Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty Read Free Book Online

splash.
    They rode through the Far Field and into the pasture where three mules were looking out together from a green glade. The sedge was glowing, the round meadow had a bloom like fruit, and the sweet gums were like a soft curtain beyond, fading into the pink of the near sky. Here the season showed. Queen Anne's lace brushed their feet as they rode, and the tight green goldenrod knocked at them. She seemed to hear the rustle of the partridgy shadows.
    Sometimes, Dabney was not so sure she was a Fairchild—sometimes she did not care, that was it. There were moments of life when it did not matter who she was—even where. Something, happiness—with Troy, but not necessarily, even the happiness of a fine day—seemed to leap away from identity as if it were an old skin, and that she was one of the Fairchilds was of no more need to her than the locust shells now hanging to the trees everywhere were to the singing locusts. What she felt, nobody knew! It would kill her father—of course for her to be a Fairchild was an inescapable thing, to him. And she would not take anything for the relentless way he was acting, not wanting to let her go. The caprices of his restraining power over his daughters filled her with delight now that she had declared what she could do. She felt a double pride between them now—it tied them closer than ever as they laughed, bragged, reproached each other and flaunted themselves. While her mother, who had never spoken the first word against her sudden decision to marry or questioned her wildness for Troy or her defiance of her father's wishes, in the whole two weeks, somehow defeated her. Dabney and her mother had gone into shells of mutual contemplation—like two shy young girls meeting in a country of a strange language. Perhaps it was only her mother's condition, thought Dabney, shaking her head a little. Only when she forgot herself, flashed out in the old way, shed tears, and begged her pardon, did Dabney feel again in her mother's quick kiss, like a peck, her watchfulness, the kind of pity for children that mothers might feel always until they were dead, reassuring to the mother and the little girl together.
    Troy treated her like a Fairchild—he still did; he wouldn't stop work when she rode by even today. Sometimes he was so standoffish, gentle like, other times he laughed and mocked her, and shook her, and played like fighting—once he had really hurt her. How sorry it made him! She took a deep breath. Sometimes Troy was really ever so much like a Fairchild. Nobody guessed that, just seeing him go by on Isabelle! He had not revealed very much to her yet. He would—that dark shouting rider would throw back the skin of this very time, of this moment.... There would be a whole other world, with other cotton, even.
    It was actually Uncle George who had shown her that there was another way to be—something else.... Uncle George, the youngest of the older ones, who stood in—who was—the very heart of the family, who was like them, looked like them (only by far, she thought, seeing at once his picnic smile, handsomer)—he was different, somehow. Perhaps the heart always was made of different stuff and had a different life from the rest of the body. She saw Uncle George lying on his arm on a picnic, smiling to hear what someone was telling, with a butterfly going across his gaze, a way to make her imagine all at once that in that moment he erected an entire, complicated house for the butterfly inside his sleepy body. It was very strange, but she had felt it. She had then known something he knew all along, it seemed then—that when you felt, touched, heard, looked at things in the world, and found their fragrances, they themselves made a sort of house within you, which filled with life to hold them, filled with knowledge all by itself, and all else, the other ways to know, seemed calculation and tyranny.
    Blindly and proudly Dabney rode, her