Delta Wedding

by EUDORA WELTY

Laura McRaven, nine, arrives at Shellmound, plantation home of her dead mother’s brother, Battle Fairchild, in the Mississippi Delta, during the late summer of 1923. The family are gathering and are preparing, in the height of the cotton-picking season, for the wedding of Dabney, seventeen, to Troy Flavin, the Shellmound overseer. George, Battle’s younger brother from Memphis, the adored one of the family, has arrived with the news that his wife Robbie Reid (whom the family considers as “common” as Troy) left him that week.

At Shellmound the family consists of Battle and Ellen, their eight children ranging from Shelley, eighteen, to Bluet, two; the old aunts Mac and Shannon; and dead brother Denis’s child Maureen, not quite right in her head from injury in infancy. Two more sisters of Battle’s, the old maids Primrose and Jim Allen, live at the near-by plantation, the Grove; Tempe, his oldest sister, is expected from Inverness — her grandchild, Lady Clare Buchanan, has already arrived.

20

Go IN and out the window, go in and out the window . . .”

They held hands, high and then low, and Shelley, who was It because she was the big girl, ran stooping under their arms, in and out. They were playing in the shade of the pecan trees, after naps and a ride to Greenwood after the groceries, Shelley, India, Maureen, Ranny, and Laura. Cousin Lady Clare Buchanan was just now sent by Aunt Mac out to play with them too. She had come ahead of Aunt Tempo, her grandmother, to Shellmound — come by herself on the Yellow Dog, and now went around with her lower teeth biting her upper lip like William S. Hart.

Oneida’s and Little Uncle’s little boys were up in the yard, crisscrossing with two lawn-mowers, cutting the grass for the wedding. Far in the back, Howard was beating the rugs with a very slow beat. The sound of the lawn-mowers was pleading; they seemed to be saying, “Please. Please.” The children were keeping out of mischief so that other people could get something done; Shelley was obeying her mother too, and this lowered her some in the eyes of them all, white and colored.

“. . . For we have gained the day.”

Lady Clare said to Laura, “Ask Shelley can Troy French-kiss.”

“I’m sure he can,” Laura said loftily, for she had been here a day longer than Lady Clare, whatever French-kissing might be.

They played “Running Water, Still Pond,” “Fox in the Morning, Geese in the Evening,” and then “Hide-and-Seek.” Laura ran to her best hiding place, down on the ground behind the woodpile in the back yard. She waited a long time crouched over and nobody came to find her. From where she hid she could see the back of the house, hear the Negroes, and upstairs on the long sleeping porch she could see Uncle George walking up and down, up and down, smoking his pipe. She listened to the dark, dense rustling of the fig trees, and once she put a straw down a doodlebug hole and said the incantation in a very low voice.

Then she saw Maureen running by, and Maureen saw her. With a leap Maureen was up on her woodpile. She did not say a word. She looked over from the top and then, after a strange pause, as if she could think, she pushed the whole of the piled logs down on Laura, upsetting herself too. “Choo-choo,” said Maureen, and then she ran away.

Laura at first was surprised, and then with great effort she began to extricate herself. The surprise, the heavy weight, and the uncertainty of getting out kept her so busy that at first she did not notice that no one had come for her. She had on her next-to-best white dress, and long tears showed in it, and long scratches marked up her legs and arms. She had the taste of bark in her mouth and kept spitting on the ground, but the taste was still there. Inside the house the light, I tinkling sounds went on; Roxie’s high laugh, like a dove cry, rose softly and hung over the yard. And from further away the sigh of the compress reminded her of Dabney, who had gone somewhere.

Harm — that was what Maureen intended; that was what she meant by her speechless gaze. That was what made her stay so close to them all, what drove her flying over the house, over the fields that way, after the others. That was what put extra sounds in her mouth. It was the harm inside her.

“She likes to spoil things,” India had explained matter-of-factly, and matter-of-factly Laura had accepted the explanation. But the cousins were a clan. They all said things, and they all kissed one another, and yet they all had secret, despiteful ways to happiness. Pushing the heavy logs from her, she felt shorn of pleasure in her cousins and angry in not having known that this was how the Fairchilds wanted things to be, and how they would make things be when it pleased them. Uncle George was nowhere to be seen, and she thought she heard Shelley laughing, and calling his name, down in the house. A feeling of their unawareness of her came over Laura and crushed her more heavily than the logs of wood.

She licked the blood away clean from her arms, and looked at her knees to see if some old scabs had come off — yes. She was as black and ugly as a little Negro. She tied her sash tight around her hips. Without looking up she crept around the yard, with her locket in her mouth, around the cistern on her hands and knees, keeping low not to be seen, her feet dragging numbly. Under the snowball bush she hit both feet with her fists until she could feel the sting, and then, picking all cinders one by one out of her elbows and skirt and out of her Roman sandals, she walked around the house and darted in to Home, which was the trunk of a tree, without being caught.

At that moment, touching Home, her finger to the tree, she was not happy, not unhappy. “Free!” she called, looking around, not seeing the others anywhere, but she had them every one separate in her head.

Then she saw Uncle George walk out of the house and stare out into the late day. She thought of herself as growing up beside Uncle George, the way some little flowers and vines have picked their tree, and so she felt herself sure of being near him. She knew quite objectively that he would not disown her and uproot her, that he loved any little green vine-leaf, and now she felt inner warnings that this was a miracle of safety, strange in any house, and in her this miracle was guarded from the contamination even of thinking.

As if by smell, by the smell of his pipe, an open smell like a place in the woods, she knew that he out of all the Delta Fairchilds had kindness and that it was more than an acting in kindness: it was a waiting, a withholding, as if he could see a fire or a light, when he saw a human being — regardless of who it was, kin or not — and had never done the first thing in his life to dim it. This made him seem young — as young as she. On the other hand, when all night she could hear coming up the dark stair well his voice soft and loud, with Uncle Battle’s bark after it, chasing, she gathered that he was hard to please in some things and therefore old. Uncle George and Uncle Battle would argue or talk until Uncle Battle hollered out the window for Roxie or Ernest to come up to the house and fix them their nightcaps.

She stored love for Uncle George fiercely in her heart, she wished Shellmound would burn down so that she could run in and rescue him, she prayed for God to bless him — for she felt they all crowded him so, the cousins, rushed in on him so; they smiled at him too much, inviting too much, daring him not to be faultless, and she would have liked to clear them away, give him room, and then — what? She would let him be mean and horrible — horrible to the horrible world. Would she? She leaned her forehead against the tree, with some shimmering design about him in her head coming like a dream, in which she was clinging, protecting, fighting all in one, a Fairchild flourishing and flailing her arms about. Of course it was all one thing — it was one feeling. It was need. Need pulled you out of bed in the morning, showed you the day with everything crowded into it, then sang you to sleep at night as your mother did. Need sent you dreams. Need did all this — when would it explain? Oh, some day. She waited now, and then each night fell asleep in the vise of India’s arms. She imagined that one day — maybe the next, in the Fairchild house-she would know the answer to the heart’s pull, just as it would come to her in school why the apple was pulled down on Newton’s head, and that it was the way for girls in the world that they should be put off, put off, put off—and told a little later; but told, surely.

Uncle George came down the steps, and walked slowly over the fresh-cut grass, not seeing her, for she was behind the big pecan tree. All his secret or his problem, or what was in the blue letter, though she did not know what it was, was sharp to her as she saw him go by, weighty and real and as cutting (and perhaps as filled with dreaded life) as a seashell she had once come on at the seashore, and unwittingly seized.

“Don’t cry out here, Laura,” said a soft voice.

It was Little Battle, in his overalls. He poked a cold biscuit with a little ham in it into her mouth, and because she was startled stood by while she swallowed it. Then they ran into the house. “Oh, Little Battle!”

21

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 as she wrote, the two ends of her little satin sash were dancing behind her. Her peach ostrich mules were on her feet, and from time to time she 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.

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

“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 warm 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.

