The Optimist's Daughter (9 page)

“She’s wasting no time, she’s fixing to break aloose right now,” said Mrs. Chisom. “Didn’t even stop to speak to me.”

Fay cried out, and looked around.

Sis stood up, enormous, and said, “Here I am, Wanda Fay. Cry on me.”

Laurel closed her eyes, in the recognition of what had made the Chisoms seem familiar to her. They might have come out of that night in the hospital waiting room—out of all times of trouble, past or future—the great, interrelated family of those who never know the meaning of what has happened to them.

“Get back!—Who told
them
to come?” cried Fay.

“I did!” said Major Bullock, his face nothing but delight. “Found ’em without a bit of trouble! Clint scribbled ’em all down for me in the office, day before he left for New Orleans.”

But Fay showed him her back. She leaned forward over the coffin. “Oh, hon, get up, get out of there,” she said.

“Stop her,” Laurel said to the room.

“There now,” said Miss Tennyson to all of them around the coffin.

“Can’t you hear me, hon?” called Fay.

“She’s cracking,” said Mrs. Chisom. “Just like me. Poor little Wanda Fay.”

“Oh, Judge, how could you be so unfair to me?” Fay cried, while Mr. Pitts emerged from behind the greens and poised his hand on the lid. “Oh, Judge, how could you go off and leave me this way? Why did you want to treat me so unfair?”

“I can tell you’re going to be a little soldier,” Major Bullock said, marching to Fay’s side.

“Wanda Fay
needed
that husband of hers. That’s why he ought to lived. He was a care, took all her time, but you’d go through it again, wouldn’t you, honey?” asked Mrs. Chisom, pulling herself to her feet. She put out her arms, walking heavily toward her daughter. “If you could have your husband back this minute.”

“No,” Laurel whispered.

Fay cried into the coffin, “Judge! You cheated on me!”

“Just tell him goodbye, sugar,” said Major Bullock as he tried to put his arm around her shoulders, staggering a little. “That’s best, just plant him a kiss—”

Fay struck out with her hands, hitting at Major Bullock and Mr. Pitts and Sis, fighting her mother, too, for a moment. She showed her claws at Laurel, and broke from the preacher’s last-minute arms and threw herself forward across the coffin onto the pillow, driving her lips without aim against the face under hers. She was dragged back into the library, screaming, by Miss Tennyson Bullock, out of sight behind the bank of greenery. Judge McKelva’s smoking chair lay behind them, overturned.

Laurel stood gazing down at the unchanged face of the dead, while Mrs. Chisom’s voice came through the sounds of confusion in the library.

“Like mother, like daughter. Though when I had to give up her dad, they couldn’t hold me half so easy. I tore up the whole house, I did.”

“Where’s the doctor? In hiding?” old Mrs. Pease was saying.

“She’ll get over it,” said Dr. Woodson. All the men except for old Tom Farris, who sat just waiting, and Major Bullock following after Fay, had withdrawn to a huddle in the hall.

“Give me those little hands,” Major Bullock’s voice came from the library.

“She bites.” Fay’s sister.

“And no wonder. It’s hard to be told to give up goodness itself.” Major Bullock.

Hearing his voice disembodied, Laurel realized he was drunk.

“Then why was he so
bad?”
screamed Fay. “Why did he do me so
bad?”

“Don’t cry! I’ll shoot the bad man for you. Where is the bad man?” came the thin pipe of Wendell. “If you don’t cry!”

“You
can’t
shoot him,” said Sis. “Because I say so, that’s why.”

“Shake her,” said Mrs. Chisom’s appreciative voice.

“There’s no telling when she last had a decent home-cooked meal with honest vegetables,” said Miss Tennyson Bullock. “That goes a long way toward explaining everything. Now, this will be just a little slap.”

In the moment of silence that came after that, Laurel looked at her father for the last time, when there was only herself to see him like this. Mr. Pitts had achieved one illusion, that danger to his lived life was still alive; now there was no longer that.

