100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1948 EUDORA WELTY. The Whole World Knows from Harper’s Bazaar

EUDORA WELTY (1909–2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She attended graduate school at Columbia University during the Great Depression, but was unable to find a job in New York, so she moved back to Jackson and began work at a radio station and a newspaper. She later took a job as a publicist with the Works Progress Administration, gathering material that documented stories about the people of Mississippi. At the same time she assembled a group of writers and composers, which she called the Night-Blooming Cereus Club.

In 1941 Welty roomed with Katherine Anne Porter and the two became great friends. A Curtain of Green, published the same year, was Welty’s first collection of short stories. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship grant, which enabled her to travel to Europe. She later lectured at Harvard University and gathered her speeches in One Writer’s Beginnings. Her works of fiction include Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Collected Stories, and Losing Battles. Series editor Martha Foley described Welty’s fiction as “gentler, less macabre in her presentation of grotesque characters than many of her Southern contemporaries.”

Welty won a Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter. Over the course of her career, she also received numerous O. Henry Awards, a National Book Award, a National Medal of Arts, and the French Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, among many other honors.

★

MOTHER SAID, Where have you been, son? — Nowhere, mother. — I wish you wouldn’t look so unhappy, son. You could come back to me, now. — I can’t do that, mother. I have to stay in Sabina.

When I locked the door of the Sabina Bank I rolled down my sleeves and stood for some time looking out at a cotton field across the way until the whiteness nearly put me to sleep and then woke me up like a light turned on in my face. Dugan had been gone a few minutes or so. I got in my car and drove it up the street, turned it around in the foot of Jinny’s driveway (there went Dugan), and drove down again. I backed in a cotton field at the other end of the pavement, turned, and made the same trip. You know — the thing everybody does every day.

There was Maideen Summers on the corner waving a little colored handkerchief. She was at first the only stranger — then finally not much of one. When I didn’t remember to stop I saw the handkerchief slowly fall still. I turned again, and picked her up.

“Dragging Main?” she said. She was eighteen years old. She promptly told you all those things. “Look! Grown-up and citified,” she said, and held both hands toward me. She had brand new white cotton gloves on — they shone. Maideen would ride beside me and talk about things I didn’t mind hearing about — the ice plant, where she kept the books. Fred Killigrew her boss, the way working in Sabina seemed after the country and junior college. Her first job — her mother could hardly believe it, she said. It was so easy, too, out in the world, and nice, with getting her ride home with me sometimes like this and not on the dusty bus — except Mr. Killigrew sometimes wanted her to do something at the last minute — guess what today — and so on.

She said, “This sure is nice. I didn’t think you saw me, Ran, not at first.”

I told her my eyes had gone bad. She looked sorry. I drove, idling along, up and down Main Street a few times more. Each time the same people, Miss Callie Hudson and all, the people standing in the store doors or riding in the other cars, waved at my car, and to them all, Maideen waved back — her little blue handkerchief was busy. Their avidity would be far beyond her. She waved at them as she did at me.

“Are you tired out like you were yesterday? Today’s just as hot.”

She knew what anybody in Sabina told her; and for four or five afternoons I had picked her up and taken her up and down the street a few turns, bought her a Coca-Cola and driven her home out by the Old Murray Forks somewhere, and she had never said a word except a kind one, like this. She was kind; her company was the next thing to being alone.

I drove her home and then drove back to the room I had at Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s — usually, but on this day, there at the end of the pavement, I turned up the cut to the Stark place. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

Maideen didn’t say anything until we reached the top of the drive and stopped, and I got out and opened her door.

“Do you want to take me in yonder?” she said. “Please, I’d just as soon you wouldn’t.”

All at once her voice came all over me. It had a kind of humility.

“Sure. Let’s go in and see Jinny. Why not?” I couldn’t stand it any longer, that was why. “I’m going and taking you.”

It wasn’t as if Colonel Waters didn’t say to me every afternoon, Come on home with me, boy — argue, while he forced that big Panama down on his head — no sense in your not sleeping cool, with one of our fans turned on you. Mabel says so, Mabel has something to say to you — and he waited a minute in the door before he left, and held his cane (the one Dugan and I had gone in together to buy him because he was president), up in the air as if he threatened me with comfort, until I answered him No Sir.