Tonight again D. was cruel to T. F. and is keeping him waiting and then going out to one last dance. T. does not go home — waits for fust a glimpse. He is interested because he thinks she must be smart. To provoke a man like him. Dabney does not even know it. Why doesn’t it dawn on T. F. that none of the Fairchilds are smart., the way he means smart? Only now and then one of us is gifted, Aunt J. A. says. I am gifted at tennis for no reason. We never wanted to be smart, one by one, but all together we have a wall, we are self-sufficient against people that come up knocking, we are solid to the outside. Does the world suspect that we are all very private people? I think one by one. we’re all more lonely than private and more lonely than selfsufficient. I think Uncle G. takes us one by one. That is love — I think. He takes us one by one but Papa takes us all together and loves us by the bunch, which makes him a more cheerful man. Maybe we come too fast for Papa. I feel we should all be cherished but not altogether in a bunch — separately, but not one to go unloved for the other loved. In the world, I mean — Shellmound and the world. Mama says shame, that we forget about Laura, and we loved her mother so much we never mention her name or we would all cry. We are all unfair people. We are such sweet people to be so spoiled. George spoils us, does not reproach us, praises us, even, for what he feels is weak in us.

Maybe I can tell him yet that I know where Robbie is. but so far I can’t. The moment of telling, I cannot bring myself to that. I thought it would be easy at the supper table, but in the middle of supper now we all look at each other, all wondering — before a thing like Dabney’s wedding, not knowing just what to do. Sometimes I believe we live most privately just when things are most crowded, like in the Delta, like for a wedding. I don’t know what to do about anybody in the world, because it seems like you ought to do it soon, or it will be too late. I may not put any more in my diary at all till after the wedding. I wish now it would happen, and be past. I hate days, fateful days. I heard Papa talking about me to Uncle G. without knowing I was running by the library door not to meet T. when he came in (but waiting, I did) and Papa said I was the next one to worry about, I was prissy — priggish. Uncle G. said nobody could be born that way, they had to get humiliated. Can you be humiliated without knowing it? I would know it. He said I was not priggish. I only liked to resist. So does Dabney like it — I know. So does anybody but India, and young children.

When T. proposed to D. I think it was just because she was already so spoiled he had to do something final to make her notice, and this did. That is not the way I want it done to me. Nobody tells T. a thing yet, and maybe we will never tell him anything. But T think he never minds at all. Trouble acts up — he puts it down. But I know that trouble is not something fresh you never saw before that is coming just the one time, but is old, and your great-aunts not old enough to die yet can remember little hurts for sixty years just like the big hurts you know now, having your sister walk into something you dread and you cannot speak to her.

T. just sits and looks at a family that cherishes its weaknesses and belittles its strength. He is from the mountains — very slow. Where is his mother? Father? He is not a born gambler of any description. He considers D. not anything he is taking a chance on but a sure thing and wants her for sure. Robbie is another person like that and wants George for sure. I can’t stand her! Maybe Europe will change everything. When I see the Leaning Tower of Pisa will I like Robbie any better? I doubt it. (Aunt T. will be with me all the time!) All of us wish G. did not want her, and fell him and tell him she is not worthy to wipe his feet. But he does want her, and suffers. He goes on. I do not know and cannot think how it was when Papa and Mama wanted each other. Of course they don’t now, and don’t suffer by now. I cannot think of any way of loving that would not fight the world, just speak to the world. Papa and Mama do not fight the world. They have let it in. Did they ever even lock a door? So much life and confusion has got in that there is nothing to stop it running over, like the magic pudding pot. The whole Delta is in and out of this house. Life may be stronger than Papa is. He let Troy in, and look, Troy took Dabney. Life is stronger than George, but George was not surprised, only he wants Robbie Reid. Life surprises Papa and it is Papa that surprise hurts. I think G. expects things to amount to more than you bargain for — and so do I. This scares me in the middle of a dance. Uncle G. scares me a little for knowing my fright. Papa is ashamed of it but G. does not reproach me — I think he upholds it. He expects things to be more than you think, and to mean something. He cherishes our weaknesses because they are just other ways that things are going to come to us. I think when you are strong you can squeeze them back and hold them from you a little while, but where you are weak you run to meet them.

Shelley with a sigh leaned out her window to rest. A whippoorwill was calling down in the bayou somewhere, and the hiss of the compress came softly and regularly as the sighing breath of night. She heard voices on the lawn. Dabney in a filmy dress was telling Troy good night. Shelley listened; how well she could hear and see from here she had not realized or tried out.

“Oh, I wish I didn’t have to go to the old dance — or that you could dance, Troy!” cried Dabney. She clung to him, her voice troubled and tender. “Never mind, we’ll soon be married.”

“Sure,” said Troy.

She clung to him more, as if she would be torn away, and looked over her shoulder at the night as if it almost startled her— indeed the soft air seemed to Shelley to be trembling with the fluctuation of starlight as with the pulsing of the compress on the river. Troy patted Dabney’s shoulder.

“I hear your heart,” she said right out, as it imploringly and yet to comfort him.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

“I will.”

“It won’t be long until I can take care of you.”

There were tears in Shelley’s eyes; their tenderness was almost pity as they clung together. She nearly cried with them.

“I have to go now, I Troy. I have to.”

She stood away. He stood with his arms hanging, and she went. Dickie Boy Featherstone put her in his open-top car.

Then Shelley heard Uncle George walk heavily over the porch and down the steps. She saw him strolling toward the gate, and smelled his pipe. “George!" He looked up and said how hot the night was. He went on. She could not say anything, she could not call it out a window. (It would seem so conceited of her, too.) She believed he went and stood on the bank of the bayou to smoke; she could see a patch of white through the Spanish Daggers, though the mist drifted there now, turning like foam in the luminous night. She leaned her forehead on the wall; the warm wallpaper pressed her head like a hand.

Dabney, she knew, would tell George in a minute that Robbie was no farther away than Fairchild’s store this day, hiding from him and crying for him. But she, Shelley, could not enlighten him. She and Robbie had seen each other across the crowded room — a suspended cluster of long-handled popcorn poppers turned gently between them to block their vision — and both their faces went fixed. They did not speak.

She could hear under her window now the faint sound of the idling motor in some boy’s automobile, and downstairs the victrola ending “By the Light of the Stars” and then the dancers catching their breath.

“Shelley! Shelley! Are you ever coming?” called Mary Lamar Mackey.

Then Shelley put a little coat of peach silk around her and went down. At the foot of the stairs Piggy McReddy was waiting for her, shouting up, “I’m the Sheik of Araby!”

22

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,” 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 in her hand a silver goblet 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 sal 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 mitt, and even upon a blameless garment like a mitt 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 mitt 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 black spot,” Ellen said regretfully. She led Troy back to the kitchen. Roy and a little stray Negro child were eating cold biscuits at Roxie’s feet 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 nf 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’d rather.” 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 another 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 too.”

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.”

23

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 mamma 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, pel-like look. He laid down his linen rag. “One called 'Trip around the World’ and one called ‘Four 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? Take 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 across 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 mountaintop. I’d go pay them a visit. They’d go to bed at sundown and I would sit up fill 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 Della either, but it’s just a matter of knowing how to handle your Negroes.” He batted the June 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 to 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. “Besides that, you don’t need to shoot ‘em — just use the butt end of your gun.” 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 liltle 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 floorwards 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 more easily.

“ 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 wineglasses.”

“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.

24

INDIA, Laura, and Runny were sitting on the parlor floor playing cassino when Aunt Tempe arrived, their six bare feet touching. Little Uncle went by two or three times with suitcases and things, and Vi’let with the 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 the 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 me,” 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, invisible, and talking to Maureen; 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: the place 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 Bluetblack-eyed Susans, a little chewed rose, and a fouro’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, which 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 by two Indian bearers to his wife, who had put it in this box and held her peace. There (India sighed with Aunt Tempe) was somebody’s Port Gibson flintlocks, 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 brought 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.”

“How is Mary Denis?” asked Ranny. “I love her!” He was sitting like a lamb at Aunt Tempe’s feet, and letting her pet him.

“As well as I ever expected her to be, precious. She gets along very well considering she’s married to a Yankee that wants his windows washed three times a week.”

“They aren’t, though, are they?” cried India staunchly.

“Look, look! Aunt Tempe, look!” Dabney whirled in laughing, with flimsy boxes and tissue paper and chiffon ruffles flying.

“I should say they’re not!” Aunt Tempe opened her arms and kissed Dabney three times under her big hat. In the back, Vi’let was crying, “Miss Dab, ain’t you ‘shamed! You bring my dresses on back here.”

