The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty Page A

without him," says Uncle Daniel, pulling me out of my poor chair. "But make haste. Listen to that! Bonnie Dee was right—she always is—it's fixing to storm." And sure enough, we heard it thunder in the west.
    I never thought of the ice again until this day. Bonnie Dee wouldn't have hesitated asking for the moon! That there should be a smidgen of ice left in Clay at that hour is one of the most unlikely things I ever heard of. What was left of the public cake on the Courthouse steps had run down in a trickle by noon.
    Well, to make a long story short, Bonnie Dee sent him word Monday after dinner and was dead as a doornail Monday before supper. Tuesday she was in her grave. Nobody more surprised than the Ponders. It was all I could do to make Uncle Daniel go to
that
funeral.
    He did try to give the Peacocks his cemetery lot, but I doubt if he knew what he was doing. They said they bury at Polk, thank you.
    He didn't want to go to Polk for anything, no indeed he did not. I had to make him. Then after he got dressed up and all the way down there, he behaved up until the last as well as I did; and it was scorching hot, too. I hope the day they bury me will be a little cooler. But at least people won't have so far to come.
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    I believe Polk did use to be a town. Mr. Springer told us how to get to it. (He was shooting through Clay headed
east
by Tuesday—there's a great deal of wonder-drug trade going on in all parts of Mississippi.) You start out like you were going to Monterrey, turn at the consolidated school, and bear right till you see a Baptist steeple across a field, and you just leave the gravel and head for that, if you have good tires. And that's Polk. The Peacocks live out from it, but trade there, and, as they said, bury there.
    Well, their church is a shell—all burnt out inside. The funeral was further still, at the house.
    Portulaca in pie pans was what they set along the front porch. And the mirror on the front of the house: I told you. In the yard not a snap of grass—an old auto tire with verbena growing inside it ninety to nothing, all red. And a tin roof you could just imagine the chinaberries falling on—ping! And now the hot rays of the sun.
    The funeral was what you'd expect if you'd ever seen Polk—crowded. It was hot as fluzions in that little front room. A lot of Jacob's-Ladder tops and althea blooms sewed on cardboard crosses, and a salvia wreath with a bee in it. A lot of ferns hauled out of creek bottoms and drooping by the time they got ready for them. People, people, people, flowers, flowers, flowers, and the shades hauled down and the electricity burning itself up, and two preachers both red-headed j but mainly I felt there were Peacocks. Mrs. Peacock was big and fat as a row of pigs, and wore tennis shoes to her daughter's funeral—I guess she couldn't help it. I saw right there at the funeral that Bonnie Dee had been the pick.
    We went by in the line, Uncle Daniel tipping on his toes. Such cracks in the floor, and chickens right under your feet! They had the coffin across the hearth on kitchen chairs.
    Bonnie Dee was holding a magnolia a little too big for her size. She really did look seventeen. They had her in a Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, old-timey looking and too big for her—never washed or worn, just saved: white. She wouldn't have known herself in it. And a sash so new and blue and shiny it looked like it would break, right out of the Polk general merchandise, tied in a bow around a waist no bigger than your thumb.
    When you saw her there, it looked like she could have loved
somebody!
    Uncle Daniel pulled loose from me and circled back. He had Mrs. Peacock by the hand in no time. He said, "Mrs. Peacock, let me tell you something. Your daughter's pretty as a doll."
    And Mrs. Peacock says, "Well sir, that's just the way I used to look, but never cared to brag."
    They had one big rawboned country preacher on one side of Bonnie Dee, to get up and say look