Delta Wedding (12 page)

"Oh, I done had it," Partheny had said. "It over by this time. I were mindless, Miss Ellen. I were out of my house. I were looking in de river. I were standing on Yazoo bridge wid dis foot lifted. I were mindless, didn't know my name or name of my sons. Hand stop me. Mr. Troy Flavin he were by my side, gallopin' on de bridge. He laugh at me good—old Partheny! Don't you jump in dat river, make good white folks fish you out! No, sir, no, sir, I ain't goin' to do dat! Guides me home. You can go on back now, go on back, Miss Ellen, to your little girl puttin' on her weddin' veil. But don't set your heels down! Go real still."

She heard someone coming from the house, and saw from the glimmer of white clothes and the tall strolling walk of "company" that it was George—he waved briefly. He looked thin. Poor boy, he had not even eaten any to speak of, of the good coconut cake she tried to tempt him with. The noise of the children made him bite his lip, and he did not like Mary Lamar Mackey, this time.

She had not even taken her apron off; she clasped her hands before her. But he untied the apron when he came and threw it over the branches of a little dogwood tree. "Forget everything out here," he said, and stood looking out.

"I saw a runaway girl in the bayou woods, George," she said, "a white girl. Going just as fast to Memphis as she could go. Purely loitering. I saw her peeping out from behind a tree, the prettiest thing ever made. I very ill-advisedly went to Brunswick-town on foot, by the short cut. There she was." She had never thought of mentioning the girl or seeing her. (Battle would say: "Ellen Fairchild, do you mean to tell me you've been out alone, a lone woman on foot, in these fields and woods? No gun either, I bet you all I've got.") But she was tired, and sometimes now the whole world seemed rampant, running away from her, and she would always be carrying another child to bring into it.

Now she saw by the dense evening light—for she always knew it when she saw it—a look on George's face that both endeared him to her and reminded her of all her anxiety for his comfort in life; the first source of the feeling, long ago, might have been that look—she did not know. It was only a tender change of countenance, a smile—but it looked like the vanishing of suspense. There was gratification and regret in it, at something you said. It was as if he had known life could not go on without this thing—now, like a crash, a fall, it had come. So you, having begun, without knowing it, some unfinished story to him, would then tell everything, perhaps. She never altogether understood George's abrupt, tender smile—yet without thinking she would often find herself telling the very thing that brought it to his face. It could not be amusement—for she had nothing funny about her, not a bone in her body. For instance, now—surely he could not be simply enjoying the idea of herself brought up against a wild runaway girl? For her heart still felt the strain. And certainly she knew he would not laugh at a girl that wanted to run away.

"Not far from here at all," she said. "She was asking the way to the public road."

He said at once, "Yes, I met her, as I was coming in."

Then she was speechless. It was a thing she had never learned in her life, to expect that what has come to you, come in dignity to yourself in loneliness, will yet be shared, the secret never intact. She gazed into the evening star, her lips unreasonably pressed together.

"And did she ask the way to the Memphis road?" she asked then.

"Yes, and I took her over to the old Argyle gin and slept with her, Ellen," said George.

She seemed to let go in her whole body, and stood languidly still under her star a moment, then pulled her apron where it still shone white in the dogwood tree and tried to tie it back on.

George made an impatient sound. Sometimes he, the kindest of them all, would say a deliberate wounding thing—as if in assurance that nothing further might then hurt you. It was always some fact—all true—about himself, just a part of the fact, which was the same as a wild, free kind of self-assertion—it was his pride, too, speaking out. Then impatiently, as if you were too close to a fire, he pulled you away from your pain.

"She's older than you thought," he said. His voice distressed her by sounding grateful to her—was it simply because she had neither flinched nor disbelieved him or said, "It amounts to nothing," like a Fairchild quick to comfort?

She glanced toward George, though she could no longer see him. A feeling of uncontrollable melancholy came over her to see him in this half-light, which had so rested her before he came out. Dear George, whose every act could verge so closely on throwing himself away—what on earth would ever be worth that intensity with which he held it, the hurting intensity that was reflected back on him, from all passing things?

