The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [49]
“It’ll get in every room in the house if you let it,” Laurel said, controlling herself from putting her hands over her hair.
“It ain’t trying to get in. Trying to get out,” said Mr. Cheek, and crowed at her. He marched around the room, glancing into Laurel’s suitcase, opened out on the bed—there was nothing for him to see, only her sketchbook that she’d never taken out—and inspected the dressing table and himself in its mirror, while the bird tried itself from curtain to curtain and spurted out of the room ahead of him. It had left the dust of itself all over everything, the way a moth does.
“Where’s Young Miss?” asked Mr. Cheek, and opened the big bedroom door. The bird flew in like an arrow.
“Mr. Cheek!”
“That’s about my favorite room in the house,” he said. He gave Laurel a black grin; his front teeth had gone.
“Mr. Cheek, I thought I told you—I wasn’t ready for a joke. You’ve simply come and made things worse than you found them. Exactly like you used to do!” Laurel said.
“Well, I won’t charge you nothing,” he said, clattering down the stairs behind her. “I don’t see nothing wrong with you,” he added. “Why didn’t you ever go ’head and marry you another somebody?”
She walked to the door and waited for him to leave. He laughed good-naturedly. “Yep, I’m all that’s left of my folks too,” he said. “Maybe me and you ought to get together.”
“Mr. Cheek, I’d be very glad if you’d depart.”
“If you don’t sound like Old Miss!” he said admiringly. “No hard feelings,” he called, skipping into his escape down the steps. “You even got her voice.”
Missouri had arrived; she came out with her broom to the front porch. “What happen?”
“A chimney swift! A chimney swift got out of the fireplace into the house and flew everywhere,” Laurel said. “It’s still loose upstairs.”
“It’s because we get it all too clean, brag too soon,” said Missouri. “You didn’t ask that Mr. Cheeks? He just waltz through the house enjoying the scenery, what I bet.”
“He was a failure. We’ll shoo it out between us.”
“That’s what it look like. It’s just me and you.”
Missouri, when she appeared again, was stuffed back into her raincoat and hat and buckled in tight. She walked slowly up the stairs holding the kitchen broom, bristles up.
“Do you see it?” Laurel asked. She saw the mark on the stairway curtain where the bird had tried to stay asleep. She heard it somewhere, ticking.
“He on the telephone.”
“Oh, don’t hit—”
“How’m I gonna git him, then? Look,” said Missouri. “He ain’t got no business in your room.”
“Just move behind it. Birds fly toward light—I’m sure I’ve been told. Here—I’m holding the front door wide open for it.” Missouri could be heard dropping the broom. “It’s got a perfectly clear way out now,” Laurel called. “Why won’t it just fly free of its own accord?”
“They just ain’t got no sense like we have.”
Laurel propped the screen door open and ran upstairs with two straw wastebaskets. “I’ll make it go free.”
Then her heart sank. The bird was down on the floor, under the telephone table. It looked small and unbearably flat to the ground, like a child’s shoe without a foot inside it.
“Missouri, I’ve always been scared one would touch me,” Laurel told her. “I’ll tell you that.” It looked eyeless, unborn, so still was it holding.
“They vermin,” said Missouri.
Laurel dropped the first basket over the bird, then cupped the two baskets together to enclose it; the whole operation was soundless and over in an instant.
“What if I’ve hurt it?”
“Cat’ll git him, that’s all.”
Laurel ran down the stairs and out of the house and down the front steps, not a step of the way without the knowledge of what she carried, vibrating through the ribs of the baskets, the beat of its wings or of its heart, its blind struggle against rescue.
On the front sidewalk, she got ready.
“What you doing?” called old Mrs. Pease through her window curtains. “Thought you were