Ned, my Ned, leaned back in his starched pillows and took the shortbread from his mouth and put it on the bedside table after feeling for the table’s edge, and said the bread was so good he would save it. He said I did the voices right. “Do the twins. You get the difference. That’s what’s good, you get the difference between them.” Put cookie tin in oven. Maybe I said that. Preheat. So I did the twins, but not as good as earlier. I can’t repeat on request, which means I ain’t a true performer. He smiled though, behind the huge head bandage (so white) and leaned back grinning, shaking his head sideways, pleased in a man-sized bed. He kept shaking his head side to side too hard maybe. And I felt pleased—I’d cheered him with my baking and my silly stunts. Okay. It’d be fine soon. It was a good sign, basically, underneath all of it. Cassie had lost all her folks and only this had grabbed me. We were lucky. One infant and one accident. Many had it worse. We’d get by. Then I saw this mark on his neck, and when I drew near it, I understood, child, it was moving, it was dark, his laughing had sent forth this exploring into daylight out from under gauze. One small red line had spilled under bandage and was now easing out from where the eyes has been. After removing from slow oven, shift to wire rack, allow to cool at room temperature. Decorate tops with almonds, bits of cherry, or angelica or citron as desired. Be “creative,” let yourself go.
Then break apart. You will not be dissatisfied.
I NOW planned running away. Get out. Had to. Of course I first took Ned to “see” these schools in a car with a hired driver … who helped to teach me driving as we went. A handy skill. I didn’t want Captain Marsden along, glad-handing headmasters, throwing his name and war record around to open doors for our son. Captain was now living at the New Ricks Hotel near the depot. I asked him not to show his face for a while and no hard feelings. I said I needed time off. He was nice about it. I mean really nice. That was what perpetually confused you.
I drove Ned to a training camp near Lumberton where we got assigned Moxie, a yellow Labrador. Ned’s brothers and sisters grumbled that they had always wanted a cocker spaniel, not a Lab, but now here Ned got a big gold Lab and trained, a whole one to hisself.
Family! Darling, what’re you going to do? You can’t live with them, and you can’t get born without them.
I’d had the ruined arsenal turned into Ned’s bedroom since the stair steps became a problem. But he asked to go back up with the others anyway. I understood that and said sure. When he moved out, I got my Singer right in again. It stayed till Sheriff Cooper evicted me from the old house some decades later.
Throughout this whole mess, my children had been unbelievable. Bricks. Not just Ned, the others. They could handle most any occasion, seemed like. They were good at anything but boredom. I took all eight out to restaurants, the two in town. My daddy had started giving me some money at this time. Captain was having trouble covering his counties-wide poker IOUs and I felt sad for him, I did. You know? I missed him being in the house. Can you stand it? Am I sounding like the battered gals you see in shadows on the Magnavox out there in Multi-Purpose?
Even so. I could see our children missed him, too, especially at dinnertime and breakfast. The thing I can’t seem to find is a way to say how potent his attention was when he was “up” and with you, really there. He had the deepest, finest, most beautiful speaking voice. The only actor’s like it was young James Mason. He’s dead, too, they all are. But like Mason’s, Captain’s had this kind of light in it. He’d just comment on the weather—and it would seem to mean something.
Here lately Cap was becoming kind of a town embarrassment. People knew what he’d done. Low on funds, too. He was beginning to forget things. Yeah, and the house seemed huge without him—and me wiping fingerprints off new spots low on the walls and wondering, Why there? Till I remembered Ned’s condition.
Good as my other kids acted, they would talk about our hurt one like he won’t in the room. “What kind do you think Ned wants?” Baby asked about a choice of dessert. “He’s sitting right here, honey. Ask him. It ain’t nothing changed about him.” But her face told me that there was too. And that I had embarrassed her. “Chocolate or vanilla, sugar?” I asked him, my hands plumping his sideburn curls that the smoked glasses always flattened.
