The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [26]
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