“He loved my mother,” Laurel spoke into the quiet.

She lifted up her head: Tish was coming to stand beside her, and old Tom Farris had remained in attendance at the back of the room. Mr. Pitts had been waiting them out in the greenery. As he stepped forward and put his strength to his task, Tish very gently winked at Laurel, and helped her to give up bearing the weight of that lid, to let it come down.

Then Mr. Pitts, as if he propelled it by using the simple power of immunity, moved through their ranks with the coffin and went first; it had been piled over with flowers in the blink of an eye. Last of all came
Miss Adele: she must have been there all the time, in the righted smoking chair, with her drawn forehead against its old brown wing.

Laurel, Miss Adele, and Missouri walked out together and watched it go. Children at play and a barking dog watched it come out, then watched the people come out behind it. Two children sat on the roof of a truck to wave at Wendell, with their hands full. They had picked the Silver Bells.

Mount Salus Presbyterian Church had been built by McKelvas, who had given it the steepest steps in town to make it as high as the Courthouse it was facing. From her place in the family pew, Laurel heard the seven members of the Bar, or their younger sons, and Bubba Chisom in his windbreaker bringing up the thundering weight of Judge McKelva in his coffin. She heard them blundering.

“Heavenly Father, may this serve to remind us that we have each and every one of us been fearfully and wonderfully made,” Dr. Bolt said over the coffin, head bowed. But was that not Judge McKelva’s table blessing? They were the last words Laurel heard. She watched him perform the service, but what he was saying might have been as silent as the movements of the handkerchief he passed over and over again across his forehead, and down his cheeks, and around.

Everybody remained seated while the family—the
family was Laurel, Fay, and the Bullocks—walked back up the aisle first, behind the casket. Laurel saw that there had not been room enough in the church for everybody who had come. All around the walls, people were standing; they darkened the colored glass of the windows. Black Mount Salus had come too, and the black had dressed themselves in black.

All of them poured down the steps together. The casket preceded them.

“He’ll touch down where He took off from,” said Miss Verna Longmeier, at the bottom. “Split it right down the middle.” Her hands ripped a seam for them: “The Mount of Olives.” Triumphantly, she set off the other way.

There was a ringing for each car as it struck its wheels on the cattleguard and rode up into the cemetery. The procession passed between ironwork gates whose kneeling angels and looping vines shone black as licorice. The top of the hill ahead was crowded with winged angels and life-sized effigies of bygone citizens in old-fashioned dress, standing as if by count among the columns and shafts and conifers like a familiar set of passengers collected on deck of a ship, on which they all knew each other—bona-fide members of a small local excursion, embarked on a voyage that is always returning in dreams.

“I’m glad the big camellia will be in bloom,” said
Laurel. She felt her gloved hand pressed in that of Miss Tennyson, as Fay said from her other side:

“How could the biggest fool think I was going to bury my husband with his old wife? He’s going in the new part.”

Laurel’s eye travelled among the urns that marked the graves of the McKelvas and saw the favorite camellia of her father’s, the old-fashioned
Chandlerii Elegans
, that he had planted on her mother’s grave—now big as a pony, saddled with unplucked bloom living and dead, standing on a fading carpet of its own flowers.

Laurel would hardly have thought of Mount Salus Cemetery as having a “new part.” It was like being driven to the other side of the moon. The procession stopped. The rest of the way was too rough, as Laurel now saw, for anything except a hearse. They got out onto the grass and clay of the petered-out road. The pick-up truck had pulled up right behind the family’s car, nearly touching it with the tin sign on its bumper. “Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto You.”

“What’re we here for?” asked Wendell, his voice in the open air carrying though light as thistledown.

“Wendell Chisom, they’ve got to finish what they started, haven’t they? I told you you was going to be sorry you ever begged,” said Sis.