“Mercy! You’ve always just washed your hair! Don’t ever let this husband of yours, whoever he is, know you can cook, Dabney Fairchild, or you’ll spend the rest of your life in the kitchen. That’s the first thing I want to tell you.”

“He doesn’t know anything about me at all,” Dabney laughed, dancing away in her mules around the wreath on the floral rug, whirling with her white wedding dress held to her.

“ Bring those affairs here to me, Ranny child,” said Aunt Tempe.

“Oughtn’t we to wait and let Dabney open everything that comes?”

Aunt Tempe shook out a dress and held it at an authoritative angle with her head tilted to match. “I must say I never heard of a red wedding before,” she said.

“American Beauty, Aunt Tempe!” cried India, teasingly whisking it from her and beginning to dance about after Dabney, holding it high.

“I stand corrected,” said Aunt Tempe.

“They fade out before they get to Shelley and Dabney,” Laura told her consolingly.

25

MAUREEN ran in, got Aunt Tempe’s hug and kiss — and took, as if for her prize, the rosy dress slightly less bright and danced with it, nicely. The little girls went gleefully, though delicately and soundlessly on their bare feet. Laura too, with a sudden spring, had gently extracted the next dress from Aunt Tempe’s fingers, and slid 1, 2, 3 into a ballroom waltz, hidden behind her pink cloud.

“Play, Lady Clare! Play till you drop,” India’s voice called.

Ranny leaped up and got under the wedding dress Dabney was holding, and then dancing frantically cried, “Let me out, let me out!”

“Slower, Lady Clare! Vi’let!” Aunt Tempe called, and Vi’let came and stood in the door with her hands on her hips. “If you don’t press these dresses right away, you won’t get a chance. They’ll be worn out completely.”

“I can’t go slower!” cried Lady Clare.

Outside, Bitsy and his little boy rubbed round peepholes in the window polish to see in, and laughed so appreciatively that they nearly lost their balance, to India’s ever watchful delight while she ponytrotted.

“Well, of course I can’t talk,” said Aunt Tempe, looking fixedly at the bride dancing and the three dresses without any heads dancing around her, with Vi’let beginning to chase them. “My own daughter married a Yankee. Naturally, I bring her to Memphis and Inverness to have her babies — and name them.”

“It’s not like Dabney was going out of the Delta,” called the pale-pink waltzing dress.

“Poor Mary Denis went clear to Illinois.”

“Oh, Aunt Tempe, how’s Mary Denis?” Dabney cried, coming to a momentary stop. “I did so want her for a bridesmaid!”

“She’s thin as a rail and white as a ghost now.”

“I bet she’s beautiful as ever. How much did her baby weigh?”

“Ten pounds, child: Little George.”

“Oh, how could you tear yourself away?” asked Dabney in a pained voice, holding a pose before the long mirror. She bent her arm and looked tenderly down over imaginary flowers. Vi’let smiled.

“I was prevailed on,” said Aunt Tempe, but Dabney had run lightly out of the parlor again, snatching a flight of dresses and letting them fall over Vi’let, covering her, as she giggled, with a bright cascade. Bluet, Maureen, Ranny, and Laura reeled after her, still under the spell, and Lady Clare was still playing “Country Gardens.”

“The overseer,” announced Aunt Tempe, nodding as if to imaginary people on both sides of the room, the tiniest smile on her face.

India sat down and looked up at her.

26

HO-HUM,” said India. She fell back on the floor and put a glass of lemonade on her diaphragm. “Aunt Tempe, I bet you don’t know something you wish you did.”

“What, child?” asked Aunt Tempe sharply.

“I bet you didn’t know Aunt Robbie ran away from Uncle George and never is coming back.”

“Hush your mouth, child.”

“ Yes she did! ”

“Ah! What has he done?” Aunt Tempe said, with her sisterly face alive to brotherly mischief. Then, “Oh, the mortification! Who told you, baby? And when?”

“I’m nine,” said India. “No-body told me, but I knew way back this morning.”

“You knew what?" called Ellen warningly from the hall. “ You did get here!” she said to Aunt Tempe in that warm, marveling voice with which she always welcomed people, no matter how late she was doing it, as if some planet had mysteriously entered a fresh orbit and appeared at Shellmound. She kissed Aunt Tempe’s cheek — the softest cheek of the Fairchilds, which Aunt Tempe offered in a temporary manner like a very expensive possession.

“Aunt Primrose and Aunt Jim Allen still don’t know you know what,” India said, putting her arm soothingly around Aunt Tempe’s neck. “They don’t even dream!”

“Get away from me, India, you’re always such a hot child! Well, madam?”

“ How’s Alary Denis?” asked Ellen as if the “ Well, madam?” were not Aunt Tempe’s question first.

“Thin as a rail, white as a ghost. Only wild horses — The baby’s my image — has Mr. Buchanan’s Titian hair . . . Mr. Buchanan’s the same Yankee he ever was, demands the impossible. . . . Oh, the mortification of life, Ellen!”

Aunt Tempe poured out another glass of lemonade and asked pitifully for a little tiny bit of sugar. “Of course I know George and Battle both try to spare me — Denis always spared me everything. It would kill me to know all poor George must have gone through, what it’s driven him to!”

“ India, you run out and tell Vi’let to stop whatever she’s doing and come sweeten Aunt Tempe’s lemonade to suit her — and take Lady Clare with you.”

In the music room there was a stir as if Lady Clare roused out of some trance. “ Did you hear me playing 'Country Gardens,’ Aunt Ellen?” she cried, running in.

“ Yes, dear, I was listening out in the hall,” Ellen said. “ You’re a big, strong girl, rounding out a little, I believe.”

“I’m bigger than Laura,” said Lady Clare. “I’m going out and turn around in the yard until it makes me drunk and I fall down and crack my head open.”

“ Now Lady Clare — just because you’re visiting! ” said Aunt Tempe.

“I’m not going to tell Dabney you know what,” said India as she walked out.

“That’s a good girl, honey.” Ellen looked at her proudly.

“She’s got so many secrets from me, I’m not going to tell her mine! Maybe I’ll tell her years later.”

“Now! Straighten me out,” Tempe said to Ellen, leaning not forward, but back.

“I can’t imagine how India finds out things.” Ellen was brooding.

“I don’t worry about India!”

Ellen sighed. “I guess not yet. Well, Dabney’s going to marry Troy Flavin, just as we told you, and Robbie has run away from George and he won’t say a word or go after her. Not connected, of course, but —”

“Two things always happen to the Fairchilds at once. Three! Have you forgotten Mary Denis having a baby at Inverness at the very moment all this was descending on you here?”

“No, I didn’t forget,” said Ellen. “I reckon there are enough Fairchilds for everything! But we’re hoping this trouble on George will blow over.”

“ Blow over! That’s Battle’s talk. I can hear him now. How in the world could it?”

“Robbie might still come to the wedding.”

“I’d like to see her! She’ll get no welcome from me, flighty thing,” said Tempe.

“Oh, Tempe, I think he’s hurt,” Ellen said. “You know George and Battle and all those men can’t stand anybody to be ugly and cruel to them.”

“I know. And how can people hurt George?” Tempe asked. She turned up her soft face with a constricted look that was wonder, and searched Ellen’s gaze. “I know George’s headstrong,” said Tempe, piteously showing the palm of her little hand. “Nobody knows better than I do — the oldest sister! He’s headstrong. Nobody has a bit of influence over him at all. But how can she think she’s fit to take him down, Old Man Swanson’s granddaughter? I could pull her eyes out this minute.”

“I had led myself to believe they were happy,” Ellen said. Vi’let was bringing the sugar on an unnecessarily big silver tray and Ellen watched her treat Tempe very specially and tell her how young and pretty she looked, not like no grandma, and she was going to bring her some of that cake. “ We’re not telling Dabney about this until the wedding’s over,” she continued, as Tempe sipped her lemonade.

“Pshaw! If Dabney’s old enough to marry the overseer out of her father’s fields, she’s old enough to know what George and every other man does or is capable of doing. I’ll tell her, the next time she dances in here.”

“Tempe,” said Ellen softly, “wait. Give Robbie just a little more time!”

“Robbie? Whose side are you on?”

