The Optimist's Daughter

by Eudora Welty

“Friends are here today and gone tomorrow,” Mrs. Chisom told Laurel and the Mayor. “Not like your kin.

He had cancer but he didn’t whimper about it, not to me. That’s because we both of us come from good old Mississippi stock!”

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

And they’re being egged on a little bit, you know, Laurel, by the rivalry that’s going on here in the room,” she said. “After all, when the Chisoms walked in on us, they thought they had their side, too—”

“This is still his house. After all, they’re still his guests. They’re misrepresenting him—falsifying, that’s what Mother would call it.”

“He never would have stood for lies being told about him. Not at any time. Not ever.” “Yes he would,” said Miss Adele. “If the truth might hurt the wrong person.”

“I’m his daughter. I want what people say now to be the truth.”

“The least anybody can do for him is remember right,” she said.

And then warningly, “Polly—” Fay at that moment burst from the hall into the parlor. She glistened in black satin. Eyes straight ahead, she came running a path through all of them toward the coffin. Miss Adele, with a light quick move from behind her, pulled Laurel out of the way.

Fay brought herself short and hung over the pillow. “Oh, he looks so good with those mean old sandbags taken away and that mean old bandage pulled off of his eye!” she said fiercely.

Who told them to come?” cried Fay. “I did!” said Major Bullock, his face nothing but delight. “Found ’em without a bit of trouble!

Fay showed him her back. She leaned forward over the coffin. “Oh, hon, get up, get out of there,” she said.

“Can’t you hear me, hon?” called Fay.

“Oh, Judge, how could you go off and leave me this way? Why did you want to treat me so unfair?”

Fay cried into the coffin, “Judge! You cheated on me!”

Laurel stood gazing down at the unchanged face of the dead, while Mrs. Chisom’s voice came through the sounds of confusion in the library. “Like mother, like daughter. Though when I had to give up her dad, they couldn’t hold me half so easy. I tore up the whole house, I did.”

“And no wonder. It’s hard to be told to give up goodness itself.” Major Bullock. Hearing his voice disembodied, Laurel realized he was drunk.

“Why did he do me so bad?”

“Shake her,” said Mrs. Chisom’s appreciative voice. “There’s no telling when she last had a decent home-cooked meal with honest vegetables,” said Miss Tennyson Bullock.

“He loved my mother,” Laurel spoke into the quiet.

“Heavenly Father, may this serve to remind us that we have each and every one of us been fearfully and wonderfully made,” Dr. Bolt said over the coffin, head bowed. But was that not Judge McKelva’s table blessing? They were the last words Laurel heard. She watched him perform the service, but what he was saying might have been as silent as the movements of the handkerchief he passed over and over again across his forehead, and down his cheeks, and around.

Laurel saw that there had not been room enough in the church for everybody who had come.

All of them poured down the steps together. The casket preceded them. “He’ll touch down where He took off from,” said Miss Verna Longmeier, at the bottom. “Split it right down the middle.” Her hands ripped a seam for them: “The Mount of Olives.”

There was a ringing for each car as it struck its wheels on the cattleguard and rode up into the cemetery. The procession passed between ironwork gates whose kneeling angels and looping vines shone black as licorice. The top of the hill ahead was crowded with winged angels and life-sized effigies of bygone citizens in old-fashioned dress, standing as if by count among the columns and shafts and conifers like a familiar set of passengers collected on deck of a ship, on which they all knew each other—bona-fide members of a small local excursion, embarked on a voyage that is always returning in dreams. “I’m glad the big camellia will be in bloom,” said Laurel.

Laurel’s eye travelled among the urns that marked the graves of the McKelvas and saw the favorite camellia of her father’s, the old-fashioned Chandlerii Elegans, that he had planted on her mother’s grave—now big as a pony, saddled with unplucked bloom living and dead, standing on a fading carpet of its own flowers.

They got out onto the grass and clay of the petered-out road. The pick-up truck had pulled up right behind the family’s car, nearly touching it with the tin sign on its bumper. “Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto You.”

The family took their assigned seats. Laurel had Fay on her right, sitting with a black-gloved hand held tenderly to her cheek. The coffin, fixed in suspension over the opened grave, was on a level with their eyes now.

