Delta Wedding (34 page)

Laura gazed at her mother, who laughed as she pulled the colored bits out and flung them on the floor. She was wearing a blue dress—"too light for traveling"—her hair was flying from the wind of riding and the breath of outside, fair long hair with the bone hairpins slipping loose. She was excited, smiling, young—as the cousins were always, but as she was not always—for the air at Shellmound was pleasure and excitement, pleasure that did not need to be explained, tears that could go a nice long time unsilenced, and the air of Jackson was different.

It was like a race between the creation of the doll and the bursting of the storm. In its summer location on the sleeping porch, the sewing machine whirred as if it spoke to the whirring outside. "Oh, Mother, hurry!"

"Just enough to stuff him!" She put every scrap in—every bright bit she had, all in one doll.

Now she was sewing on the head with her needle in her fingers. Then with the laundry ink she was drawing a face on the white stocking front. Laura leaned on her mother's long, soft knee, with her chin in her palm, entirely charmed by the drawing of the face. She could draw better than her mother could and the inferiority of the drawing, the slowly produced wildness of the unlevel eyes, the nose like a ditto mark, and the straight-line mouth with its slow, final additions of curves at the end, bringing at maddening delay a kind of smile, were like magic to watch.

Her mother was done. The first drop of rain had not fallen.

"What's his name?" Laura cried.

"Oh—he can be Marmion," said her mother casually Had she been, after all, tired? Had she wanted to do something else, first thing on getting home—something of her own? She spoke almost grudgingly, as if everything, everything in that whole day's fund of life had gone into the making of the doll and it was too much to be asked for a name too.

Laura snatched Marmion from her mother and ran out. She did not say "Thank you." She flew down the stairs and out the front door.

The stormy air was dark and fresh, like a mint leaf. It smelled of coming rain and leaves sailed in companies through the middle air. Jackson to come back to was filled with a pulse of storm and she stood still and felt it, the forgotten heartbeat, for of course it had not rained on them visiting. The ground shook to some thunder not too far to hear, or of which only one note could be heard, like the stroke of a drum as far as Smitn Park on band-concert nights. She ran to the corner, which was down a hill, down a brick sidewalk, and at the cornet house she called Lucy Bell O'Malley. Sometimes it is needful to show our dearest possessions to a comparative stranger. Lucy Bell was not a very good friend of Laura's, being too little. Last Christmas Laura had been taken calling on Lucy Bell by a neighbor in order that she might see something Santa Claus had brought her—a Teddy bear with electric eyes. The O'Malley parlor had had curtains and shades drawn—it was still and dark, almost as if a member of the family had died. And on the library table glittered, on and off, two emerald-green eyes. The Teddy bear lay there, on his back. But he could never be taken up from the library table and loved, for out of his stomach a cord attached him to the lamp, and Lucy Bell could only stand by and touch him. His eyes were as hot as fire.

"Lucy Bell! Look at my doll! We just came back from a car trip!" (Why, they had been to the Delta—been here! To Shellmound. And come home from it—it was under its momentum that her mother had been so quick and gay.) "His name is Marmion!"

She did not remember a thing Lucy Bell said to that. But as she cried it all out to her she knew that the reason she felt so superior was that she had gotten Marmion the minute she wished for him—it wasn't either too soon for her wish or too late. She had not even known, herself, that she wanted Marmion before that moment when she had implored her mother, "Make me a doll!"

She turned around and ran back in the winglike dark, holding Marmion high, so that Lucy Bell's eyes could follow. She got home and watched it storm, she and her mother standing quietly at the windows.

Now she held Marmion close, looking out across his crooked flat eye at the flying cotton, the same white after white, the fire-bright morning. She could kiss his fragrant face and know, Never more would she have this, the instant answer to a wish, for her mother was dead.

"Ah," said Mr. Rondo from the back seat. "The Yellow Dog!" as if he knew that subject interested the Fairchilds.

The track ran beside them on its levee through the fields and swamps, with now and then some little road, like the Shellmound road, climbing over the track to go off into the deep of the other side. Laura and Maureen waved at the Dog as it came down going back to Yazoo City. The engineer looked out of his window. "Mr. Doolittle," said Mr. Rondo.

