Of course, I didn’t. Hear him. All I heard: coughing. As coughs go—if most along this hall sound the size of potholes in the road—Taw’s was the Carlsbad Caverns. You couldn’t believe a man so thin could go down so deep. But, being me and needing this, I even let his cough seem less a tax paid for my visit than some small tribute to it. I’d upset him? Okay. He had noticed he was living, hadn’t he? That’d do for now.
How to explain all this to a person young as you? I figured it’d been a start. Every great journey begins with that first humble bunion. Twenty-one. Well, well.
I REMEMBER rolling then to our Visitors’ Lounge, nobody around—my powder-blue Tripler pressed against me. I sat staring at the aquarium’s two surviving angelfish. Used to be a crowd in there. The two drifted around and around noplace particular, half studying one another, circling only their earlier circles but at least in there together. A bubbler coughed in gasps considered healthy for sea life. And setting here before green water, hugging my physics like some new Bible, I started to know: I hoped for something, and after so long without a plan.
I pictured more purposeful breakfasts, lunches, dinners in Multipurpose. For onct, physics seemed on my side, something held me straighter in my chair.
And odd: I knew that I would have to live a while longer. Just to see how it all turned out. “What is energy?” … Well, partly it’s the central heating system hid inside the question “What’ll happen next?” The most optimistic question in the world!
Something had just changed me. I bent forwards from my chair. I did a silly thing. I pressed my creasy lips against cold glass. First the fish darted off, then calmed each other. Finally they drifted nearer, checking what my mouth was. Food? Maybe something good.
But, darling, why him? A yellow crank, a chain smoker who spit on folks? A man who’d lost all but half a lung? Somebody penniless and vain and mean? Still, I’d got interested against my will. I needed to know more. A person she still feels things. I’d seen something I wanted.
DON’T laugh at me.
The Passable Kingdom
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
—ISAIAH 11:6
DOC COLLIER attended me during that first pregnancy and he did fine till my eager-beaver daughter arrived early. Doc was off someplace in the country, hard to trace. And here I was, waddling around the house in socks wet from the water fallen with a great playful weight (like the sound Castalia made that time I tackled her). So I asked a neighbor to fetch Cassie, but quick. I saw her basin first, then the two dark hands gripping it, and all the rest of her came sudden in the door, wider than when last we met, and she clanged the basin down onto the floor beside my bed and pointed at the basin. “Goes in there,” she said then laughed.
Cap had been in the room, I sent him somewhere. Also banished my own mother, who, no good in emergencies, was literally tearing her best hankie to shreds. Both these folks appeared right grateful for Castalia’s presence. I looked up at her holding the brass alarm clock, timing my contractions—totally involved with my lower body, my crowning child, my legs’ position. Cas kept checking from lower Lucy regions to the clock’s face like seeking some family resemblance—but she was not studying me. I can’t tell you how relieving I found this, darling, having somebody treat me just … factual. It let me know: Every drunk downtown on Saturday had costs some poor woman nine months, then this. Put it all in perspective. I now wanted to do good for my child and Castalia, in that order. The big woman was in control down there and her sympathy was impersonal. That someway made it feel just enormous, bigger even than skinny me felt: subleased to a girl child weighing (you ready?) nine pounds and two ounces, and a first child too.
Smarts.
Beneath me, as Cassie got me stooping over the enamel basin white as me and round as Mother Earth, as she got me to squat like black women delivered then—I studied the ivory-colored palms of her black-backed hands. An amazing sight (when, once, I briefly took leave of the pain whilst on the verge of passing out). Beneath me I saw colors—the beet-blue baby’s advancing pliant head, the cord so red it seemed orange, and glossed with my own entrail leavings plus the baby’s packing slop and luster, plus those coal-toned male-sized hands easing a child out of my unlikely! Then pain reclaimed me as raw matter. My entire nervous system went on red alert, and the niceties of coloring lost all charm. Loan-shark oxygen threatened to call back its controlling interest in my lungs’ continuing.