“ I’m on George’s side. And Dabney’s side. George is the sweetest boy in the world, but I think now it’s up to Robbie. I think he’s left it up to her. Tempe, we don’t know — we don’t know anything.”

27

ELLEN walked to the window. Then she gave a cry: “Oh, who on earth can that be coming? Oh — it’s Troy. Here comes Dabney’s sweetheart, you all!” They peeped behind her.

“Don’t let him see us!”

“I believe to my soul he’s got red hair!” cried Tempe.

“Let’s us not move.” India put her eye on Laura and Roy, but Roy was reading and heard nothing.

“ I think he’s a very steady, good boy,” said Ellen. “And he’s going to learn.”

“That’s a bad sign if I ever heard one,” Tempe cried instantly. “My, he’s in a hurry about it too. Flavin is a peculiar name.”

“He doesn’t usually come that fast, does he?” Primrose whispered, as Troy leaped over little Ranny’s stick-horse in the drive and hurried toward the steps. “He’s bringing something. My, it looks like Aunt Studney’s sack, but of course it isn’t.”

“Let’s still don’t get up and look,” muttered India, lying flat.

“I wouldn’t have known him!” said Primrose.

“It’s bigger than Aunt Studney’s sack! Is old Aunt Studney dead yet?” asked Tempe, her fine brows meeting as she peered.

“ No, indeed,” Ellen said. “She still ‘ain’t studyin" us, either. She told Battle so yesterday, asking him for a setting of eggs. He’s at the door.”

“Here’s Troy!” cried Dabney’s voice. She was rushing down the stairs and letting him in.

Aunt Mac came through the parlor and by their sashes pulled the three ladies neatly away from the window, and went out again.

“You didn’t kiss me!” cried Dabney.

But Troy was pushing his way into the parlor, disheveled. “Look!” he said. “Everybody look! Did you ever think your mother could make something like this? My mammy made these, I’ve seen her do it. A thousand stitches! Look — these are for us, Dabney.”

“Quilts!” Dabney took his arm. “Shelley! Come in and look. Troy, come speak to Aunt Tempe — she’s come for the wedding, Papa’s sister from Inverness.”

But he flung her off and held up a quilt of jumpy green and blue. “‘Delectable Mountains,’” he said. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. I swear that’s the ‘Delectable Mountains.’ Do you see how any lady no higher’n a grasshopper ever sewed all those little pieces together? Look — ‘Dove in the Window.’ Where’s everybody?”

They all came forward and watched Troy spread out the quilts, snatch them together, spread them out again. “Wedding presents.” “They’re lovely!” “Get up off the floor, India, or you’ll get a quilt over you! ”

“She sent so many,” said Shelley, backing away a little each time she came forward.

“It gets cold in Tishomingo,” said Troy gravely.

“Couldn’t your mother come to the wedding, Troy?” asked Ellen gently. “We could send for her.” Even if his mother wrote to him, she had not been sure he wrote to his mother.

“ Not just to a wedding. If we had a baby or something, she’d scoot down.”

“What’s the name of this quilt?” asked Dabney, arms on her hips.

“Let’s see. I think it’s ‘Tirzah’s Treasure,’but it might be ‘Hearts and Gizzards.'”

“Didn’t you know either about George’s predicament?” Aunt Tempe said to Aunt Primrose across the room. “I’m glad somebody else didn’t know.”

“He told me when I came in. Bless his heart! She’ll come back,” Aunt Primrose said, looking around Troy’s arm.

“ Ma pieced that top of a snowy winter,” said Troy gravely staring, his eyes far away.

“I wish I could make something like that,” said Aunt Primrose gallantly.

“Not everybody can,” said Troy. “But ‘Delectable Mountains, ‘ that’s the one I aim for Dabney and me to sleep under most generally, warm and pretty.”

Aunt Tempe gave Ellen a long look.

“I think they are beautiful, useful wedding presents,” said Ellen. “Dabney will treasure them, I know. Dabney, you must write and thank Troy’s mother tonight.”

“Let her wait till she tries them out, Mrs. Fairchild,” said Troy. “That’s what will count with Mammy.”

Aunt Primrose darted her little hand out, as if the quill were hot and getting hotter, and Ellen and Dabney and Troy pulled it out taut in the air. The pattern shone and the ladies and Dabney all fluttered their eyelids as if the simple thing revolved while they held it.

“I’ve seen a plenty of cats bounced in quilts,”said Troy, hilarious with pride.

“Why? Poor little kitties,” murmured Aunt Primrose.

“Well, you know what it means if the cat landed in front of you — you’d be the next. To marry.” Then Troy’s face turned as red as fire: poor Aunt Primrose was an old maid. But Dabney giggled and put her arm around his.

“Look,” said Ellen. “Troy, there’s a paper pinned to this corner.”

“Oh, that’s Ma’s wish,” said Troy. “I noticed it.”

“She says here, ‘A pretty bride. To Miss Dabney Fairchild. The disappointment not to be sending a dozen or make a bride’s quilt in the haste. But send you mine. A long life. Manly sons, loving daughters, God willing!’ ”

“That’s Ma. She’ll freeze all winter.”

“Your pretty bride,” said Dabney, going around. “ How did she know I was pretty?”

“I don’t know,” said Troy. ”I didn’t tell her much.” He bent to her disbelieving kiss. “I guess you’d better get these off the floor and fold them nice, Dabney. And lay them on a long table with that other conglomeration for folks to come see.”

The dinner bell rang. Battle and the boys came in rosy and slicked, playing with the barking dogs. Laura ran through them, looking back, but they scarcely noticed her. Orrin had on his pompadour cap. George came down with Ranny riding him, knees on his shoulders. Ranny had the family telescope up to his eye, and turned it with both hands about the room, exclaiming.

“Who do you see in this room?” George was asking him quietly. “Do you see Mama having secrets with Aunt Primrose and Aunt Tempe and Aunt Jim Allen?” They went toward them.

“ Yes, sir! ”

“I always thought Robbie was a very strenuous girl,” said Aunt Primrose hesitantly, looking up at George.

“She’s direct,“ said Ellen.

“She has her cheek,” Tempe snapped, while Jim Allen was still asking pleadingly, “Who, who?”

“She has the nerve of a brass monkey,” said George, and Ranny crowed from his head. George’s forehead, nose, and cheeks were fiery from the sun; he seemed to be beaming at the sight of his sisters all gathered, with a midday fragrance of stuffed green peppers and something else floating over them like a spicy cloud.

28

THEY’RE both as direct as two blows on the head of a nail, George and Robbie, Ellen was thinking with surprise. George was so tenderhearted, his directness was something you forgot; when he was far away, in Memphis, she thought of him — as she always thought of the man or the woman — as at Robbie’s mercy. Robbie, anywhere, was being direct.

“I’ve racked my brains to think of something we can tell the Delta,” Tempe declared, with Ranny’s telescope turned on her.

“Tell the Delta about what?”

“About Robbie Reid, your wife,” said Tempe. “You have to tell the Delta something when your wife flies off and leaves you. Right at the point of another wedding! You should have thought of it when you married her, woke up the night. Ranny, is that the manners your Uncle George teaches you? That’s staring.”

“I don’t see Robbie,” Ranny said, turning George with his digging knees. He looked through the front window, out at the glare. “I just see Maureen chasing a bird, and Laura turning round and round in the yard.”

“Call them in,” growled Battle.

“Tell the Delta to go to Guinea,” said Ellen stoutly.

Aunt Mac came up the hall, her strong voice singing, belligerently sad, “O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son? . . . mother, make my bed soon.”

“Of course Mary Denis is thin as a rail. — Mercy! ” Tempe said to Lady Clare, who appeared too and circled round her, ecstatically walking on her knees and drinking something green. “Don’t you drink that in here. Ink? Take it on out, I can’t watch you.”

“Well, is everything all pretty near ready now?” Troy’s voice was asking.

“ I see Dabney kissing Troy,”Ranny announced.

“Oh, Troy, the altar rocks!” Dabney cried.

“Put a hammer in my hand, I’ll knock it into shape before we sit down to dinner.”

“I see Lady Clare drinking Shelley’s ink,” said Ranny dreamily.

“Lady Clare, you know what happens when you show off,” Aunt Primrose said, putting her finished bridesmaid’s mitt to her lips and biting the thread.

