The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [40]
Laurel had hesitated coming to open her father’s desk; she was not hesitating here—not now. She touched the doors where they met, and they swung open together. Within, the cabinet looked like a little wall out of a country post office which nobody had in years disturbed by calling for their mail. How had her mother’s papers lain under merciful dust in the years past and escaped destruction? Laurel was sure of why: her father could not have borne to touch them; to Fay, they would have been only what somebody wrote—and anybody reduced to the need to write, Fay would think already beaten as a rival.
Laurel opened out the writing lid, and reaching up she drew down the letters and papers from one pigeonhole at a time. There were twenty-six pigeonholes, but her mother had stored things according to their time and place, she discovered, not by ABC. Only the letters from her father had been all brought together, all she had received in her life, surely—there they were; the oldest envelopes had turned saffron. Laurel drew a single one out, opened the page inside long enough to see it beginning “My darling Sweetheart,” and returned it to its place. They were postmarked from the courthouse towns her father had made sojourn in, and from Mount Salus when he addressed them to West Virginia on her visits “up home”; and under these were the letters to Miss Becky Thurston, tied in ribbons that were almost transparent, and freckled now, as the skin of her mother’s hands came to be before she died. In the back of the pigeonhole where these letters came from was some solid little object, and Laurel drew it out, her fingers remembering it before she held it under her eyes. It was a two-inch bit of slatey stone, given shape by many little strokes from a penknife. It had come out of its cranny the temperature and smoothness of her skin; it fitted into her palm. “A little dish!” Laurel the child had exclaimed, thinking it something made by a child younger than she. “A boat,” corrected her mother importantly. The initials C.C.M.McK. were cut running together into the base. Her father had made it himself. It had gone from his hand to her mother’s; that was a river stone; they had been courting, “up home.”
There was a careful record of those days preserved in a snapshot book. Laurel felt along the shelf above the pigeonholes and touched it, the square boards, the silk tassel. She pulled it down to her.
Still clinging to the first facing pages were the pair of grayed and stippled home-printed snapshots: Clinton and Becky “up home,” each taken by the other standing in the same spot on a railroad track (a leafy glade), he slender as a wand, his foot on a milepost, swinging his straw hat; she with her hands full of the wild-flowers they’d picked along the way.
“The most beautiful blouse I ever owned in my life—I made it. Cloth from Mother’s own spinning, and dyed a deep, rich, American Beauty color with pokeberries,” her mother had said with the gravity in which she spoke of “up home.” “I’ll never have anything to wear that to me is as satisfactory as that blouse.”
How darling and vain she was when she was young! Laurel thought now. She’d made the blouse—and developed the pictures too, for why couldn’t she? And very likely she had made the paste that held them.
Judge McKelva, who like his father had attended the University