Free Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty Page B

"Oh, Battle." She looked from one to the other, then went to watch helplessly at the darkening window, where they could hear the horses coming. "Here's Dabney."

    As Dabney and India rode in, Uncle George was coming down the front steps to meet them. He always met them like that, and they could tell him from anybody in the world. He called Dabney's name across the yard; his white shirt sleeve waved in the dark. He helped them down with the night light, and Dabney took it from him with a little predatory click of the tongue.
    "Everything's fine with you, I hear," said George. "Troy's in the house," and Dabney brushed against him and kissed him.
    India saw Troy—he was a black wedge in the lighted window.
    "It's all right," Dabney said, coolly enough, and ran up the steps.
    But they heard it—running, she dropped the little night light, and it broke and its pieces scattered. They heard that but no cry at all—only the opening and closing of the screen door as she went inside.
    India ran up to Uncle George and flung herself against his knees and beat on his legs. She could not stop crying, through Uncle George himself stayed out there holding her and in a little began teasing her about a little old piece of glass that Dabney would never miss.

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    It was so hard to read at Shellmound. There was so much going on in real life. Laura had tried to read under the bed that morning, but Dabney had found her and pulled her out by the foot. Now with Volume I of
Saint Ronan's Well
inside her pinafore, next to her skin, she went tiptoeing in the direction of the library, where no one ever went at this hour. She could hear nothing, except the sounds of the Negroes, and the slow ceiling fan turning in the hall, and the submissive panting of the dogs just outside under the banana plants, lying up close to the house. Even Mary Lamar Mackey had gone to Greenwood.
    Laura generally hesitated just a little in every doorway. Jackson was a big town, with twenty-five thousand people, and Fairchilds was just a store and a gin and a bridge and one big house, yet she was the one who felt like a little country cousin when she arrived, appreciating that she had come to where everything was dressy, splendid, and over her head. Demonically she tried to be part of it—she took a breath and whirled, went ahead of herself everywhere, then she would fall down a humiliated little girl whose grief people never seemed to remember. The very breath of preparation in the air, drawing in or letting out, hurried or deep and slow, made Dabney's wedding seem as fateful in the house as her mother's funeral had been, and she knew the serenity of this morning moment was only waiting for laughter or tears.
    Even from the door, the library smelled of a tremendous dictionary that had come through high water and fire in Port Gibson and had now been left open on a stand, probably by Shelley. On the long wall, above the piles of bookcases and darker than the dark-stained books, was a painting of Great-Great-Uncle Battle, whose name was written on the flyleaf of the dictionary. It was done from memory by his brother, Great-Grandfather George Fairchild, a tall up-and-down picture on a slab of walnut, showing him on his horse with his saddlebags and pistols, pausing on a dark path between high banks, smiling not down at people but straight out into the room, his light hair gone dark as pressed wildflowers. His little black dogs, that he loved as a little boy, Great-Grandfather had put in too. Did he look as if he would be murdered? Certainly he did, and he was. Side by side with Old Battle's picture was one of the other brother, Denis, done by a real painter, changelessly sparkling and fair, though he had died in Mexico, "marching on a foreign land." Behind the glass in the bookcases hiding the books, and out on the tables, were the miniatures in velvet cases that opened like little square books themselves. Among them were Aunt Ellen's poor mother (who had married some