At Lucas’ I bought petunias—last of the season, marked down. I lined clay pots in our kitchen windowsill. Some smell, but did he notice? I volunteered to be the Room Mother for all six of my children in school. (That’s a heap of cupcakes, honey.) I ordered new lino for our kitchen floor, paid for it from a fund I’d personally set up to get my Louisa into nursing or social work school. I begun to find my sadder husband better-looking. Strange, his straight-facedness had begun to working on me. He’d quit paying nightly social calls on my side of the bed. I thought, Now we are back from the Front—we’re finally ready to learn to love each other right. But, you know me, I was always thinking that. My nature to. The sight of him dragging up the porch steps, slow, at six—it broke into a whole new zone of my heart (Sorry for Our Appearance—We Are Expanding for Your Shopping Convenience). It was my heart’s fatty rind, a annex that I figured he’d done used up years earlier.
On the road I had feared him. Home, I mainly pitied the fellow. That made me need him more. I hoped, at the very least, for Cap to come home every night, to do what he said he would. Well, he didn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. But he sure did not.
One odd thing, after seeing the tree again, his hair went white. And real fast too. I thought he must be dyeing it—or else that he’d finally quit. Almost seemed like my own scrub-bleaching of the house was having some effect upon his temples. Ten weeks, four months—and by deepening wintertime, my man’s mane and beard showed no color in it whatsoever. His momma’s hair had done that, due to Sherman. Happens, I’m told. Doc Collier explained to Cap: A shock can do it. Our GP then asked the Captain what his shock had been. He said, “Nothing I didn’t know already. Is this exam about over, sir?”
Downtown my man gathered crowds—him in that outfit, the gray wool, the white hair and beard now setting it off more. I remembered when he’d been shy about his war doings. It got kind of tacky, his dressing like that so much. I stayed home alone more. The house I’d hoped would lift his spirits after work each day failed to air out mine. Frost got the petunias. I kept busy, though. I had them IOU class-mother cupcakes—I decorated for Halloween, Christmas, and could it already be Easter? I tried to encourage Baby to do more with her first language than complain and brag. I visited my parents, who were running down like rusting clocks. I watched this with a cool sad eye that scared me some. I crocheted booties for my latest one, due any day. I’d already wove enough booties to stock many of the East Coast’s looser unwed mothers. I could stitch booties while cooking and helping with math homework and talking to Castalia in code about which person on what street had done what smut now. Little pitchers have big ears. I made more booties still, it kept me moving, busy. Only when I stopped did I tend to collapse. Sitting quiet, I remembered the long trip north and my old man’s strangeness up a tree and even back on flat land. Like Winona, he seemed disappeared.
And I missed him. Missed just having him in the house every evening at a certain hour. Missed how on good nights he’d tell the children stories, he’d let them take turns sitting on his knee—them sometimes using his Swiss pocket watch to time each tale. I missed how, after breakfast, he set that fine watch by my kitchen clock, how he got a stern regretful look before stalking out to earn another day and dollar, how he’d asked—sly—of my Seth Thomas, “Now you’re sure this is right?” I’d nod, “Was right yesterday, won’t it? What do I look like, anyway, Greenwich Mean Time?”
“Well, you look Mean,” he’d smirk, he’d flirt. I would stick my tongue out—like clockwork, clockwork—and the kids would laugh. Those days him and me failed to do something like this, children’s breakfast digestion got thrown all off. “You forgot to stick out your tongue at him, Momma. Poppa, watch her.—There.”
“Baby miss!” was screamed from the cradle. Louisa held Baby up, then I did the tongue again. She got replaced. “Satisfied?” I called. “That child’s going to lead the cotillion if she has to invent or hire one. Ain’t nobody going to get her goat. And more power to her.”
THEY LEAVE you alone, and no matter how much you’ve played like you wanted that, when it happens you miss them. You even miss wishing they would … leave you alone. Don’t ask me to explain it. If it was logical, then you could go buy a algebra textbook, check the answers in the back. If love was something you could balance like a checkbook, we’d have CPAs, not Cupid. Cupid’s arrows hurt. Arrows do.
