Delta Wedding Page 11

  4

  "Papa, Uncle George gave me a walking horse, red with four white socks and a star here!"

  "Well, you didn't cry about that, did you?" said Battle.

  "She's going to ride me!" said Ranny.

  "None of this is going to do you any good that I can see, Dabney," said Battle, "across the river. I don't know whether to give you an airplane or build you a bridge."

  "I know a way she could come back home from Marmion," said Ranny. "If she goes down the other side of the river to the bridge at Fairchilds and goes across and comes up this side, she could come home."

  "You're too big for your breeches," said Battle, lifting him up and throwing him to the ceiling. "You think you can show Dabney the way home, do you? No, sir, Dabney's going away from us and never coming back."

  Ranny burst into tears in the air, and so did Bluet out in the hall. Battle set the boy down in haste.

  "Ranny!" said Shelley, looking up from her book. "Papa was joking. Papa was only joking. Dabney will come back whenever you call her, Ranny. Oh, Papa."

  "Stop crying, Ranny," said Battle shortly. "Bluet can cry her eyes out if she wants to, because she's a girl, but you can't, or I'll take the switch to you promptly."

  "She's never coming back," sobbed Ranny.

  "Never coming back," Bluet cried after him, and hugged Ranny around the neck and cried with her forehead pressed to his. Even their little white sideburns were wet with tears. Then, without any appreciable change of their hold on each other or their noise, they were laughing.

  "Good-bye, Dabney!" they shouted.

  Ellen and Troy stood shyly looking at each other across the big red Heatrola where the back halls crossed. They were dismally afraid of each other, Ellen knew. She had a silver goblet in her hand she had retrieved from the sand pile.

  "Troy," she said, "come help me polish these goblets. Dabney's gone to Greenwood for the groceries. You don't mind finding me busy, do you?"

  "I reckon all this is bound to make you busy," said Troy. He tiptoed around the Heatrola and followed her. She felt that he lightly peeped into the back door of the library as they went by. Primrose sat in there sewing some object—George had brought the aunts up this morning. As a matter of fact, Ellen noticed, it was a bridesmaid's lace mit, and even upon a blameless garment like a mit the sweet lady could not have satisfied herself her work would go perfectly with Troy peeping in. And indeed it was not perfect, but Primrose could never have had the thought occur to her that being a lady she could not sew a seam worthy of a lady, and would have undertaken anything in the trousseau.

  "Where's Jim Allen?" she called. Primrose jumped, and drew the little mit to her. "Oh—it's Ellen! She's looking at your roses, though it's the heat of the day."

  "She'll find them covered with blackspot," Ellen said regretfully. She led Troy back to the kitchen. Roy and a little stray Negro child were eating cold biscuits under Roxie's foot and feeding a small terrapin on the floor, and were sent out to the back yard. Aunt Mac, ignoring Roxie, Howard stringing beans, the children, and now Ellen and the young man, was ironing a stack of something on the trestle board in the back part of the kitchen.

  They sat down at the scrubbed round table in the center. A June bug flying on a thread was tied to Troy's chair. "That's Little Battle's," Ellen said as if by divination. "You don't mind June bugs, do you?"

  "Oh, no'm."

  "Get you another chair if you do." She collected things from the dining room and pantry. "Here's the polish, here's you a rag, and you can take half these goblets. Roxie and Vi'let and Howard and all just have so much to do, and Pinchy at this time—Be particular you get in that little ridge."

  "Yes'm."

  "Wait. I'll get you a bite of cooky. That cup in your hand now will be Dabney's," she said, and Troy almost let it fall. "We have so many daughters—of course you have to divide things up. One daughter couldn't have more than her share." She set a plate of cookies and a glass of buttermilk in front of him, went back and got him a cold drumstick. "Not that there's a contentious bone in any of my children's bodies.—That's Orrin's. Blessed Orrin likes silver too. He said, 'Mama, I want to have a silver cup of my own to shave out of when I'm grown,' and I told him it was surely his privilege."