“She doesn’t care,” said Ranny, smiling, at the telescope. “She doesn’t care.”

“ I seem to hear the dinner bell,” said Aunt Jim Allen.

“Roy, close your book.” Ellen kissed the top of his head, and he looked up with sucked-in breath.

“Laura and Maureen,” said Battle, with the condensed roar in his fatherly voice carrying out the window, “will you obey me and come to the table before I skin you alive and shake your bones up together and throw the sack in the bayou? And Mary Lamar Mackey,” he said, to the other direction, “will your ditty wait?”

“Oh, Papa, you’re so hot!” said Shelley. She pulled at his starched coat sleeve and tried to kiss him, and he spanked her ahead of him to the table.

“Miss Priss! Do you love your papa, not forget him?”

“Naturally,” said Aunt Tempe, when Roy with his eyes bright told what George did, about the Yellow Dog on the trestle, “he did it for Denis.”

She smiled and fanned with the Chinese fan she brought from Inverness, nodding at them. Dabney, who loved her father and adored George, knew beyond question, when Aunt Tempe came and stated it like a fact of the weather, that it was Denis and always would be Denis that they gave the family honor to. She held Troy’s hand under the table and accepted it with a feeling not far from luxuriousness.

Denis was the one that looked like a Greek god, Denis who squandered away his life loving people too much, was too kind to his family, was torn to pieces by other people’s misfortune, married beneath him. threw himself away in drink, got himself killed in the war. It was Denis who gambled the highest, who fell the hardest when thrown by the most dangerous horse, who was the most delirious in his fevers, who went the farthest on his travels, who was the most beset. It was Denis who had read everything in the world and had the prodigious memory — not a word ever left him. Denis knew law, and could have told you the way Mississippi could be made the fairest place on earth to live, all of it like the Delta.

It was Denis that was ahead of his time and it was Denis that was out of the pages of a book too. Denis could have planted the world and made it grow. Denis knew what to do about high water, could have told you everything about the Mississippi River from one end to the other. Denis could have been anything and done everything, but he was cut off before his time. He could have one day married some beautiful girl worthy ot him (Mary Lamar Mackey would have grown up to him), leaving Virgie Lee (Denis’s choice was baffling, not to be too much brooded on) to somebody she would better have tried to live with; he would have had a beautiful child — a son — a second Denis, though not his father’s equal.

It was a shame on earth that Maureen, though George would naturally risk his life for her, was the only remnant of his body; she bore no more breath of resemblance to him than she did to, as Aunt Jim Allen always remarked, the King of Siam; if anything, she took after her mother, though her hair was light. It would be wrong to see in her dancing up and down any bit of Denis’s tender mischief or marvelous cavorting.

“These fields and woods are still full of Denis, full of Denis,” Tempe said firmly. “If I were to set foot out there by myself— though catch me! — I’d meet the spirit of Denis Fairchild, first thing, I know it.”

She looked pleased, Dabney thought, as if she were mollified that Denis was dead if his spirit haunted just where she knew. Not at large, not in transit any more, as in life, but fixed — tied to a tree. She pressed Troy’s hand, and he pressed back. Poor Denis! she thought all at once, while Maureen, eying her, stuck out her tongue through her smiling and fruit-filled mouth.

29

IT WAS morning, the day of the rehearsal. Roy ran out of the house and scattered some crumbs to the birds. Ellen saw him from her window — his face tender-eyed under the blocky, serious forehead and the light slept-on hair pushed to the side, with a darker shadow the size of a guinea egg under the crest. Alone in the yard, he said something to a bird. This was her last day with her daughter Dabney before she married. How she loved her sons, though!

“This is Dabney’s wedding rehearsal day,” Ellen said, turning to the old great-aunts, with Roxie by her offering them a second cup of black coffee while breakfast was getting ready.

“Gordon, dear, I’m hot,” said Aunt Shannon fretfully. She lay back with her soft black Mary Jane slippers crossed, on Aunt Mac’s chaise longue, frowning slightly at the mounted blue butterflies on the wall.

“She thinks none of the rest of us know it’s September,” growled Aunt Mac. She snapped her watch onto her bosom. “Nobody but Brother Gordon killed in the Battle of Shiloh. Foot!”

Aunt Mac was three years younger than Aunt Shannon. She had dyed black hair that she pulled down, spreading its thin skein as far as it would go, about her tiny, rosy-lobed ears. Little black ringlets bounced across her forehead as if they alone were her hair and the rest were a cap, an old-fashioned winter toboggan with a small fuzzy ball at the peak, which was her impatient knot. She was little with age. Somewhere, in mastering her dignity over life, she had acquired the exaggerated walk of a small boy, under her long black skirt, and went around Shellmound with her old, wine-colored lip stuck out as if she invited a dare. Her cheekbones like little gossamer-covered drums stood out in her face, on which rice powder twinkled when she sat in her place under the brightest lamp.

Her sharp, bright features looked out (though she was quite deaf now) as it she were indeed outdoors in her new cap, a bright boy or young soldier, stalking the territory of the wide world, looking for something to catch or may be let get away this time. She watched out; but very exactingly she dressed herself in mourning for her husband, Duncan Lawes, killed in the Battle of Corinth sixty years ago. A watch crusted with diamonds was always pinned to the little hollow of her breast, and she would make the children tell her the time by it, right or wrong. She whistled a tune sometimes, some vaguely militant or Presbyterian air that sounded archaic and perverse in a pantry, where she would sometimes fling open the cupboard doors to see how nearly starving they were.

Her smile, when it came, was soft. She gave a trifling hobble sometimes now when she walked, but it seemed to be a flourish, just to look busy. Her eyes were remarkable, stone-blue, and with all she had to do, she had read the Bible through nine times before she ever came to Shellmound and started it again there. She and her sister Shannon had brought up all James’s and Laura Allen’s children, when they had been left, from Denis aged twelve to George aged three, after their dreadful trouble; were glad to do it — widows!

And though Shannon drifted away sometimes in her mind and would forget where she was, and speak to her husband Lucian as if he had not started out to war to be killed, or to her brother Battle the same way, or her brother George as if he had been found and were home again, or to dead young Denis she had loved best — she, Mac, had never let go, never asked relenting from the present hour. And if anything should, God prevent it, happen to Ellen now, she was prepared to do it again, start in with young Battle’s children, and bring them up. She would start by throwing Troy Flavin in the bayou in front of the house and letting the minnows chew him up.

The two old sisters were not too congenial — had never been except for a little while when Battle’s generation were growing up and absorbing their time; and in recent years the belief on Aunt Shannon’s part that she was conversing with people whom Aunt Mac knew well to be dead seemed a freer development of the schism. Far back in Civil War days, Ellen had been told or had gathered, some ineradicable coolness had come between them — it seemed to have sprung front a jealousy between the sisters over which one agonized the more or the more abandonedly over the fighting brothers and husbands.

With the brothers and husbands every man killed in the end, the jealousy did not seem canceled by death, but extended by it; memory of fear and the keeping up of loyalty had its rivalries too — made them endless and now wholly desperate, for no good was ever to come of anguish any more, just as it never had when anguish was fresh. Aunt Shannon now, with her access to their soldier brothers Battle, George, and Gordon, as well as to James killed only thirty-three years ago in the duel, to her husband, Lucian Miles, and even to Aunt Mac’s husband, Duncan Lawes, was dwelling without shame in happiness and superiority over her sister.

Poor Aunt Mac did indeed seem to think less of her husband now, in spite ot herself (she made little flung-off remarks about his family, “Columbus newcomers”) when Aunt Shannon spoke casually to “Duncan, dearie,” and bent her head, as if he had come up behind her while she was knitting to give her a little kiss on the back of the neck, as indeed he had done often long ago.

“The wedding’s right here. Are we ready, Aunt

Mac?”

“ Duncan, dearie, there’s a scrap of nuisance’around here ought to be shot,” said Aunt Shannon, glancing sideways without stirring. “You’ll see him. Pinck Summers, he calls himself. Coming courting here.”

“ Duncan Lawes will shoot who I tell him, thank you,” said Aunt Mac. “Shannon, be ashamed of yourself for getting your time so mixed up. Vainest of the Fairchilds! Well, then, Ellen, go on to Dabney! Wake her up!”

