The Optimist's Daughter Part 5

The caller entered the room without the benefit of Miss Adele, walking with a spring on the b.a.l.l.s 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 b.u.t.toned 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 d.a.m.n 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," now," said Laurel. 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 might have done that! She's the only one I know who had it in her. 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 wrist.w.a.tch.

"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 remember right," she said. right," she said.

"I believe to my soul it's the most, too," said Miss Adele. And then warningly, "Polly-" "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.

"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 them to come?" cried Fay. 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 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." 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?" bad?" screamed Fay. "Why did he do me so screamed Fay. "Why did he do me so bad?" 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 can't shoot him," said Sis. "Because I say so, that's why." 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sengers 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 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 hea.r.s.e. They got out onto the gra.s.s 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 b.u.mper. "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 gra.s.s. "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.