  "How old is Orrin now?" was all Troy could think of to reply, and Ellen could not think to save her life just then how old Orrin was.

  "Here's one will be Dabney's, for you to shine. It was from the Dabneys—my family—brought over." She jumped up again and brought him a voluminous linen napkin to wipe his fingers on. "Don't leave that drumstick and let it waste. This is Dabney's cup."

  Troy took it with his thumb and middle finger, sticking his forefinger well out.

  "It won't say Sterling," called Aunt Mac from the ironing board. "That's because those things were made before there ever was an old Sterling, it's like B.C."

  They polished in silence for a while. Troy added a little spit now and then, and held up each goblet critically but silently to see how Ellen thought it shone. His fingers were sprouted with his red hairs but they had a nice shape and they were kind, in Ellen's judgment.

  "My little old mama made the prettiest quilts you ever laid your eyes on," he said, when he finally spoke. His foxy skin turned rosy with pleasure and his thick lashes growing in light-red bunches and points gave him a luxuriant, petlike look. He laid down his linen rag. "One called 'Trip around the World' and one called Tour Doves at the Window.' 'Bouquet of Beauty,' that was one...."

  "And you asked your mother their names." Ellen looked at him as though he had done a commendable thing. "Where was your mother? Where was your home, Troy?" she asked softly. How she had wondered. Of course Battle would never have asked a man such a thing!

  "My little mama ain't dead! No, ma'am, though she writes an infrequent letter and I take after her. Bear Creek, up Tishomingo Hills. She can crochet just as well as she can piece tops—hard to believe."

  Why had Ellen wondered? She could have seen the little perched cabin in her mind any time, by just not trying. ("Howard," she said, "did you leave any strings on? Well, now, you take your hammer out under that cool fig tree and start making that altar Miss Dabney wants. Just do it your way—I can't even tell you how to start it.") She looked back at Troy. "Well, you're still Mississippi," she said, smiling.

  "Though this don't seem like Mississippi to me," he said. "I mean at first. Two years back I would just as soon have been in Timbuktu as Fairchilds, not to see one hill."

  "You were an only child? Like me?" she said, gently taking the goblet he had set down and putting her rag to it.

  "Only boy."

  Ellen could not imagine a boy not enumerating his sisters, but she nodded.

  "I sure wish Dabney and myself could have one of Mammy's pretty quilts now, to lay on our bed."

  "I guess your sisters ask her for them when they marry," she said rather breathlessly, and he nodded, as if to commend her. "Aunts," he said. "I had me three old-maid aunts that loved lots of cover." He cut his eye at Aunt Mac, who was by this time singing a Presbyterian hymn. "They were forever scared they'd get cold, and they had more quilts than you ever did see in your life. Lived on a mountain top. I'd go pay them a visit. They'd go to bed at sundown and I would sit up till about twelve o'clock before the fire, throwing on logs, getting the place hotter and hotter. Every time I'd throw on a log they'd throw off a quilt."

  "Troy," she said, "I believe you're a tease too."

  Troy straightened up, and taking a goblet as if it were unfinished business on the table between them, he attacked it with his rag, first spitting on it thinly between drawn lips. "Well, there's nothing easy about hills," he said. "And plenty like me have left them, four to my knowledge on one bend of the Tennessee River. They all come to the Delta. It sure gets you quick. By now, I can't tell a bit of difference between me and any Delta people you name. There's nothing easy about the Delta either, but it's just a matter of knowing how to handle your Negroes." He batted the Jun
e bug.

  "Well, Troy, you know, if it was that at first, I believe there's more to it, and you'll be seeing there's a lot of life here yet that will take its time working out," said Ellen. She held up the goblet for him to see.

  "What would it be?" Troy asked. He smiled down on her for the first time.

  "The Delta's just like everywhere," she said mysteriously. "You keep taking things on, and you'll see. Things still take a little time...."

