The Golden Apples
By Eudora Welty
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Here in Morgana, Mississippi, the young dream of other places; the old can tell you every name on every stone in the cemetery on the town’s edge; and cuckolded husbands and love-starved piano teachers share the same paths. It’s also where one neighbor has disappeared on the horizon, slipping away into local legend.
Black and white, lonely and the gregarious, sexually adventurous and repressed, vengeful and resigned, restless and settled, the vividly realized characters that make up this collection of interrelated stories, with elements drawn from ancient myth and transplanted to the American South, prove that this National Book Award–winning writer, as Katherine Anne Porter once wrote, had “an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork.”
“I doubt that a better book about ‘the South’—one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life, and its special tone and pattern—has ever been written.” —The New Yorker
Eudora Welty
EUDORA WELTY (1909–2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and attended the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University (where she studied advertising). In addition to short fiction, Welty wrote novels, novellas, essays, and reviews, and was the winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
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47 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Golden Apples is a novel by Eudora Welty that reads like a series of bizarre short stories with the same recurring characters set in a fictional town in Mississippi. Some readers may find it difficult because of its use of language (specifically nigger). Others may find it difficult just for it's odd prose. The chapters are not linear nor are obvious segues ever used to cue the reader in that a jump in time has taken place. There are also lots of characters with similar names making it easy to lose track of who has done what, when. If I were more drawn into the book I'd want to reread it to get the pieces I missed or misunderstood but frankly I'm just not captivated enough to want to do that right now.
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The Golden Apples - Eudora Welty
Copyright © 1949, 1948, 1947 by Eudora Welty
Copyright renewed 1977, 1976, 1975 by Eudora Welty
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
ISBN 0-15-636090-X (Harvest: pb)
eISBN 978-0-547-53996-6
v2.0318
To Rosa Farrar Wells
and Frank Hallam Lyell
The town of Morgana and the county of MacLain, Mississippi, are fictitious; all their inhabitants, as well as the characters placed in San Francisco, and their situations are products of the author’s imagination and are not intended to portray real people or real situations.
Main Families In Morgana, Mississippi
King MACLAIN
Mrs. MACLAIN (nee Miss Snowdie Hudson)
Ran and Eugene
Comus STARK
Mrs. STARK (nee Miss Lizzie Morgan)
Jinny Love
Wilbur MORRISON
Mrs. MORRISON
Cassie and Loch
Mr. CARMICHAEL
Mrs. CARMICHAEL (Miss Nell)
Nina
Felix SPIGHTS
Mrs. SPIGHTS (Miss Billy Texas)
Woodrow, Missie, and Little Sister
Old Man MOODY
Mrs. MOODY (Miss Jefferson)
Parnell
Miss Perdita MAYO
Miss Hattie MAYO
Fate RAINEY
Mrs. Fate RAINEY (Miss Katie)
Victor and Virgie
Also LOOMISES, CARLYLES, HOLIFIELDS, NESBITTS, BOWLESES, SISSUMS and SOJOURNERS. Also Plez, Louella, and Tellie MORGAN; Elberta, Twosie, and Exum MCLANE; Blackstone and Juba, colored
1.
Shower of Gold
That was Miss Snowdie MacLain.
She comes after her butter, won’t let me run over with it from just across the road. Her husband walked out of the house one day and left his hat on the banks of the Big Black River.—That could have started something, too.
We might have had a little run on doing that in Morgana, if it had been so willed. What King did, the copy-cats always might do. Well, King MacLain left a new straw hat on the banks of the Big Black and there are people that consider he headed West.
Snowdie grieved for him, but the decent way you’d grieve for the dead, more like, and nobody wanted to think, around her, that he treated her that way. But how long can you humor the humored? Well, always. But I could almost bring myself to talk about it—to a passer-by, that will never see her again, or me either. Sure I can churn and talk. My name’s Mrs. Rainey.
You seen she wasn’t ugly—and the little blinky lines to her eyelids comes from trying to see. She’s an albino but nobody would ever try to call her ugly around here—with that tender, tender skin like a baby. Some said King figured out that if the babies started coming, he had a chance for a nestful of little albinos, and that swayed him. No, I don’t say it. I say he was just willful. He wouldn’t think ahead.
Willful and outrageous, to some several. Well: he married Snowdie.
