Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty Page A

more woods left standing here than she had remembered. The shade was nice. Moss from the cypresses hung deep overhead now, and by the water vines like pediments and arches reached from one tree to the next. She walked abstractedly, gently moving her extended hand with the closed umbrella in it from side to side, clearing the vines and mosquitoes from her path. There were trumpet vines and passion flowers. The cypress trunks four feet thick in the water's edge stood opened like doors of tents in Biblical engravings. How still the old woods were. Here the bayou banks were cinders; they said it was where the Indians burned their pottery, at the very last. The songs of the cotton pickers were far away, so were the hoofbeats of the horse the overseer rode (and once again, listening for them in spite of the quiet, she felt as if the cotton fields so solid to the sight had opened up and swallowed her daughter). Even inside this narrow but dense wood she found herself listening for sounds of the fields and house, walking along almost anxiously enough to look back over her shoulder—wondering if something needed her at home, if Bluet had waked up, if for some unaccountable reason Dabney had flown back from a party, calling her mother.
    Then she heard a step, a starting up in the woods.
    "Who's that?" she called sharply. "Come here to me."
    There was no answer, but she saw, the way she moved in the woodsy light, it was a girl.
    "Whose girl are you? Pinchy?" Pinchy, Roxie's helper, was coming through these days, and wandered around all day staring and moaning until she would see light. But Pinchy would answer Miss Ellen still.
    "Are you one of our people? Girl, are you lost then?"
    Still there was no answer, but no running away either. Ellen called, "Come here to me; I could tell, you are about the size of one of my daughters. And if you belong somewhere, I'm going to send you back unless they're mean to you, you can't hide with me, but if you don't belong anywhere, then I'll have to think. Now come out. My soup's getting cold here for an old woman."
    Then since the girl remained motionless where she had been discovered, Ellen patiently made her way through the pulling vines and the old spider webs toward her. She was dimly aware of the chimney to the overseer's house stuck up through the trees, but in here it seemed an ancient place and for a moment the girl was not a trespasser but someone who lived in the woods, a dark creature not hiding, but waiting to be seen, careless on the pottery bank. Then she saw the corner of a little torn skirt poking out by the tree, almost of itself trembling.
    "Come out, child.... It's luck I found you—I was just looking for a little pin I lost," she said.
    "I haven't seen
no pin,
" the girl said behind her tree.
    When she heard the voice, Ellen stopped still. She peered. All at once she cried, "Aren't you a Negro?"
    The girl still only waited behind a tree, but a quick, alert breath came from her that Ellen heard.
    So she was white. A whole mystery of life opened up. Ellen waited by a tree herself, as if she could not go any farther through the woods. Almost bringing terror the thought of Robbie Reid crossed her mind. Then the girl seemed to become the more curious of the two; she looked around the tree. Ellen said calmly, "Come out here in the light."
    She came out and showed herself, a beautiful girl, fair and nourished, round-armed. Not long ago she had been laughing or crying. She had been running. Her skin was white to transparency, her hazel eyes looking not downward at the state of her skirt but levelly into the woods around and the bayou.
    "Stand still," said Ellen.
    It was a thing she said habitually, often on her knees with pins in her mouth. She herself was sternly still, as if she expected presently to begin to speak—and speech at such a time would likely be stern questions that perhaps would find no answers. Yet at her side her arms slowly felt light and except for their burdens her