With Maideen, I walked around the baked yard to the porch, under the heavy heads, the too-bright blooms that hang down like fruits from the trees — crape myrtles. Jinny’s mama, I saw, put her face to her bedroom window first thing, to show she’d marched right upstairs at the sight of Randall MacLain coming to her door, bringing who-on-earth with him too. After daring to leave her daughter and right on Easter Sunday before church. Now right back to her door, big as you please. And her daughter Jinny, Virginia, who once Shared His Bed, sent straight into the arms of Trash by what he did. One thing — it was Jinny’s family home after all, her mother still kept alive to run it, grand old Mrs. Stark, and this outrage right under her nose. The curtain fell back, as on a triumph.

“I’ve never been invited to the Stark home,” Maideen said, and I began to smile. I felt curiously lighthearted. Lilies must have been in bloom somewhere near, and I took a full breath of their water smell as determinedly as if then consciousness might go, or might not.

Out in the front hall, Jinny stood with her legs apart, cutting off locks of her hair at the mirror. The locks fell at her feet. She had on boy’s shorts. She looked up at me and said “How do you like it?” She grinned, as if she had been preparing for me, and then she looked past my shoulder. She would know, with her quickness like foreknowledge, that I would come back when this summer got too much for me, and that I would just as soon bring a stranger if I could find one, somebody who didn’t know a thing, into the house with me when I came.

I remember Maideen looked down at her gloves, and seemed to decide to keep them on. Jinny hollered at Tellie to bring in some cokes. A spell of remoteness, a feeling of lightness, had hold of me still, and as we all stood on that thin light matting in the Stark hall that seems to billow a little if you take a step, and with Jinny’s hair lying on it, I saw us all in the mirror. And I could almost hear it being told right across me — our story, the fragment of what happened, Jinny’s and my story, as if it were being told — told in the clear voice of Maideen, rushing, unquestioning — the town words. Oh, this is what Maideen Summers was — telling what she looked at, repeating what she listened to — she was like an outlandish little bird, being taught, some each day, to sing a song people made… He walked out on her and moved three blocks away down the street. Now everybody’s wondering when he’ll try to go back. They say Jinny MacLain’s got her sweetheart there. Under her mama’s nose. Good thing her father’s dead and she has no brothers. Sure, it’s Lonnie Dugan, the other one at the bank, and you knew from the start, if it wasn’t Ran, who else in Sabina would there be for Jinny Stark? They don’t say how it happened, does anybody know? At the circle, at the table, at Mrs. Judge’s, at Sunday School, they say, they say she will marry the sweetheart if he’ll marry her, but Ran will kill someone if she does. And there’s Ran’s papa died of drink, remember, remember? They say Ran will do something bad. He won’t divorce her but he will do something bad. Maybe kill them all. They say Jinny’s not scared. And oh you know, they say, they run into each other every day of the world, all three. Poor things! But it’s no surprise. There’ll be no surprises. How could they help it if they wanted to help it, how could you get away from anything here? You can’t get away in Sabina. Away from anything.

Maideen held the tinkling glass in her white glove and said to Jinny, “I look too tacky and mussed when I work all day to be coming in anybody’s strange house.”

She looked like Jinny—she was an awkward version of Jinny. Jinny, “I look too tacky and mussed when I work all day to be always revealed contamination. I knew it after the fact, so to speak — and was just a bit pleased with myself.” I don’t mean there was anything of mockery in Maideen’s little face — no — but something of Jinny that went back early — to whatever original and young my Jinny would never be now. The breeze from that slow ceiling fan lifted their hair from their temples, like the same hand — Maideen’s brown hair long and Jinny’s brown hair short, ruined — she ruined it herself, as she liked doing.

Maideen was so still, so polite, but she glowed with something she didn’t know about, there in the room with Jinny. She took on a great deal of unsuspected value. It was like a kind of maturity all at once. They sat down in wicker chairs and talked to each other. With them side by side and talking back and forth, it seemed to reward my soul for Maideen to protest her fitness to be in the house. I would not have minded how bedraggled she would ever get herself. I relaxed, leaned back in my chair and smoked cigarettes. But I had to contain my sudden interest; it seemed almost too funny to be true, their resemblance. I was delighted with myself, most of all, to have been the one to make it evident. I looked from Jinny to Maideen (of course she didn’t guess) and back to Jinny and almost expected praise — praise from somewhere — for my true vision.

There were knocking sounds from outside — croquet again. Jinny was guiding us to the open door (we walked on her hair) where they were slowly moving across the shade of the backyard — Doc Short, Vera and Red Lassiter, and the two same schoolteachers — with Lonnie Dugan striking a ball through the wicket. I watched through the doorway and the crowd seemed to have dwindled a little. I could not think who was out. It was myself.

Mother said, Son, you’re walking around in a dream.

