The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [25]
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 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