The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [43]
Judge McKelva had let this pass, but Laurel had said, “I know—you’re quoting the words of your own father.”
She had nodded at them fervently.
When she was fifteen years old, Becky had gone with her father, who was suffering pain, on a raft propelled by a neighbor, down the river at night when it was filled with ice, to reach a railroad, to wave a lantern at a snowy train that would stop and take them on, to reach a hospital.
(“How could you make a fire on a raft?” asked Laurel, here on this matting. “How could a fire burn on water?” “We had to have a fire,” said her mother, sewing on her fingers. “We made it burn.”)
In the city of Baltimore, when at last they reached the hospital, the little girl entrusted the doctors with what he had told her: “Papa said, ‘If you let them tie me down, I’ll die.’ ” He could not by then have told the doctors for himself; he was in delirium. It turned out that he had suffered a ruptured appendix.
Two doctors came out of the operating room, to where Becky stood waiting in the hall. One said, “You’d better get in touch with whoever you know in Baltimore, little girl.” “But I don’t know anybody in Baltimore, sir.” “Not know anybody in Baltimore?”
This incredulity on the part of the hospital was the memory that had stayed sharpest in Becky’s mind, although afterwards she had ridden home in the baggage car of the train, guided herself back to her mother and the houseful of little boys, bearing the news and bringing the coffin, both together.
Neither of us saved our fathers, Laurel thought. But Becky was the brave one. I stood in the hall, too, but I did not any longer believe that anyone could be saved, anyone at all. Not from others.
The house shook suddenly and seemed to go on shaking after a long roll of thunder.
“Up home, we loved a good storm coming, we’d fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it,” her mother used to say. “We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms wide open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.” During the very bursting of a tornado which carried away half of Mount Salus, she said, “We never were afraid of a little wind. Up home, we’d welcome a good storm.”
“You don’t know anybody in Baltimore?” they had asked Becky.
But Becky had known herself.
There had been so much confidence when first her vision had troubled her. Laurel remembered how her mother, early in the morning of her first eye operation (and after an injection supposed to make her sleepy), was affected with the gayest high spirits and anticipation, and had asked for her dressing case, and before the inadequate mirror had powdered and dabbed rouge on her face and put on a touch of lipstick and even sprayed about with her scent, as though she had been going to an evening party with her husband. She had stretched out her hand in exhilaration to the orderly who came to wheel her out, as if after Nate Courtland had removed that little cataract in the Mount Salus Hospital, she would wake up and be in West Virginia.
When someone lies sick and troubled for five years and is beloved, unforeseen partisanship can spring up among the well. During her mother’s long trial in bed, Laurel, young and recently widowed, had somehow turned for a while against her father: he seemed so particularly helpless to do anything for his wife. He was not passionately enough grieved at the changes in her! He seemed to give the changes his same, kind recognition—to accept them because they had to be only of the time being, even to love them, even to laugh sometimes at their absurdity. “Why do you persist in letting them hurt me?” her mother would ask him. Laurel battled against them both, each for the other’s sake. She loyally reproached her mother for yielding to the storms that began coming to her out of her darkness of vision. Her mother had only to recollect herself! As for her father, he apparently needed guidance in order to see the tragic.
What burdens we lay on the dying, Laurel thought, as she listened now to the accelerated rain on