Delta Wedding Read online

  "Look pretty. Here we are," said India.

  They were riding by the row of Negro houses and the manager's house. The horses lifted their noses, smelling the river. Little Matthew saw them and opened the back gate, swinging on it, and ran after them to help them off Junie and Rob. He put his little flat nose against the horses' long noses and spoke to them. Dabney and India loaded him up. Great-Grandmother's magnolia, its lower branches taken root, spread over them. Only bits of sunlight, bright as butterflies, came through the dark tree.

  The house at the Grove, a dove-gray box with its deep porch turned to the river breeze, stood under shade trees with its back to the Shellmound road. It was a cypress house on brick pillars now painted green and latticed over, and its double chimneys at either end were green too. There was an open deck, never walked any more, on its roof; it was Denis's place—he had loved to read poetry there. The garden, sun-faded, went down to the dusty moat in which the big cypresses stood like towers with doors at their roots. The bank of the river was willowy and bright, wild and unraked, and the shadowy Yazoo went softly colored and lying narrow and low in the time of year.

  Aunt Primrose caught sight of them through the window of the kitchen ell, and agitatedly signaled to them that they must go round to the front door and not on any account come in at the back, and that she was caught in her boudoir cap and was ashamed.

  They waded through the side yard of mint and nodding pink and white cosmos, the two pale bird dogs licking them. Lethe flew out to help and fuss at Matthew, while Aunt Primrose—they could hear her—spread the screen doors wide. "Bless your hearts! Mercy! What all have you got there, always come loaded!" she cried. A brown thrush, nesting once again in September, flew out of the crape-myrtle tree at them and made Dabney nearly drop the wine she was carrying herself, to catch at her hair. Aunt Primrose, as if she should have known that thrush would do that, ran out with little cries—for she was the most tender-headed of the Fairchilds and could not bear for anyone to have her hair caught or endangered.

  India was allowed to go find Aunt Jim Allen, who was the deaf aunt. She was in the first place India looked, the pantry, tenderly writing out in her beautiful script the watermelon-rind-preserve labels and singing in perfect tune, "Where Have You Been, Billy Boy?" India tickled her neck with a piece of verbena.

  "WTiy, you monkey!" She was embraced.

  Then, "Dabney!" and both aunts at last clutched the bride, their voices stricken over her name.

  "We'll sit in the parlor and Lethe will bring us some good banana ice cream, that's what we'll do. (Oh, I was sorry when the figs left!)" said Aunt Jim Allen.

  "Then you'll have to turn straight around and start back," said Aunt Primrose.

  They went on. "You're looking mighty pretty. I declare, Dabney, if Sister Rowena had lived, I don't know what she would have said. I don't believe she could have realized it. Did you feel this way about Mary Denis Summers, Jim Allen? I didn't." In their pinks and blues they looked like two plump hydrangea bushes side by side. "She's having a baby right this minute," India put in, while Dabney was saying, "It's some of Mama's wine, and she apologizes if it's not as good as last year, and Shelley's cape—she says please don't work too hard on it and put out your eyes, but she could wear it on the Berengaria and wrap up. And I'm afraid we forgot the hyacinths, but we can send them by Little Uncle in the morning."

  Matthew, just now making his way in from the back, put everything down on the carpet in one heap. Both aunts immediately ran and extracted all away, with soft cries.

  "Neither Dabney nor me is scared to stay out after dark by ourselves, Aunt Primrose," India said.

  "Nonsense."

  Dabney felt as if she had not been at the Grove with her aunts since she was a little girl—all in two weeks they had gone backward in time for her. She looked at them tenderly.

  "I started you a cutting of the Seven-Sister rose the minute I heard you were going to be married," said Aunt Primrose, pointing her finger at her.