They struck out across the field. There were already a few dozen graves here, dotted uniformly with indestructible
plastic Christmas poinsettias.

“Now, is everybody finding the right place?” called Miss Tennyson, her eyes skimming the crowd that went walking over the young grass. “Somebody help old Tom Farris get where he’s going!”

An awning marked the site; it appeared to be the farthest one in the cemetery. As they proceeded there, black wings thudded in sudden unison, and a flock of birds flew up as they might from a ploughed field, still shaped like it, like an old map that still served new territory, and wrinkled away in the air.

Mr. Pitts waited, one more time; he stood under the awning. The family took their assigned seats. Laurel had Fay on her right, sitting with a black-gloved hand held tenderly to her cheek. The coffin, fixed in suspension over the opened grave, was on a level with their eyes now.

Miss Tennyson, still on Laurel’s left, murmured close to her ear, “Look behind you. The high school band. They better be here! Clint gave ’em those horns they’re sporting, gave ’em the uniforms to march in. Somebody pass ’em the word to perk up.
Of course
they’re not going to get to play!”

Under Mr. Pitts’ awning Laurel could smell the fieriness of flowers restored to the open air and the rawness of the clay in the opened grave. Their chairs were set on the odorless, pistachio-green of Mr. Pitts’ portable grass. It could still respond, everything must
respond, to some vibration underfoot: this new part of the cemetery was the very shore of the new interstate highway.

Dr. Bolt assumed position and pronounced the words. Again Laurel failed to hear what came from his lips. She might not even have heard the high school band. Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears. Beside her, then, Fay’s black hand slid from her cheek to pat her hair into place—it was over.

“I want to tell you, Laurel, what a beautiful funeral it was,” said Dot Daggett, immediately after Dr. Bolt had gone down the line shaking hands with the family, and they’d all risen. “I saw everybody I know and everybody I used to know. It was old Mount Salus personified.” Dot looked up at Laurel out of her old movie-actress eyes. Kissing her hand to the others, she told them goodbye, cutting Miss Tennyson Bullock.

The members of the high school band were the first to break loose. They tore across the grass, all red and gold, back to their waiting jalopy. Wendell ran at their heels. In the road he found his truck. He climbed into the back of it and threw himself down on the floor and lay flat.

The rest of the company moved at a slower pace. “Somebody mind out for old Tom Farris!” called Miss
Tennyson. Laurel, letting them go ahead, walked into the waiting arms of Missouri.

In the wake of their footsteps, the birds settled again. Down on the ground, they were starlings, all on the waddle, pushing with the yellow bills of spring.

4

I
N THE PARLOR
, the fire had mercifully died out. Missouri and Miss Tennyson got all the chairs back into place in the two rooms here and the dining room, and the crowd of bridesmaids had succeeded among them in winding the clock on the mantel and setting the hands to the time—only ten minutes past noon—and starting the pendulum.

Miss Tennyson Bullock, from the dining room, gave out the great groan she always gave when a dish had been made exactly right; it was her own chicken mousse. She invited them in.

Fay stared at the spread table, where Miss Tennyson, Miss Adele, Tish, and some of the other bridesmaids were setting plates and platters around. Missouri, back in her apron but with cemetery clay sticking to her
heels, was bringing in the coffee urn. Missouri looked at her own reflection in the shield of its side and lifted her smiling face to Laurel.

“Now!” she said softly. “The house looking like it used to look! Like it used to look!”

“So you see? Here’s the Virginia ham!” said the minister’s wife to Laurel, as if everything had turned out all right: she offered her a little red rag of it on a Ritz cracker. Then she scampered away to her husband.

As soon as she was out of the house, Major Bullock carried in the silver tray heavy with some bottles and a pitcher and a circle of silver cups and tall glasses.

“Wanda Fay, you got enough stuff in sight to last one lone woman forever,” said Bubba Chisom, both his hands around a ham sandwich.

“I think things have gone off real well,” said Fay.