AND WHO was I? Good question. A wellborn if rough-talking child on the front row, gaping up. I’d get to noticing so hard I chewed the brush end of my braids till Momma slapped my hands back down to ladylike. Cap knew my daddy. Cap slowly understood that I was looking. I remember the first day Captain stared back. Gray eyes! Amber bits shot all across them. When he turned them on me, even though I was seated on the front row, I seemed to fall some inches into earth. I heard a new roaring around my head, a garland of fiddling crickets fastened over me like earmuffs. I couldn’t hold his gaze for long, but sat—legs swinging—staring at the brickwork herringbone of our Courthouse Square. When I checked back, I saw: He liked that. My acting modest. His mouth had set. Man never blinked. His eyeball “had” me before I knew what “had” could fully mean. It still upsets me, excites me to remember.—I believed myself to be right bold and semi-clever. But, darling? from the start, Captain Marsden was strategy fine-toothed as Lee’s. Me, I was Miss Chicken with Her Head Cut Off.
HE MIGHT be nearing fifty but—for all his war glory—the fellow still acted extra shy. Folks said as how three women, two of them rich, had come right out and proposed marriage to him. Cap Marsden didn’t like that type of boldness one little bit. He lived alone, had a colored woman cook and clean for him. (She was named Marsden, too, but of course not because he’d upped and married her. Till right recent, he’d owned Castalia. They were the same age and once had been somewhat in love—but that’s a later story, God willing. Was her admirers who’d spit at Cap’s feet downtown, men miffed that Freedom had come and gone and their high-spirited Cassie was still bellied up to another bucketful of Marsden dirty dishes.)
Thing about Captain was, nobody knew him. Yes, by day he talked shop. Sure, he attended First Baptist onct a month, need it or no. Yeah, come weekend nights, he told the tales: How General Forrest got twenty-nine horses shot out from under him, but by Appomattox bragged he’d killed one Yankee more than he’d lost mounts—he’d stayed one human soul ahead. People respected Marsden way too much to take one jolly personal fact for granted. Nobody slapped him on the back, nobody called him anything but Captain. If you knew his first name was William (after his Latin scholar of a poppa), was hard to recollect ever hearing anybody downtown bray that name aloud. His staying so quiet left him wide open for whatever you most wanted him to be. Me? I had my own ideas.
Silent people can always lord it over gabbers like yours truly. You believe they know something. The more you natter around them, the sillier you feel, the more of a Buddha they commence to seem.—I’m thinking of you, for instance, darling. You and this machine that don’t say nothing but must know something and just keep rolling along. I know it’s hard to fit a word in edgeways with me on this here gabfest tear. You’ll get your turn, after. I’m expecting to hear about your life, loves, the lessons and upsets. I want you to tell—all. Soon as the paint of this is dry. Or even tacky.—The quiet ones, they do know something. Know to keep their traps shut. They understand (he sure did) that speech’ll never make a body seem as glamorous as a long smart hush. Still, only one thing’s going to teach Lucy here to finally pipe down and join the strong-and-silents. And I’ll breathe my last trying to talk Death out of that!
My chatterbox mind made the most of Captain’s being still. Me, on his front row, maybe I was extra-young, all eyes—but seemed like I already knew his secret. I didn’t even consider telling anybody, that’s how powerful it was. And Captain’s eyes soon let on: He knew I knew.
Bands played Sousa off-key, flags were snapping, President McKinley—a short portly man with a Presbyterian preacher’s samish speaking voice—he used a wealth of hand gestures. Everybody’s eyes were fixed on our nation’s Commander-and-Chief. Instead I studied a Captain perched up yonder, gleaming like for sale.
Nobody else knew, but hidden way under that solid mid-years rosy fellow yonder with the rusty beard I noticed, plain as anything, one skinny saddened child. The boy’s wide-open eyes locked right on me. This pip had been there, locked like in a closet, hiding through the war. War’d been over for thirty-some years but the child still stood there listening, bug-eyed, waiting for the all-clear bugle. He still expected outside air to be clotted with miniés. The sensible baby soldier waited, scared so long, at constant attention. I blinked, seeing what I saw. Only place this living boy showed through was: in the Captain’s adult eyes. Only person that saw him there was me. I checked around. Others yet studied poor Mr. McKinley, two years from assassination. Captain’s face itself was only extras—just a beefy margin, tax-paying, full-grown. McKinley now said, “… honor to share the platform with your distinguished veterans,” and flung one hand the Captain’s way. Everybody joined me, looking at the soldier, but when others veered back to the President’s podium, I stayed on—was then he really ladled sight my way.
