Our twins were business partners of the rarest kind—them what trust each other through and through. They’d married twins (and the wedding was a little rich in symmetry and gingham darlingness for my blood, but I didn’t say nothing critical at the time). They were together in the real estate game, as they call it, pistols them two. Coming up, they’d never been my whiz kids but now riches were raining down on them like another part of the plan. Didn’t matter they’d been held back a grade. They had money, were my only children not in nursing or teaching or some service to others. Except Baby, of course. But I reckon acting is a service. She had a walk-on part as a French maid in Her Second Marriage and walked off with the reviews. She sent us copies by the fastest possible mail. One said: “How many things can be done with an ostrich-feather duster? Consult ‘Baby’ Marsden, currently seen as Fifi, the scene stealer in our latest parlor drama at the Roxy. Other cast members must loathe ‘Baby’ precisely as much as last night’s audience was thoroughly hers.” In the margin, Baby’d put a exclamation point beside a question mark. Wanting Mamma’s approval, not sure the review was rave enough?
Things moved and changed and I knew I’d been through most of what’d have to happen next. Experience has a way of working for me in threes. It now seemed more than two-thirds shot.
One day at the Superette, I spied this September sale on new school notebooks, a bright stack, and though my children were off being grown or beyond, I bought just one. Red. I opened it at my kitchen table. I planned to get something down at last. I’ve forever loved a fresh chance. My kids had told me a couple times I should write down what’d happened in my elastic lifetime bandaging century to century, a tree graft. “Nobody’d believe it,” Louisa smiled. I wished she’d lose some of that weight, she still had such a pretty face.—Well, I drank three extra cups of my vice, coffee (nobody’s perfect) and wrote: “In the town of Falls (N.C.) a plain little girl was born …” I crossed that out. Awful, bland as anybody. So then I jotted: “Me, I started out young …” Too sassy by half. I wadded up the page. There seemed too much to tell while I was setting here alone. I needed a crowd, or one questioner’s “Yes?” Needed to talk it out. My single major knack. And so I took the almost virgin notebook to my husband’s room (I’d just got it “broke in” good). He looked at me, suspicious, pleased. I put a pencil into one big tawny fist of him, the book I opened in his other. “Get busy, Mr. Man. Write your memoirs. You’ve loved all them other war ones. Mark Twain wrote Grant’s and they made a fortune, pulled them both from debt. So, start. Get us out of hock.”
He tilted his head my way, more the way puppies do or parrots in movies. Trying to understand, cute but by accident.
“Memoirs means memories, nothing fancier. Write your memories in here. List them. I’ll be back at four and I want to find a goodly start, boy, hear me?”
When I stepped in later, he was sloppily asleep. But I saw marks on page one, and oh, my heart did a little skedaddle snare-drum roll. Odd, after all this time to grow excited at the thought of your old man’s life being wrote up (or down). His years might finally achieve a start, and mid, and end. That’d help it mean something to both him and me. He had made a drawing looked like this:
I stood in the late-day side room (you’ll be relieved to hear we didn’t share a bed no more). I studied this sketching of his major war loss. Marsden’s memory was in there yet, in some Miami of the nervous system, fled as far south as The Confederate Scared can get. I looked over at the moony-bearded face, one now watching me. Eyes suddenly open—still that gray and wildly young-looking.
“Take me,” he said, plain if croakish. First, alarmed, I thought he was being lovey-dovey again. (When I bathed him, he still revved up right manly but he’d mercifully forgot what-all to do with it.)
“To … where, sug?”
“Back … to tree, war, Ned’s tree where … back, please, Buttermilk.”
The nickname got me. “Really want to see all that mess again, sug? Think it’d help you rest more easy? That it?”
He held his massy finger up before his face. “One,” a sleepy voice said. “Once … more. Poor Ned. Lucy? they shot Ned.”
“I know. Was a loss to all of us. Yes, they did shoot him.”
SO WE went.
I’d become a good driver while taking Ned to schools, learned from Cassie’s third-oldest son, handsome gray-eyed Antwan. I stopped by a Lucas-Hedgepath service station—another business owned by our great merchants’ families’ enterprising inbred children. (Tied to Falls by inherited property, they stayed put, unlike my scattered tribe.)
“You think you’re up to this?” the fellow at the pump asked, a second cousin of Ruth, our old neighbor. (She’d killed herself at thirty-nine when Willard finally broke his cherry-blossom silence to petition for a legal divorce after all that time. He couldn’t just stay merrily gone, could he?) “Sure,” says I. “Been before.”
Cap was in the car beside me. The filling-station man give us every map of either Carolina and Virginia. I was determined to do this last thing right for my Captain. Figured this would put me well ahead on what little of the tally sheet he might still remember.
Castalia helped me strap him in with rope. Man couldn’t sit up, chin’d be on the dashboard otherwise. This was, I believe, the world’s first seat belt but did I get one nod of credit for inventing it? Not a penny.
