“Thank God you’re all right,” said the Mayor’s brother-in-law, a man who often introduced himself: “I am the Mayor of Falls’ only brother-in-law, and who are you?” “We dreaded the worst. What’s gone on, a thief, an altercation, some nigger intruder, what? Because: Not to fear, Widow Smythe, the neighborhood menfolk have gathered.”
“That’s what I keep a gun here for. Actually, a woodchuck. A monster woodchuck,” she grinned even harder, the first time in recent memory. Her pleasure spooked folks worse than any usual sourpuss gloom. “And happily I nabbed one fat enough to feed me for many days to come.” Then with a strange low chuckle, Winona Smythe reached into the grave of bedding. By its tail, she snatched forth a furred and dripping creature. The thing was bigger than some hunting dogs and it sent half the crowd scampering backwards, hiding behind each other, tightening belts of terry robes and letting loose a few squeals and several deeply felt “icch” sounds. For years neighbors had sworn that something near the size of hog was burrowing here in the Smythes’ yard. Folks claimed this beast staged savage night raids on hybrid dahlias all along the street. “I can’t keep dahlias,” ladies complained.
One Christian woman, now clutching her nightdress shut at the neck, fought back her own disgust. “My dear Mrs. Smythe, if it’s come to this kind of hunger, we have, you’ll recall, regularly offered you casseroles, and for some years now. My squash one with the bread-crumb topping is, if I do say so my …”
“I like the taste of game,” Winona gloated. “Especially homegrown game I nailed myself. Game’s better when it’s fresh, don’t you find?” Then Winona couldn’t but tell the truth: “This is the first time I’ve ever shot a firearm. And, beginner’s luck, here I’ve realized a week of dinners, plus the pelt.” Cheered, she moved to clean her double-barrel.
The Widow Smythe emptied her yard almost at once.
3
HONEY, I believe some men put on wars just to have a topic afterwards. My husband went and lived long enough to finally hear the Great War called that.
“Great?” Captain Marsden would snap. “They name this French thing Great and our only one on native soil gets downgraded to plain Civil? Why, that’s not even patriotic.”
My man’s peacetime memory lost many a house key but it recollected the whereabouts of every roadhouse in either Carolina. A tale-telling vet could get free bourbon after dark. Captain Marsden’s peacetime memory forgot to pay our grocery bills on time, but, child, his wartime one was a Dewey decimal system of musket balls. Every minute from ’61 to ’65 had schooled Cap in how to tell it true.
I heard his tales so often they’ve stayed more real than, say, the dirty looks our grocer gave me. From back of piled-up goods bought for seven children, then nine, I grinned at Luke Lucas of Lucas’ All-Round Store. “Mr. Luke,” says I, “this’ll just be another charge.”
The grocer—speaking of my husband’s wartime fame and civilian slack—goes, “Lucy, the Light Brigade said that too, said, ‘This’ll just be another charge,’ and look where it got them.”
I decided to forget this part. You can see, I haven’t.
A body learns to stress what you’d call the Upbeat. Maybe thanks to that, I still love my husband. Left on its own, Memory tends to make—not war—but many little treaties.
Captain Marsden had quite the mouth on him you get a few under his belt. Nobody had to force them down with no funnel, either. After our fifth child came, Cap swilled even more. Not sad, mind you, no, he just loved having five. He’d tell strangers about it, show the pictures. Be out celebrating three nights to the week. You’d think he’d won the lottery. First he would offer drinking pals free servings of his Antietam gore, then he’d swoop on home, corner our children. Finally I run clear out of patience.
Still, his tales could make a knot-tying merit badge out of anybody’s heart. Since ’65 and boyhood, he’d just expanded into all the space that respectful civilian ears awarded him. Others’ listening held my husband up like ropes do the big top. After Lee signed it, Marsden stood taller, spread, gone huge with stories. By Appomattox, he’d only just begun to shave. Home, the beard sprouted like his lore did. Cap acted proud of his civvy whiskers, first brown then white. Heaped at the doorstep of his face, beard looked rolling and massy as a small woodpile. Each story would make him finger yet another corner of that great tangle. You definitely noticed my man’s size. Had pores the size as dimes, fingernails tough and flat as baby garden trowels. Folks sometimes complained to me about his tall tales. Well, I say, a person this size can’t help it.
