The Wide Net: and Other Stories (Harvest Book, Hb278)

by Eudora Welty

the room was almost excessively his own, as it would have been a stray kitten’s that came to the same spot every night.

Once a rattlesnake had shoved its head from a boot as he stretched out his hand; but that was not likely to happen again in a thousand years.

“We always talks this much,” said Sam, “but now everybody so quiet, they hears us.”

A great curtain of wet leaves was borne along before a blast of wind, and every human being was covered. “Now us got scales,” wailed Sam. “Us is the fishes.” “Hush up, little-old colored children,” said Virgil. “This isn’t the way to act when somebody takes you out to drag a river.”

Dragging a river as a highlight of community life.

The whole town of Dover began to throb in its wood and tin, like an old tired heart, when the men walked through once more, coming around again and going down the street carrying the fish, so drenched, exhausted, and muddy that no one could help but admire them.

“Didn’t you ever think she was in there?” asked William Wallace. “The whole time?” “Nary once,” said Doc. “He’s just smart,” said Virgil, putting his hand on William Wallace’s arm. “It’s only because we didn’t find her that he wasn’t looking for her.” “I’m beholden to you for the net, anyway,” said William Wallace. “You’re welcome to borry it again,” said Doc.

He found it effortless to love at a distance. He could look at the flowering trees and love Peggy in fullness, just as he could see his visions and love God.

It was as if three whirlwinds had drawn together at some center, to find there feeding in peace a snowy heron. Its own slow spiral of flight could take it away in its own time, but for a little it held them still, it laid quiet over them, and they stood for a moment unburdened. . . .

It was like an old song they carried in their memory, the story of the two houses separated by a long, winding, difficult, untravelled road—a curve of the old Natchez Trace—but actually situated almost back to back on the ring of hills, while completely hidden from each other, like the reliefs on opposite sides of a vase.

It was spring, the flowers in the baskets were purple hyacinths and white lilies that wilted in the heat and showed their blue veins.

Stiff and stern, Jenny sat there with her feet planted just so on the step below, in the posture of a child who is appalled at the stillness and unsurrender of the still and unsurrendering world.

The Lockhart house stood between two of the empty stretches along the road. It was wide, low, and twisted. Its roof, held up at the corners by the two chimneys, sagged like a hammock, and was mended with bark and small colored signs. The black high-water mark made a belt around the house and that alone seemed to tighten it and hold it together.

“Some stranger lost through here says, ‘Why don’t you all move away?’ Move away?” He laughed, and pointed a finger at Jenny. “Did you hear that, Miss Jenny—why don’t we move away? Because we live here, don’t we, Miss Jenny?”

She was holding the amber beads they used to give her mother to play with. She looked at the lump of amber, and looked through to its core. Nobody could ever know about the difference between the radiance that was the surface and the radiance that was inside. There were the two worlds. There was no way at all to put a finger on the center of light. And if there were a mountain, the cloud over it could not touch its heart when it traveled over, and if there were an island out in the sea, the waves at its shore would never come over the place in the middle of the island.

The crape-myrtle trees were beginning to fill with light for they drank the last of it every day, and gave off their white and flame in the evening that filled with the throb of cicadas.