The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [35]
The library was a little darker now that one of the two windows that looked out on the Courtland side of the house was covered by Judge McKelva’s office cabinet. This was jammed with lawbooks and journals, more dictionaries, his Claiborne’s Mississippi and his Mississippi Code. Books, folders, file boxes were shelved with markers and tapes hanging out. Along the cabinet top his telescope was propped extended, like a small brass cannon.
Laurel slid back the glass doors and began to dust and put back neatly what she came to. His papers were in an order of their own—she thought it was that of importance to unimportance. He had kept civic papers dating from the days when he was Mayor of Mount Salus, and an old dedication speech made at the opening of the new school (“These are my promises to you, all the young people I see before me: …”). The promises had made them important to him. There was a bursting folder of papers having to do with the Big Flood, the one that had ruined the McKelva place on the river; it was jammed with the work he had done on floods and flood control. And everybody had already forgotten all about that part of his life, his work, his drudgery. This town deserved him no more than Fay deserved him, she thought, her finger in the dust on what he’d written.
Laurel took her eyes away from words and stood for a moment at the window. In the backyard next door, Miss Adele was hanging something white on the clothesline. She turned as if intuitively toward the window, and raised her arm to wave. It was a beckoning sort of wave. She beckons with her pain, thought Laurel, realizing how often her father must have stood just here, resting his eyes, and looked out at her without ever seeing her.
Yet he loved them as a family. After moving into town from out in the country, the Courtlands ploughed the field behind the house, and back of that, in the pasture, kept cows. In Laurel’s early memory, Mrs. Courtland had sold milk and to Judge McKelva’s disturbance had had her children drink it skimmed blue so she could sell all the cream.
It was not until that night when Dr. Courtland told her, that Laurel ever heard he owed part of his medical schooling to her father. Never had Judge McKelva been well off until the last few years. He had come unexpectedly into a little oil money from a well dug in those acres of sand he still owned in the country—not a great deal, but enough, with his salary continuing for life, to retire on free of financial worry. “See there?” he had written to Laurel—or rather dictated to Dot, who loved underlining his words on her typewriter. “There was never anything wrong with keeping up a little optimism over the Flood. How well would you like to knock off, invite a friend for company, and all go see England and Scotland in the spring?” The next thing she heard, he was about to marry Fay.
She’d been all around the room, and now there was the desk. It stood in the center of the room, and it had been her father’s great-grandfather’s, made in Edinburgh—a massive, concentrated presence, like that of a concert grand. (The neglected piano in the parlor seemed to have no presence at all.) Behind the desk yawned his leather chair, now in its proper place.
Laurel walked around to it. There used to be standing on the desk, to face him in his chair, a photograph of her mother, who had been asked