The Optimist's Daughter (8 page)

Dr. Woodson was saying, “Clint and me used to take off as shirt-tail lads with both our dogs and be gone all
day up in the woods—you know where they used to call it Top o’ the World? With the gravel pit dug out of the claybanks there. I’ve been his doctor for years, hell, we’re the same age, but after all this time it hasn’t been until now that something made me think about his foot. Clint went swinging on a vine, swinging too wide and too high, and soared off and came down on a piece of tin barefooted. He liked-to bled to death a mile from home! I reckon I must have carried Clint into town on my back and used strength I didn’t know I had. You know Clint always gave you the impression you couldn’t kill him, that nothing could, but I believe he really must have been kind of delicate.”

Light laughter broke out in the room and hushed itself in the same instant.

“Is this it, Aunt Sis?” Wendell Chisom asked. “Is it the funeral yet?”

“It’ll be the funeral when I say so,” said Sis.

“After I’d
got
him here, he fell out cold. But there’s houses in sight by then. It’s where the Self-Serve Car Wash is now. I reckon I’m to blame for saving Clint’s life for him that time!”

“Father
was
delicate,” said Laurel.

“With everything that’s the matter with me, you’d have thought he’d outlive me,” the doctor went on.

“Not for me or you to ask the reason why,” Mrs. Chisom told him. “It’s like the choice between Grandpa and my oldest boy Roscoe. Nobody in Texas could
understand what the Lord meant, taking Roscoe when He did.”

“What happened to Roscoe, Grandma?” Wendell asked, abandoning the coffin to hang over her lap and look up into her face.

“Son, you’ve heard me tell it. Stuffed up the windows, stuffed up the door, turned on all four eyes of the stove and the oven,” said Mrs. Chisom indulgently. “Fire Department drug him out, rushed him to the Baptist Hospital in the firewagon, tried all their tricks, but they couldn’t get ahead of Roscoe. He was in Heaven already.”

“He beat the fire engines? Was you there, Grandma?” Wendell cried. “You see him beat ’em?”

“I’m his mother. Well, his mother could sit and be thankful he didn’t do nothing any more serious to harm his looks. He hated more than anything having remarks made against him. In his coffin he was pretty as a girl. Honey, he just stretched him out easy and put his head on a pillow and waited till he’d quit breathing. Don’t you ever let me hear you tried that, Wendell,” said Mrs. Chisom.

Wendell turned and looked back at Judge McKelva.

“Roscoe told his friends in Orange, Texas, what he was figuring on doing. When it’s all done, they wrote and told me he’d called ’em up crying and they went and cried with him. ‘Cried
with
him?’ I wrote those people back. ‘Why couldn’t you-all have told his
mother?’ I can’t get
over
people. I says on my card, ‘I had the bus fare. I’m not that poor. I had the round-trip from Madrid to Orange and back again.’ ” She was patting both feet.

“He’s better off, Mama,” said Sis. “Better off, just like Judge McKelva laying yonder. Tell yourself the same thing I do.”

“I wrote another card and said at least tell his mother what had been fretting my son, if they knew so much, and they finally got around to answering that Roscoe didn’t
want
me to know,” Mrs. Chisom said, her face arranging itself all at once into an expression of innocence. It lasted for only a minute. She went on, “Roscoe was my mainstay when Mr. Chisom went. They said, ‘Prepare your mind, Mrs. Chisom. Mr. Chisom is not going to go anywhere but downhill.’ They was guessing right, that time, the doctors was. He went down fast and we buried him back in Mississippi, back in Bigbee, and there on the spot I called Roscoe to me.” She pulled Wendell to her now. “ ‘Roscoe,’ I says, ‘you’re the mainstay now,’ I says. ‘You’re the head of the Chisom family.’ He was so happy.”

Wendell began to cry. Laurel wanted at that moment to reach out for him, put her arms around him—to guard him. He was like a young, undriven, unfalsifying, unvindictive Fay. So Fay might have appeared, just at the beginning, to her aging father, with his slipping eyesight.

At that moment, Wendell broke from Mrs. Chisom
and ran tearing toward the hallway. He threw his arms around the knees of an old man whom Miss Adele was just showing in from the hall.

“Grandpa Chisom! I can’t believe my eyes! It’s Grandpa!” Sis cried out.