The joy of knowing how to drive—having a purse temporarily stuffed full of green, a brisk October day, the chance of maybe later doing a surprise side trip and seeing our daughter, the top nurse. The sky that day glowed the color of a dare.
“You know where we’re getting ready to go, sir?”
“Get,” he repeated. “Get … even?”
“Darl, we’ll get to Virginia and maybe we’ll get you some nice car-trip memories. But ‘even’ is one thing nobody ever gets. Not even you.”
He seemed cheerful, hearing our destination. The few neighbors that knew our mission come down to the fronts of their yards and waved. Cap saluted for the first time in six months. I said, “You do know, don’t you?”
So, back to war yet again. Would it never end? We passed the Mall, flattening a spot where the beauty of The Lilacs mansion once literally stopped traffic on land and water. Where the Big House stood, a Toys “R” Us! We’re the gods’ playthings okay, darling. Toys “R” Us!
Then all up into Virginia did the happy couple tool. Me helping him with the ropes and then his zipper. This was in the roadside weeds. We never stopped at rest rooms because I could hardly squire the Cap into the Men’s side. The Ladies would’ve squealed seeing shoes that huge in the next booth.
Took me two days and at least one fleabag motel I checked us out of fast on account of pre-used sheets, imagine. On up to Gaines’ Mill. Onct in the town proper, I aimed forth from there, fanning in all directions, asking farmers of both races at the few farmlike stores left. Mostly there were basket shops and cute antique places that would, you knew, charge you a fortune for something they probably “aged” in their garage last weekend.
Two men told me that such a lake was long since landfill, ancient history. “Who you got there in your Chevy, ma’am?” “A old man what fought at that lake. He’s needing to see the spot again.” “Well, I declare. Not the Civil War, you know not. He must’ve been a baby in it, how many are left? I do declare.”
I hate being interesting to strangers. Now, honey, don’t sulk. I wouldn’t count you—you? a stranger? After all we been through together? Why you’ve kept on coming back remains a central mystery that warms my heart.
Him and me wasted two more days searching, Captain wearing diapers I’d made from some old dormitory sheets. You have to really love the other person, since this was previous to the Adult Pampers that are very bread-and-butter necessity at Lanes’ End Rest here. I invented seat belts and Adult Pampers. Meantime, People runs dumb articles on Dog Groomers to the Soap Stars! I ask you.
Another day and him all-a-fidget like some child.
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I got testy, hearing his ropes creak. “You still even interested?”
It was a mean thing to say.
“They shot Ned,” he told me. Then he repeated the same thing for forty minutes, put the emphasis on a different of the three words each time. “Didn’t they?” he ended.
I agreed. “I sure wish they hadn’t of. Why, if Ned Smythe and his wife and their kids had become our kids’ friends, wouldn’t that’ve been ideallike? if your Ned had come home and hitched up with somebody I considered worthy company, some woman, well, like … Castalia,” and I laughed. He did, too. I almost had a wreck, seeing—or thinking—he’d maybe understood.
Finally his “They shot Ned” made me stop to ask again concerning bodies of water hereabouts.
It was another pottery place, a big stone barn, and inside I found a shaggy boy throwing this slick vase at his kick wheel. He sat there shell-backed and when I spoke over his classical music, he jerked but threw hands far from the pot and, thank God, didn’t spoil it. Even in surprise, he was graceful. I described the MIA pond. I told more of the story than I usually let out. Music played and a aged finch hopped to and fro in a pretty wicker old-time cage like one of Winona’s.
The potter cleaned his hands on a filthy apron he wore, so crusted it seemed a starter garden with armholes. He asked, “This pond wouldn’t have had a mill on it, a gristmill?” “Sure did.” Thought I’d said so, getting addled, hate that. Happens a lot lately. I fell last week. I don’t want to talk about it.
He walked to the back of his studio and opened the wide doors and led me out onto a kind of stone ramp beside a suburban pond.
He told me how his girlfriend’s mother had inherited this bankrupt gristmill. At the pond’s far end, cedar-shingled homes clumped, all alike. And yet, just short of a motorboat dock, some older trees had been saved back. I pointed across water, “I think that’s where it happened.”
Potter said, “And the participant is actually in your car out front?”
“The one that lived is.”
So this boy hurried out there with me, checked, said, “Wow. Some patriarch. Looks positively Mosaic.”
“He’s way older than me, always was.”
“I saw that at once, of course.”
“You’ll go far, son,” and I climbed into the car, thanking him. Imagine driving right up to the right gristmill. He told me I couldn’t pull close to the water on that far bank, said he’d follow in his jeep and he’d help. The potter turned over a sign on his studio door, it read: “Closed Creatively.” No comment. He locked up like he was going to Paris, France. (The modern world! the trusties are the last ones to be foolish enough to trust others.)
Our old Chevy followed his jeep, mud-flecked as the potter hisself. I think his name was Wade or something. Wayne. Call him Wade, I could find out if I really had to know.
