The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [50]
“I am, just about!” called Laurel, and opened the baskets.
Something struck her face—not feathers; it was a blow of wind. The bird was away. In the air it was nothing but a pair of wings—she saw no body any more, no tail, just a tilting crescent being drawn back into the sky.
“All birds got to fly, even them no-count dirty ones,” said Missouri from the porch. “Now I got all that wrenching out to do over.”
For the next hour, Laurel stood in the driveway burning her father’s letters to her mother, and Grandma’s letters, and the saved little books and papers in the rusty wire basket where pecan leaves used to get burned—“too acid for my roses.” She burned Milton’s Universe. She saw the words “this morning?” with the uncompromising hook of her mother’s question mark, on a little round scrap of paper that was slowly growing smaller in the smoke. She had a child’s desire to reach for it, like a coin left lying in the street for any passer-by to find and legitimately keep—by then it was consumed. All Laurel would have wanted with her mother’s “this morning?” would have been to make it over, give her a new one in its place. She stood humbly holding the blackened rake. She thought of her father.
The smoke dimmed the dogwood tree like a veil over a face that might have shone with too naked a candor. Miss Adele Courtland was hurrying under it now, at a fast teacher’s walk, to tell Laurel goodbye before time for school. She looked at what Laurel was doing and her face withheld judgment.
“There’s one thing—I’d like you to keep it,” said Laurel. She reached in her apron pocket for it.
“Polly. You mustn’t give this up. You must know I can’t allow you—no, indeed, you must cling to this.” She pressed the little soapstone boat back into Laurel’s hand quickly, told her goodbye, and fled away to her school.
Laurel had presumed. And no one would ever succeed in comforting Miss Adele Courtland, anyway: she would only comfort the comforter.
Upstairs, Laurel folded her slacks and the wrinkled silk dress of last night into her case, dropped in the other few things she’d brought, and closed it. Then she bathed and dressed again in the Sibyl Connolly suit she’d flown down in. She was careful with her lipstick, and pinned her hair up for Chicago. She stepped back into her city heels, and started on a last circuit through the house. All the windows, which Missouri had patiently stripped so as to wash the curtains over again, let in the full volume of spring light. There was nothing she was leaving in the whole shining and quiet house now to show for her mother’s life and her mother’s happiness and suffering, and nothing to show for Fay’s harm; her father’s turning between them, holding onto them both, then letting them go, was without any sign.
From the stair window she could see that the crabapple tree had rushed into green, all but one sleeve that was still flowery.
The last of the funeral flowers had been carried out of the parlor—the tulips, that had stayed beautiful until the last petal fell. Over the white-painted mantel, where cranes in their circle of moon, the beggar with his lantern, the poet at his waterfall hung in their positions around the clock, the hour showed thirty minutes before noon.
She was prepared for the bridesmaids.
And then, from the back of the house, she heard a sound—like an empty wooden spool dropped down through a cupboard and rolling away. She walked into the kitchen, where through the open door she could see Missouri just beginning to hang out her curtains. The room was still odorous of hot soapsuds.
The same wooden kitchen table of her childhood, strong as the base of an old square piano, stood bare in the middle of the wooden floor. There were two cupboards, and only the new one, made of metal, was in daily use. The original wooden one Laurel had somehow passed over in her work, as forgetfully as she’d left her own window open to the rain. She advanced on it, tugged at the wooden doors until they gave. She opened them and got the earnest smell of mouse.
In the dark interior she made