Lots of worse men wouldn’t have: no better sense. Them Hudsons had more than MacLains, but none of ’em had enough to count or worry over. Not by then. Hudson money built that house, and built it for Snowdie . . . they prayed over that. But take King: marrying must have been some of his showing off—like man never married at all till he flung in, then had to show the others how he could go right on acting. And like, Look, everybody, this is what I think of Morgana and MacLain Courthouse and all the way between
—further, for all I know—marrying a girl with pink eyes.
I swan!
we all say. Just like he wants us to, scoundrel. And Snowdie as sweet and gentle as you find them. Of course gentle people aren’t the ones you lead best, he had that to find out, so know-all. No, sir, she’ll beat him yet, balking. In the meantime children of his growing up in the County Orphan’s, so say several, and children known and unknown, scattered-like. When he does come, he’s just as nice as he can be to Snowdie. Just as courteous. Was from the start.
Haven’t you noticed it prevail, in the world in general? Beware of a man with manners. He never raised his voice to her, but then one day he walked out of the house. Oh, I don’t mean once!
He went away for a good spell before he come back that time. She had a little story about him needing the waters. Next time it was more than a year, it was two—oh, it was three. I had two children myself, enduring his being gone, and one to die. Yes, and that time he sent her word ahead: Meet me in the woods.
No, he more invited her than told her to come—Suppose you meet me in the woods.
And it was night time he supposed to her. And Snowdie met him without asking What for?
which I would want to know of Fate Rainey. After all, they were married—they had a right to sit inside and talk in the light and comfort, or lie down easy on a good goosefeather bed, either. I would even consider he might not be there when I came. Well, if Snowdie went without a question, then I can tell it without a question as long as I love Snowdie. Her version is that in the woods they met and both decided on what would be best.
Best for him, of course. We could see the writing on the wall.
The woods
was Morgan’s Woods. We would any of us know the place he meant, without trying—I could have streaked like an arrow to the very oak tree, one there to itself and all spready: a real shady place by day, is all I know. Can’t you just see King MacLain leaning his length against that tree by the light of the moon as you come walking through Morgan’s Woods and you hadn’t seen him in three years? Suppose you meet me in the woods.
My foot. Oh, I don’t know how poor Snowdie stood it, crossing the distance.
Then, twins.
That was where I come in, I could help when things got to there. I took her a little churning of butter with her milk and we took up. I hadn’t been married long myself, and Mr. Rainey’s health was already a little delicate so he’d thought best to quit heavy work. We was both hard workers fairly early.
I always thought twins might be nice. And might have been for them, by just the sound of it. The MacLains first come to Morgana bride and groom from MacLain and went into that new house. He was educated off, to practice law—well needed here. Snowdie was Miss Lollie Hudson’s daughter, well known. Her father was Mr. Eugene Hudson, a storekeeper down at Crossroads past the Courthouse, but he was a lovely man. Snowdie was their only daughter, and they give her a nice education. And I guess people more or less expected her to teach school: not marry. She couldn’t see all that well, was the only thing in the way, but Mr. Comus Stark here and the supervisors overlooked that, knowing the family and Snowdie’s real good way with Sunday School children. Then before the school year even got a good start, she got took up by King MacLain all of a sudden. I think it was when jack-o’-lanterns was pasted on her window I used to see his buggy roll up right to the schoolhouse steps and wait on her. He courted her in Morgana and MacLain too, both ends, didn’t skip a day.
It was no different—no quicker and no slower—than the like happens every whipstitch, so I don’t need to tell you they got married in the MacLain Presbyterian Church before you could shake a stick at it, no matter how surprised people were going to be. And once they dressed Snowdie all in white, you know she was whiter than your dreams.
So—he’d been educated in the law and he traveled for somebody, that was the first thing he did—I’ll tell you in a minute what he sold, and she stayed home and cooked and kept house. I forget if she had a Negro, she didn’t know how to tell one what to do if she had. And she put her eyes straight out, almost, going to work and making curtains for every room and all like that. So busy. At first it didn’t look like they would have any children.
So it went the way I told you, slipped into it real easy, people took it for granted mighty early—him leaving and him being welcomed home, him leaving and him sending word, Meet me in the woods,
and him gone again, at last leaving the hat. I told my husband I was going to quit keeping count of King’s comings and goings, and it wasn’t long after that he did leave the hat. I don’t know yet whether he meant it kind or cruel. Kind, I incline to believe. Or maybe she was winning. Why do I try to figure? Maybe because Fate Rainey ain’t got a surprise in him, and proud of it. So Fate said, Well now, let’s have the women to settle down and pay attention to home-folks a while.