Bella, Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s little dog, panted sorrowfully all the time — she was sick. I always went out in the yard and spoke to her. Poor Bella, how do you do, lady? Is it hot, do they leave you alone?

Mother said, Where have you been, son? — Not anywhere, mother. — I wish you wouldn’t look so peaked. And you keep things from me, son. — I haven’t been anywhere, where would I go? — If you came back with me, everything would be just like it was before. I know you won’t eat at Mrs. Judge’s table, not her biscuit.

When the bank opened, Miss Callie Hudson came up to my window and hollered, Randall, when are you coming back to your precious wife? You forgive her, now, you hear? That’s no way to do, bear grudges. Your mother never bore your father a grudge in her life, and he made her life right hard, I tell you, how do you suppose he made her life? She didn’t bear him a grudge. We’re all human on earth. Where’s little old Lonnie, now, has he stepped out, or you done something to him? I still think of him as a boy in knee breeches and Buster Brown bob, riding the ice wagon, stealing ice — your lifelong playmate, Jinny’s lifelong playmate — a little common but so smart. Ah, I’m a woman that’s been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then. But you march on back to your wife, Ran MacLain. You hear? It’s a thing of the flesh, not the spirit, it’ll pass. Jinny’ll get over this in three, four months maybe. You hear me? And you go back nice. No striking about now and doing anything we’ll all be shamed to hear about. I know you won’t. I knew your father, was crazy about your father, just as long as he could recognize me, love your mother. Sweetest people in the world, most happily mated people in the world. Go home and tell your mother I said so. And you march back to that precious wife. March back and have you some chirren. How long has it been? How long? What day was it you tore the house down, Christmas or Easter? I said Easter, Mr. Hudson said Christmas — who was right? My Circle declares she’ll get a divorce and marry Lonnie but I say not. Thing of the flesh, I told Mr. Hudson. Won’t last. And they’ve known each other a hundred years! The Missionary Circle said you’d kill him and I said, You all, who are you talking about? If it’s Ran MacLain that I knew in his buggy, I said he’s the last person I know to take on to that extent. I laughed. And little Jinny. I had to laugh at her. Says — I couldn’t help it. I says, How did it happen, Jinny, tell old Miss Callie, you monkey, and she says, Oh Miss Callie, I don’t know — it just happened, she says, sort of across the bridge table. I says across the bridge table my foot. Jinny told me yesterday on the street, Oh, she says, I just saw Ran. I hope Ran won’t cherish it against me, Jinny says. I have to write my checks on the Sabina Bank, and Lonnie Dugan works in it, right next to Ran. And we’re all grown up, not little children any more. And I says I know, how could you get away from each other if you tried, you could not. It’s an endless circle. That’s what a thing of the flesh is. And you won’t get away from that in Sabina or hope to. Even our little town. Jinny was never scared of the Devil himself as a growing girl, and shouldn’t be now. And Lonnie Dugan won’t ever quit at the bank, will he? Can’t quit. But as I said to Mr. Hudson — they’re in separate cages. All right, I said to Mr. Hudson, look. Jinny was unfaithful to Ran — that’s what it was. There you have what it’s all about. That’s the brunt of it. Face it, I told Mr. Hudson. You’re a train man — just a station agent, you’re out of things. I don’t know how many times.

But I’d go back to my lawful spouse! Miss Callie hollers at me through the bars. You or I or the man in the moon got no business living in that little hot upstairs room with a western exposure at Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s for all the pride on earth, not in August.

After work I was always staying to cut the grass in Mrs. Judge’s backyard, so it would be cooler for Bella. It kept the fleas away from her a little. None of it did much good. The heat held on. After I went back to the Starks, the men were playing, still playing croquet with a few little girls, and the women had taken off to themselves, stretched out on the screen porch. They called Maideen, I sent her in to them. It was the long Mississippi evening, the waiting till it was cool enough to eat. The voice of Jinny’s mama carried — I heard it — her reminiscent one — but the evening was quiet, very hot and still.

Somebody called, You’re dead on Lonnie. It was just a little Williams girl in pigtails.

I may have answered with a joke. I felt lighthearted, almost not serious at all, really addressing a child, as I lifted my mallet — the one with the red band that had always been mine. I brought Dugan to earth with it. He went down and shook the ground, fanning the air as he went. He toppled and sighed. Then I beat his whole length and his head with that soft girl’s hair and all the schemes, beat him without stopping my mallet till every bone and little bone, all the way down to the little bones in the hand, flew to pieces. I beat Lonnie Dugan till there was nothing to know there. And I proved the male body — it has a too certain, too special shape to it not to be hurt — could be finished and done away with — with one good loud blow after another — Jinny could be taught that. I looked at Dugan down there. And his blue eyes remained unharmed. Just as sometimes bubbles a child blows seem the most impervious things, and grass blades will go through them and they still reflect the world, give it back unbroken. Dugan I declare was dead.

