The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [24]
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,