30

BUT Dabney had ridden out on her red filly before any of them were awake, out through the early fields. Vi’let had not yet swept the night cobwebs from the doors, and she had dashed through shuddering, with fighting hands, and pushed open the back gate into the early eastern light which already felt warm and lapping against her face and arms. In her stall the little filly looked at her as if she were waiting for her early; there was a tremor to go, in her neck and side.

Howard’s little boy was sitting in the hay and he saddled the filly and put Dabney on and held the gate. She rode out looking back with her finger to her lips — Howard’s boy put finger to lips too, and jumped over the ditch watching her go. She thought she would ride out by herself one time. She had even come out without her breakfast, having eaten only what was in the kitchen, milk and biscuits and a bit of ham and a chicken wing, and a row of plums sitting in the window.

Flocks of birds flew up from the fields, the little horse went delightedly through the wet paths, breasting and breaking the dewy nets of spiderwebs. Opening morning-glories were turned like eyes on her pretty feet. The occasional fences smelled sweet, their darkened wood swollen with night dew like sap, and following her progress the bayou rustled within, ticked and cried. The sky was softly blue all over, the last rim of sunrise cloud melting into it like the foam on fresh milk.

With her whip lifted, Dabney passed Troy’s house, and passed through Mound Field and Far Field, through the Deadening, and on toward the trees, where the Yazoo was. Turning and going along up here, looking through the trees and across the river, you could see Marmion. Around the bend in the early light that was still night-quiet in the cypressy place, the little filly went confidently and fastidiously as ever.

Dabney bent her head to the low boughs, and then saw the house reflected in the Yazoo River—an undulant tower with white wings at each side, like a hypnotized swamp-butterfly, spread and dreaming where it alights. Then the house itself reared delicate and vast, with a strict tower, up from its reflection, and Dabney gazed at it, counting its rooms.

Marmion had been empty since the year it was completed, 1890, when its owner and builder, her grandfather, James Fairchild, was killed in the duel he fought with Old Ronald McBane, and his wife Laura Allen died brokenhearted very soon, leaving two poor Civil War-widowed sisters to bring up the eight children. They went back, though it crowded them, to the Grove; Marmion was too heartbreaking.

Honor, honor, honor, the aunts drummed into their ears, little Denis and Battle and George, Tempe and Annie Laurie, Rowena, Jim Allen and Primrose. To give up your life because you thought that much of your cotton — where was love, even, in that? Other people’s cotton. Fine glory! Dabney would not have done it. The eagerness with which she was now going to Marmion, entering her real life there with Troy, told her enough — all the cotton in the world was not worth one moment of life! It made her know that nothing could ever defy her enough to make her leave it.

How sweet life was, and how well she could hold it, pluck it, eat it, lay her cheek to it — oh, no one else knew. The juice of life and the hot, delighting taste and the fragrance and warmth to the cheek, the mouth. She hated the duel for her grandfather, actively, while the little horse trembled with impatience under her hand and hated being kept standing still. Everybody in the family had nearly forgotten the old duel by now (it was “bad about Marmion,” they “abandoned the place”) except Dabney, whom it had lately come to horrify. She would not leave Marmion, having once come to it, if there were duels for any cause.

What was the reason death could be part of a question about the crops, for instance? Yes, honor — she had been told when she asked questions as a little girl. Marmion was empty out in the woods because Old Ronald McBane at Old Argyle had not protected his landing where some of the people’s cotton for miles around was shipped from his gin. Grandfather, who had a gin too, had accused him of it, had been challenged and called out to pistols on the river bank, had been killed instantly. But both gins went on the same.

Dabney had always resisted and pouted at the story when any of the boys told it — when they said “Bang-bang!" she covered up her ears and wept, until they comforted her and gave her something for having made her cry. She knew, though, that even the surrender of life was the privilege of fieriness in the blood. She felt it in herself, but would anything ever make her tell, ever find it out? Not while she could resist and lament that dear life would surrender itself for anything.

31

THE sun lifted over the trees and struck the face of Marmion; all the tints of cypress began to shine on it, the brightness of age like newness. Her house! And somehow the river always seemed swift here, though it was the same river that passed through Fairchilds under the bridge where the cotton wagons went over as noisily as a child beating a tin pan, and passed the Grove where the aunts sat on the porch and cried for a breeze from it.

“ I will never give up anything!” Dabney thought. “Never! Never! For I am happy, and to give up nothing will prove it. I will never give up anything, never give up Troy — or to Troy!” She thought smilingly of Troy, coming slowly, — this was the last day, — slowly plodding and figuring, sprung all over with red-gold hairs. Shelley couldn’t stand him because he had hair in his ears. She called him Hairy Ears — Dabney smiled, biting her lip at that small torment. The truth was, slowness made any Fairchild frantic, and Dabney delighted now again in Troy’s slowness like a kind of alarm.

“ Papa never gave up anything,” she was thinking. “ I am the first thing Papa has ever given up. Oh, he hates it!” He would not tell her how he really felt about her going to Troy — nobody would. Nobody had ever told her anything — not anything very true or very bad in life. Proud and outraged together for the pampering ways of the Fairchilds, she put the little switch to her horse.

The rehearsal was tonight. If they didn’t say anything to her now, or try to stop her, it was their last chance. And let them! Just now, while they never guessed, she had seen Marmion — the magnificent temple-like, castle-like house, with the pillars springing naked from the ground, and the lookout tower, and twenty-five rooms, and inside, the wonderful free-standing stair-the chandelier, chaliced, golden in light, like the stamen in the lily downhanging. The garden, the playhouse, the maze — they had all been before her eyes when she was all by herself, even her own boat-landing!

Then after she got in and was living there married, she wanted it to rain, rain — sound on the roof like fall, like spring, bend the trees — and the lightning to glare and show them trembling, lifted, bent, comealive, the way trees looked from windows during storms at night. She wanted this to be outside; and inside, herself, sitting in dignity with her cheek-on her hand.

She rode by the thick woods where the whirlpool lay, and something made her get off her horse and creep to the bank and look in — she almost never did, it was so creepy and scary. This was a last chance to look before her wedding. She parted the thonged vines of the wild grapes, thick as legs, and looked in. There it was. She gazed, feasting her fear on the dark, vaguely stirring water.

There were more eyes than hers here — frog eyes, snake eyes? She listened to the silence and then heard it stir, churn, churning in the early morning. She saw how the snakes were turning and moving in the water, passing across each other just below the surface, and now and then a head horridly sticking up. The vines and the cypress roots twisted and grew together on the shore and in the water more thickly than any roots should grow, gray and red, and some roots too moved and floated like hair. On the other side, a turtle on a root opened its mouth and put its tongue out.

And the whirlpool itself—could you doubt it? Doubt all the stories since childhood of people white and black who had been drowned there — people that had been dared to swim in this place; and of boats that had ventured to the center of the pool begun to go around and disappeared? A beginning of vertigo seized her, until she felt herself leaning, leaning toward the whirlpool. But she was never as frightened of it as the boys were. She looked in while she counted to a hundred, and then ran.

Behind her the little filly had been stamping her foot. She mounted, and galloped back into the fields, the Deadening, Far Field, Mound Field, back to Shellmound. When she went under Troy’s window she drew the reins a moment and cried out rapidly, tauntingly, all run together like one word: —

Was he awake? Did he hear? She rode flying home, and began calling, “Mama! Roxie! Roxie! Papa!” How hungry she was!

32

SHELLEY!" Ellen called at the foot of the stairs.

“Ma’am?” came Shelley’s ladylike voice from around several corners in the upper regions. Where on earth was she?

“She’s painting her name on her trunk to go to Europe,” India said at her mother’s feet. She kept her informed about what everybody was doing at all times, which she knew though she herself, as now, might he cutting paper dolls out of the Delineator on the hall floor with Laura and Roxie’s little Sudie; she seemed truly the only one who knew.

“I want you to go to the store for me and get me a spool of strong string for Howard’s altar!” called Ellen in a patiently high voice. “The pony cart’s out front now — while it’s still a little cool. And go to Brunswick-town and take Partheny a cup of that broth Roxie’s pouring off, and tell her if she’s over being mindless to come up without fail to help in the kitchen! Tell her to be here tomorrow morning with the birds! You can take Laura and India with you,” she added in her normal voice. “Where’s Lady Clare?”