Dear God, I feel it yet.
And when his eyeballs latched right square on mine, I flinched so. I’d seen in. I keeled back and then drew close again. Both his eyes said, “You finally? Help me, sister.”
Hundreds of countryfolks milled about holding candied apples and souvenir fans courtesy of Black’s Funeral Emporium—“Burying the community for fifty years from one convenient location.” Momma, prim, overdressed, sat on my right, one hand idly centering her cameo. Poppa made joker’s eyes at his best drinking buddy up there on the reviewing stand, Pop kept trying and get the man to giggle—the fellow stared clear into the sky, like praying to be spared the sight of Poppa sticking out his tongue while a U.S. President spoke. Instead Poppa made two fingers become devil’s horns behind the Mayor’s sister’s hat before him, till Momma slapped Pop’s hand down, sighed her usual “Rea-lly, Samuel.” And not one soul was noticing how—when Captain looked my way—oh boy, bye-bye to brass bands, town square, right down and back and into him young Lucy here did go, a swimmer. Nobody knew! The adult man let me see—before a crowd of nine hundred—a child’s message spelled there plain. Boy’s eyes said, “Sister, please come in and help me out of this. I’m begging here.” I heard that clearer than any old-man President. I’d been asked to do a favor for a boy my very age. And my two eyes said back, “Well, okay. I’ll give my best try, buddy-ro.”
That was pretty much it.
Momma spoke of Cap as a “mature” man. At fifty? No lie. Poppa, a well-known local card and storyteller hisself, had always envied Captain’s war crimes (some material!). Pop said you sure had to admire a solid fellow done up in more gold braid than gift-wraps New York City come Christmastime. But, honey, all I saw was somebody else fifteen. A big-toothed boy whose hair no oil could tame, whose singing voice was nothing much to speak of. Willie stood there—one hushed semi-homely child—everything had froze for him back then. His face smarted, it’d just found out: War means nothing fancier than losing your best friend.
—SUG, you know what I wanted? Wanted in. What I someway planned: to tie a rope around my waist, to hook its other end around this bright sure year of 1899, to scramble back on down, right square into the dark and smoke, the tar smell, back to where, by feel only, I’d surely find that child (part brother, partly baby son, plus mostly my love of loves, my true medicine) and, oh, I’d lug him out with me, him tucked under one arm, I’d hold that boy, all powder-burned and stunned past talking. I would bring him home safe, to live in peace. With me. In a nice white house.
Poppa really set the marriage up. Saw me looking, says, “You got your heart fixed on that one, don’t you, my Runt Funny and Minute Hand?” I just studied my knuckles, ones scratched scabby from recent tree-house building. Lowered eyes were considered a Yes answer for girl of my age and class and time—I knew it, too. Child, if you are young and powerless enough, just saying nothing means: Do what you plan with me.
(I kept picturing how I would one day wash Cap’s bitter gray eyes with water, two little porcelain eyecups Momma had at home. Those eyes of his would be red from flying metal slivers, red from seeing too many others’ eyes lose quickness. How good the coo
l water would feel.)
I weighed eighty-six, ninety, in there—low nineties—pounds I mean, not years, not yet. I owned fourteen or twenty-some dresses. I was Poppa’s hands-down favorite, was considered (by me, leastways) headstrong and somewhat funny when the need arose. Around our house, it arose right often. That was part of my power and still is. Pop called it “getting a rise out of people.” Made me think of Lazarus. Had Jesus maybe stood at the mouth of the grave and cracked “a good one” and first heard a sound like pottery breaking and then a sucking in of wind till one bone knee got slapped and death-defying giggles echoed from the tomb? One honest and earned laugh to make a shroud go glad rags! “Getting a rise out of folks” meant making them laugh against their will. Especially then. It sometimes seemed my only power. I sure have clung to it.
