Delta Wedding by Welty Eudora

Author:Welty, Eudora [Welty, Eudora]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

"Are we going to the store now?" asked Laura.

"Look. Do you want to go by the cemetery and see your mother's grave?" asked Shelley in a practical voice. "We're near it now."

"Not me," said India, and jumped out of the pony cart with Partheny's cake, when Shelley drew the reins.

"All right," said Laura. "But I want my present for Uncle George before dinner."

The cemetery, an irregular shape of ground, four-sided but narrowing almost to a triangle, with the Confederate graves all running to a point in the direction of the depot, was surrounded by a dense high wall of honeysuckle, which shut out the sight of the cotton wagons streaming by on two sides, where the roads converged to the railroad tracks, the river, the street, and the gin. The school, where the Fairchild children all went, was across one road, and the Methodist Church, with a dooryard bell in a sort of derrick, was across the other. The spire, the derrick, and the flag pole rose over the hedge walls, but nothing else of Fairchilds could be seen, and only its sound could be heard—the gin running, the compress sighing, the rackety iron bridge being crossed, and the creak of wagon and harness just on the other side of the leaves.

A smell of men's sweat seemed to permeate the summer air of Fairchilds until you got inside the cemetery. Here sweet dusty honeysuckle—for the vines were pinkish-white with dust, like icing decorations on a cake, each leaf and tendril burdened—perfumed a gentler air, along with the smell of cut-flower stems that had been in glass jars since some Sunday, and the old-summer smell of the big cedars. Mockingbirds sang brightly in the branches, and Fred, a big bird dog, trotted through on the path, taking the short cut to the icehouse where he belonged. Rosebushes thick and solid as little Indian mounds were set here and there with their perennial, worn little birdnests like a kind of bloom. The gravestones, except for the familiar peak in the Fairchild lot of Grandfather James Fairchild's great pointed shaft, seemed part of the streaky light and shadow in here, either pale or dark with time, and ordinary. Only one new narrow stone seemed to pierce the air like a high note; it was Laura's mother's grave.

All around here were the ones Laura knew—Laura Allen, Aunt Rowena, Duncan Laws, Great-Great-Grandfather George, with Port Gibson under his name in tall letters, the slab with the little scroll on it saying Mary Shannon Fairchild. A little baby's grave, son of Ellen and Battle. Overhead, the enormous crape-myrtle tree, with its clusters of golden seed, was the same.

"Annie Laurie," said Shelley softly, still in that practical voice that made Laura wonder. It always seemed to Laura that when she wanted to think of her mother, they would prevent her, and when she was not thinking of her, then they would say her name. She stood looking at the mound, green now, and Aunt Ellen or Uncle

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