That was all he could say about it.
So, you wouldn’t have had to wait long. Here come Snowdie across the road to bring the news. I seen her coming across my pasture in a different walk, it was the way somebody comes down an aisle. Her sunbonnet ribbons was jumping around her: springtime. Did you notice her little dainty waist she has still? I declare it’s a mystery to think about her having the strength once. Look at me.
I was in the barn milking, and she come and took a stand there at the head of the little Jersey, Lady May. She had a quiet, picked-out way to tell news. She said, I’m going to have a baby too, Miss Katie. Congratulate me.
Me and Lady May both had to just stop and look at her. She looked like more than only the news had come over her. It was like a shower of something had struck her, like she’d been caught out in something bright. It was more than the day. There with her eyes all crinkled up with always fighting the light, yet she was looking out bold as a lion that day under her brim, and gazing into my bucket and into my stall like a visiting somebody. Poor Snowdie. I remember it was Easter time and how the pasture was all spotty there behind her little blue skirt, in sweet clover. He sold tea and spices, that’s what it was.
It was sure enough nine months to the day the twins come after he went sallying out through those woods and fields and laid his hat down on the bank of the river with King MacLain
on it.
I wish I’d seen him! I don’t guess I’d have stopped him. I can’t tell you why, but I wish I’d seen him! But nobody did.
For Snowdie’s sake—here they come bringing the hat, and a hullabaloo raised—they drug the Big Black for nine miles down, or was it only eight, and sent word to Bovina and on, clear to Vicksburg, to watch out for anything to wash up or to catch in the trees in the river. Sure, there never was anything—just the hat. They found everybody else that ever honestly drowned along the Big Black in this neighborhood. Mr. Sissum at the store, he drowned later on and they found him. I think with the hat he ought to have laid his watch down, if he wanted to give it a better look.
Snowdie kept just as bright and brave, she didn’t seem to give in. She must have had her thoughts and they must have been one of two things. One that he was dead—then why did her face have the glow? It had a glow—and the other that he left her and meant it. And like people said, if she smiled then, she was clear out of reach. I didn’t know if I liked the glow. Why didn’t she rage and storm a little—to me, anyway, just Mrs. Rainey? The Hudsons all hold themselves in. But it didn’t seem to me, running in and out the way I was, that Snowdie had ever got a real good look at life, maybe. Maybe from the beginning. Maybe she just doesn’t know the extent. Not the kind of look I got, and away back when I was twelve year old or so. Like something was put to my eye.
She just went on keeping house, and getting fairly big with what I told you already was twins, and she seemed to settle into her content. Like a little white kitty in a basket, making you wonder if she just mightn’t put up her paw and scratch, if anything was, after all, to come near. At her house it was like Sunday even in the mornings, every day, in that cleaned-up way. She was taking a joy in her fresh untracked rooms and that dark, quiet, real quiet hall that runs through her house. And I love Snowdie. I love her.
Except none of us felt very close to her all the while. I’ll tell you what it was, what made her different. It was the not waiting any more, except where the babies waited, and that’s not but one story. We were mad at her and protecting her all at once, when we couldn’t be close to her.
And she come out in her pretty clean shirt waists to water the ferns, and she had remarkable flowers—she had her mother’s way with flowers, of course. And give just as many away, except it wasn’t like I or you give. She was by her own self. Oh, her mother was dead by then, and Mr. Hudson fourteen miles down the road away, crippled up, running his store in a cane chair. We was every bit she had. Everybody tried to stay with her as much as they could spare, not let a day go by without one of us to run in and speak to her and say a word about an ordinary thing. Miss Lizzie Stark let her be in charge of raising money for the poor country people at Christmas that year, and like that. Of course we made all her little things for her, stitches like that was way beyond her. It was a good thing she got such a big stack.
The twins come the first day of January. Miss Lizzie Stark—she hates all men, and is real important: across yonder’s her chimney—made Mr. Comus Stark, her husband, hitch up and drive to Vicksburg to bring back a Vicksburg doctor in her own buggy the night before, instead of using Dr. Loomis here, and stuck him in a cold room to sleep at her house; she said trust any doctor’s buggy to break down on those bridges. Mrs. Stark stayed right by Snowdie, and of course several, and I, stayed too, but Mrs. Stark was not budging and took charge when pains commenced. Snowdie had the two little boys and neither one albino. They were both King all over again, if you want to know it. Mrs. Stark had so hoped for a girl, or two girls. Snowdie clapped the names on them of Lucius Randall and Eugene Hudson, after her own father and her mother’s father.
