The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [28]
Fay stared at the spread table, where Miss Tennyson, Miss Adele, Tish, and some of the other bridesmaids were setting plates and platters around. Missouri, back in her apron but with cemetery clay sticking to her heels, was bringing in the coffee urn. Missouri looked at her own reflection in the shield of its side and lifted her smiling face to Laurel.
“Now!” she said softly. “The house looking like it used to look! Like it used to look!”
“So you see? Here’s the Virginia ham!” said the minister’s wife to Laurel, as if everything had turned out all right: she offered her a little red rag of it on a Ritz cracker. Then she scampered away to her husband.
As soon as she was out of the house, Major Bullock carried in the silver tray heavy with some bottles and a pitcher and a circle of silver cups and tall glasses.
“Wanda Fay, you got enough stuff in sight to last one lone woman forever,” said Bubba Chisom, both his hands around a ham sandwich.
“I think things have gone off real well,” said Fay.
“Poor little girl!” Major Bullock said. As he offered her one of the silver cups with whiskey and water in it—she let him go on holding it—he said again, “Poor little girl. I reckon you know you get the house and everything in it you want. And Laurel having her own good place in Chicago, she’ll be compensated as equally as we know how—”
“Oh, foot,” said old Mrs. Pease.
“I sure do know whose house this is,” said Fay. “But maybe it’s something a few other people are going to have to learn.”
Major Bullock lifted the cup he’d offered to her and drank it himself.
“Well, you’ve done fine so far, Wanda Fay,” said old Mrs. Chisom. “I was proud of you today. And proud for you. That coffin made me wish I could have taken it right away from him and given it to Roscoe.”
“Thank you,” said Fay. “It was no bargain, and I think that showed.”
“Still, I did the best I could. And I feel like Roscoe sits up there knowing it now,” said Mrs. Chisom. “And what more could you ask.”
“You drew a large crowd, too,” said Sis. “Without even having to count those Negroes.”
“I was satisfied with it,” said Fay.
“For the first minute, you didn’t act all that glad to see us,” said Sis. “Or was I dreaming?”
“Now, be sisters,” warned old Mrs. Chisom. “And I’m glad you broke down when you did, Wanda Fay,” she went on, wagging her finger. “There’s a time and a place for everything. You try begging for sympathy later on, when folks has gone back about their business, and they don’t appreciate your tears then. It just tries their nerves.”
“Wanda Fay, I’m sorry I can’t fool around here no longer,” said Bubba Chisom, handing her his empty plate. “A wrecking concern hasn’t got all that time to spare, not with all we got to do in Madrid.”
“Come on, then,” said Sis, who had pushed herself to her feet again. “Let’s get going before the children commence to fighting and Wendell starts giving trouble again. Wendell Chisom,” she said to the little boy, “you can take this home to your mother: this is the first and last time you’re ever going to be carried to a funeral in any charge of me.” She took Laurel’s hand and shook it. “We thought a heap of your old dad, even if he couldn’t stay on earth long enough for us to get to know him. Whatever he was, we always knew he was just plain folks.”
Through the open front door could be seen the old grandfather already outside with his hat on, walking around looking at the trees. The pecan tree there was filled with budding leaves like green bees spaced out in a hive of light. There was something bright as well in the old man’s hatband—the other half of his round-trip ticket from Bigbee.
“Wanda Fay,” said Mrs. Chisom, “let me ask you this: who’re you ever going to get to put in this house besides you?”
“What are you hinting at?” said Fay with a dark look.
“Tell you one thing, there’s room for the whole nation of us here,” Mrs. Chisom said, and stepping