  Vi'let came in with a vase of wilted zinnias. "Miss Tempe's come in," she said. "Sent me out first thing to throw dead flowers out the parlor. Is it all right to throw 'em away?"

  'It's all right, Vi'let, they're really dead. Go tell her Miss Ellen'll be there in a minute." She frowned over Troy's head. She was torn between her pride—presenting Troy naturally and now, to Tempe, and her conviction that she might wait just a little while about it.

  "You can look for me back about sundown," Troy was saying. He stood up, put the chair up to the table again with the June bug, tired, hanging floodwards now, and took his hat off the top of the bread safe.

  "Don't be late—it's supper and the rehearsal, remember. If those clothes and crooks haven't come, what'll we do?"

  "Dey come," Roxie prophesied. "Ain't nothin' goin' to defeat Miss Dab, Miss Ellen."

  Troy was bending in a polite bow to Aunt Mac. He started out and then stock-still asked Ellen, "Is she ironing money?"

  "Why, that's the payroll," said Ellen. "Didn't you know Aunt Mac always washes it?"

  "The payroll?" His hand started guiltily toward his money pocket.

  "I get the money from the bank when I drive in, and she hates for them to give anything but new bills to a lady, the way they do nowadays. So she washes it."

  "If that's what she wants to do, let her do it!" roared Battle. He was coming down the hall followed by four Negroes, all of them carrying big boxes. "Here's Dabney's doin's," he said. "All creation's coming out of Memphis. What must I do with it, throw it out the back door?"

  "Take it quick, Roxie," said Ellen. "Vi'let! Howard! Aunt Mac, you'll have to soon make way at the ironing board!" she cried to the old lady's ear.

  "Tempe's here along with it," said Battle. "Come on, Troy, let's get out."

  Troy walked a little gingerly out of the kitchen, as if he might be offered his salary before he got out, fresh and warm from the iron, but when Ellen pulled him from Battle and led him toward the cross hall by the side door and showed him the long present table set out there, he went easier.

  "Now I'm really scared for you to touch Bohemian glass till after the wedding, Troy," she said earnestly. She took up a bit of it from the tray. "From Virginia," she said. "Dabney cousins that couldn't come. They sent an outrageous number of wine glasses."

  "They sure are the prettiest things yet," he said, as she turned the flower-shaped glass in the light. He watched her worn, careful, ladylike hand with the bit of fragile glass sparkling around it.

  "I love the hills," she said, glancing up. "I miss them even now."

  He shook his head, smiling, at the distant past.

  II

  India, Laura, and Ranny were sitting on the parlor floor playing cassino when Aunt Tempe arrived, their six bare feet touching. A great lot of boxes came with her, Little Uncle went by two or three times with things, and Vi'let with the whitest dress box sailed to the back. Skipping in front, Lady Clare came in all over again under the aegis of Aunt Tempe and made a face at them. She looked around for the piano (as if it had ever been moved!) and sidling through the archway sat down and began to play "Country Gardens." Just at the door, India noticed, her father sent Aunt Tempe in with a nice, soft spank, and went off calling "Ellen! Ellen!"

  Aunt Tempe, in a batik dress and a vibratingly large hat, entered (keeping time) and kissed all the jumping children. Then she straightened up from her kisses and admonitions and looked quickly around the parlor, as if to catch it before it could compose itself. Howard, who kept coming in and standing motionless, studying the spot on the floor where he had to put the altar, was caught in her gaze. "'Scuse," he said, and vanished with his hammer. The big feet of Bitsy and Bitsy's little boy, who was learning, hung inside the room; the Negroes were washing the outside of the windows behind thick white stuff, and talking to Maureen in the yard; if they knew Aunt Tempe could see their feet, they would be moving their rags.

  India sat back on the floor and gazed at her aunt, admiring the way she kept her hat on, and shuffling the cassino cards gently. Aunt Tempe was about to call Vi'let—she did call Vi'let and ask her what dead zinnias were doing in front of the original Mr. George Fairchild? And where were Miss Ellen and Miss Dabney—running around frantic upstairs? And where was Mr. George? And where was just some ice water? Out in the back they could hear Horace, Aunt Tempe's goggly chauffeur, whistle at how hot it was at Shellmound, as opposed to Inverness.

