Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

watch crusted with diamonds was always pinned to the little hollow of her breast, and she would make the children tell her the time by it, right or wrong. She whistled a tune sometimes, some vaguely militant or Presbyterian air that sounded archaic and perverse in a pantry, where she would sometimes fling open the cupboard doors to see how nearly starving they were. Her smile, when it came—often for India—was soft. She gave a trifling hobble sometimes now when she walked, but it seemed to be a flourish, just to look busy. Her eyes were remarkable, stone-blue now, and with all she had to do, she had read the Bible through nine times before she ever came to Shellmound and started it there. She and her sister Shannon had brought up all James's and Laura Allen's children, when they had been left, from Denis aged twelve to George aged three, after their dreadful trouble; were glad to do it—widows! And though Shannon drifted away sometimes in her mind and would forget where she was, and speak to Lucian as if he had not started out to war to be killed, or to her brother Battle the same way, or to her brother George as if he had been found and were home again, or to dead young Denis she had loved best—she, Mac, had never let go, never asked relenting from the present hour, and if anything should, God prevent it, happen to Ellen now, she was prepared to do it again, start in with young Battle's children, and bring them up. She would start by throwing Troy Flavin in the bayou in front of the house and letting the minnows chew him up.
    But Aunt Shannon, when she would look around the room and know it, would catch her breath and ask for something—for a palmetto fan, anything; as if life were so piteous that all people had better content themselves with was to be waited on hand and foot; tend or be tended, the wave would fall, and it was better to be tended.
    Ellen took one of the big black cotton umbrellas out of the stand and went out. The sun did press down, like a hot white stone. The whole front yard was dazzling; it was covered with all the lace curtains of the house drying on stretchers. Just then here came Roy, riding on his billy goat, in and out, just not touching all the curtains.
    "Oh, Roy! I did think you were asleep! Are you being careful?"
    "I'll never touch a curtain or make the tiniest hole, Mama. Want to watch me?"
    "No, I trust you."
    "Can I ride along behind you, Mama, where you're going?"
    "Not this time," she said.

    She crossed the bayou bridge, almost treading on the butterflies lighting and clinging on the blazing, fetid boards, and walked leisurely down the other side on the old Marmion path (when there had been a river bridge up this far) through the trees. She had been weary today until now. It seemed to her that Dabney's wedding had made everybody feel a little headstrong this week, the children flying out of the house without even pretending to ask permission and herself not being able as well as usual to keep up with any of it.
    It was a clamorous family, Ellen knew, and for her, her daughter Dabney and her brother-in-law George were the most clamorous. She knew George was importunate—how much that man hoped for! Much more than Battle. They should all fairly shield their eyes against that hope. Dabney did not really know yet for how much she asked. But where George was importunate, Dabney was almost greedy. Dabney was actually, at moments, almost selfish, and he was not. That is, she thought, frowning, George had not Dabney's kind of unselfishness which is a dread of selfishness, but the thoughtless, hasty kind which is often cheated of even its flower, like a tender perennial that will disregard the winter earlier every year.... The umbrella was in her way now that she had come to the shade, and she could wish she had brought a little Negro along to carry it or the soup.
    She noticed how many little paths crisscrossed and disappeared in here, the deeper she went. Who had made them? There had been