"Mit-la Doo-littla can-na get-la by!" called Maureen.

Laura looked up at Shelley, her head with the band around it, as if she thought so much that she had to tie her brain in, like Faithful John and his heart and the iron band. It was good that Shelley had not that kind of heart too.

At that moment, with no warning, Shelley took one of the little crossing roads and drove the car up over the track, in front of the Yellow Dog, and down the other side.

"If you tell what I did, Laura," Shelley said calmly, after she let out her breath, "I'll cut you to pieces and hang you up for the buzzards. Are you going to tell?"

"No," said Laura, before she was through. Shelley's desperate qualities, out of the whole family, were those in which she unreservedly believed.

"I hope you won't speak of this, Mr. Rondo."

"Oh, no, no...!"

"Or Papa'd break my bones," Shelley said deprecatingly.

With her chin high, she drove along this side of the tracks where no road followed, taking the ruts, while the wildflowers knocked up at the under side of the car. It had struck her all at once as so fine to drive without pondering a moment onto disaster's edge—she would not always jump away! Now she was wrathful with herself, she despised what she had done, as if she had caught herself
contriving.
She flung up her head and looked for the Dog.

"Run home, Miss Shelley Fairchild!" called Old Man Doolittle.

Oh, horrors, he had stopped the Dog again! There it waited on the track, before the crossing, as if politely! How patronizing—coming to a stop for them a second time. Who on earth did Old Man Doolittle think he was, that he could even speak to a Fairchild out of that little window! The Yellow Dog started up again and came on by, inching by, its engine, with Mr. Doolittle
saluting,
and four cars, freight, white, colored, and caboose, its smoke like a poodle tail curled overhead, an inexcusable sight.

"Damn the Yellow Dog!" cried Shelley. "Excuse me, Mr. Rondo."

"Quite understand," said that foolish little man; even Laura knew he would have been the last person knowingly to let prudence, and respect for the spoiled young ladies of Shellmound, be damned, and on a Sunday morning.

They rode, one way or another, into Fairchilds. "Is that Aunt Virgie Lee?" cried Laura.

Shelley slowed the car down and spoke to Virgie Lee. Usually she would have tried to pass without seeming to notice—the wild way Virgie Lee looked in the face, her cheeks painted red as if she were going to meet somebody, and in the back, with her hair tied up in a common rope.

Virgie Lee Fairchild, shaking her hair, going along in the ripply shade under the corrugated iron awning over the walk, rustled a green switch in their faces. As a matter of fact, she was going toward the church, fighting off the dogs—the Baptist Church.

"Go away! Go away! Don't tamper with me! Go home to your weddings and palaver," she said throatily. In her other hand she carried a purse by its strap (the way no lady would), a battered contraption like a shrunken-up suitcase. She might never end up in church, at all. When she swung the purse and danced the leafy branch, her long hair seemed to move all over in itself, like a waterfall.

Maureen leaned out over the side of the car and laughed aloud at her mother.

The sight and sound of that so terrified Laura that she flung herself over the back of the seat and threw her arms around Maureen as if to pull her back from fire, and held her, calling her as if she were deaf, "Maureen, Maureen!"

Virgie Lee, who had never stopped for them, emerged in the naked sun of the road and went on, her black hair seeming if possible to spread in the morning light, growing under eyes that hardly believed it, like a stain.

"You see! She'll have none of us!" said Shelley, in her light voice that had the catch in it.

Mr. Rondo, probably remembering he had already been asked not to mention one thing, looked polite, taking the shortest glance at Virgie Lee. If he seemed to recognize her at all, it was as a Baptist. Shelley whirled off up the street and across the bridge, and they put Mr. Rondo down at the Methodist stile, where he thanked them and took out his watch, which, Laura told Shelley, seemed to have stopped.

"Poor Ellen," said Tempe, clasping her softly, her delicate, fragrant face large and serious as it pressed Ellen's close. "This has nearly killed you. I know! But, child, it's what mothers are for." They embraced in the kitchen, with Ranny pulling his mother's skirt—only a baby still.