“Now watch.”

Dugan said that. He spoke with no pain. Of course he never felt pain, never had time to. But that absurd, boyish tone of competition was in his voice. It had always been a mystery, now it was a deceit. Dugan — born nothing. Dugan — the other boy at the dance, the other man in the bank, the other sweetheart in Sabina, Jinny’s other man — it was together he and I made up the choice. Even then it was hard to believe — we were the choice in everything. But if that was over, settled — how could it open again, the destroyed mouth of Dugan? And I heard him say “Now watch.” He was dead on the ruined grass. But he had risen up. Just then he gave one of the fat little Williams girls a spank. I could see it and not hear it, the most familiar sound in the world.

There was that breathless stillness, and the sky changing the way a hand would pass over it. And I should have called it out then—All is disgrace! Human beings’ cries would swell in the last of evening like this and cross the grass in the yard before the light changes, if only they cried. Our grass in August is like the floor under the sea, and we walk on it slowly playing, and the sky turns green before dark. We don’t say anything the others remember.

But at our feet the shadows faded out light into the pale twilight and the locusts sang in long waves, O-E, O-E. Sweat ran down my back, arms, and legs, branching like some upside-down tree.

Then, “You’ll all come in!” They were calling from the porch — the well-known yellow lamps suddenly all went on. They called us in their shrill women’s voices, Jinny and all and her mama. “Fools, you’re playing in the dark! Come to supper!”

Somebody bumped into me in the sudden blindness of the yard. We laughed at their voracious voices. Across the dark the porch of women waited. It was like a long boat to me, or a box lighted up from within. But I was hungry.

I’d go down to Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s to sleep in my little western room — that’s the house where Mrs. Judge and the three other Sabina schoolteachers sit on the porch. Each evening to avoid them I ran through porch and hall both, like a man through the pouring rain. In the big dark backyard, full of pecan trees, moonlit, Bella opened her eyes and looked at me. They showed the moon. If she drank water, she vomited it up — yet she went with effort to her pan and drank again. I held her. Poor Bella. I thought she suffered from a tumor, and stayed with her most of the night.

Mother said, Son, I noticed that old pistol of your father’s in your nice coat pocket, what do you want with that old thing, your father never cared for it. Not any robbers coming to the bank that I know of. Son, if you’d just saved your money you could take yourself a little trip to the coast. I’d go with you. They always have a breeze at Gulfport, nearly always.

When you get to Jinny’s, there are yuccas and bare ground — it looks like some old playground, with the house back out of sight. Just the sharp, over-grown yuccas with up and down them rays of spiderwebs glinting in the light — as if they wore dresses. And back up in the shade is a little stone statue, all pockmarked now, of a dancing girl with a finger to her chin. Jinny stole that from a Vicksburg park once and her mama let her keep it.

Maideen said, “Are you taking me in yonder? I wish you wouldn’t.”

I looked down and saw my hand on the gate, and said “Wait. I’ve lost a button.” I showed my loose sleeve to Maideen. I felt all at once solemn — fateful — ready to shed tears.

“Why, I’ll sew you one on, if you stop by my house,” Maideen said. She touched my sleeve for an instant. A chameleon ran up a leaf, and held there panting. “Then Mama can see you. She’d be so glad to have you stay to supper.”

I opened the little old gate. I caught a whiff of the sour pears on the ground, the smell of August. I had not told Maideen I was ever coming to supper at any time, or seeing her mama.

“Oh, Jinny can sew it on now,” I said.

“Oh, I can?” Jinny said. She had of course been listening to me all the time from the half-hidden path. She looked out from under her shade-hat. She has the face, she has the threatening stare of a prankster — about to curtsey to you. Don’t you think it’s the look of a woman that loves dogs and horses best, and long trips away she never takes? “Come in before I forget, then,” Jinny said.

We went ahead of Maideen. There in the flower beds walked the same robins, where the sprinkler had been. Once again, we went in the house by the back door. We took hands. We stepped on Tellie’s patch of mint — the yellow cat went around the corner — the back door knob was as hot as the hand to the touch, and on the step, impeding the feet of two people going in together, the fruit jars with the laborious cuttings rooting in water—“Watch out for Mama’s—!” That had happened a thousand times, the way we went in. As a thousand bees droned and burrowed in the pears that lay on the ground.

