The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty Page A

place—it was over.
    “I want to tell you, Laurel, what a beautiful funeral it was,” said Dot Daggett, immediately after Dr. Bolt had gone down the line shaking hands with the family, and they’d all risen. “I saw everybody I know and everybody I used to know. It was old Mount Salus personified.” Dot looked up at Laurel out of her old movie-actress eyes. Kissing her hand to the others, she told them goodbye, cutting Miss Tennyson Bullock.
    The members of the high school band were the first to break loose. They tore across the grass, all red and gold, back to their waiting jalopy. Wendell ran at their heels. In the road he found his truck. He climbed into the back of it and threw himself down on the floor and lay flat.
    The rest of the company moved at a slower pace. “Somebody mind out for old Tom Farris!” called MissTennyson. Laurel, letting them go ahead, walked into the waiting arms of Missouri.
    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.

4
    I N THE PARLOR , the fire had mercifully died out. Missouri and Miss Tennyson got all the chairs back into place in the two rooms here and the dining room, and the crowd of bridesmaids had succeeded among them in winding the clock on the mantel and setting the hands to the time—only ten minutes past noon—and starting the pendulum.
    Miss Tennyson Bullock, from the dining room, gave out the great groan she always gave when a dish had been made exactly right; it was her own chicken mousse. She invited them in.
    Fay stared at the spread table, where Miss Tennyson, Miss Adele, Tish, and some of the other bridesmaids were setting plates and platters around. Missouri, back in her apron but with cemetery clay sticking to herheels, was bringing in the coffee urn. Missouri looked at her own reflection in the shield of its side and lifted her smiling face to Laurel.
    “Now!” she said softly. “The house looking like it used to look! Like it used to look!”
    “So you see? Here’s the Virginia ham!” said the minister’s wife to Laurel, as if everything had turned out all right: she offered her a little red rag of it on a Ritz cracker. Then she scampered away to her husband.
    As soon as she was out of the house, Major Bullock carried in the silver tray heavy with some bottles and a pitcher and a circle of silver cups and tall glasses.
    “Wanda Fay, you got enough stuff in sight to last one lone woman forever,” said Bubba Chisom, both his hands around a ham sandwich.
    “I think things have gone off real well,” said Fay.
    “Poor little girl!” Major Bullock said. As he offered her one of the silver cups with whiskey and water in it—she let him go on holding it—he said again, “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—”
    “Oh, foot,” said old Mrs. Pease.
    “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.”
    Major Bullock lifted the cup he’d offered to her and drank it himself.
    “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.”
    “Still, I did the best I could. And I feel like Roscoe sits up there knowing it now,” said Mrs. Chisom. “And what more could you ask.”
    “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?”
    “Now, be sisters,” warned old Mrs. Chisom. “And I’m glad you broke down