  Aunt Primrose was the youngest aunt, she was next to George, and Jim Allen had been next to Denis. They were both pretty for old maids. Aunt Primrose had almost golden hair, which she washed in camomile tea and waved on pale steel curlers which after twenty years still snapped harshly and fastened tightly, because her hair was so fine. Her skin was fine and tender as Bluet's, and it had never had the midday sun to touch it, or any sun without a hat or a parasol between her and it. Her eyes were weak, but she could not be prevailed on to wear ugly glasses. Her tiny ears, fine-lined and delicate, had been pierced when she was seven years old (the last thing her mother had done for her before the day she fell dead) and she wore little straws through the holes until she was big enough for diamonds. Her throat was full, with a mole like a tiny cameo in its hollow, which sometimes struggled with the beat of her heart, and her voice might have come out of such a throat like a singer's, but it did not, being too soft and timid; Aunt Jim Allen's came out strong. She was growing plumper in the last few years, but she was always delicate and was thought of as the little sister of the family. Her hands (with her mother Laura Allen's rings) most naturally clasped, and then suddenly flew apart—as if she were always eager to hear your story, and then let it surprise her. She could not tolerate a speck of dust in her house, and every room was ready for the inspection of the Queen, Aunt Mac said belittlingly. Her dresses, and Aunt Jim Allen's, were all dainty, with "touches," and they wore little sachets tied and tucked here and there underneath, smelling of clove pinks or violets, nothing "artificial." Aunt Primrose was sweet to Aunt Jim Allen and never said a cross word all day to her or to Lethe or any of the men or her manager. She loved everybody but there was one living man she adored and that was her brother George. "As well I might," she said. She was not scared to live in the house alone with Jim Allen, because she simply had faith nothing would happen to her.

  Both of them would tell you that Jim Allen was the better cake maker, but Primrose was better with preserves and pickles and candy, and knew just the minute any named thing ought to be taken off the fire. They swore by Mashula Hines's cook book, and at other times read Mary Shannon's diary she kept when this was a wilderness, and it was full of things to make and the ways to set out cuttings and the proper times, along with all her troubles and provocations.

  It was eternally cool in summer in this house; like the air of a dense little velvet-green wood it touched your forehead with stillness. Even the phone had a ring like a tiny silver bell. The Grove was really Uncle George's place now; but he had put his two unmarried sisters in the house and given them Little Joe to manage it, and gone to Memphis to practice law when he married that Robbie Reid. Matting lay along the halls, and the silver doorknobs were not quite round but the shape of little muffins, not perfect. Dabney went into the parlor. How softly all the doors shut, in this house by the river—a soft wind always pressed very gently against your closing. How quiet it was, without the loud driving noise of a big fan in every corner as there was at home, even when at moments people sighed and fell silent.

  The parlor furniture was exactly like theirs, there were once double parlors here at the Grove, furnished identically in Mashula Hines's day, but how differently everything looked here. Grandmother's and Great-Grandmother's cherished things were so carefully kept here, and the Irish lace curtains were still good except for one little new place of Aunt Primrose's that shone out. Once a cyclone had come and drawn one pair of the curtains out the window and hung them in the top of a tall tree in the swamp, and Laura Allen had had Negroes in the tree all one day instructed to get them down without tearing a thread, while her husband kept begging her to let them come help with the cows bellowing everywhere in the ditches, and then she had mended what could not help but be torn, so that no one could tell now which curtains they were.

  There were two portraits of Mary Shannon in this room, on the dark wall the one Audubon painted down in Feliciana, where she visited home, which nobody liked, and over the mantelpiece the one Gr
eat-Grandfather did. It showed the Mary Shannon for whom he had cleared away and built the Grove—it had hung in the first little mud house; he had painted it one wintertime, showing her in a dark dress with arms folded and an expression of pure dream in the almost shyly drawn lips. There was a white Christmas rose from the new doorstep in her severely dressed hair. There were circles under her eyes—he had not been reticent there, for that was the year the yellow fever was worst and she had nursed so many of her people, besides her family and neighbors; and two hunters, strangers, had died in her arms. Shelley always thought, for some reason nobody understood, that this was why Great-Grandfather made her fold her arms and hide her hands, but India thought he could not draw hands, because she couldn't, and had not needed to try by giving her a good defiant pose. Dabney thought that Mary folded her arms because she would soon have her first child. Great-Grandfather only painted twice in his life, the romantic picture of his brother, in the library at home, and the realistic one of his wife—the two people he had in the world.

  Mary seemed to look down at her and at the dear parlor, with the foolish, breakable little things in it. How sure and how alone she looked, the eyes so tired. What if you lived in a house all alone and away from everybody with no one but your husband?