After supper, Pop and me adjourned to porch or parlor. There, with Momma as our martyr audience, he’d smile, “Do somebody, Runt Funny.”
I did. “Saw a teacher today and she runs something like … this.” I demonstrated how the forceful Witch Beale rushed wrenlike all over town in thirty-foot lunges, stopping like wondering if she’d locked her boardinghouse door, then dashing off again, refueled. Or how Luke Lucas straightened his apron straps with the finicky pride of a girl arranging her first formal’s spaghetti straps. All these I stowed, then I mockingbirded back. To look at me downtown, you’d take me for any noisome freckle farm—background, no better. But I was sopping up pretensions, postures, voices. Pop guessed Witch in two seconds then minced through each of Pastor Saiterwaite’s arty daughters, but not in order of age—so he’d make guessing harder. “Now you try each,” he said. We took turns. By age fourteen, I felt I’d pretty much nailed every notable local silly citizen.
At fifteen I would discover the sixty percent of Falls I’d missed. The black majority. Had I skipped them out of mercy or through ignorance or both? A crash course waited dead ahead. I only wanted to “do” others for fun. But I soon found how others get “impersoned” (like “imprisoned”) in the doer’s body and for good. Many of these folks from then are dead—only not yet, not totally. My fingertips and neck muscles still imperson them a bit. Later, for their sakes, yours and mine especially, I’ll do some. “Doing” people! Has a smutty kind of ring to it. Maybe that’s why Pop liked it, why I love it so?
Here’s the church, here’s the steeple.
Lingo and fidget, I’ll do all the people.
(The one time Poppa, newly wed, attended Momma’s childhood Episcopal church, he—being so countrified—felt increasingly uneasy. Maybe, hoping to break him into Summit society, she overcoached him? This forced him to do something that nobody understood the purpose of, Poppa least of all: He started making farting noises with his mouth. Hushed, then lifelike and loud. Everybody knew who was “doing” these. Nobody knew why, either. “Our Father [plltt] who art in [seep-poi-ert] heaven,” et cetera. During the Doxology, he ran out of church. Everybody felt relieved, even Momma. Being civilized humans, nobody ever mentioned it to my folks. Locals claimed my poppa would do nearbout anything. At the time, this struck me as right high praise. Momma soon lapsed into being Baptist. What choice? He sat quieter amongst the Dunkers. Shame and the Episcopals don’t mix.)
Momma would look at me and Poppa “cutting up” on the porch. In her rocker, she sat studying her newest sheet music. She belonged to “Prelude of the Month” Club. Poppa made fun of this—claimed he planned signing up for “Chewing Tobacco of the Day” Club, or Spittoon of the Week. Poppa knew no limits. You think I’m bad! For this reason, Momma rarely showed signs of being non-deaf. “Today” (eyes still latched on her sheet music), “thanks to the beauty of this Prelude” (study, study), “your base stunts are lost on me, Samuel. I am impervious, cloaked in Spirit.” He leaned nearer her chair, blowing breath at her face. “So, baby doll, what’d the chicken say to the egg? Heard this down at Lucas’ from one of the slower Wilcox boys. Third from dimmest. Still, it’s got more philosophy in it than John Harvard’s college plus that new tune you’re pretending to read.” She tried concentrating harder, it always made her prettier, her finger traced the five-lined staff. “Ask me for this joke, Bianca. I know you’ll lap this up. Beg Sammy.”
She finally rolled her eyes, she closed her Preludio. “As if there were a choice. Just one.” Momma kept her mouth all slotted, joyless. “All right, what was it? What did the chicken say to the egg?”
He bent nearer her smooth neck. “Said, ‘You come first this time, I’ll come first next time.’”
“Samuel! And in front of our Lucille. Really,” and rocking her chair, she opened her score from Boston, finger falling back a bar or two then gliding on. “Why me?” she asked the mail-order music. “Of all the art-loving thinkers on earth, why should this particular ragweed love have been visited upon me?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” he winked. She shuddered—40 percent of it pleasure. Correction, 48 percent.
