The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

way.
    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,” saidLaurel. She felt her gloved hand pressed in that of Miss Tennyson, as Fay said from her other side:
    “How could the biggest fool think I was going to bury my husband with his old wife? He’s going in the new part.”
    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.
    Laurel would hardly have thought of Mount Salus Cemetery as having a “new part.” It was like being driven to the other side of the moon. The procession stopped. The rest of the way was too rough, as Laurel now saw, for anything except a hearse. 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.”
    “What’re we here for?” asked Wendell, his voice in the open air carrying though light as thistledown.
    “Wendell Chisom, they’ve got to finish what they started, haven’t they? I told you you was going to be sorry you ever begged,” said Sis.
    They struck out across the field. There were already a few dozen graves here, dotted uniformly with indestructibleplastic Christmas poinsettias.
    “Now, is everybody finding the right place?” called Miss Tennyson, her eyes skimming the crowd that went walking over the young grass. “Somebody help old Tom Farris get where he’s going!”
    An awning marked the site; it appeared to be the farthest one in the cemetery. As they proceeded there, black wings thudded in sudden unison, and a flock of birds flew up as they might from a ploughed field, still shaped like it, like an old map that still served new territory, and wrinkled away in the air.
    Mr. Pitts waited, one more time; he stood under the awning. 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.
    Miss Tennyson, still on Laurel’s left, murmured close to her ear, “Look behind you. The high school band. They better be here! Clint gave ’em those horns they’re sporting, gave ’em the uniforms to march in. Somebody pass ’em the word to perk up. Of course they’re not going to get to play!”
    Under Mr. Pitts’ awning Laurel could smell the fieriness of flowers restored to the open air and the rawness of the clay in the opened grave. Their chairs were set on the odorless, pistachio-green of Mr. Pitts’ portable grass. It could still respond, everything mustrespond, to some vibration underfoot: this new part of the cemetery was the very shore of the new interstate highway.
    Dr. Bolt assumed position and pronounced the words. Again 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. Beside her, then, Fay’s black hand slid from her cheek to pat her hair into