As Mama Stark almost ran over me, she shrank with a cry, and started abruptly up the stairs — bosom lifted — her shadow trotted up beside her like a nosy bear. But she could never get to the top without turning. She came down again and held up a finger at me. Her voice… Randall. Let me tell you about a hand I held yesterday. My partner was Amanda Mackey and you know she always plays her own hand with no more regard for her partner than you have. Well, she opened with a spade and Fanny doubled. I held: a singleton spade five clubs to the king queen five hearts to the king and two little diamonds. I said two clubs, Gert Gish two diamonds, Amanda two spades, all passed. And when I laid down my hand Amanda said, O partner! Why didn’t you bid your hearts! I said Hardly. At the level of three with the opponents doubling for a takeout. It developed of course she was two suited — six spades to the ace jack and four hearts to the ace jack ten, also my ace of clubs. Now Randall. It would have been just as easy for Amanda when she opened her mouth a second time to bid three hearts. But no! She could see only her own hand and so she took us down two, and we could have made five hearts. Now do you think I should have bid three hearts? — I said, You were justified not to, Mama Stark, and she gave me a nod. Then she glared as if I had slapped her. How well she could turn up her discontent to outrage again, and go on upstairs.

We turned, Jinny leading me, into the little back study, “Mama’s office,” with the landscape wall-paper and the desk full-up with its immediacy of Daughters of the Confederacy correspondence. Tellie sashayed in with the work basket and then just waited, eyeing and placing us and eyeing the placing herself between us.

“Put it down, Tellie. Now you go on. Pull your mouth in, you hear me?” Jinny took the fancy little basket and flicked it open and fished in it. She found a button that belonged to me, and glanced up at Tellie.

“I hear you’s a mess.” Tellie went out.

Jinny looked at me. She pulled my hand up and I shot. I fired point blank at Jinny — more than once. It was close range — between us suddenly there was barely room for the pistol to come up. And she only stood threading the needle, her hand not deviating, not even shaken at the noise. The little heart-shaped gold and china clock on the mantel was striking — the pistol’s noise had not drowned that. I looked at Jinny and I saw her childish breasts, little pouting excuses for breasts, all sprung with bright holes where my bullets had gone. But Jinny did not feel it, the noise had veered off at the silly clock, and she threaded the needle. She made her little face of success. Her thread always went in its tiny hole.

“Hold still,” Jinny muttered softly between fixed lips. She far from acknowledged her pain — anything but sorrow and pain. Just as when she was angry, she sang some faraway song. For domestic talk her voice would lower to a pitch of utter disparagement. Disparagement that had all my life elated me. The little cheat. I waited unable to move again while she sewed dartingly at my sleeve; the sleeve to my helpless hand. As if I counted my breaths now I slowly exhaled fury and inhaled simple dismay that she was not dead on earth. She bit the thread. I was unsteady when her mouth withdrew. The cheat.

I could not, dared not say goodby to Jinny any more, and “Go get in the croquet,” she told me. She walked to the mirror in the hall, and began cutting at her hair.

I know Vera Lassiter darted in the room and her face lighted. “Mercy me,” she said, and in her mischief came up and fingered Jinny’s hair, the short soft curls. “Who’re you being now? Somebody’s little brother?”

But Jinny stood there at her mirrored face half smiling, so touchingly desirable, so sweet, so tender, vulnerable, touching to me I could hardly bear it, again I could not.

Old Tellie spat into the stove and clanged down an iron lid as I went out through the kitchen. She had spent so much time, twenty-seven years, saying she had brought Jinny into this world: “Born in dis hand.”

“No use for you atall you don’t whup her. Been de matter wid you? Where you been?”

I found Maideen waiting out in the swing, and took her arm and led her down to the croquet where we all played Jinny’s game.

Dear God wipe it clean. Wipe it clean, wipe it out. Don’t let it be.

At last Mrs. Judge O’Leary caught hold of me in the hall. Do me a favor. Ran, do me a favor and put Bella out of her misery. None of these school teachers any better at it than I would be. And Judge too tenderhearted. You do it. Just do it and don’t tell us, hear?

Where have you been, son? — Nowhere, mother, nowhere. — If you were back under my roof I would have things just the way they were. Son, I wish you would just speak to me, and promise—

And I was getting tired, oh so tired, of Mr. Killigrew. I felt cornered when Maideen spoke, kindly as ever, about the workings of the ice house. Now I knew her mother’s maiden name. God help me, the name Parsons was laid on my head like the top teetering crown of a pile of things to remember. Not to forget, the name of Parsons.