"Oh, George!" she cried, and then, "Sometimes I'm so afraid when Dabney marries she won't be happy in her life."

He patted her arm, yet not heavily or trying to turn her around. "Well, let's go in," she said. Yet she lingered, a little breeze seemed to stir over the bayou, and she was refreshed. George was the one person she knew in the world who did not have it in him to make of any act a facile thing or to make a travesty out of human beings—even, in spite of temptation at a time like this moment, of himself as one human being. (How the Fairchilds did talk on about their amazing shortcomings, with an irony that she could not follow at all, and never rested in perfecting caricatures, little soulless images of themselves and each other that could not be surprised or hurt or changed! That way Battle, when they were first married, had told her something like this.) Only George left the world she knew as pure—in spite of his fierce energies, even heresies—as he found it; still real, still bad, still fleeting and mysterious and hopelessly alluring to her.

She had feared for the whole family, somehow, at a time like this (being their mother, and the atmosphere heavy with the wedding and festivities hanging over their heads) when this girl, that was at first so ambiguous, and so lovely even to her all dull and tired—when she touched at their life, ran through their woods. She had not had a chance to face this fear before, for at the time she had had to cope with the runaway girl herself, who was only the age of her daughter Dabney, so she had believed. But at last she was standing quietly in the long twilight with George, bitterly glad (now it was certain: he was not happy) that he had been the one who had caught the girl, as if she had been thrown at them; for now was it not over?

Aware of his touch on her tired arm—for he was seldom, in the way the others were, demonstrative—she felt that he was, in reality, not intimate with this houseful at all, and that they did not know it—for a moment she thought she saw how it was.

All around them the lightning bugs had flashed to life. They flew slowly and near the earth—just beyond the reach now of India's hand.

"Ellen!" Battle called out, first from the window, then from the door. "Oh, Ellen, here's Troy! He's come up to supper! Ellen!"

"It's time to go in," Ellen said. "Dabney will be coming home and looking everywhere for her mother."

She knew she had provoked that smile again, in the blurred profile she looked into as they started up the garden. But she went in step with him through the dark wet grass, and breathed and sighed expectantly in the dark, as if before they reached the light and confusion of the house she could tell something promising and gentle to him.

"Look," George said.

Ranny was at their feet in the grass asleep—worn out—lying astride a stalk of sugar cane. George took him up without waking him, and carried him.

"He's gained!"

"He weighs thirty-six pounds."

Presently Ranny stirred, said something, and George set him down. Balancing and complaining like an old drunken man for a moment, he went forward on his own feet.

"What did he say?" Ellen asked.

"He said, 'Don't hold me.'"

Ranny, who always until now wanted dearly to be held, walked straight forward, and they sighed in amusement, drawing together, to see the little figure going in front of them, then beginning lightly, blindly, to trot, riding the horse of his mind in the big Delta night.

After Shelley had stayed her time in the room with Troy, waiting for her sister, she excused herself to dress for the Clarksdale dance. But up in her room, in her teddies, she sat down on her cedar chest and unlocked her Trip Abroad diary, lit a Fatima cigarette, and began to write. She had turned the floor fan on her back and seat, and behind her as she wrote the two ends of her little satin sash were dancing straight out.

Laura with her nightgown on stood in the door watching her.

