Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty Read Free Book Online Page B

it his face crumpled—with a loud squall he went with arms straight out to Uncle George, who stopped and let him cry a minute. And then the other little Negro sat up off the ground, the small black pole of his chest striped with the shirt bandage, and climbed up to him too and began to holler, and he knelt low there holding to him the two little black boys who cried together melodiously like singers, and saying, still worriedly, "Damn you! Damn you both!" Then what did he do to them? He asked them their names and let them go. They had gone flying off together like conspirators. Dabney had never forgotten which two boys those were, and could tell them from the rest—Man-Son worked for them yet and was a good Negro, but his brother, the one with the scar on his neck, had given trouble, so Troy had got his way when he came, and her father had let him go.
    When George turned around on the bayou, his face looked white and his sunburn a mask, and he stood there still and attentive. There was blood on his hands and both legs. He stood looking not like a boy close kin to them, but out by himself, like a man who had stepped outside—done something. But it had not been anything Dabney wanted to see him do. She almost ran away. He seemed to meditate—to refuse to smile. She gave a loud scream and he saw her there in the field, and caught her when she ran at him. He hugged her tight against his chest, where sweat and bayou water pressed her mouth, and tickled her a minute, and told her how sorry he was to have scared her like that. Everything was all right then. But all the Fairchild in her had screamed at his interfering—at his taking part—
caring
about anything in the world but them.
    What things did he know of? There were surprising things in the world which did not surprise him. Wonderfully, he had reached up and caught the knife in the air. Disgracefully, he had taken two little black devils against his side. When he had not even laughed with them all about it afterwards, or told it like a story after supper, she was astonished, and sure then of a curious division between George and the rest. It was all something that the other Fairchilds would have passed by and scorned to notice—hadn't Denis, even?—that yet went to a law of his being, that came to it, like the butterfly to his sight. He could have lifted a finger and touched, held the butterfly, but he did not. The butterfly he loved, the knife not. The other Fairchilds never said but one thing about George and Denis, who were always thought of together—that George and Denis were born sweet, and that they were not born sweet. Sweetness then could be the visible surface of profound depths—the surface of all the darkness that might frighten her. Now Denis was dead. And George loved the
world
, something told her suddenly. Not them! Not them in particular.

    "Man-Son, what do you mean? You go get to picking!" she cried. She trembled all over, having to speak to him in such a way.
    "Yes'm, Miss Dabney. Wishin' you'n Mr. Troy find you happiness."
    They rode across the railroad track and on. The fields shone and seemed to tremble like a veil in the light. The song of distant pickers started up like the agitation of birds.
    "Look pretty. Here we are," said India.
    They were riding by the row of Negro houses and the manager's house. The horses lifted their noses, smelling the river. Little Matthew saw them and opened the back gate, swinging on it, and ran after them to help them off Junie and Rob. He put his little flat nose against the horses' long noses and spoke to them. Dabney and India loaded him up. Great-Grandmother's magnolia, its lower branches taken root, spread over them. Only bits of sunlight, bright as butterflies, came through the dark tree.

    The house at the Grove, a dove-gray box with its deep porch turned to the river breeze, stood under shade trees with its back to the Shellmound road. It was a cypress house on brick pillars