Cap forever chose the wrong time for lovemaking and tale-telling. But on both counts, I’d usually hang around anyway. Don’t ask me why. It’s the foreground questions that’re hardest to answer. Love—blame love. Times, I hated myself, but soon as he offered our kids “Once …” I usually gave in anywhere from twenty to thirty percent. You would’ve too.
—Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to the people who can tell them.
NOW, here I am, socked into this Home so called.
But I’m still semi-perked up, I would yet feel ripe for hearing his old rust-and-velvet voice. Even now, I know his war wounds by heart like the forty-eight states’ capitals. Other stuff, I’ve dropped. Can’t even remember all my Normal School teachers, which embarrasses a onetime not-that-bad student. Whole summers I have lost like items left off your grocery list. But what stays put are my hardships with the man, plus his tales. Like pets, each one got named. And, child, most every one still comes when called.
I’d best hurry. Soon they’ll be bringing the wheelchair to rush me off for lunch. Today Tuesday? Oh Lord, that means chili con carne just as sure as the Pope’s Cath’lic and a wild bird goes to the bathroom in the woods.
Anyhow, he’d reel home from a smoky roadhouse or some duck hunt. Out the bed he’d fish our brood, him calling, “Poppa’s story time, bedtime story time.”
“Wartime story,” I’d add. “And if you give these young ones dreams again, you’re getting up, not nobody else.”
Later, our kids considered this their happiest memory of Poppa. Typical. They took it as a great compliment, his springing them from the sack after I’d teased and threatened them into it. They didn’t know that their grizzled hero was somewhat lubricated. But in them days, drink mostly made him livelier and sometimes tender. Later, not—but that’s another story.
With young ones nested all around him in their pink-and-blue pj’s, some sitting on his huge shoes, others folding and unfolding his pant cuffs full of dirt, horse oats, and cattail fluff from duck blinds, with him breathing out great warrior whiffs of sentiment, 150 proof, he’d grin at us. “Now …,” he’d rub his huge hands together.
I was hovering nearby like some WCTU worker hanging around outside a barroom where I myself would never dare set foot. Then his fingers commenced to testing different corners of the beard, a phone operator plugging about for the right trunk line. He finally cleared his throat, man started.
The story was always one we’d heard—seemed we’d been born knowing them like catechism. I guess that, chapter and verse, Captain’s were no gorier than the Brothers Grimm’s or Mr. Andersen’s. My own favorite peaceful poems are still Mr. R. L. Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. I said that. But even in nice Mr. Stevenson’s stories, each boy’s life only catches your deepest interest when a pirate is about to slit that sweet child’s throat.—What makes a story good ain’t what makes a person good. Why is that?
With crickets clicking their own low-lying sagas outdoors, with the noisy world of Falls, North Carolina, commerce asleep except for our town’s ten misers clinking through their coins (lamps off to save more money yet), my late husband—one huge arm wrapping two daughters, the other bundling thin sons—remembered aloud how “Once …”
THE HOUSING from a shell ricocheted against this stone embankment in Virginia, struck one enlistee square in the right side of his young head. The boy heard church bells, a parlor full of whistling cana
ries, a choir singing, “Cleft for me, cleft for me, cleft for me.” He pitched forward into a low gully. Others, rushing past, saw the homely kid topple but they couldn’t stop. Cap explained that—whilst falling—he seemed to recognize the boots of all the men and boys he knew. It surprised little Marsden: how much of each fellow showed in his boots—polished or not, original issue or traded for, pointed with citified smartness or blunt from miles of country trying. And just before he passed out, the child decided: Every boot … is the portrait of the person wearing it.
When the child come to, he noticed black ants working on a red arm. Only the tickling told him finally: They’re eating your arm, fool. His shoulder spasmed, he smeared ants off. “Not yet, you,” he yelled at bugs. “Not Willie Marsden’s time just yet.” (The War Betwixt States was, for American ants, the golden age.)