“On the joggling board, joggling,” said India.

“Yes’m, Mama! In a minute,” called Shelley. “I’m all covered with black!”

“We can go without Shelley,” said India, her face close to Laura’s. She poked her scissors at Laura’s heart. “We’ll go with each other.”

“Let me at the phone,” said Aunt Tempe, entering. “Pinck’s going to have to get me some little fluted paper salted-nut holders! It occurred to me in the garden — twelve silver ones won’t go anywhere. I’ll catch him at the Peabody!”

Nothing tired Ellen herself more than the spectacle of marital bullying, but it was the breath of life to Tempe, spectacle and all. She sailed among the children to the telephone, while little India smiled in the wake of her pleasure in demanding one more little old thing from Pinck.

George walked through, and the children all swept around him. Tempe took hold of him. Caught in their momentum, he looked out at Ellen perfectly still, as if from a train window.

“No, I’m going to the Grove and have dinner with Jim Allen and Primrose,” he was saying.

“ Today?” Tempe exclaimed.

“Has the wedding anything to do with today? That’s tomorrow.” He teased Tempe, but went out the front door. Through the side lights Ellen saw him stretch out in the porch hammock and lie as if asleep when Troy rode Isabelle up in the yard and called “Hi, George!” with his arm raised in that rather triumphant way. She waited a moment watching him, feeling that there was something radical in George, or that some devastating inner picture of their unnecessary ado would flash before his vision now and then.

There was an ascetic streak in him, even, she felt timidly. Left to himself, he might not ask for anything of any of them — not necessarily. No, she could not think that for more than a moment. He was too good. He would not wish them any way but the way they were. But she, herself, wished they could all be a little different on occasion, more aware of one another when they were all so close. They should know of one another’s rebellions, consider them. Why, children and all rebelled!

Laura and India were hunching down the steps like dwarfs together under the big black umbrella that completely obliterated their shadows down to their trotting feet.

“Wait-wait-wait!” cried Shelley. She ran flying out the door lacing her fresh middy and tying it with the impatient knot of a tomboy. Her hair from under her tight headband blew straight back in the wind. Her cheeks were both smudged with shiny black lacquer. She pretended not to see Uncle George, for she did not beg him to come or tell him good-bye.

“I had to finish my name,” she said to India and Laura. “Looks like you all could wait that long.”

She dipped between them and took the umbrella up to her height and tilted it stylishly. Three pairs of leg shadows jiggled on the grass. Above them, Roy was sitting on the roof and singing “My name is Samuel Hall and I hate you one and all, damn your eyes!”

“Just don’t look at him and he’ll come down,” said Shelley. “Now you can come with me, but don’t touch me.” They sat in the pony cart and Shelley drove Tiny down the road. India and Laura carefully held the umbrella over her and made faces behind her back. “I’m still full of breakfast,” Laura ventured.

No one on the street of Fairchilds spoke any way but beautifully-mannered to Shelley; all the men promptly swept off their hats. No one told her her face was dirty, and India was waiting until they got home to make her look in the glass. They drove up and down the street three times and had Coca-Colas, speaking to people over and over, with all the men’s hats going up and down. India cried joyously, “Hi, Miss Thracia! Hi, Miss Mayo! Oh, I’m so lonesome at Shellmound!” she sighed to Laura. “Miss Mayo has an oil painting that winks its eye.”

33

ANY member of the Fairchild family in its widest sense, who wanted to, could go into the store, walk behind the counter, reach in and take anything on earth, without having to pay or even specify exactly what he took. It was like the pantry at Shellmound. Anything was all right, since they were all kin.

And no matter what any of them could possibly want, it would be sure to be in the store somewhere; the only requirement was that it must be looked for. There was almost absolute surety of finding it. One day on the ledge with the hunting caps, India found a perfect china doll head to fit on the head of the doll she had broken the minute before.

At the moment nobody seemed to be keeping the store at all, except little Runny, whom Tippy must have set down in here to wait; smelling of violets, he was bouncing a ball in a cleared space, his soft voice going, ". . . 23, 24, last night, or the night before, twenty-four robbers at my back door —” There were some old fellows ninety years old sitting there around the cold stove, still as sleeping flies resting over a few stalks of sugar cane.

Laura, who loved all kinds of boxes and bottles, all objects that could keep and hold things, went gazing her fill through the store, and touching where she would. At first she thought she could find anything she wanted for a present for her Uncle George, on which she had set her heart. Along the tops of the counters were square glass jars with gold-topped stoppers — they held the kernels and flakes of seed and, just as likely, crusted-over wine-balls, licorice sticks, or pink-covered gingerbread stage-planks.

All around, at many levels, fishing boxes all packed, china pots with dusty little lids, cake stands with the weightiest of glass covers, buckels marked like a mackerel sky, dippers, churns, bins, hampers, baby baskets, popcorn poppers, cooky jars, butter molds, money safes, hair-receivers, mousetraps, held the purest enchantment for her. Once, last year, she had thrown her arms around the pickle barrel and seemed to feel a heavy, briny response in its nature, unbudging though it was. The pickle barrel was the heart of the store in summer, as in winter it was the stove that stood on a square stage in the back, with a gold spittoon on each corner.

The name of the stove was “ Kankakee,” written in raised iron writing by a hand unknown but a lady’s, and its breast was decorated with summer-cold iron flowers. The air was a kind of radiant haze, which disappeared into a dim blue among hanging boots above—a fragrant store-dust that looked like gold dust in the light from the screen door. Cracker dust and flour dust and brown-sugar particles seemed to spangle the air the minute you stepped inside. (And she thought, in the Delta all the air everywhere is filled, with things — it’s the shining dust that makes it look so bright.)

All was warm and fragrant here. The cats smelled like ginger when you rubbed their blond foreheads and clasped their fat yellow sides. Every counter smelled different, from the lady-like smell of the dry-goods counter, with its fussy revolving ball of string, to the man-like smell of coffee where it was ground in the back. There were areas of banana smell, medicine smell, rope and rubber and nail smell, bread smell, peppermint-oil smell, smells of feed, shot, cheese, tobacco, and chicory, and the smells of the old cane chairs creaking where the old fellows slept.

Objects stood in the aisle as high as the waist, so that you waded when you walked, or twisted like a cat. Other things hung from the rafters, to be touched and to swing at the hand when you gave a jump. Once Laura’s hand went out decisively and she almost chose something - a gold net of blue agates - for Uncle George. But she said, sighing, to Ranny running by, “I don’t see a present for Uncle George. Nothing you have is good enough!”

“... 9, 10, a big fat hen! ” Ranny cried at her, with a radiant, spitting smile.

But Shelley had stiffened the moment she entered the store. Sure enough, she could hear somebody crying, deep in the back. She went to look, her heart pounding. Robbie was sitting on the cashier’s stool, filling the store with angry and shameless tears, under a festoon of rubber boots. Shelley stood beside her, not speaking, but waiting — it was almost as if she had made her cry and was standing there to see that she kept on crying. Her heart pounded on.

Robbie’s tears shocked her for being unhesitant — for being plain, assertive weeping for a man; weeping out loud in the heart of Fairchilds, in the wide-open store that was more public than the middle of the road. Nothing covered up the sound except the skipping of Laura up and down, the little kissing sound of Ranny’s bouncing ball, and the snore of an old man. Shelley stood listening to that conceited fervor, and then Robbie raised her head and looked at her with the tears running down, and made an even worse face, deliberately — an awful face. Shelley fell back and flew out with the children. An old mother bird-dog lay right in the aisle, her worn teats flapping up and down as she panted — that was how public it was.

34

ROBBIE bared her little white teeth after Shelley Fairchild and whatever other Fairchilds she had with her. The flat in Memphis had heavy face-brick pillars and cement ornamental fern boxes across a red tile porch. It was right in town! The furniture was all bought in Memphis, shiny mahogany and rich velvet upholstery, blue with gold stripes, up and down which she would run her fingers, as she would in the bright water in a boat with George. There were soft pillows with golden tassels, and she would bite the tassels!

Two of the chairs were rockers to match the davenport and there were two tables — matching. The lamps matched, being of turned mahogany, and there were two tall ones and two short ones all with shades of mauve georgette over rose China silk. On the mantel, which was large and handsome and made of red brick, was a mahogany clock, very expensive and ticking very slowly. The candles in heavy wroughtiron holders on each side had gilt trimming and were too pretty to be lighted.

