Free The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty Page A

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 MissAdele. 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.
    “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