Sickening, ain’t it? that I loved him yet. I did, though. Odd, at first, it almost seemed half pleasant—I’d be sipping coffee near the pre-frost purple petunias that come sundown put off a mild bruised-smelling sweetness. (They gave up too easy—petunias’ only drawback.) I’d have Baby propped up nearby, teething, in the high chair opposite me, her ringlets nearbout good as Ned’s. Nothing calmed her down like a little hand mirror—she could study parts of her own face for hours. The others’d be out playing Indians in the vacant lot in this powdery perfect early evening. Supper all but ready and me not knowing where he was. With me alone at home, it was easier to love him.
He was out all hours visiting other aging soldiers, Monday-morning-quarterbacking Jeff Davis’ several mistakes. I missed the regular bulk, fine appetite, coarse jokes he repeated as if I was once—for him—at least the equal of his colored stockyard workers. Even now, I miss being taken for granted. Even this old, I still hope he will change.
5
CAPTAIN hired a private detective from Raleigh to track down the absent Mrs. Smythe. She’d took along her pup tent with her thirty birds and her son’s little blond-oak bed. How she slipped away lugging all that, how she got past the Mayor’s nosy sister right next door—that’d keep the busybody neighbor wide awake for months, regretting. Captain brought more guns home. I knew that he was wagering our money, he was winning big. He bet on artillery now. I’d hoped that seeing the swimming hole might help—but it’d upped the terrible ante for us all.
Seems to be like that strict sage says in Corinthians: Love suffereth long, and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, it thinketh no evil. Compared to the Captain since our war outing, felt like I’d once had a semi-model husband. As they say, sug, it’s all relative. Relatives especially. But even with the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all mysteries, and if I had all knowledge, if I didn’t have love, I’d be nothing. Not nothing. Or so the Book says.
Of course, I was not alone—not with eight children, the ninth (a kicker and a turner) percolating past its due date. But still, too, alone. Stuffed with the company of babies but feeling real alone from the outside in—a losing combination. Castalia would stop over and pour java in her favorite white mug—the chipped one, that’s how she knew it from the look-alikes. And this saucy wide woman would sit at my kitchen table and talk and talk. She’d tell me worries about her oldest boys still at home, or midwifing news from all over Nash County, scandals brewing at the bank. I pumped her for slave-days lore. I wanted to know the full scoop on what it meant: being in the boat from Africa, being a member of what her people called the Tribe That Answers. She let me have it a little at a time over ten thousand cups of coffee dark as her, addicting as she was. We had our spats but, times, it seemed that she was the one factor kept that your Lucy grounded, not half mad. I stayed moving. If I stopped onct, it was over. Water boiling all day long.
UH-OH. Where’s your car parked? “Relatives and Visitors”? Well, that’s good. Otherwise, they will tow you. It’s one way our Home makes money to support the penniless ones in here, like me. Fact is, the director gets a commission from the tow-truck company. Don’t tell.
We had a troop of Pixie Scouts in here last week … What? Well, Brownies then—what difference could that make? And they just swarmed from room to room singing camp songs whilst wearing green beanies. They read us only the cheerful Bible verses. One gal explained to me she got extra merit-badge points the older her old one was. Word leaked out. I was surely popular that day.—Anyhow, the girls’ leader, she was full of smiles and wiggles, so sugar-sweet you longed to let
your dentures drop into your lap, just to see what-all she’d do. She prayed in every room, loud. They’s some that think a prayer is a Hallmark greeting card, only less expensive. The Pixies kept their eyes open all during, watching her be perky and overfamiliar with God. I could see they sure had her number. Some winked at me during Prayer, and I can’t say but that I didn’t do it back.
After going, “Amen,” the leader lady chirps about me: “My, girls, but isn’t this lady a colorful old one!” And me right here, still breathing halitosis and feeling full of potential. Acted like she’d brung her Pixie troop to the monkey house at the Asheboro Zoo. I told her straight, “Colorful? Lady, I’m white as you and a pile more honest. It’s rude to talk about folks like they ain’t even in the room. Especially when it’s their room you been invited into.” Pixies giggled over that.—Well, her car got towed. While she was visiting my cubicle, thinking she was the magic wand of youth twinkling from room to room, they dragged her station wagon off right quick. She found out when she was standing right over there and oh you could hear her clear down the hall just cussing a blue streak. Them Pixies learnt a word or two that day. I loved it.—But, yes, “Relatives and Visitors,” that’s a safety zone.