I remember your wedding, Old Lady Hartford said at my window, poking her finger through the bars. Never knew it would turn out like this, the prettiest wedding in my memory. If you had all this money, you could leave town.

Maideen believed so openly — I believe she told Miss Callie — that I wanted to take her somewhere sometime by herself and have a nice time — like other people — but that I put it off till I was free. Still, she had eyes to see, we would run into Jinny every time, Jinny and Lonnie Dugan and the crowd. Of course I couldn’t help that, not in Sabina. And then always having to take the little Williams girl home at night. She was the bridge player; that was a game Maideen had never learned to play. Maideen — I never kissed her.

But the Sunday came when I took her over to Vicksburg.

Already on the road I began to miss my bridge. We could get our old game now, Jinny, Dugan, myself and often the little Williams child, who was really a remarkable player, for a Williams. Mama Stark of course would insist on walking out in stately displeasure, we were all very forward children indeed if we thought she would be our fourth, holding no brief for what a single one of us had done. So the game was actually a better one.

Maideen never interrupted our silence with a word. She turned the pages of a magazine. Now and then she lifted her eyes to me, but I could not let her see that I saw her wondering. I would win every night and take their money. Then at home I would be sick, going outdoors so the teachers would not wonder. “Now you really must get little Maideen home. Her mother will be thinking something awful’s happened to her. Won’t she, Maideen?”—Jinny’s voice. “I’ll ride with you”—the little Williams. Maideen would not have begun to cry in Jinny’s house for anything. I could trust her. Did she want to? She wasn’t dumb.

She would get stupefied for sleep. She would lean farther and farther over in her chair. She would never have a rum and coke with us, but she would be simply dead for sleep. She slept sitting up in the car going home, where her mama, now large-eyed, maiden name Parsons, sat up listening. I would wake her up to say I had got her home at last. The little Williams girl would be chatting away in the back seat, there and back wide awake as an owl.

Vicksburg: nineteen miles over the gravel and the thirteen little swamp bridges and the Big Black. Suddenly all sensation returned.

Sabina I had looked at till I saw nothing. Till the street was a pencil mark on the sky, a little stick. Maybe outside my eyes a real roofline clamped down still, Main Street was there the same, four red-brick scallops, branchy trees, one little cross, but if I saw it, it was not with love, it was a pencil mark on the sky. Sabina wasn’t there to me. If some indelible red false-fronts joined one to the other like a little toy train went by — I did not think of my childhood any more. Sabina had held in my soul to constriction. It was never to be its little street again.

I stopped my car at the foot of Vicksburg, under the wall, by the canal. There was a dazzling light, a water-marked light. I woke Maideen and asked her if she were thirsty. She smoothed her dress and lifted her head at the sounds of a city, the traffic on cobblestones just behind the wall. I watched the water-taxi come, chopping over the canal strip at us, absurd as a rocking horse.

“Duck your head,” I said to Maideen.

“In here?”

Very near across the water the island rose glittering against the sunset — a waste of willow trees, yellow and green strands that seemed to weave loosely one upon the other, like a basket that let the light spill out uncontrollably. We shaded our eyes to ride across the water. We all stood up bending our heads under the low top. The Negro who ran the put-put never spoke once, “Get in” or “Get out.” “Where are we going?” Maideen said. In two minutes we were touching the barge. Old ramshackle floating saloon fifty years old, with its twin joined to it, for colored.

Nobody was inside but the one man — a silent, relegated place like a barn. I let him bring some rum cokes out to the only table, the card table out on the back where the two cane chairs were. The sun was going down on the island side, and making Vicksburg alight on the other. East and West were in our eyes.

“Don’t make me drink it. I don’t want to drink it,” Maideen said.

“Go on and drink it.”

“You drink if you like it. Don’t make me drink it.”

“You drink it too.”

I looked at her take some of it, and sit shading her eyes. There were wasps dipping from the ledge over the old screen door and skimming her hair. There was a smell of fish and of the floating roots fringing the island. The card table smelled warmly of its oilcloth top and of endless deals. A load of Negroes came over on the water-taxi and stepped out with tin buckets. They were sulphur yellow all over, thickly coated with cottonseed meal, and disappeared in the colored barge at the other end, in single file, as if they were sentenced to it.

“Sure enough, I don’t want to drink it.”

“You drink it. It doesn’t taste bad.”

Inside, in the dim saloon, two men with black spurred cocks under their arms had appeared. Without noise they each set a muddy boot on the rail and drank, the cocks hypnotically still. They got off the barge on the island side, where they disappeared in the hot blur of willow branches. They might never be seen again.