  "Dabney, where were you?" The aunts, with India holding their hands and swinging between them, came in. "Maiy Denis Summers Buchanan has come through her ordeal—very well," said Aunt Jim Allen. "Tempe just telephoned from Inverness—didn't you hear us calling you? She wanted us to tell you it was a boy."

  "I think Dabney's been eating green apples, but I feel all right," India said. Dabney stood watching them with her arms folded across herself, looking lost in wonder.

  "Dabney! Do you feel a little...? Run put back the spread and lie down on my bed." Aunt Primrose pulled her little bottle of smelling salts out of her pocket. "There's too much excitement in the world altogether," she said, with a kind of consoling, gentle fury that came on her sometimes.

  "Why, India! I feel perfect!" laughed Dabney, feeling them all looking at her. And all the little parlor things she had a moment ago cherished she suddenly wanted to break. She had once seen Uncle George, without saying a word, clench his fist in the dining room at home—the sweetest man in the Delta. It is because people are mostly layers of violence and tenderness—wrapped like bulbs, she thought soberly; I don't know what makes them onions or hyacinths. She looked up and smiled back at the gay little knowing nods of her aunts. They all sat down on the two facing sofas and had a plate of banana ice cream and some hot fresh cake and felt better.

  "Now hurry and start back," said Aunt Primrose. "Oh, you never do come, and when you do you never stay a minute! Oh—growing up, and marrying. India, you're still my little girl!" Aunt Primrose without warning kissed India rambunctiously and pulled her into her sacheted skirt.

  Aunt Jim Allen took up her needle-point and the green-threaded needle. "I'm going to give you this stool cover with the calla lily, of course, Dabney. I'll have it ready by the time Battle can get Marmion ready, I dare say."

  "Dabney will have to have some kind of little old wedding present from us to take home," said Aunt Primrose. "Jump up and pick you out something, honey. You take whatever you like. Don't want to see you hesitate."

  "Oh—everything's so soon now," said Dabney, jumping up. "Papa said any kind of wedding I wanted I could have, if I had to get married at all, so I'm going to have shepherdess crooks and horsehair ruffled hats."

  "Can anybody put their feet on the stool?" asked India. "Troy?"

  "Hush, dear," said Aunt Primrose softly. "We hope not."

  "I'm going to be coming down the stairs while Mary Lamar Mackey plays—plays something—but you'll see it all," and Dabney was walking, rather gliding, around on the terribly slick parlor floor among all the little tables full of treasures. Some old friends of hers—two little china dogs—seemed to be going around with her.

  "I'm a flower girl," said India, following her. "Cousin Laura McRaven's not one, because Aunt Annie Laurie is dead. Cousin Maureen and Cousin Lady Clare are flower girls. Bluet's wild to be the ring-bearer but she can't be—she's not a boy. That's Ranny."

  "I'm going to have my bridesmaids start off in American Beauty and fade on out," said Dabney, turning about. "Two bridesmaids of each color, getting paler and paler, and then Shelley in flesh. She's my maid of honor."

  "Of course," sighed Aunt Primrose.

  "The Hipless Wonder," said India. "Her sweater belts go lower than anybody in Virginia's."

  "Why, India."

  "Then me in pure white," Dabney said. "Everything's from Memphis, but nothing's come."

  "But if it does come, it will all be exquisite, honey," said Aunt Primrose a little dimly.

  "Everything's from Memphis but me. I have Mama's veil and Mashula's train—I could hold a little flower from your yard, couldn't I?"

  But both aunts looked a little gravely into her swaying glance.

  "Who are the bridesmaids, Dabney, dear?" Aunt Jim Allen called out.

  "Those fast girls I run with," said Dabney irresistibly. "The ones that dance all night barefooted..."

  "Child!"

  "She was just teasing," India said.

  "Won't she take our present?" Aunt Primrose began to fan herself a little with the palmetto fan she had bound in black velvet so that when anyone wanted to pull it apart it couldn't be done.

  "I hate to—I hate to take something you love!"

  "Fiddlesticks!"

  "We've never really seen Troy," Aunt Jim Allen said faintly. She did sound actually frightened of Troy. "Not close to—you know." She indicated the walls of the green-lit parlor with her little ringed finger.