We got quite a antique-filled parking lot out there, don’t we? Some days when Jerome slides me in my wheelchair, I’ll just set at my window yonder, gazing out at all them cars. Makes me proud. So many of us residents brought along our old sedans. Try and sell them, you can’t get half what they’re worth. Anybody hates to part with something that’s served them good through the years. We got many a fine touring car out there. We won’t all always as poor as we are now. Strangers sometimes come to the Info desk in front, ready to pay a fifty-cent admission. They think we got a museum going here. We do, in a way.—Six black Packards in a row! I don’t care what’s come down the pike since, don’t nothing touch the hem of a Packard.
I can’t brag much on my old green Chevy out yonder. It’s the ’46. I made sure it got parked next to Mrs. Minnie Lytton’s Cord-Airstream. My Chevy’s somewhat akin to me—a low-priced one-owner vehicle, a hundred and ten thousand miles on it. Car may be too antique to risk on the interstate but it’s just a bit too nice for use as scrap, thank you.
You let your automobile set around long enough, magic happens. Its fins and chrome will first get to looking somewhat lumpy, mumps-prone. Till you hit around year fifteen or twenty. Then your model finally commences to growing on people. First—it only seems a “novelty item.” But soon it begins to gain a dignity especially around its running boards and headlamps. Why, Dignity has even sneaked up and pounced on my trusty ugly Chevy. Our Mohawked candy-striper, Zondro (she’s taking art classes and she’s good), she told her boyfriend that my old buggy had upped and turned into “a classic.” Child, I can’t wait till that happens to plain me.
Listen, on your way out—you flip the canvas tarp back, get you a goodly look at Minnie Lytton’s Cord-Airstream. She lets people. Her car is proof of how much we expected of this century. Sleek, child. That roadster looks like our Future ought to, like the Future used to!
A Hunger to Be Vertical
BACK FROM war zones, I Dutch-cleansered even harder—feeling half ashamed, like dirt was mostly my fault, my own fluffy leavings. My favorite maroon cardigan was getting thin around the elbows. I loved it too good to abandon now. My ninth was kickishly near due. Child-bearing in them times, you didn’t check into no hospital for a week to ten days. Didn’t have these fancy breathing lessons, with your cooperating husband hovering right there to help. No, ma’am, I’d send word from my home bed over to Castalia’s mink ranch. She’d swoop in modeling the coat she’d begun to making for herself.
It started as a collar piece of mink that grew into one of those trailing wraps where you can see the shape of minks as minks and where the eyes are glass and where they bite each other into staying round broad shoulders. Then those fused into a short cape that soon added on others at the bottom and was dropping more toward a stole. She wore it in most weathers. The pelts were good but I worried a wee bit about her skill at sewing them together. Still, mink is mink and her pride in it dared you (like her clothes’ bold color combos) to do much past admire.
By then, Cassie was delivering most every new baby in town. Doc Collier didn’t like this fad. She’d come running with her famous basin, she’d set her fur wrap on a far chair—out of harm’s way. She’d make you climb out the bed, stoop over that tin bowl, squatting-like, efficient (but no way to have your picture took). With Cassie’s good coaching, out’d eventually drop your latest, that was it. I begged her—when it happened this time—she should please gag me so my screams wouldn’t upset the little ones. I feared I’d yell things about my husband. I could imagine Baby, hearing me shrieking like Mrs. Lon Chaney through our home’s thin walls, and Baby going, “Baby miss.” Lucky Baby.
If you didn’t die in three days, they called you back to work. First they’d ask you how to do some one thing right. Family’d inquire if you could maybe get up out of bed, step over here, and show them how. “Now the best way to peel a potato,” you’d lecture, knife in hand, and you’d turn around and there you were, alone in the kitchen again, so you knew you’d lived. If you didn’t pass on by day three, they figured you’d probably be good for at least a year and a baby more. If you did die, well, you did. Many did.