The heat trembled on the water and on the other side wavered the edges of the old white buildings and concrete slabbed bluffs. From the barge, Vicksburg looked like an image of itself in a tarnished mirror — like its portrait at a sad time of life.

A short cowboy in boots and his girl came in, walking alike. They dropped a nickel in the nickelodeon, and came together.

The canal had no visible waves, yet trembled slightly beneath us; I was aware of it like the sound of a winter fire in the room.

“You don’t ever dance, do you?” Maideen said.

It was a long time before we left. All kinds of people had come out to the barge, and the white side and the nigger side filled up. When we left it was good-dark.

The lights twinkled sparsely on the shore — old sheds and warehouses, long dark walls. High up on the ramparts of town some old iron bells were ringing.

“Are you a Catholic?” I asked her suddenly, and I bent my head to hear her answer.

“No.”

I looked at her — I made it plain she had disappointed some hope of mine — for she had; I could not tell you now what hope.

“We’re all Baptists. Why, are you a Catholic?” Oh, nobody was a Catholic in Sabina.

“No.”

Without touching her except momently with my knee I walked her ahead of me up the steep uneven way, to where my car was parked listing sharply downhill. Inside, she could not shut her door. I stood outside and looked, it hung heavily and she had drunk three or four drinks, all I had made her take. Now she could not shut her door. “I’ll fall out, I’ll fall in your arms. I’ll fall, catch me.”

“No you won’t. Shut it hard. Shut it. All your might.”

At last. I leaned against her shut door, spent for a moment.

I grated up the steep cobbles, turned and followed the river road high along the bluff, turned again off into a deep rutted dirt way under shaggy banks, dark and circling and down-rushing.

“Don’t lean against my arm,” I said. “Sit up and get some air.”

“I don’t want to,” she said in her soft voice that I could hardly understand any more.

“You want to lie down?”

“No. I don’t want to lie down.”

“Get some air.”

“Don’t make me lie down. I don’t want to do anything, anything at all.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I don’t want to do a thing from now and on till evermore.”

We circled down. The sounds of the river tossing and dizzying and teasing its great trash could be heard through the dark now. It made the noise of a moving wall, and up it fishes and reptiles and uprooted trees and man’s throwaways played and climbed all alike in a splashing like innocence. A great wave of smell beat at my face. The track had come down deep as a tunnel. We were on the floor of the world. The trees met and matted overhead, the cedars came together, and through them the stars of Vicksburg looked sifted and fine as seed, so high and so far. There was the sound of a shot, somewhere, somewhere.

“Yonder’s the river,” she said. “I see it — the Mississippi River.”

“You don’t see it. We’re not that close.”

“I see it, I see it.”

“Haven’t you ever seen it before? You baby.”

“Before? No, I never have seen the Mississippi River before. I thought we were on it on the boat.”

“Look, the road has ended.”

“Why does it come this far and stop?”

“How should I know? What do they come down here for?”

“Why do they?”

“There are all kinds of people in the world.” Far away somebody was burning something.

“Do you mean bad people and niggers and all? Ones that hide? Moonshiners?”

“Oh, fishermen. River men. Cock fighters. You’re waked up.”

“I think we’re lost,” she said.

Mother said, if I thought you’d ever go back to that Jinny Stark, I couldn’t hold up my head. — No, mother, I’ll never go back. — The whole world knows what she did to you.

“You dreamed we’re lost. We’ll go somewhere where you can lie down a little.”

“You can’t get lost in Sabina.”

“After you lie down a little you’ll be all right again, you can get up. We’ll go somewhere where you can lie down.”

“I don’t want to lie down.”

“Did you know a car would back up a hill as steep as this?”

“You’ll be killed.”

“I bet nobody ever saw such a crazy thing. Do you think anybody ever saw such a crazy thing?”

We were almost straight up and down, hanging on the bluff and the tail end bumping and lifting us and swaying from side to side. At last we were up. If I had not drunk that last drink maybe I would not have made such startling maneuvers and would not have bragged so loud. The car had leaned straight over that glimpse of the river, over the brink as sweetly as you ever saw a hummingbird over a flower.

We drove a long way. All among the statues in the dark park, the repeating stances, the stone rifles again and again on lost hills, the spiral-staired and condemned towers.

I looked for the moon, which would be in the last quarter. There she was. The air was not darkness but faint light, and floating sound — the breath of all the people in the world who were breathing out into the night looking at the moon, knowing her quarter.