  "You'll have to see him at the wedding," India told her loudly. "He has red hair and cat eyes and a mustache."

  "I'm going to have him trim that off, when we are married," said Dabney gravely.

  "It's not as if you were going out of the Delta, of course," Aunt Jim Allen said, looking bemused from her little deaf perch on the sofa. "Now it's time you chose something."

  Dabney stopped, and her hand reached out and touched a round flower bowl on the table in front of her. It was there between the two china retrievers—was it the little bunny in one mouth that looked like Aunt Jim Allen, and the little partridge in the other that was Aunt Primrose? "I'd love a flower bowl," she said.

  "You didn't take the prettiest," warned India.

  Both aunts rose to see.

  "No, no! No, indeed, you'll not take that trifling little thing! It's nothing but plain glass!"

  "It came from Fairchild's Store!"

  "Now you'll take something better than that, missy, something we'd want you to have," declared Aunt Primrose. She marched almost stiffly around the room, frowning at all precious possessions. Then she gave a low croon.

  "The night light! She must have the little night light!" She stood still, pointing.

  It was what they had all come to see when they were little—the bribe.

  "Oh, I couldn't." Dabney drew back, holding the flower bowl in front of her.

  "Put that down, child. She must have the night light, Jim Allen," said Aunt Primrose, raising her small voice a clear octave. "Dabney shall have it. It's company. That's what it is. That little light, it was company as early as I can remember—when Papa and Mama died."

  "As early as I can remember," said Aunt Jim Allen, making her little joke about being the older sister.

  "Dabney, Dabney, they're giving you the night light," whispered India, pulling at her sister's hand in a kind of anguish.

  "I love it." Dabney ran up and kissed them both and gave them both a big hug to make up for waiting like that.

  "And Aunt Mashula loved it—that waited for Uncle George, waited for him to come home from the Civil War till the lightning one early morning stamped her picture on the windowpane. You've seen it, India, it's her ghost you hear when you spend the night, breaking the window and crying up the bayou, and
it's not an Indian maid, for what would she be doing, breaking our window to get out? The Indian maid would be crying nearer your place, where the mound is, if she cried."

  "Jim Allen wants all the ghosts kept straight," said Aunt Primrose, flicking a bit of thread from her sister's dress.

  "When did that Uncle George come back?" asked India.

  "He never came back," said Aunt Primrose. "Nobody ever heard a single word. His brother Battle was killed and his brother Gordon was killed, and Aunt Shannon's husband Lucian Miles killed and Aunt Maureen's husband Duncan Laws, and yet she hoped. Our father and the children all gave up seeing him again in life. Aunt Mashula never did but she was never the same. She put her dulcimer away, you know. I remember her face. Only this little night light comforted her, she said. We little children would be envious to see her burn it every dark night."

  "Who's Aunt Maureen?" asked India desultorily.

  "Aunt Mac Laws, sitting in your house right now," said Aunt Primrose rapidly. It made her nervous for people not to keep their kinfolks and their tragedies straight.

  "Oh, it'll be company to you," Aunt Jim Allen said, while India, just to look at the little night light, began jumping up and down, rattling and jingling everything in the room. "There's nobody we'd rather have it, is there, Primrose, having no chick nor child at the Grove to leave it to?"

  "I should say there isn't!" called Aunt Primrose to her. "Though George loved it, for a man. Where would that little Robbie put it, in Memphis? What would she set it on?" And taking a match from the mantelpiece she walked over to the little clay-colored object they all gazed at, sitting alone on its table, the pretty one with the sword scars on it. It was a tiny porcelain lamp with a cylinder chimney decorated with a fine brush, and an amazing little teapot, perfect spout and all, resting on its top.

  "Shall we light it?"

  India gave a single clap of the hands.

  Aunt Primrose lighted the candle inside and stepped back, and first the clay-colored chimney grew a clear blush pink. The picture on it was a little town. Next, in the translucence, over the little town with trees, towers, people, windowed houses, and a bridge, over the clouds and stars and moon and sun, you saw a redness glow and the little town was all on fire, even to the motion of fire, which came from the candle flame drawing. In two high-pitched trebles the aunts laughed together to see, each accompanying and taunting the other a little with her delight, like the song and laughter of young children.