The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [41]
“Our horse was Selim. Let me hear you pronounce his name,” her mother had said to Laurel while they sat here sewing. “I rode Selim to school. Seven miles over Nine Mile Mountain, seven miles home. To make the time pass quicker, I recited the whole way, from horseback—I memorized with no great effort, dear,” she’d replied to the child’s protest. “Papa hadn’t had an entirely easy time of it, getting books at all up home.”
Laurel had been taken “up home” since a summer before she remembered. The house was built on top of what might as well have been already the highest roof in the world. There were rocking chairs outside it on the sweet, roofless green grass. From a rocking chair could be seen the river where it rounded the foot of the mountain. It was only when you wound your way down the mountain nearly to the bottom that you began to hear the river. It sounded like a roomful of mesmerized schoolchildren reciting to their teacher. This point of the river was called Queen’s Shoals.
Both Becky’s father and her mother had been Virginians. The mother’s family (fathered by a line of preachers and teachers) had packed up and gone across the border around the time of the Secession. Becky’s own father had been a lawyer, too. But the mountain had stood five times as high as the courthouse roof, straight up behind it, and the river went rushing in front of it like a road. It was its only road.
They must have had names. Laurel never remembered hearing them said. They were just “the mountain,” “the river,” “the courthouse,” parts of “up home.”
In the early morning, from the next mountain, from one stillness to another, travelled the sound of a blow, then behind it its echo, then another blow, then the echo, then a shouting and the shouting falling back on itself. On it went.
“Mother, what are they doing?” Laurel asked.
“It’s just an old man chopping wood,” said “the boys.”
“He’s praying,” said her mother.
“An old hermit that is,” said Grandma. “Without a soul in the world.”
“The boys”—there were six—saddled the pony for their sister; then they rode off with her. They lay on blankets and saddles under the apple tree and played the banjo for her. They told her so many stories she cried, all about people only she knew and they knew; had she not cried she would have never been able to stop laughing. Of her youngest brother, who sang “Billy Boy” and banged comically on the strings, she said, “Very well for Sam. He went out and cried on the ground when I married.”
In sight of the door there was an iron bell mounted on a post. If anything were ever to happen, Grandma only needed to ring this bell.
The first time Laurel could remember arriving in West Virginia instead of just finding herself there, her mother and she had got down from the train in early morning and stood, after it had gone, by themselves on a steep rock, all of the world that they could see in the mist being their rock and its own iron bell on a post with its rope hanging down. Her mother gave the rope a pull and at its sound, almost at the moment of it, large and close to them appeared a gray boat with two of the boys at the oars. At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.
Bird dogs went streaking the upslanted pasture through the sweet long grass that swept them as high as their noses. While it was still day on top of the mountain, the light still warm on the cheek, the valley was dyed blue under them. While one of “the boys” was coming up, his white shirt would shine for a long time almost without moving in her sight, like Venus in the sky of Mount Salus, while grandmother, mother, and little girl sat, outlasting the light, waiting for him to climb home.
Wings beat again. Flying in from over the mountain, over the roof and a child’s head, high up in blue air, pigeons had formed a cluster and twinkled as one body.