I saw Castalia’s satchel full of items familiar from the closet in my kitchen, the needle and thread now meant something new. She doused a terry rag with wintergreen, she pressed into its fold real mint leaves from her yard and, with my child squalling in my arms, the feel of Cassie’s hands mashing compress across my forehead meant a benediction that could only be delivered by a child-bearing woman to another who’s just managed that. “Thank you,” I said to the ceiling, meaning her. “Welcome,” came her umber voice without a trace of usual irony. But then I knew she hadn’t said “You’re welcome” to my gratitude, she was greeting the little goon in my arms. “Louisa,” I said, “for the lady what wrote Little Women.” “Good enough,” Castalia told me. I asked her to say the name out loud to make it real. She did, first to me and then to her, right close near Louisa, who quieted. “She know,” Cas remarked.
“Who know?,” I needed it again. “Louisa do.” I laid here under mint and wintergreen and how glad I was that Doc had been far out, important and untraceable, in Edgecombe County. Captain and my mother were soon close up, and it hurt me to notice how, between their sides, under their arms, a shape retreated, gathering equipment and stealing towards our parlor. (I’d never wanted a servant around, and I certainly did not want her being just a servant.) “Not yet.” I reached toward Castalia’s great cascading mass of back. So these other white adults called her in again, they acted understanding but disturbed. “I still here, not to fret none, Baby Momma.”
“Good. Stay.”
I needed her here to tell me that this strange wizened mewing toadish … shape was complete, regular. Human. Just having Cassie’s bulk near the bed let me relax finally, sobbing but not crying, pure release, and a single thought rose up out of my head, child: This is my house. I won’t no longer a bartered kid adults could trick or bully. I was the mother to Louisa first and foremost, though I’d never even got to tell the girl one story yet. My child. And lying there, so calmly, I knew: I would kill to keep her being safe with me in a nice white house forever. Mine.
Then I saw I had been yelling that. I looked around my bed and my mother wept to see me made a mother with a child helpless as she had been a child. My husband shook his head with pride or shock and his huge Rebgray eyes were wet too. Only Castalia’s burned dry, amused. She was getting a kick out of me yelping Mine. I made a face at her. We laughed. It caught the others out.
THIS I must say:
Having babies is one thing in life I know I didn’t make up.
I do have this tendency to embroider on the decent muslin truth. You noticed? My momma was born right well-off, so to me, she’s a heiress. Poppa loved his low pranks—he come to seem nearbout the Mark Twain of the Piedmont. But, if anything, I draw back from overstating the pain and wonder (they can amount to the same thing) of toting then spilling nine six-to-ten-pound young ones. And me myself just ninety-six pounds dripping wet when the waters broke!
How children get here—in my wildest fever dreams, I couldn’t have invented. (If you put it in a made-up book … who’d believe?)
Folks oohed and aahed that somebody skinny as me could have so many children so fast. I figure it’s like a jar of olives, once you get the first worked loose, others topple free more easy.—Folks don’t call it labor for nothing. Only my favorite midwife give me comfort. Any hour of the day or night, Castalia’d come running with her basin, all two-eighty-odd pounds of her on the move
PDQ, her yelling, “Hold off, Cassie’s come, goes in here.” That helped. You know how some doctors say a person can’t remember pain from one hurt to the next? Ha. For pain, I got a photogenic memory.
SOON as each of my children could talk, I started coaching them in their sums and figures. A Normal School teacher once told me I had a real knack for things mathematical. One day and one day only, she swore I was real college material. I run home and told Poppa. He must have thought my teacher said College of Material—wanted to send me off to sewing school in Rocky Mount. Even with that much training, I’d of been extra thrilled.
I always did have a good attitude. That’s been my problem, see. My regrets come not from what I did wrong, but every silly thing I did right. Odd, how all along I figured I was a one-girl rebellion, little Miss Red Mischief. It’s insulting to look back and see: They considered me Miss Easy to Boss. My golden award—if I ever get one—turns out to be: Best Actress in a Supporting Role. And all along they told me it was the starring part!
