him to “scrooch up” when the conductor came through for the tickets, for he was a tall lank boy, and his half-fare age might be called to question.
She took him to Florida in the late winter following Gant’s return from Augusta: they went to Tampa first, and, a few days later, to Saint Petersburg. He plowed through the loose deep sand of the streets, fished interminably with jolly old men at the end of the long pier, devoured a chest full of dime novels that he found in the rooms she had rented in a private house. They left abruptly, after a terrific quarrel with the old Cracker who ran the place, who thought himself tricked out of the best part of a season’s rent, and hurried off to South Carolina on receipt of a hysterical message from Daisy which bade her mother to “come at once.” They arrived in the dingy little town, which was sticky with wet clay, and clammy with rain, in late March: Daisy’s first child, a boy, had been born the day before. Eliza, annoyed at what she considered the useless disruption of her holiday, quarrelled bitterly with her daughter a day or two after her arrival, and departed for Altamont with the declaration, which Daisy ironically applauded, that she would never return again. But she did.
The following winter she went to New Orleans at the season of the Mardi Gras, taking her youngest with her. Eugene remembered the huge cisterns for rain-water, in the back yard of Aunt Mary’s house, the heavy window-rattling thunder of Mary’s snores at night, and the vast pageantry of carnival on Canal Street: the storied floats, the smiling beauties, the marching troops, the masks grotesque and fantastical. And once more he saw ships at anchor at the foot of Canal Street; and their tall keels looked over on the street behind the sea walls; and in the cemeteries all the graves were raised above the ground “because,” said Oll, Gant’s nephew, “the water rots’em.”
And he remembered the smells of the French market, the heavy fragrance of the coffee he drank there, and the foreign Sunday gaiety of the city’s life—the theatres open, the sound of hammer and saw, the gay festivity of crowds. He visited the Boyles, old guests at Dixieland, who lived in the old French quarter, sleeping at night with Frank Boyle in a vast dark room lighted