She only really tantrumed for real when I said “ain’t” again. Born monied, poor Momma hoped to make me a shiny debutante like she’d been in Raleigh, like Captain Marsden’s mother had got to be in Charleston proper back in 1840. (Charleston rests higher than Raleigh on the local deb dream scale. Not that it matters any.) But I ask you, child, can imagine your Lucy here leading some prissy cotillion of whiny powder-shouldered society girls? I tried telling Momma that Coming Out would always be beyond me. I won’t ever what you’d call a beauty. I was built short if sturdy, overaverage, not unclean. I was, turns out, just the kind of girl a longtime bachelor with many years’ experience in judging character and livestock recognizes.
Anyhow, he acted mighty dashing and nice to me and I liked him for it. On night walks, he told me stories, ones he’d kept aside even from other grownups. Me and girls my age had always snickered when we saw Captain around town. He forever scared us with his old-fashioned auctioneer’s tendency to appraise us. A soberness like the smell of smoke, it hinted that military good looks and big money still hadn’t made his life no picnic. But the man sure kept a eye out for the most fetching of my classmates. When one of my girlfriends got old enough for him to tip his hat to—she felt his gray eyes on her like a mustard plaster mashed hot across her lower back, then lower, a sealed bid. Out of Captain’s sight, we teased each other. “He looked at you the most, Shirley.” “No, you, he stared right at your … middy knot.” Then we collapsed into great sherbet scoops of giggles.
The older women who’d asked for Captain’s hand in marriage? seeing me with him, they did just snub me dead on Falls’ wooden sidewalks. Being fifteen, I liked that part a lot. Poppa soon called me Lady Engaged. He imitated me coming down the aisle and tripping on the carpet while gnawing on my braids’ tips—he mimed a Lucy not able to say “I do” for all the hair stuffing her mouth. “‘Tain’t funny,” goes I. Momma cringed behind her April Preludio. She said there’d be no wedding if my grammar didn’t take a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn toward something I’d not yet noticed, something known—in towns far more advanced than muddy Falls—as civilization. Ever hear of it?
Soon as company come visiting, Poppa started in on engagement jokes—he took both parts. Odd thing was (and this should of tipped me off, but young as I was I missed it) my own father, flesh and blood, was way better at copying Captain Marsden than he was at doing me. He got Cap by going all stiff-backed, dropping chin against chest, holding elbows far away from ribs, and lowering his voice to sound formal, charbroiled. Me, Poppa would ape by skipping up and down our best parlor, by tripping over nothing, by twirling either braid. So far so good—but, still, Pop missed something basic. Hard to ex plain. All mimes know that the real imitation is what you do with your whole trunk—ain’t just the fussy flibbertigibbet fingertip stuff.
Whilst engaged, I felt disappointed by the Me that he showed company—all the yeast and heat of True Lucille was missing. Underneath my freckles, I felt wild and turquoise as a rebel Indian princess, gorgeous, inky. In front of guests, disappointed, I’d r
ush over and punch Poppa really hard in his upper arm. Soon we got to tussling on the porch floor like two scrappy boys. Mother would then rise, set down her music, she’d lean back against a wall, one hand held to her throat and hiding her profile cameo like the brooch alone had disappointed her. “No, please, not again, you two, oh no. To our distinguished visitors, I can only say once more, I don’t know them, either of them. Really. What did a woman do to earn this? It’s far beyond seeming droll anymore. What possesses you two to …? Lucille will be a Mrs. in two weeks’ time, and with a good-sized scab on one knee. Look at her. A tragedy. I can’t live like this. Sometimes your pranks suffocate me. Look. I’m suffocating, I tell you.”
Family life!
Poppa paid a secret visit on the County Registrar of Deeds (the listing of who owned what). Red-haired Poppa bobbed home with his best cat-on-the-canary-farm grin. “Exceptional man, this finance of your, gal. Sterling character.”
A typical joke of Poppa’s—saying “finance” for “fiancé.”
And I thought I’d chosen Captain William More Marsden!
I STILL believed I could rescue the boy in him. Bring him out, literal. Little Miss Search Party. I figured I was mightier than any old war. After all, war was over. And me? Why, I’d just begun. Fifteen, that’s the age when the only world event that counts is whatever mood you’re in that day. I was in love. I was confused. I thought he was fifteen and I was fifty. Oh Lord. We married.