"Tempe, I couldn't have done it without you." It was true, and she held Tempe the longer for being tired, from everything, from waiting—from mentally taking out shrubbery, from trying to make Howard love roses, from trying to make Bluet not want chicken pox or anything else because Lady Clare had it, from letting Aunt Mac get clear to the bank on a Sunday morning ... Look at me, am I sorry for myself? she thought, shaken, seeing a mist in Tempe's eye.

Aunt Mac as a matter of fact had long since returned from her trip, without announcing whether it was successful or not. She came sitting as straight as she sat going out, in the pony cart under its wide flounced umbrella, and alighted at the carriage block without the slightest remark or notice of the world. She made her way into the house, Roy running up from somewhere like a flash, with a cut on his foot bleeding (he was the most
courteous
of her boys!), and escorting her, holding her elbow on the flat of his hand like a fine tray. No word would ever be said to
her
about money! Sunday money or any other kind.

Battle woke up and called for her, Jim Allen and Primrose were driven home, and the boys left over from the dance last night ate breakfast and departed, Red Boyne leaving Shelley a wild note which India read out loud. George and Robbie—who had gone off hours ago to buy a little dress and hat—came back in two cars, with the joke between them that it was Sunday. "We bought a car, though!" said Robbie. "The man opened up everything for George, and sold him a Hudson Super-Six." Shelley and the children came in starved from Greenwood, but bringing groceries from some charitable man, thank goodness.

Then Ellen was saying, catching the little girl in the hall, "Laura, there's something to tell you. We want you to stay, to live with us at Shellmound. Until you go to Marmion, perhaps.... Would you be happy? Your papa would listen to reason, he hopes you'd be happy too. India would be glad ... Something's got all the curl out of your poor hair!"

The visit, the round-trip ticket on the Dog, had been just a premonition—now they told her what would really be. Shellmound! The real thing might always dawn upon her slowly, Laura felt, hanging her head while Aunt Ellen sadly stretched a straight strand of her hair out on her finger. That feeling that came over her—it was of having been cheated a little, not told at once. And so she answered overly soon, overly brightly, "Oh, I want to! I want to stay!" Then she cried, "But I don't want to go to Marmion!"

"Marmion'll be yours, you know, when you want it. I reckon! Someday you'll live there like your Aunt Ellen here, with all your chillen," said Uncle Battle, looking around Aunt Ellen and stepping out from behind her.

"I will?" said Laura. "It's big—isn't it?"

"Now, Battle, that's all too complicated to think of now, here in the hall," said Aunt Tempe, passing by. "You let Dabney have Marmion now, she wants it!"

"Besides—do you ever trust Virgie Lee not to flare up?" Aunt Ellen seemed to brood for a moment, her fingers went still in Laura's hair. "She'll have none of us now, but..."

"Did you have a dream about Virgie Lee?" Uncle Battle laughed.

Laura felt that in the end she would go—go from all this, go back to her father. She would hold that secret, and kiss Uncle Battle now.

Uncle Battle laughed and gave her a little dressing on her skirt. "Big? You'll grow, Skeeta," he said. "But no need to hurry."

And there was Aunt Shannon.

"Aunt Shannon," said Battle gruffly, sent in. His softened voice was always hoarse; India listened, as she passed with her doll. "There's a plenty of everything. There's a plenty all around you. All in the world to eat, no need at all hiding bread crusts in your room. And nobody is dreaming they could get you or harm you. I'm here. See me?"

She nodded her head, gently and then sharply, and regarded him; India leaned in the door. "My little old boy," she said, and patted him. "Oh, you have a great deal to learn. Oh, Denis, I wish you wouldn't go out in the world unshielded and unprotected as you are. I have a feeling, I have a feeling, something will happen to you...."

"If it isn't the Reconstruction, it's things just as full of trouble to you, isn't it?" Battle said softly, letting her pat her little hand on his great weight, holding still. He changed the level of his voice. "I'll stay, Aunt Shannon. I'll stay. I'm here. Here I am."

"Good-bye, my darling," she said.

It was the first night Dabney and Troy were back, and George's and Robbie's last night at the place. They would have a little family picnic.

"I don't see a bit of use trying to sit down to a big supper tonight, after all we've been eating, wedding food, company food ... We'll just have a little picnic," said Ellen at the dinner table.

"Come to the Grove!" cried Primrose. The aunts were on hand at Shellmound for the welcomes and good-byes, of course.