From this boy’s low place, he looked out on a clearing thick with evening mist. Then he peeked up at sky. After such a nasty battle, the sky burned black as earth. Dirt itself was misted and, this late in the day, looked a milky sky blue. Marsden’s arms, which should’ve been white-boy-colored, appeared scaly as tree bark, dingy from explosion’s soot. Meantime—in a grove across the way—trees, split by shelling, had peeled open to show the pinky-yellow tint of your standard white folks’ flesh. Confusing. Just before the boy passed out, he closed both eyes, tried making everything go back to being its own rightful color.
“Oh,” Captain, grown now, overgrown, adds to his captive listeners. “I forgot how—it being evening and all—my gray uniform in such light looked pure blue. Now, children, how would you all feel if the sky appeared like black dirt while the dirt kept trying to be sky? And if you, that’d spent your whole recent life trying and honor the Southern side, found all along it seemed you had been wearing Yankee blue? How would that make a person feel, do you suppose?”
“Funny,” says our oldest boy.
“Correct,” the Boss answers. Younger kids snap their fingers, sorry they didn’t chance what their brother did and maybe get some extra credit. I stand here, worrying.
So anyhow the boy in blue passed out. Which is blackness. He comes around again in a camp hospital. Which first registers as its tinny sounds, then turns the opposite of blackness, which breaks into separate tints, becoming a place, yourself alive in that place, one row of cots. Crippled people rest on the cots. Some watch you wake. Over on the ground near a surgeon’s tent, you see another pile of amputated legs and arms. Some of the hands are open, some are closed. They look like they don’t know they’re dead yet. Maybe you don’t, either.
Boy Marsden spies—propped in a basin—one shaving mirror. He hollers for the orderly to bring it fast, please. In its round frame, a pink face—some freckles—regular. “Thank you, General Jesus H. Christ. I’m white!” he screams. “Sky’s blue. Dirt’s dark and back where dirt belongs. I was black but now I’m white, was black but now I’m me!”
Everybody laughed. Even fellows hurting the most considered this to be “a good one.” Bandaged like the mummies of Egypt, some man (it was hard to tell which) said, “Well, little colored fellow, I’m glad at least you got something out’n this damn war!”
See, others didn’t know the story behind his saying it: the story of how if a shell casing hits you hard enough and in one certain rear part of your young head, every color in the world can mutiny, change places on you.
“Well,” goes the teller to his blinking ragamuffins (two dozed off, during). “That’ll start us. Being one from then. Not the best by far and I’m the first to admit it. Something’s missing, never have been quite sure what. You all bored? You even hear it?”
“Sure, and, Poppa? Poppa, I bet you sure felt … ‘funny,’” Baby puts in.
“You can bank on that, sweetheart.” Our vet is definitely not feeling no present pain. “All right, would you all like another or not? Either way’s fine, just be honest.”
Loud cheering. Anything to stay up. I say, “One more and one more only. Understand?” I cross my arms. But I’ve said all this after his friction-resisting “Once …” Nobody’s listening.
OKAY, this one will be about how a man loved his wife too much.
Okay, once there was just such a person, once there lived the very fellow who loved his wife so much, he cried each night. He did. He’d get to sniffling then whimpering for her, called her name out loud, he sure did tire most everybody in his tent. Boy didn’t have a picture of her but described the wife constantly. Men began to call this boy by his wife’s name, “Dora.” His name was Donald, so they didn’t have to change much. He spoke of his young bride’s fine cooking (baking was a specialty), he mentioned her posture, her blue-ribbon needlework. Donald said every person in their hometown knew: He didn’t deserve such a spouse. Don claimed it only showed another proof of Dora’s decency.
Some mail waited in Norfolk. Don got a package from home. Dora—for reasons known best to her (maybe Donald had asked for it?)—sent one of her better dresses. It was a pretty blue, some lace like iceberg lettuce at its sleeves and throat. For memory’s sake, and maybe owing to happiness, Donald—standing among men reading their letters—stripped naked, then put on Dora’s dress. Men stared but said nothing as Don now strolled from group to group describing how well his wife moved, trying to show his buddies, all while admitting that he, of course, could never look so good in her finery as the stately Dora did herself.