Wendell at his side, the old man came slowly into the parlor and through the crowd, carrying a yellowed candy box in one hand and a paper sack in the other. Wendell had possession of his old black hat. He came up to Laurel and said, “Young lady, I carried you some Bigbee pecans. I thought you might not harvest their like around here. They’re last year’s.” He held onto his parcels while he explained that he had sat up most of last night, after walking to the crossroads to flag down the bus at three this morning, and had shelled the nuts on the way, to keep awake. “Where I got lost was after I got inside of Mount Salus,” he said, giving the box to Laurel. “That’s the meats. You can just throw the shells away for me,” he added, handing her the sack. “I didn’t like to leave ’em in that nice warm seat for the next passenger.” He carefully dusted his hands before he turned toward the casket.

“Who you think it is, Grandpa?” asked Wendell.

“It’s Mr. McKelva. I reckon he stood whatever it was long enough,” said Mr. Chisom. “I’m sorry he had to go while he’s so many miles short of home.”

“Out of curiosity, who does he remind you of?” Mrs. Chisom asked him as he gazed down.

The old man reflected for a minute. “Nobody,” he said.

“Clint thought it was too good a joke not to play it on somebody!” Laurel heard behind her, at the end of a long spate of words.

She saw that most of the Bar had gathered themselves up and gone behind the screen of ferns, without being missed. They had retired into her father’s library and were talking among themselves back there. Now and then she heard a laugh. She smelled the cigar smoke. They were all back there but Major Bullock.

“How’s my fire?” cried Major Bullock. “Somebody tend to the fire!” he called toward the kitchen. “Important time like this, you can’t do without a fire, can you?” But he kept his own watch on the doorway leading from the hall, and looked eagerly to see each one who came in.

Old Mrs. Pease kept a watch on the front walk through the parlor curtains, making herself at home. “Why, here comes Tommy,” she said now. She might have been entertaining a notion of running him away, as she might have to run those Texas children if they played too near the house.

The caller entered the room without the benefit of Miss Adele, walking with a spring on the balls of his feet, striking his cane from side to side in a lordly way. He was Tom Farris, Mount Salus’s blind man. Instead of going to the coffin, he went to the piano and tapped his cane on the empty piano stool.

“He’s so happy,” said Miss Tennyson approvingly.

He sat down, a large, very clean man with rotund, open eyes like a statue’s. His fly had not been buttoned up quite straight. Laurel thought he had never been in the house before except to tune the piano, ages ago. He sat down on the same stool now.

“And under that cloak of modesty he wore, a fearless man! Fearless man!” Major Bullock suddenly burst into speech, standing at the foot of the coffin. “Remember the day, everybody, when Clint McKelva stood up and faced the White Caps?” The floor creaked agonizingly as he rocked back and forth on his feet and all but shouted, filling the room, perhaps the house, with his voice. “The time Clint sentenced that fellow for willful murder and the White Caps let it be known they were coming to town out of all their holes and nooks and crannies to take that man from the jail! And Clint just as quick sent out word of his own: he was going to ring that jail and Courthouse of ours with Mount Salus volunteers, and we’d be armed and ready. And the White Caps came, too—came a little bit earlier than they promised, little bit earlier than the rest of us got on hand. But Clint, Clint all by himself, he walked out on the front steps of that Courthouse and stood there and he said, ‘Come right on in! The jail is upstairs, on the second floor!’ ”

“I don’t think that was Father,” Laurel said low to Tish, who had come up beside her.

Major Bullock was going irrepressibly on. “ ‘Come
in!’ says he. ‘But before you enter, you take those damn white hoods off, and every last one of you give me a look at who you are!’ ”

“He hadn’t any use for what he called theatrics,” Laurel was saying. “In the courtroom or anywhere else. He had no patience for show.”

“He says, ‘Back to your holes, rats!’ And they were armed!” cried Major Bullock, lifting an imaginary gun in his hands.

“He’s trying to make Father into something he wanted to be himself,” said Laurel.

“Bless his heart,” mourned Tish beside her. “Don’t spoil it for Daddy.”

“But I don’t think it’s fair
now,”
said Laurel.

“Well, that backed ’em right out of there, the whole pack, right on out of town and back into the woods they came from. Cooked their goose for a while!” declared Major Bullock. “Oh, under that cloak of modesty he wore—”

“Father really was modest,” Laurel said to him.