We rode in wilderness under the lifting moon, Maideen keeping very still, sighing faintly as if she longed for something herself, for sleep — for going the other way. A coon, white as a ghost, crossed the road, passed a gypsy camp — all sleeping.

Off the road, under the hanging moss, a light burned in a whitewashed tree. It showed a circle of whitewashed cabins, dark, and all around and keeping the trees back, a fence of white palings. Sunset Oaks. A little nigger boy leaned on the gate this late at night, wearing an engineer’s cap.

Yet it did not seem far. I pulled in, and paid.

“One step up,” I told her at the door.

I sat on the bed, the old iron bed with rods. I think I said, “Get your dress off.”

She had her head turned away. The naked light hung far down in the room — a long cord that looked as if something had stretched it. She turned, then, with tender shoulders bent toward the chair, as if in confidence toward that, the old wreck of a thing that tonight held her little white dress.

I turned out the light that hung down, and the room filled with the pale night like a bucket let down a well. It was never dark enough, the enormous sky flashing with its August light rushing into the emptiest rooms, the loneliest windows. The month of falling stars. I hate the time of year this is.

If we lay together any on the bed, almost immediately I was propped up against the hard rods with my back pressing them, and sighing — deep sigh after deep sigh. I heard myself.

“Get up,” I said. “I want the whole bed. You don’t need to be here.” And I showed I had the pistol. I lay back holding it toward me and trying to frown her away, the way I used to lie still cherishing a dream in the morning and Jinny would pull me out of it.

Maideen had been pulling or caressing my arm, but she had no strength in her hands at all. She rose up and stood in the space before my eyes, so plain there in the lighted night. She was disarrayed. There was blood on her, blood and disgrace. Or perhaps there wasn’t. I did not remember anything about it. For a moment I saw her double.

“Get away from me,” I said.

While she was speaking to me I could hear only the noises of the place we were in — of frogs and nightbirds, a booted step in the heavy tangle all around, and the little idiot nigger running up and down the fence, up and down, as far as it went and back, sounding the palings with his stick.

“This is my grandfather’s dueling pistol — one of a pair. Very valuable.”

“Don’t, Ran. Don’t do that, Ran. Don’t do it. Please don’t do it.”

I knew I had spoken to her again in order to lie. It was my father’s pistol he’d never cared for. When she spoke, I didn’t hear what she said; I was reading her lips, the way people being told good-by do conscientiously through train windows. I had the pistol pointing toward my face and did not swerve it. Outside, it sounded as though the little nigger at the gate was keeping that up forever — running a stick along the fence, up and down, to the end and back again.

Poor Bella, it was so hot for her. She lay that day with shut eyes, her narrow little forehead creased. Her nose was dry as a thrown-away rind. The weather was only making her suffer more. She never had a long thick coat, was the one good thing. She was just any kind of a dog. The kind I liked best.

I tried to think. What had happened? No — what had not happened? Something had not happened. The world was not going on. Or, you understand, it went on but somewhere it had stopped being real, and I had walked on, like a tight-rope walker without any rope. How far? Where should I have fallen? Hate. Discovery and hate. Then, right after… Destruction was not real, disgrace not real, nor death. They all got up again, Jinny and Dugan got up…

Up and down, the little idiot nigger. He was having a good time at that. I wondered, when would that stop? Then that stopped.

I put the pistol’s mouth in my own. It tasted, the taste of the whole machinery of it. And then instead it was my own mouth put to the pistol’s, quick as a little baby’s maybe, whose hunger goes on every minute — who can’t be reassured or gratified, ever, quite in time enough. There was Maideen still, white in her petticoat.

“Don’t do it, Ran. Please don’t do it.”

Urgently I made it — made the awful sound.

And immediately she said, “Now, you see. It didn’t work. Now you see. Hand that old thing to me, I’ll keep that.”

She took it from me. She took it over to the chair, as if she were possessed of some long-tried way to deal with it, and disposed of it in the fold of her clothes. She came back and sat down on the edge of the bed. In a minute she put her hand out again, differently — and touched my shoulder. Then I met it, hard, with my face, the small, bony, freckled (I knew) hand that I hated (I knew), and kissed it and bit it until my lips and tongue tasted salt tears and salt blood — that the hand was not Jinny’s. Then I lay back in the bed a long time, up against the rods.

“You’re so stuck up,” she said.

I lay there and after a while my eyes began to close and I saw her again. She lay there plain as the day by the side of me, quietly weeping for herself. The kind of soft, restful, meditative sobs a child will venture long after punishment.

So I slept.

How was I to know she would hurt herself like this?

Now — where is Jinny?