There were several Chinese ash trays about. (Oh, George’s pipe!) The rugs were both very fine, and she and George went barefooted. The black wroughtiron firescreen, andirons, and poker set were the finest in Memphis. Every door was a French door, the floors were hardwood, highly waxed, and yellow.

His books had never a speck of dust on them, such as the Shellmound books were covered with if you touched them. His law books weighed a lot, and she carried them in her arms one by one when she moved them from table to chair to see all was perfect, dusted. She was a perfect housekeeper with only one Negro, and one more to wash. How fresh her curtains were! Even in the dirtiest place in the world: Memphis.

Only the bedroom was still not the way she wanted it. She really wanted a Moorish couch such as Agnes Ayres had lain on in the picture show, but a mahogany bed would come in a set with matching things and she knew that would please George, new and shiny and expensive. Just yet they had an old iron bed with a lot of thin rods head and foot, and she had painted it. There were unnoticeable places where the paint had run down those hard rods, that had never quite got dry, and when George went away on a case or was late coming home she would lie there indenting these little rivers of paint with her thumbnail very gently, to kill time, the way she would once hold rose petals on her tongue and gently bite them, waiting here in the store, the days when he courted.

They lived on the second floor of a nice, two-story flat, and nobody bothered them. The living room faced the river with two windows. In front of those she had the couch so that they could lie there listening to the busy river life and watching the lighted boats on summer nights. As long as they stayed without going to bed they could hear colored bands playing from here and there, never far away. The little hairs on her arm would rise, to think where she was. Then they would dance barefooted and drink champagne, and sometimes in the middle of the day they would meet by appointment in the New Peabody by the indoor fountain with live pure Mallard ducks in it!

“Give me some of that slick-back stuff for my hair,” said a man in front of her. It was Troy Flavin, the Fairchild overseer, with his red hair surely down in his eyes.

“I’m not waiting on people, I’m just, waiting. Looking for somebody,” she said, opening her own eyes wide, expecting him to see who she was.

“Oh, I beg your pardon. Who’re you looking for, ma’am?” Troy asked. Suddenly he swept off his straw hat and fanned her face with it, vigorously. When she bent away he held her straight on the stool and fanned her firmly as if he were giving her medicine. “Is it the heat? Who’re you looking for?” He didn’t know her at all yet, and maybe the heat had him.

“None of your business! Well, all right, I’ll tell you. For George Fairchild, then!”

“You asked the right one. I know him good,” He put his head on one side as if he talked to some child. “Why didn’t you ask me somebody hard, from the way you’re about to cry?”

“I’m not! Where is he?”

“Could put my finger on George Fairchild this minute. I’m marrying into that family, eight o’clock tomorrow night. You look familiar.”

“Not Shelley! Oh — Dabney!” She began to laugh. “Don’t you know me? I’m Robbie Fairchild. I’m George’s wife.”

Miss Thracia Leeds came into the store and fingered over the ribbon counter, like a pianist over trills. “Why, hello, Robbie, are you back at the store?”

“It’s a small world,” said Troy. “Well, he’s right there at Shellmound in the porch hammock, if you want him. His wife? You look like you’ve been to Jericho and back, so dusty.”

“I’ve been leaving him — that’s what I’ve been doing. If anybody wondered!”

“In the porch hammock, he is,” said Troy. “Dabney’s who I’m marrying — you know, Mr. Battle’s girl. Not. the oldest—the prettiest. High-strung sometimes, though!”

“High-strung!” said Miss Thracia with much sarcasm.

“But they’re all high-strung. Ready to jump out of their skins if you don’t mind out how you step. 'Course, it would be worse for a girl, marrying into them.”

“I didn’t marry into them! I married George!” and she beat his hat away, as though he had brought some insufferably old argument into her face.

“Well, it’s a close family,” Troy said laconically, catching his hat. “Too close, could be.”

“A family can’t be too close, young man,”said a new voice. Miss Mayo Tucker had come in.

Robbie wept and laughed gently on her stool, and Troy put his hand over her flushed forehead as if trying to feel there how dangerously close the Fairchilds were. Miss Maggie Kinkaid stood behind Miss Mayo and asked Robbie, if she had come back to work, if she would give her a new nest egg, since the other one broke.

“I might have known! I might have known he wouldn’t hunt for me. I could kill him ! Right back at. Shellmound in a hammock,”Robbie cried. “I thought he would drag the river, even.”

“Drag which river? Why, Dabney wanted George here to stand up with me at the wedding. That’s why he’s here,” said Troy, looking down at her in concern. “Dabney sent for him. He’s my what-youcall-it — best man. They didn’t care for Buster Daggett for that, friend of mine in Fairchilds City, ice and coal.”

“Buster Daggett, I don’t wonder.” remarked Miss Mayo. “Rohbie, did I hear you’d run away, and George Fairchild used to beat you unmercifully every whipstitch, in Memphis? Cut me off a yard of black sateen, child, you’re right at it.”

Robbie laughed and brushed at her eyes. “Dabney’s marrying — marrying you? You’re the overseer out there.”

“Yes, ma’am, Troy Flavin, that’s me. The overseer — how’d you know?”

“We’ve met, " said Robbie with energy. “Don’t you remember me on the trestle — that day? I remember you. All you did was keep looking up at the sky and saying, 'Why don’t she storm?'”

“And she didn’t?” Troy slapped his thigh in delight, after a moment. “That day! I don’t remember but one thing! I got engaged up yonder!”

“You got engaged, and George Fairchild missed by a hair letting the Yellow Dog run over him for the sake of a little idiot child! Never thinking of me!”

Robbie with furious neatness cut off a yard of sateen, tied it up, and rang up thirty cents on the cash register. “You’re Robbie, George’s wife. People’ve been asking about you, sure! Didn’t connect anything, though,” said Troy. “Well, you’re just in time.”

“I bet it’s a big wedding and all. Did Miss Tempe make herself come? How’s Mary Denis?” asked Miss Thracia.

“They’ve come from far and near, Fairchilds.” said Troy mechanically. “Mary Denis is thin as a rail. You could have been too late.” He gave Robbie a smile and gently reversed the fanning hat and fanned himself. “For the wedding.”

“Me! Who’s going to invite me?”

“I invite you,” said Troy. “Now I’ve invited me somebody.” He stared at her. Then he put his hat, carefully, over her head to make her laugh, and spread a big hand sprinkled with red hair over each of her shoulders.

“ Which way is this? Set me straight. Did you run off and leave George, or did he run off and leave you? I believe those Fairchild men are great consorters,” said Miss Mayo. “Does he make any money in the law business? It’s bad luck for a girl to put a man’s hat on.”

“It would be fun to walk in during it, and make George and everybody jump,” Robbie said, looking up at Troy and smiling for the first time, under the yellow brim.

“What! Not during the wedding!”

“Oh, look at me forget about, you being there.”

“It would cause a stir. Furthermore, I’d be scared of Aunt Mac. Why don’t you go walk in now? What’s keeping you, if you’re going in the end, like I say to myself?”

“Do you mean to say, Robbie Reid, you had gone off and left George Fairchild and now you’re just coming back?” said Miss Thracia. “I know what he ought to do to you.”

“Must I go now, and push him out of the hammock?” said Robbie softly. Her eyelids fell, as if she were about to go to sleep. Tears ran down her face.

“That sounds better than the other,” said Troy. She jumped off the stool. “I rather you didn’t shoot up my wedding. We’re next thing to kin, so go wash your face.”

She gave him back his hat and he stood holding it politely.

“And to tell you the truth,”he said when she came in from the little back porch with a clean face, “I feel without doubt you ought to be getting somewhere near your husband, not sitting here baking by yourself in this hot store.”

Robbie went out, past Miss Thracia, Miss Maggie, and Miss Mayo, fluffing her hair. “See if you think she’s going to have a baby,”said Miss Maggie. “I wonder if it will be a boy or girl and how they’ll divide up the land in that case.”

“She’s not,”said Miss Mayo definitely.

With a start Troy went to the door and looked up and down the street. “I forgot to wonder how she’d git there,”he said.

(To be continued)