  Aunt Tempe drew a breath and sighed. She made little turns on her Baby Louis heels, and her soft plump shoulders came in view like more bosoms in the back, over her corset. India could read her mind. The table lamp provoked Aunt Tempe. The three white marble Graces holding the shade in their six arms, with dust unreachable in the folds of their draperies and the dents of their eyes, were parading the whole lack of Shellmound to Aunt Tempe—it was outdated—it didn't do for marrying girls off in. Of course Battle and Ellen would do the place over, the day one of the children prevailed on them hard enough—perhaps it would be quick little India—dress it up and maybe brick it over, starting with the gates. One day they would take up the floral rugs and the matting, and put in something Oriental, and they would get rid, somehow, of that Heatrola she hated to pass in the hall. They were only procrastinating about it. But here Dabney was marrying, and still the high, shabby old rooms went unchanged, for weddings or funerals, with rocking chairs in them, little knickknacks and playthings and treasures all shaken up in them together—and those switches on the mantel would probably stay right there, through the ceremony. On the table before her now a Tinker-Toy windmill was sitting up and running—with the wedding two days off—right next to the exquisite tumbler with the Young Pretender engraved on it, that was her wedding present to Battle and Ellen—cracked now, and carelessly stuffed with a bouquet that could have been picked and put there by nobody but Bluet—black-eyed Susans, a little chewed rose, and a four-o'clock.

  Aunt Tempe closed her eyes to see Mashula's dulcimer still hanging by that thin ribbon on the wall—did she know Shelley could take it down and play "Juanita" on it? India followed her gaze; it passed fleetingly over Uncle Pinck's coin collection from around the world, that Aunt Tempe had been tired of looking at in Inverness and taking out of little Shannon's mouth—and fell sadly on the guns that stood in the corner by the door and the pistols that rested on a little gilt and marble table in the bay window."Those firearms!" she murmured, freshly distressed at their very thought, as if in her sensitive hearing she could hear them all go off at once. That was Somebody's gun—he had killed twelve bears every Saturday with it. And Somebody's pistol in the lady's workbox; he had killed a man with it in self-defense at Cotton Gin Port, and of the deed itself he had never brought himself to say a word; he had sent the pistol ahead of him by two Indian bearers to his wife, who had put it in this box and held her peace, a lesson to girls. There (India sighed with Aunt Tempe) was Somebody's Port Gibson flintlock, and Somebody's fowling piece he left behind him when he marched off to Mexico, never to be laid eyes on again. There were the Civil War muskets Aunt Mac watched over, an old Minie rifle coming to pieces before people's eyes. Grandfather's dueling pistols, that had not saved his life at all, were on the stand in a hard velvet case, and lying loose was Grandmother Laura Allen's little pistol that she carried in her riding skirt over Marmion, with a flower scratched with a penknife along the pearl handle, and Battle's, her father's, little toothmarks in it.

  "Bang bang!" said Ranny.

  "No longer a baby," Aunt Tempe sighed. She sat down in a rocker, and Vi'let brough
t a pitcher of her lemonade—so strong it would bring tears to the eyes. "And poor Laura," she said, reaching out at her and kissing her again. To her, girls were as obvious as peony plants, and you could tell from birth if they were going to bloom or not—she said so.

  "I've brought Dabney a forty-piece luncheon set for the time being," she said, seeming to address Ranny. "I couldn't put my mind to anything more."

  "How is Mary Denis's little new baby?" Ranny asked. "Is it still a boy?"

  "Mm-hmm, and he's the image of me—except he has Titian hair," said Aunt Tempe. "That he got from Mr. Buchanan. It took wild horses to drag me away from Mary Denis at such a time, but I was prevailed on. I felt compelled to come to you."