We built a ship upon the stairs
All made of the back-bedroom chairs,
And filled it full of sofa pillows
To go a-sailing on the billows.
We took a saw and several nails,
And water in the nursery pails,
And Tom said, “Let us also take
An apple and a slice of cake—”
Which was enough for Tom and me
To go a-sailing on, till tea.
We sailed for days and days
And had the very best of plays.
But Tom fell out and hurt his knee,
So there was no one left but me.
Meaning, I was a married lady, alone in a house, making the best of it.
SEEMS the more you learn, the less you know, and five years into marriage I was still in bed with Captain Marsden. Still serving under him. During daylight, he could be okay company. His stories got better with practice, a good thing—since he repeated them right often. Times, I liked having him underfoot. Right after breakfast, he’d stand, pull at the double V’s his vest bottom made—then, serious, the man would draw out his platinum pocket watch, set it by our kitchen’s Seth Thomas. There was something in his steady look then, preparing to leave the house for work, not really wanting to—like taking our strength into the world with him. The man could charm a person—little jokes he’d heard. He’d come home from a buying trip and tell the children that he’d seen one farmer who had hogs so skinny the man had to knot their tails to keep them from sliding out the cracks in the fence. “Lucy,” he tipped back in his kitchen chair. “Yesterday I was privileged to meet the world’s foremost sheep counter. Fastest in our nation. I asked his secret and, you know, he actually told it to me.”
Our children, eating pancakes, listened. “And what was his secret, Captain?” (We had it down.)
“Man said, ‘It’s easy. I just count their hooves and divide by four.’”
I laughed. The older kids frowned, the younger ones still waiting.
Sometimes Cap would hoist our two oldests—each a armful—and then turn in one place till he got so dizzy he had to tilt against the mantelpiece, laughing—taking great bites of household air. Kids wailing, “More, harder, Poppa,” the youngests begging to go next.—But this was during daylight. Later, when you get your children in bed and off to sleep, later, when the decks were cleared, child, watch out.
He might have worked long hours, maybe he rode across three filthy counties buying decent shoats, mules. But you could not tucker out that old soldier. All was never quiet on his western front! Well up into his fifties, a fellow still randy as three billies at rut. Some nights I’d beat retreat to my sewing room off the kitchen, my only refuge. I had the key. I’d spread a pallet on the floor. Soon, he knocked on the door. He’d ask, of his own knocking, “Who is it?” A tender charming joke, he thought. The man wouldn’t stay out of there even if I locked, even if I propped a chair under the doorknob. I blocked the entry with my foot-treadle Singer. Fellow could not take a hint.
Cap had a history of battle tactics on his side, had a bull’s own strength. I was the china shop this particular bull had got used to. I thought about them signs in porcelain gift stores: “Sorry, folks, but: You break it, you bought it.” Well, he had bought it before he broke it. Bought it so he could break it in good. Captain would just jimmy up the window. “Hi,” he’d say, stepping in, standing there, grinning like I couldn’t guess what-all he planned for us, me. “Just happened to be passing by. Couldn’t help notice your light on, Missy. I’ve certainly been missing you,” grins he.
“You ain’t been missing me,” I says. “You might be missing something but it ain’t me. Least, ain’t much of me.”
“But …” He toyed with his watch chain, studied the floor, rocking his upper body to and fro like a schoolboy doing Diction. “But it’s one of my favorite parts.”
“So I noticed.”
He steps nearer, squats down by my pallet, says, hoarser, “Can’t I just look at it?”
What’s a woman to do? You can’t live with them. You can’t live without. But you can’t live.—To put it mildly, sugar, the honeymoon was over.