He finally pulls down a dirt road I never would of found. “We’re here, I think,” I told the Captain. And from nodding in sleep, he went to being so fully awake. He had come alive so quick that it seemed to me (for a instant anyhow) his whole senility had been faked. As a personal convenience. As a decoy, waiting out death. I left him in our car while me and the boy with clay in his longish hair patrolled the shoreline. We passed deep ruts and I asked him about them—Wade said it was from the motorbikes young kids ride all back in here. I pictured those tires passing over the unmarked grave of young Ned Smythe, Confederate, and thought he’d like that, twelve, thirteen hisself. “Bike noises travel across that lake like you cannot believe, drive us up the wall. We thought we’d found the end of nowhere after Manhattan. You never have, I guess.”
“No,” said I.
He took my arm, polite boy if filthy. We had to gallop down a real steep bank. I think his name was Wade. Waylon. No, was Wade, definite. I walked, wondering would I know the sycamore if it jumped me. Did it even matter if I found the exact one? But yeah, it always matters. Has to. I’d come this far and, if only for myself, I wanted to do this right. Wearing my nice little linen dress with the light jacket and a new leather belt, flats but good ones. As Captain lost interest, I’d took to seeing Lolly monthly and buying clothes a bit. Along lake’s edge, Wade and me stepped over milk cartons and used French letters. There was clots of junk mail in bright IOU colors. The mess made me sad.
“It’s awful, I know,” the potter apologized.
“You didn’t do it, you want it nice. Don’t blame yourself for what you didn’t do, Wade, Dwayne, no, Wayne.” Or whatever. Definitely Wade. (Memory is a muscle—one that needs constant flexing. Lose it or use it.)
• • •
I KNEW which sycamore. It told me. Fact. A wind come up and leaves turned sides and it was the granddaddy of them all. It stood on the little hill but most of its land had been lost now to the lake and all these roots showed like them twists on the surface of some great brain. But the whole tree was yet alive, I saw that.
“And somebody was killed here? Skirmish?”
“Snipers,” I said, and looked quick across the water, just checking.
“Imagine. And he knew them?”
“Loved him. He was here when it happened. Kids, both of them. Left home holding hands the way girls that age would.”
We trudged back to fetch my Captain. He’d someway untied hisself and got his uniform tunic from out the honeymoon satchel where he seen me store it. He’d tore a hole in the old rose-patterned valise instead of using its clasps, but there he stood, ready. As we drew nearer, Wade said, “Your husband looks like God in Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam.’ What a noble head.”
I said, yeah, well, Noble is as noble does. I asked if that was like Michael-angelo and he said, “Actually Mick, I’m told, is correct. Mick-alangelo.”
“You don’t say. Live and learn.” I thought of Momma’s An American Child’s Sistine folio I won’t allowed to touch with my grimy mitts and blood-sister bandage. Odd how jumbled every moment is.
Down to water we got Cap, him trying to stand at attention while we tried and keep him easing along pitched red clay banks. “He knows,” the potter told me quiet over Cap’s shoulder.
“He knows,” Captain agreed, embarrassing Wade. Wade didn’t understand Cap was referring to Ned. Cap meant: knows we’re here, Ned does.
We led the old soldier to the shade under that largest sycamore. I saw how its huge shadow had stunted lesser trees struggling near but under it. Captain stared up into the thing. “Right,” he said, and gave me a look of the old wild intelligence, and even a little sexual something underneath. I loved him then!
“You’re most welcome. We got fewer kids along this time, don’t we, honey?”
He beckoned me to stoop down where he rested in the weeds. Wade turned away from what he expected to be some tearful tender scene maybe.
Cap pointed up its trunk. “There’s more,” he said, and rubbed fingers together. I knew then he meant the harness, maybe a grain of it still up there.
I WANTED to put all this behind us. The chances of discovering any findable horse tether this many years after, it seemed impossible, but you are either in on something or you’re not. I stepped out of my flats and leaned against the sycamore trunk to pick off a few corn plasters that might get in my way and—considering the strapping helpful Wade blinking yonder—might be also unsightly.
“He expects you to …” Wade pointed at its top, ninety feet above.
“Yeah, oh he expects … he’s still good at that.”
“To climb?”
“You got it, honey. And I still can, I bet. Was onct a pro. Someways I never have felt more relaxed than in a tree house me and a good girlfriend built.—Whether I’ll find what my husband’s hoping, that’s another matter. But I didn’t drive all this way not to least try. Here goes nothing.”
“Wait,” I told the Cap, like he had a choice. I bent and he caught my hand, he kissed my knuckles. I said, “Don’t expect. It’s later than you think, century-wise.”
His face was spr
ead rosy with widening memory, the old light, the old poison maybe raring up on him but seeming sweetened some. All I need, thought I, is his dying on me here. And yet, as I set my handbag in a prominent spot, that really didn’t seem so bad, Cap’s exiting here. I might borrow a shovel from Wade. I’d dig a slow but good-sized hole, just past complicating tree roots. I’d buy a nice jug from that boy and set it at the head of Cap’s grave, a purchase to thank Wade—Dwayne? no, Wade—for helping. Sweet boy.