The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [51]
Kneeling, moving the objects rapidly out of her way, Laurel reached with both hands and drew it out into the light of the curtainless day and looked at it. It was exactly what she thought it was. In that same moment, she felt, more sharply than she could hear them where she was, footsteps that tracked through the parlor, the library, the hall, the dining room, up the stairs and through the bedrooms, down the stairs, in the same path Laurel had taken, and at last came to the kitchen door and stopped.
“You mean to tell me you’re still here?” Fay said.
Laurel said, “What have you done to my mother’s breadboard?”
“Bread board?”
Laurel rose and carried it to the middle of the room and set it on the table. She pointed. “Look. Look where the surface is splintered—look at those gouges. You might have gone at it with an icepick.”
“Is that a crime?”
“All scored and grimy! Or you tried driving nails in it.”
“I didn’t do anything but crack last year’s walnuts on it. With the hammer.”
“And cigarette burns—”
“Who wants an everlasting breadboard? It’s the last thing on earth anybody needs!”
“And there—along the edge!” With a finger that was trembling now, Laurel drew along it.
“Most likely a house as old as this has got a few enterprising rats in it,” Fay said.
“Gnawed and blackened and the dust ground into it—Mother kept it satin-smooth, and clean as a dish!”
“It’s just an old board, isn’t it?” cried Fay.
“She made the best bread in Mount Salus!”
“All right! Who cares? She’s not making it now.”
“You desecrated this house.”
“I don’t know what that word means, and glad I don’t. But I’ll have you remember it’s my house now, and I can do what I want to with it,” Fay said. “With everything in it. And that goes for that breadboard too.”
And all Laurel had felt and known in the night, all she’d remembered, and as much as she could understand this morning—in the week at home, the month, in her life—could not tell her now how to stand and face the person whose own life had not taught her how to feel. Laurel didn’t know even how to tell her goodbye.
“Fay, my mother knew you’d get in her house. She never needed to be told,” said Laurel. “She predicted you.”
“Predict? You predict the weather,” said Fay.
You are the weather, thought Laurel. And the weather to come: there’ll be many a one more like you, in this life.
“She predicted you.”
Experience did, finally, get set into its right order, which is not always the order of other people’s time. Her mother had suffered in life every symptom of having been betrayed, and it was not until she had died, and the protests of memory came due, that Fay had ever tripped in from Madrid, Texas. It was not until that later moment, perhaps, that her father himself had ever dreamed of a Fay. For Fay was Becky’s own dread. What Becky had felt, and had been afraid of, might have existed right here in the house all the time, for her. Past and future might have changed places, in some convulsion of the mind, but that could do nothing to impugn the truth of the heart. Fay could have walked in early as well as late, she could have come at any time at all. She was coming.
“But your mother, she died a crazy!” Fay cried.
“Fay, that is not true. And nobody ever dared to say such a thing.”
“In Mount Salus? I heard it in Mount Salus, right in this house. Mr. Cheek put me wise. He told me how he went in my room one day while she was alive and she threw something at him.”
“Stop,” said Laurel.
“It was the little bell off her table. She told him she deliberately aimed at his knee, because she didn’t have a wish to hurt any living creature. She was a crazy and you’ll be a crazy too, if you don’t watch out.”
“My mother never did hurt any living creature.