It was the only sign she ever give Morgana that maybe she didn’t think the name King MacLain had stayed beautiful. But not much of a sign; some women don’t name after their husbands, until they get down to nothing else left. I don’t think with Snowdie even two other names meant she had changed yet, not towards King, that scoundrel.
Time goes like a dream no matter how hard you run, and all the time we heard things from out in the world that we listened to but that still didn’t mean we believed them. You know the kind of things. Somebody’s cousin saw King MacLain. Mr. Comus Stark, the one the cotton and timber belongs to, he goes a little, and he claimed three or four times he saw his back, and once saw him getting a haircut in Texas. Those things you will hear forever when people go off, to keep up a few shots in the woods. They might mean something—might not.
Till the most outrageous was the time my husband went up to Jackson. He saw a man that was the spit-image of King in the parade, my husband told me in his good time, the inauguration of Governor Vardaman. He was right up with the big ones and astride a fine animal. Several from here went but as Mrs. Spights said, why wouldn’t they be looking at the Governor? Or the New Capitol? But King MacLain could steal anyone’s glory, so he thought.
When I asked the way he looked, I couldn’t get a thing out of my husband, except he lifted his feet across the kitchen floor like a horse and man in one, and I went after him with my broom. I knew, though. If it was King, he looked like, Hasn’t everybody been wondering, though, been out of their minds to know, where I’ve been keeping myself!
I told my husband it reasoned to me like it was up to Governor Vardaman to get hold of King and bring something out of him, but my husband said why pick on one man, and besides a parade was going on and what all. Men! I said if I’d been Governor Vardaman and spied King MacLain from Morgana marching in my parade as big as I was and no call for it, I’d have had the whole thing brought to a halt and called him to accounts. Well, what good would it have done you?
my husband said. A plenty,
I said. I was excited at the time it happened. That was just as good a spot as any to show him forth, right in front of the New Capitol in Jackson with the band going, and just as good a man to do it.
Well, sure, men like that need to be shown up before the world, I guess—not that any of us would be surprised. Did you go and find him after the Governor got inaugurated to suit you then?
I asked my husband. But he said no, and reminded me. He went for me a new bucket; and brought me the wrong size. Just like the ones at Holifield’s. But he said he saw King or his twin. What twin!
Well, through the years, we’d hear of him here or there—maybe two places at once, New Orleans and Mobile. That’s people’s careless way of using their eyes.
I believe he’s been to California. Don’t ask me why. But I picture him there. I see King in the West, out where it’s gold and all that. Everybody to their own visioning.
II.
Well, what happened turned out to happen on Hallowe’en. Only last week—and seems already like something that couldn’t happen at all.
My baby girl, Virgie, swallowed a button that same day—later on—and that happened, it seems like still, but not this. And not a word’s been spoke out loud, for Snowdie’s sake, so I trust the rest of the world will be as careful.
You can talk about a baby swallowing a button off a shirt and having to be up-ended and her behind pounded, and it sounds reasonable if you can just see the baby—there she runs—but get to talking about something that’s only a kind of near thing—and hold your horses.
Well, Hallowe’en, about three o’clock, I was over at Snowdie’s helping her cut out patterns—she’s kept on sewing for those boys. Me, I have a little girl to sew for—she was right there, asleep on the bed in the next room—and it hurts my conscience being that lucky over Snowdie too. And the twins wouldn’t play out in the yard that day but had hold of the scraps and the scissors and the paper of pins and all, and there underfoot they were dressing up and playing ghosts and boogers. Uppermost in their little minds was Hallowe’en.
They had on their masks, of course, tied on over their Buster Brown bobs and pressing a rim around the back. I was used to how they looked by then—but I don’t like masks. They both come from Spights’ store and cost a nickel. One was the Chinese kind, all yellow and mean with slant eyes and a dreadful thin mustache of black horsy hair. The other one was a lady, with an almost scary-sweet smile on her lips. I never did take to that smile, with all day for it. Eugene Hudson wanted to be the Chinaman and so Lucius Randall had to be the lady.