In Shelley's room, the best front one, there were medallions on the wallpaper, each a gold frame with a face inside—which Laura had thought were grandfathers and grandmothers, probably from Port Gibson, until Shelley had told her they weren't anybody—which was much more
mysterious. The wastebasket Shelley had woven in Crafts her summer at Camp. Her bureau was decorated with a tray and powder-box and jar set from her Dabney grandmother. The jars she had filled with rose leaves and clove pinks the summer before, and now and then, but not often, she still took the stoppers out and smelled their last year's perfume. The mirror, on the side arm of which her curling irons hung like a telephone, was stuck all around with snapshots taken mostly on a trip with Mary Denis Summers and some Yankees to the West, at which she had had the worst time she ever had away from home; she could not tell you why she kept their pictures, snooty faces against dim yawning streaks of the Grand Canyon, daily in view. Her silver comb and brush set had EVD on them—Aunt Ellen's—the initials intertwined with raised lilies of the valley, and the bristles worn curved as a thin shell now; luckily nobody brushed their hair any more. Her jewelry was inside a little box Aunt Shannon, before she was so mixed up, had given her; it was a present from her Great-Uncle Denis who had sent it to her the year she was born, from off in the Mexican War; it had a key with forked-tongued snakes on it. Inside were a pair of her mother's gold bracelets with chains, a silver butterfly ring from the Western trip, her Camp ring, one of Uncle George's cuff links she had found when little and had kept, her Great-Grandmother Mary Shannon's black cameos, earrings, and pin, and her seed-pearl comb, and two or three diamond rings. Shelley would not be caught dead wearing any of them. She liked a garnet brooch of her mother's to pin her middy blouse together, but now she could not find it; Shelley said Dabney had probably borrowed it, it was Dabney who lost everything, or maybe India, who could dress herself up like a savage this summer, scavenging from room to room.

In the cedar chest underneath her now lay all the underclothes she had received for graduation presents from high school and college in Virginia, some in little silk sacheted purses made to keep them in until she got married. There was one gown—Aunt Primrose had made it, of all people, Shelley said—of peach chiffon with a little peach chiffon coat that had a train, every edge picoted, and then embroidered all around with lover's knots: it was transparent. Shelley's mantel was wood and white marble, and the hearth was round and raised in a fat apron. The fireplace was now hidden by a perfectly square silk screen painted by Aunt Tempe, with a bayou floating with wild ducks at sunset; a line of the ducks was rising at a right angle from the water and went straight to the upper corner like an arrow. On her mantel shelf was a gold china slipper, a souvenir of Mary Denis Summers's wedding, holding matches, and that was all, except for an incense burner and a photograph of Shelley in a Spanish comb and a great deal of piled hair, taken the year she graduated from Fairchilds High School. Shelley hated it. On the washstand was Shelley's glass with three stolen late-blooming Cape jessamines from Miss Parnell Dortch's yard, now turned bright gold, still sweet. The bed was Aunt Ellen's from Virginia, a high square cool one with a mosquito net over it and a trundle bed underneath it. As a baby Shelley had slept on that, near her mother, and she despised having it still under her bed. There was no way on earth Shelley could get a lamp brought in to read by in bed. A long brass pole dangled from the center of the ceiling ending in two brass lilies from each of which a long, naked, but weak light bulb stuck out. "Plenty light to dress by, and you can read in the lower part of the house with your clothes on like other people," Uncle Battle said, favoring Dabney as he did and she never read, not having time. A paper kewpie doll batted about on a thread tied to the chandelier, that was all it was good for. Shelley wanted to read
The Beautiful and Damned
which was going around the Delta and to read it in bed, but she was about to give up hope. It was hard for her to even see how to write. In her closet were mostly evening dresses but enough middy blouses and pleated skirts hung at one end. All her shoes were flung in a heap on the floor, as if in despair. One green King Tut sandal was out in the middle of the room. Her peach ostrich mules were on her feet and as she wrote she from time to time lifted up her bare heels and waited a moment, tensely, before going on, like a mockingbird stretching in the grass. Momently, she put her Fatima cigarette ashes in her hair receiver.

"Go away, Laura!" said Shelley. "You aren't supposed to watch us every minute!"

Laura ran off, having the grace not to stick out her tongue as India would do.

Shelley was to go to Europe after the wedding, with Aunt Tempe—it was Aunt Tempe's graduation present; but she could not bring herself to wait that long before beginning to write in the book with the lock and key. The first entry was three weeks ago—"We all went fishing with Papa in Moon Lake, caught 103 fish, home in time, Indianola dance. Pee Wee Prentiss. Stomach ache. Dabney's favorite word is 'perfect.'" But already, so soon, she was writing long entries. Dressing a moment (they were calling her downstairs) and writing a moment, jumping up and down, she succeeded in getting the tulle dress, still hot from the iron, over her head and in filling in almost six pages of the diary. Her chest rose and fell in the little "starlight blue" dress, flat as a bathing suit against her heart.