THESE DAYS they call it lovemaking, don’t they? Used to, that meant just the kissing part, the warm-up. Titles change, styles in it shift, but that particular shenanigan has sure stayed popular right along. Well, after a while, you quit the struggling, you see it’s maybe bigger than the both of you. Even bigger than him—which is going some. For one thing, it’s free. They really love it in poor countries. It don’t demand no expensive regulation gear but what you got on you.—Finally a woman has to learn to just lean back into it—either that or leave home. Relaxed, it sure hurts less. And there were times, I got to admit, I found out how to catch him, how to dash on by and wait ahead, toe-tapping, miles in front and ready for my Captain to rush up red-faced, wheezing like the horse cavalry, and finish the famous race my old man did so dearly love to run. He seemed to need it—proof sure he was still alive. It was a kind of punch clock for a man of fifty-some. I was a kind of punch clock.
Honey, when he traveled on the road for three nights straight, I’d finish the dishes, get the last of our kids’ pajamaed, I’d stay longer than usual tucking them in. I would come downstairs, and every pine knot’s popping of house timbers, every dog barking a block off would be filling in this odd new time—a welcome silence but, too, strange, don’t you know? Them old songs might call it “Lack of a man.” To me it was more “Lack of somebody.” He happened to be it—that give him standing—faults and all. And when I moved from lamp to lamp, dousing household lights, the place seemed darker than usual with just me downstairs. I didn’t miss it (didn’t exactly want him to jump out of a hall closet, grinning, “I been homesick for something, guess what?”). I just missed his extra stir and weight—call it ballast.
He knew too much about card games and horse races. One night in bed he’d told me how folks invented the saying “To get somebody’s goat.” Seems that racehorses are keyed-up, high-strung creatures—jumpy about being shipped from track to track. So trainers give the thoroughbreds their own pet—another small life to fit into their stall each night: a goat. It soothes, this mascot, comes to be familiar and a constant. Well, bad men, the night before some race, they know how they can sure upset a competition horse. They steal into the stall, they kidnap the champion’s beloved goat. The racehorse won’t catch one wink one of sleep. “To get your goat.” Nights that Captain was on the road, seemed my own was gone. The old goat. I slept shallower. Missed him and—only the slant-like, I reckon I got to miss that other part, too.
Yet, once he come home and however I cooperated, it never seemed enough. Captain believed Bed to be a type of siege. During, he’d mutter down at me, sometimes in a not-nice voice. Some evenings, he growled like I was a Yankee boy he’d trapped behind Rubble lines, a boy foe he planned to finish off from the back in a whole new way.
Later when one of our sons went
out for high school football, I learned the name of a penalty: “unnecessary roughness.” On me, Cap was still making Northerners pay. I was the middleman trapped between wartime and tonight. Sometimes he’d get my wrists wrestled flat to mattress, veins up. I’d call, “Look, ease off, I promise I ain’t going anyplace, okay?”
Honey, for him it was all a flanking action.
Afterwards, Cap would roll my way, might lift one braid end from my unraveled bun, would try brushing my closed eyes with it, ask me how I was. But he didn’t really want my facts. Poor thing longed for compliments, like craving good grades from his Normal School teacher.—You know how women get blamed for being too monthly-moody, for staying too near mirrors? Look, I described the Captain’s dress uniform, didn’t I? Well, they don’t call it a dress uniform for nothing. Men have always held the patent for sullenness. Why, war itself is a form of pouting.
As for mirrors, men invented those. There’s that myth boy that looked into a pond’s top and fell flat in love with his reflected self. He figured the only thing on earth better than hisself was hisself twice. Thought he was so pretty he took the name of a flower. He did. In sulking and raw vanity, men could give us women lessons for life. Oh, don’t get me on the subject of it, please.
I’m sure that Captain tried. But in bed he was like a stamp collector born with mittens on. A steam locomotive trying to hop up onto your knees and pass as a lapdog. Just wouldn’t fit. Too much of everything. We never truly dovetailed at the mouths or lower. Teeth always knocking, bones in the wrong spots. He was twice my weight, going on three times my age. I don’t want to dwell on this.
He kept a few old muskets right under our bed. Sometimes, during, I’d think of them—deadly—just inches below, antique and maybe loaded, cocked, and each one listening.