So they were making tails and do-lollies and all kinds of foolishness, and sticking them on to their little middles and behinds, snatching every scrap from the shirts and flannels me and Snowdie was cutting out on the dining room table. Sometimes we could grab a little boy and baste something up on him whether or no, but we didn’t really pay them much mind, we was talking about the prices of things for winter, and the funeral of an old maid.
So we never heard the step creak or the porch give, at all. That was a blessing. And if it wasn’t for something that come from outside us all to tell about it, I wouldn’t have the faith I have that it come about.
But happening along our road—like he does every day—was a real turstworthy nigger. He’s one of Mrs. Stark’s mother’s niggers, Old Plez Morgan everybody calls him. Lives down beyond me. The real old kind, that knows everybody since time was. He knows more folks than I do, who they are, and all the fine people. If you wanted anybody in Morgana that wouldn’t be likely to make a mistake in who a person is, you would ask for Old Plez.
So he was making his way down the road, by stages. He still has to do a few people’s yards won’t let him go, like Mrs. Stark, because he don’t pull up things. He’s no telling how old and starts early and takes his time coming home in the evening—always stopping to speak to people to ask after their health and tell them good evening all the way. Only that day, he said he didn’t see a soul else—besides you’ll hear who in a minute—on the way, not on porches or in the yards. I can’t tell you why, unless it was those little gusts of north wind that had started blowing. Nobody likes that.
But yonder ahead of him was walking a man. Plez said it was a white man’s walk and a walk he knew—but it struck him it was from away in another year, another time. It wasn’t just the walk of anybody supposed to be going along the road to MacLain right at that time—and yet it was too—and if it was, he still couldn’t think what business that somebody would be up to. That was the careful way Plez was putting it to his mind.
If you saw Plez, you’d know it was him. He had some roses stuck in his hat that day, I saw him right after it happened. Some of Miss Lizzie’s fall roses, big as a man’s fist and red as blood—they were nodding side-to-side out of the band of his old black hat, and some other little scraps out of the garden laid around the brim, throwed away by Mrs. Stark; he’d been cleaning out her beds that day, it was fixing to rain.
He said later he wasn’t in any great hurry, or he would have maybe caught up and passed the man. Up yonder ahead he went, going the same way Plez was going, and not much more interested in a race. And a real familiar stranger.
So Plez says presently the familiar stranger paused. It was in front of the MacLains’—and sunk his weight on one leg and just stood there, posey as statues, hand on his hip. Ha! Old Plez says, according, he just leaned himself against the Presbyterian Church gate and waited a while.
Next thing, the stranger—oh, it was King! By then Plez was calling him Mr. King to himself—went up through the yard and then didn’t go right in like anybody else. First he looked around. He took in the yard and summerhouse and skimmed from cedar to cedar along the edge of where he lived, and under the fig tree at the back and under the wash (if he’d counted it!) and come close to the front again, sniffy like, and Plez said though he couldn’t swear to seeing from the Presbyterian Church exactly what Mr. King was doing, he knows as good as seeing it that he looked through the blinds. He would have looked in the dining room—have mercy. We shut the West out of Snowdie’s eyes of course.
At last he come full front again, around the flowers under the front bedroom, Then he settled himself nice and started up the front steps.
The middle step sings when it’s stepped on, but we didn’t hear it. Plez said, well, he had on fine tennis shoes. So he got across the front porch and what do you think he’s fixing to do but knock on that door? Why wasn’t he satisfied with outdoors?
On his own front door. He makes a little shadow knock, like trying to see how it would look, and then puts his present behind his coat. Of course he had something there in a box for her. You know he constitutionally brought home the kind of presents that break your heart. He stands there with one leg out pretty, to surprise them. And I bet a nice smile on his face. Oh, don’t ask me to go on!
Suppose Snowdie’d took a notion to glance down the hall—the dining room’s at the end of it and the folding-doors pushed back—and seen him, all Come-kiss-me
like that. I don’t know if she could have seen that good—but I could. I was a fool and didn’t look.
It was the twins seen him. Through those little bitty mask holes, those eagle eyes! There ain’t going to be no stopping those twins. And he didn’t get to knock on the door, but he had his hand raised the second time and his knuckles sticking up, and out come the children on him, hollering Boo!
and waving their arms up and down the way it would scare you to death, or it ought to, if you wasn’t ready for them.
We heard them charge out, but we thought it was just a nigger that was going by for them to scare, if we thought anything.
Plez says—allowing for all human mistakes—he seen on one side of King come rolling out Lucius Randall all dressed up, and on the other side, Eugene Hudson all