And Captain would have remarried fast enough. He’d made that plain. There was always some other woman nearby (living with her younger brother’s big brood), some unwed woman that didn’t quite cut the mustard looks-wise but won’t the least bit scared of work. She’d earned her own unpretty way for all these years. She’d had to. Cap kept his eye on one each time I was laid up.
Some fine morning just before I got ready to spring my ninth, here he came to stand near our bed (I’m sure it was his backhand idea of encouraging me someway) and he told me which woman he had in mind this go-round to be my babies’ future stepmomma. He asked did I approve. Imagine. Just said it to make me mad so I wouldn’t fade off and perish on him. He knew I’d never leave my precious ones to some hatchet-faced workhorse that’d beat them for not being her blood own, that’d pinch them when Captain went off into the country buying more edible livestock to dress up Sunday platters countywide.
At fifteen, why I’d been able to do everything. But at twenty-six? No. Before, the world had been going at me only from the outside in. Now it was hardship from the insides out. And, child, that’s way different. Calendar-wise, I was young yet but my tiredness soon felt the age of Lucy now. No, older. Older than the Old Testament. Back pre-everything, lacking form and voice and the will to even be toilet-trained. It soon felt like such a gray and important tiredness. Was the gray of circles under all the eyes that ever longed to shut for good. The fatigue was so huge that no one night’s sleep, no month of good nights’ rest, could whittle one initial in it. It just sat there, on you.
Our trip back into his war had everything to do with this great dip in Lucy energy. Till that, the whole war was a paper-doll chain of stories, a litter of ditties and tragedies, mostly true, if stretched out lacy, newsprint. Now it was a actual location, and not that far away. Imagine you could drive over one state line—and visit Hell. Not “Fort” Hell. Hell itself. Like looking down into some tourist Grand Canyon. Only, you can witness tormented souls frying in their juices like a zillion rafts of bacon popping on the canyon floor. And along the crater’s upper ridge, shutterbugs taking Kodaks of Purgatory. Postcard vistas for sale, the foldout kind, heavily colorfully retouched.
The war now seemed a place for me. I understood—it still daily licked its greasy chops, eager for some whole new cast of characters, recruits. I felt it had our names now, me and all my babies listed, even the unnamed one yet drubbing in me.—A weasel is so sly that it can suck a hen’s egg through one hole in the egg’s underside, your average weasel knows how to leave the thing looking perfect. Poor hen’ll set on it forever, waiting.
Before our trip I?
??d stayed untired as possible in resistance to something. I’d been getting steady if quiet help from him. Now he was off God knows where. He was wagering with money from my own dowry—a good-sized lump, I later discovered. He was risking my children’s futures to win yet more collector’s-item guns. They stacked under our bed till some nights, shifting, I’d feel them, rigid and not-nice beneath the mattress. Our weight would rattle hammers, triggers, stocks. Gave me the willies, bad. Suddenly the enemy seemed so near, right well equipped.
War: a fiery lake squirming with people I was pretty powerless to save. I felt smaller.
Castalia then weighed just 230–260.
Captain, he weighed 198–210.
Lucy—even pregnant—just broke 109.
BEING this old makes me remember how it felt then. My tiredness now is right on schedule. I’m really doing pretty good for somebody that should’ve been dead long ago—if she had a shred of decency left. At this age a person thinks, Of course I’m fatigued, after all I’m nearbout as old as God. But when you ain’t yet twenty-seven and get so low, it feels way worse. Out my home’s front window, I’d spy—walking back and forth to town—the spinster Cap had picked to fill in for me at my death. She wore her clothes like a Pilgrim, toted a handbag big enough to carry a stolen orphan in. She cut her own hair, you could tell from sixty feet. Was I being crazy, or was she sizing up our home, our yard? “So,” I said, rolling over, with something in me rolling over in me. I meant: “So be it.” I was starting to get too tired to stay mad long. For me that means near death, child.