Laurel could smell the fieriness of flowers restored to the open air and the rawness of the clay in the opened grave.

this new part of the cemetery was the very shore of the new interstate highway.

Laurel failed to hear what came from his lips. She might not even have heard the high school band. Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears.

In the wake of their footsteps, the birds settled again. Down on the ground, they were starlings, all on the waddle, pushing with the yellow bills of spring.

“I think things have gone off real well,” said Fay.

“Poor little girl. I reckon you know you get the house and everything in it you want. And Laurel having her own good place in Chicago, she’ll be compensated as equally as we know how—”

“I sure do know whose house this is,” said Fay. “But maybe it’s something a few other people are going to have to learn.”

“Well, you’ve done fine so far, Wanda Fay,” said old Mrs. Chisom. “I was proud of you today. And proud for you. That coffin made me wish I could have taken it right away from him and given it to Roscoe.” “Thank you,” said Fay. “It was no bargain, and I think that showed.”

“You drew a large crowd, too,” said Sis. “Without even having to count those Negroes.” “I was satisfied with it,” said Fay. “For the first minute, you didn’t act all that glad to see us,” said Sis. “Or was I dreaming?”

“Wanda Fay, I’m sorry I can’t fool around here no longer,” said Bubba Chisom, handing her his empty plate. “A wrecking concern hasn’t got all that time to spare, not with all we got to do in Madrid.”

She took Laurel’s hand and shook it. “We thought a heap of your old dad, even if he couldn’t stay on earth long enough for us to get to know him. Whatever he was, we always knew he was just plain folks.”

“Wanda Fay,” said Mrs. Chisom, “let me ask you this: who’re you ever going to get to put in this house besides you?” “What are you hinting at?” said Fay with a dark look. “Tell you one thing, there’s room for the whole nation of us here,” Mrs. Chisom said, and stepping back into the hall she looked up the white-railed stairway. “In case we ever took a notion to move back to Mississippi.”

“It’d make a good boarding house, if you could get your mother to come cook for ’em.”

Fay cried, “I don’t even mind standing up in the back and riding with the children!”

“You’ll wind up riding on my lap,” said her mother. “I know you.” She put her hand out and stopped a tray going by. “I wouldn’t mind taking some of that ham along, though,” she told Tish. “If it’s just going begging.”

“Fay, I wanted you to know what day I’ll be leaving,” she said. “So there’ll be no danger of us running into each other.” “That suits me dandy.” “I’m giving myself three days. And I’ll leave Monday on the three o’clock flight from Jackson. I’ll be out of the house around noon.”

“You just try and be as good as your word.—I’m coming, Mama! Don’t you-all go off and leave me!” she yelled over Laurel’s head.

“What made you tell me what you did about your family? The time we talked, in the Hibiscus.” “What did I say?” Fay challenged her. “You said you had nobody—no family. You lied about your family.” “If I did, that’s what everybody else does,” said Fay. “Why shouldn’t I?” “Not lie that th...

“I believe a few days with your own family would do you good,” Miss Tennyson Bullock said. In the dining room, all of them were waiting on their feet. “Eating a lot of fresh vegetables, and so forth.” “Well, at least my family’s not hypocrites,” said Fay. “If they didn’t want me, they’d tell me to my face.” “When you coming back?” asked Major Bullock, swaying a little. “When I get ready.”

“Oh, how I hate that old striking clock!” cried Fay. “It’s the first thing I’m going to get rid of.”

“Go ahead. I know you’re blaming Major,” said Miss Tennyson. “Why he had to get so carried away as to round up those Chisoms, I’ll never know, myself. He said they were nothing but just good old Anglo-Saxons. But I said—” “You can’t curb a Baptist,” Mrs. Pease said. “Let them in and you can’t keep ’em down, when somebody dies.

“It’s true they were a trifle more inelegant,” said Miss Adele. “But only a trifle.”

“Are you prepared now to pity her, Laurel?” “Cat’s got her tongue,” said old Mrs. Pease. “I hope I never see her again,” said Laurel.