He told tentmates (who didn’t want to know) how the skirt especially smelled just like Dora. Now he had her garment in hand, Don cried less. He cheered right up. Don finally became a pretty good soldier. He could concentrate at last, and he gave Dora full credit. General Forrest swept through, inspecting the division. He stopped before Donald. Bedford Forrest—a crusty old killer with bad grammar and a grudge that, during wartime, served him well—reached out. He poked and fidgeted with lumps across young Donald’s lower tunic. Forrest seemed peeved by so chubby a infantryman during so rough a campaign. Out from under gray worsted, a entire skirt fell—blue, its hem unfurled, dainty, draping clear to the ground. Don’s dress hid Don’s soldier boots, Don’s dress covered Don’s soldier sword.
“What is it?” The General backed away. “Whose is it?”
Angry-sounding, his chin lifted, Don spoke. “This,” he said, harsh, “is Dora’s. We are all good soldiers here, sir, but we’re backed up by many other people you can’t always see. This … is Dora’s. And I, for one, am not ashamed of her!”
There was a second when it could have gone either way. Maybe Forrest was about to slap Donald for being far stranger than any decent Rebel should. But the steadiness of Don’s stare while posing, pouty in blue (the enemy color!), why, it sobered the great man. Of Don’s explanation, the General said, “Oh.” Then, turning toward a nearby colonel, Forrest went, “We’ve got us some billets opening in Richmond. This fellow seems a prime candidate for such spy work.”
Donald (and his dress) were carted out of camp that very night. Nobody ever saw him again.
At the war’s butt end, Jefferson Davis tried giving his Yankee posse the slip. He threw on his wife’s raincloak, tossed a shawl over his bare head (it was raining, and he suffered bad neuralgia). Well, Northern papers claimed that old Jeff had been caught escaping in women’s clothes. That can hurt any man’s reputation. After the war, P. T. Barnum (lacking shame) added a side act to his midway: it showed a large homely fellow whose nose was as beaked as Jefferson D.’s. Onstage, this actor stole, tiptoeing from Yankee guards, while wearing a huge hoopskirt, bows and lace, much rouge, and the world’s orangest wig. One soldier notices the humongous shoe size of this belle, the other guard says, “There goes the ugliest white woman I’ve ever seen,” then they grab Jeff. Hearing about this later, the division—spread by civilian life—would think of Donald.
Odd, only after young Donald had left camp did his clothing habits come to seem a wee bit funny. While he’d modeled his loved one’s outfit, while he’d used her hem beneath his face as nightly pillo
w—there was something saddening but half familiar about poor Don. You sort of understood a man so homesick for women that he’d wear what they did. While he sashayed through camp, hadn’t nobody laughed. Fellows remembered, it’d been right nice having such a pretty outfit so close by. Miles from any woman, in this countryside of muddiness, mules, and blood—a lady’s dress became a holy thing.
And afterward, men found they understood exactly how Dora herself must look. They knew her political opinions, favorite jokes, how her face was poreless except just under the eyes, what color her hair turned at each summer’s golden end. Donald taught his buddies how to really love a person such as Dora. And men came to feel that she, too, had been a hearty member of their own division—one of its finest.
“BEDTIME for all civilian children,” I cry, loud. “No ifs, ands, or buts.”
“One more?” Louisa begs, holding her hands prayer-wise. “I want the ‘Death of the Harpsichord’ one. I’m sorry but I do. I just really … crave it.”
“Too long,” her poppa’s reasonable for once. I been standing off to one side, like if I’m on my feet maybe I can draw some of the next tale’s harm to me, clear of my children. “No,” Captain’s saying. “I believe I’ll end with …” and waits, eyes locked on the upturned faces still awake.
“‘The Right-Sized Shoe’?” Our pretty oldest boy raises a hand.
“Well, I prefer to title it ‘The Shoe That Fits,’ but right, pal,” Captain grins, half shy with pleasure. “You guessed it.”
I stomp once. “They never sleep after some of these. Especially ‘The Shoe Fits.’ They’ll have the dreams. You know that. Please, honey—this time, don’t.”