a remote, an unreal world—it came nearest to being real for Shelley only in the shock, the challenge to pride. It shut a door in their faces. Behind the closed door, what? Shelley's desire fled, or danced seriously, to an open place—not from one room to another room with its door, but to an opening wood, with weather—with change, beauty...

There was a scratch at the back door, and Shelley unlatched it. Her old cat, Beverley of Graustark, came in. He had been hunting; he brought in a mole and laid it at her feet.

In the music room, with some of the lingering guests there, Tempe and Primrose sang two-part songs of their girlhood, arch, full of questions and answers—and Tempe was in tears of merriment at the foolishness she had lived down. Primrose with each song remembered the gestures—of astonishment, cajolery—and Tempe could remember them the next instant. The sisters sang beckoning and withdrawing like two little fat mandarins, their soft voices in gentle, yielding harmony still. But soon Tempe, who had only come inside looking for her fan, was back where the dancing was.

Ellen strolled under the trees, with Battle somewhere near, looking among the dancers for her daughters. The lanterns did not so much shine on the dancers as light up the mistletoe in the trees. She peered ahead with a kind of vertigo. It was the year—wasn't it every year?—when they all looked alike, all dancers alike smooth and shorn, all faces painted to look like one another. It was too the season of changeless weather, of the changeless world, in a land without hill or valley. How could she ever know anything of her own daughters, how find them, like this? Then in a turn of her little daughter India's skirt as she ran partnerless through the crowd—so late!—as if a bar of light had broken a glass into a rainbow she saw the dancers become the McLeoud bridesmaid, Mary Lamar Mackey (freed from her piano and whirling the widest of all), become Robbie, and her own daughter Shelley, each different face bright and burning as sparks of fire to her now, more different and further apart than the stars.

She saw George among the dancers, walking through, looking for somebody too. Suddenly she wished that she might talk to George. It was the wrong time—she never actually had time to sit down and fill her eyes with people and hear what they said, in any civilized way. Now he was dancing, even a little drunk, she believed—this was a time for celebration, or regret, not for talk, not ever for talk.

As he looked in her direction, all at once she saw into his mind as if he had come dancing out of it leaving it unlocked, laughingly inviting her to the unexpected intimacy. She saw his mind—as if it too were inversely lighted up by the failing paper lanterns—lucid and tortuous: so that any act on his part might be startling, isolated in its very subtlety from the action of all those around him, springing from long, dark, previous, abstract thought and direct apprehension, instead of explainable, Fairchild impulse. It was
inevitable
that George, with this mind, should stand on the trestle—on the track where people could indeed be killed, thrown with their beauty disfigured before strangers into the blackberry bushes. He was capable—taking no more prerogative than a kind of grace, no more than an ordinary responsibility—of meeting a fate whose dealing out to him he would not contest; even when to people he loved his act was "conceited," if not absurd, if not just a little story in the family. And she saw how it followed, the darker instinct of a woman was satisfied that he was capable of the same kind of love. Indeed, there danced Robbie, the proof of this. To all their eyes shallow, unworthy, she was his love; it was her ordinary face that was looking at him through the lovely and magic veil, little Robbie Reid's from the store.

George made his way through the dancers now, sometimes caught up by one, sometimes not. She thought that everything he did meant something. Not that it was symbolic—with all her young-girl's love of symbols she could scorn them for their meagerness and her fallible grasp—everything he did meant something to him, it had weight. That seemed very rare! Everything he lost meant something.... Of course ... She did not need to know each little thing about him any more—to be a mother to him any more. She recognized him as far from kin to her, scarcely tolerant of her understanding, never dependent on hers or anyone's, or on compassion (how merciless that could be!). He appeared, as he made his way alone now and smiling through the dancing couples, infinitely simple and infinitely complex, stretching the opposite ways the self stretches and the selves of the ones we love (except our children) may stretch; but at the same time he appeared very finite in that he was wholly singular and dear, and not promisingly married, tired of being a lawyer, a smiling, intoxicated, tender, weatherworn, late-tired, beard-showing being. He came forward through a crowd and anybody's hand might beckon or reach after him. He had, and he gave, the golden acquiescence which Dabney the bride had in the present moment—which Ranny had. "Are you happy, Dabney?" Battle had kept asking her over and over. How strange! Passionate, sensitive, to the point of strain and secrecy, their legend was
happiness.
"The Fairchilds are the happiest people!" They themselves repeated it to each other. She could hear the words best in Primrose's gentle, persuading voice, talking to Battle or George or one of her little boys.

"Will you dance this with me, Ellen?" George asked.

"Don't you dare, Ellen," said Battle. "Do you want to kill yourself?"

Clumsily, with care, she put up her arms and took hold of his. She pressed his arms tenderly a moment, as if she could express it, that he had not been harmed after all and had been ready for anything all the time. She loved what was pure at its heart, better than what was understood, or even misjudged, or afterwards forgiven; this was the dearest thing.

"I would always dance with you as quick as anything," she told him. She felt lucky—cherished, and somehow
pretty
(which she knew she never was). There were some people who lived a lifetime without finding the one who relieved the heart's overflow. She bore a little heavily on George's arm. She would not know in her life, or ask, whether he had found the one. She was his friend and loved him. But starting new, she thought as the waltz played and they moved by a tree where a golden lantern hung, and without one regret for her life with Battle, she might have been the one. There was the misdetoe in the tree. It was like a tree, too—a tree within a tree.

"You're tired," he said.

"No, not tired, I haven't danced in a long time, I guess, and when now again?"

They danced, the music progressed, changed, and slowed. It was "Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot"—it was good night.

Then they were waiting for Dabney and Troy to come back, and for George and Robbie to go, for Laura to go—three days.

The first morning, they were all beating their aching heads, Battle and George groaning out pitifully, waked up by Ranny and Bluet with the birds. Mary Denis telephoned from Inverness that Baby George had gained an ounce, and asked, did Dabney get off? Mary Lamar was driven home, the house was more or less silent, and Uncle Pinck sat meditating out all alone by the sundial.

Ellen in the morning cool walked in the yard in her old dress, her scissors on a ribbon around her neck, and one of the children's school gloves on in case she wanted to poke around or pull much.

"Howard! Start the water running out here. Let it run from the open hose, soak everything." She reached down and pulled up, light as down, a great scraggly petunia bush turned white every inch. In those few days, when she had forgotten to ask a soul to water things, how everything had given up, or hung its head. And that little old vine, that always wanted to take everything, had taken everything—she pulled at a long thread of it and unwound it from the pomegranate tree.

The camellia bushes had all set their buds, choosing the driest and busiest time, and if they did not get water they would surely drop them, temperamental as they were. The grass all silver now showed its white roots underfoot, and was laced with ant beds up and down and across. And in just those few days, she must warn Battle, some caterpillar nets had appeared on the pecan trees down in the grove—he would have to get those burnt out or they would take his trees. Toward the gate the little dogwoods she had had brought in out of the woods or saved, hung every heart-shaped leaf, she knew the little turrety buds were going brown, but they were beyond help that far from the house, they would have to get along the best they could waiting for rain; that was something she had learned. Dabney loved them, too.