The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [6]
Mr. Dalzell proved to be a fellow Mississippian. He was from Fox Hill. Almost immediately, he convinced himself that Judge McKelva was his long-lost son Archie Lee.
“Archie Lee,” he said, “I might’ve known if you ever did come home, you’d come home drunk.”
Judge McKelva once would have smiled. Now he lay as ever, his good eye closed, or open on the ceiling, and had no words to spare.
“Don’t you worry about Mr. Dalzell,” Mrs. Martello said to Laurel as they prepared one morning to change places. “Your daddy just lets Mr. Dalzell rave. He keeps just as still, laying there just like he’s supposed to. He’s good as gold. Mr. Dalzell’s nothing you got to worry about.”
3
“NOTHING TO DO but give it more time,” said Dr. Courtland regularly. “It’s clearing. I believe we’re getting us an eye that’s going to see a little bit.”
But although Dr. Courtland paid his daily visits as to a man recovering, to Laurel her father seemed to be paying some unbargained-for price for his recovery. He lay there unchangeably big and heavy, full of effort yet motionless, while his face looked tireder every morning, the circle under his visible eye thick as paint. He opened his mouth and swallowed what she offered him with the obedience of an old man—obedience! She felt ashamed to let him act out the part in front of her. She managed a time or two (by moving heaven and earth) to have some special dish prepared for him outside; but he might as well have been spooned out hospital grits, canned peaches, and Jello, for all that food distracted him out of his patience—out of his unnatural reticence: he had yet to say he would be all right.
One day, she had the luck to detect an old copy of Nicholas Nickleby on the dusty top shelf in the paperback store. That would reach his memory, she believed, and she began next morning reading it to her father.
He did not ask her to stop; neither could he help her when she lost their place. Of course, she was not able to read aloud with her mother’s speed and vivacity—that was probably what he missed. In the course of an hour, he rolled his visible eye her way, though he rationed himself on the one small movement he was permitted, and lay for a long time looking at her. She was not sure he was listening to the words.
“Is that all?” his patient voice asked, when she paused.
“You got that gun loaded yet?” called Mr. Dalzell. “Archie Lee, I declare I want to see you load that gun before they start to coming.”
“That’s the boy. You go right on hunting all night in your mind,” Mrs. Martello stoutly told Mr. Dalzell. She would never in a year dare to get so possessive of Judge McKelva, Laurel reflected, or find something in his predicament that she could joke about. She had gained no clue but one to what he used to be like in Mount Salus. “He’s still keeping as good as gold,” she greeted Laurel every morning. “It’s nothing but goodness—I don’t think he sleeps all that steady.”
Mrs. Martello had crocheted twenty-seven pairs of bootees. Bootees were what she counted. “You’d be surprised how fast I give out of ’em…” she said. “It’s the most popular present there is.”
Judge McKelva had years ago developed a capacity for patience, ready if it were called on. But in this affliction, he seemed to Laurel to lie in a dream of patience. He seldom spoke now unless he was spoken to, and then, which was wholly unlike him, after a wait—as if he had to catch up. He didn’t try any more to hold her in his good eye.
He lay more and more with both eyes closed. She dropped her voice sometimes, and then sat still.
“I’m not asleep,” said her father. “Please don’t stop reading.”
“What do you think of his prospects now?” Laurel asked Dr. Courtland, following him out into the corridor. “It’s three weeks.”
“Three weeks! Lord, how they fly,” he said. He believed he hid the quick impatience of his mind, and moving and speaking with deliberation he did hide it—then showed it all in his smile. “He’s doing all right. Lungs clear, heart strong, blood pressure not a bit worse than it was before. And that eye’s clearing. I think he’s got