“Honey, what do you mean? Honey, you were away. You were sitting up yonder in Chicago, drawing pictures,” Major Bullock told her. “I saw him! He stood up and dared those rascals to shoot him! Baring his breast!”

“He would have thought of my mother,” said Laurel. And with it came the thought: It was my mother who
might
have done that! She’s the only one I know who had it in her.

“Remains a mystery to me how he ever stayed alive,” said Major Bullock stiffly. He lowered the imaginary gun. His feelings had been hurt.

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

“But who do you call the man, Dad?” asked Wendell, plucking at his father’s sleeve.

“Shut up. Or I’ll carry you on home without letting you see the rest of it.”

“It’s my father,” Laurel said.

The little boy looked at her, and his mouth opened. She thought he disbelieved her.

The crowd of men were still at it behind the screen. “Clint’s hunting a witness, some of the usual trouble, and this Negro girl says, ‘It’s him and me that saw it. He’s a witness, and I’s a got-shot witness.’ ”

They laughed.

“ ‘There’s two kinds, all right,’ says Clint. ‘And I know which to take. She’s the got-shot witness: I’ll take her.’ He could see the funny side to everything.”

“He brought her here afterwards and kept her safe under his own roof,” Laurel said under her breath to Miss Adele, who had come in from the door now; it would be too late for any more callers before the funeral. “I don’t know what the funny side was.”

“It was Missouri, wasn’t it?” said Miss Adele.

“And listening,” said Laurel, for Missouri herself was just then lit up by a shower of sparks; down on
her knees before the fire, she was poking the big log.

“I always pray people won’t recognize themselves in the speech of others,” Miss Adele murmured. “And I don’t think very often they do.”

The log shifted like a sleeper in bed, and light flared all over in the room. Mr. Pitts was revealed in their midst as though by a spotlight, in the act of consulting his wristwatch.

“What’s happening isn’t real,” Laurel said, low.

“The ending of a man’s life on earth is very real indeed,” Miss Adele said.

“But what people are saying.”

“They’re trying to say for a man that his life is over. Do you know a good way?”

Here, helpless in his own house among the people he’d known, and who’d known him, since the beginning, her father seemed to Laurel to have reached at this moment the danger point of his life.

“Did you listen to their words?” she asked.

“They’re being clumsy. Often because they were thinking of you.”

“They said he was a humorist. And a crusader. And an angel on the face of the earth,” Laurel said.

Miss Adele, looking into the fire, smiled. “It isn’t easy for them, either. And they’re being egged on a little bit, you know, Laurel, by the rivalry that’s going on here in the room,” she said. “After all, when the Chisoms walked in on us, they thought they had their side, too—”

“Rivalry? With Father where he lies?”

“Yes, but people being what they are, Laurel.”

“This is still his house. After all, they’re still his guests. They’re misrepresenting him—falsifying, that’s what Mother would call it.” Laurel might have been trying to testify now for her father’s sake, as though he were in process of being put on trial in here instead of being viewed in his casket. “He never would have stood for lies being told about him. Not at any time. Not ever.”

“Yes he would,” said Miss Adele. “If the truth might hurt the wrong person.”

“I’m his daughter. I want what people say now to be the truth.”

Laurel slowly turned her back to the parlor, and stood a little apart from Miss Adele too. She let her eyes travel out over the coffin into the other room, her father’s “library.” The bank of greenery hid the sight of his desk. She could see only the two loaded bookcases behind it, like a pair of old, patched, velvety cloaks hung up there on the wall. The shelf-load of Gibbon stretched like a sagging sash across one of them. She had not read her father the book he’d wanted after all. The wrong book! The wrong book! She was looking at her own mistake, and its long shadow reaching back to join the others.

“The least anybody can do for him is
remember
right,” she said.

“I believe to my soul it’s the most, too,” said Miss
Adele. And then warningly,
“Polly—”

Fay at that moment burst from the hall into the parlor. She glistened in black satin. Eyes straight ahead, she came running a path through all of them toward the coffin.

Miss Adele, with a light quick move from behind her, pulled Laurel out of the way.

“No. Stop—stop her,” Laurel said.

Fay brought herself short and hung over the pillow. “Oh, he looks so good with those mean old sandbags taken away and that mean old bandage pulled off of his eye!” she said fiercely.