I got the best possible harness for Moxie. There was a store of Blind Supplies in Raleigh, a whole display of short short canes, red-and-white, the sight of which—a rack of twelve models for your well-equipped blind child—I cannot tell you. “You choose,” I said, and sat here like some mother in a shoe store where, instead of walking on carpet, your kid he tap-taps into everything. They’d set up a little obstacle course of boxes and stuff. “I think,” the nice salesman said, “he’s tending toward our lighter-weight models. The modified bamboo has been a big favorite this season.” “Good. Whatever.” And all during, I am sitting here considering—with a inward sound like some giant amount of wind lashing over a cave’s fixed open mouth—escape. My own. Just mine. Maybe someplace with palms like ones in Cassie’s home village, like ones Maimie Lucille Beech so loved? I’d had it with this taking care of others. Seemed like I had tried this—staying in place and being kind and making school lunches—and had failed. I’d been put in charge of shirts and nickels and children. One child was dead, another blinded. I really should let others, better qualified by nature, try and get it right now.
“Let’s see. Is this cash or a check? How will you be paying, ma’am?”
Out of my bone marrow, I almost said. But didn’t. You don’t. I was done with acting crazy. That just gave them too much satisfaction, their seeing that they’d got to you, their hurting you that much. But I stood, I walked to Ned, smiling, him knocking into walls, using his cane like a fencing sword and grinning under dark glasses. I stood beside the register, my wallet out, and I noticed that the register had Braille on all its keys. I looked at the salesman who’d seemed so at ease. He was young and smiling at the sound of Ned’s cane whooshing through air. “It’s a good weight,” the man said three inches too far left of me. “He’ll do well with that.” My problems seemed so silly compared to others’, but to me how huge and gray and lardy-real they felt.
Revelations says, “And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations … and I will give him the morning star.” I changed the “him” to “her,” of course, and waited. Forget nations. I’d settle for some favor as small as breakfast in bed someplace foreign yet sunny. I’d grown so primed for a reward: two weeks’ rest would do nicely, thank you.
I walked all over Falls with Ned, making sure Moxie did right by my son at street crossings. People give us unasked-for respect, closed-mouth smiles, eyes that turned down at their outer corners. I felt almost glad Ned couldn’t see—pride had been his sin, too. These grins seemed embarrassed at knowing the whole history of our loss and my collaborator’s part in it.
ONE DAY a little Pomeranian bitch in heat turned Moxie’s head and I was there to catch that fool dog after his quarter-block run, him yanking along my Ned, who—when I got to him—was laughing. “He sure liked something,” Ned told me. The child still wore bandages, but only over the sockets now. He put smoked glasses over them to make gauzed dents look less scary and a tad more human. From Ruth’s I telephoned Lumberton, concerned about Moxie’s roving eye, and they said it was time to have him altered, his being altered would help him keep on giving Ned good help.
“Altered?” I asked—it sounded like having his dog-collar style updated.
“You know … de-maled,” the gent said after a tactful pause.
I laughed, “So that’s the way to get good use out of male ones! Why didn’t I think of that before?” I chortled like a lunatic longing for escape. Silence from the head Seeing Eye man.
Captain kept his own hours now. He sold Lady More Marsden’s final farm. He asked me for formal dinner invitations. He was sleeping in the back of his livery stable, a little room with two cots, his former poker headquarters. H
e turned on the charm while at home and I appreciated the effort, I did. He made things easier. He brought over gifts I knew he couldn’t no longer easily afford. He mail-ordered a rocking horse for Ned—covered in real pony fur and with glass amber eyes that spooked me. Ned, just gone twelve, and way too old for hobbyhorses now. I see how much it bothered Cap, coming in like some uncle, not their father. But none of it made me want to stay. I was right far gone. I tend to get righteous, it’s a failing. But the sight of Ned caning around the house, and being such a good sport, oh Lord. I worked hard to stay wide open to our other children. I took each, alone, on separate outings downtown. They might sulk about Ned’s getting Moxie, but they basically pulled through with many kindnesses. My children already seemed like solid moral little people.
That made my leaving them seem easier.
NED dearly loved to sit whole minutes touching Cassie’s homegrown coat. He made up his own names for each animal donor. Captain, a model of kindness there for a while, told me I should take a day off, he’d mind the kids. I worried about having Ned alone with him again, unchaperoned, but then I figured, sounding bitterer than I thought I’d ever sink: What else can the man do to him? I got granted a day all to myself, my gang comedy off seeing a farm where gamecocks were bred. But I spoiled time off with pacing, laundry, and regrets, with plans to run away. I picked the date. I again explained to myself why I would have to leave alone. I was cleaning up the house and in every room there seemed a spare red-and-white cane tilting up against some wall. You know how some absentminded folks leave a pair of bifocals on every table in the house so they’ll never be without? When would I get used to it? I literally feared for my own mind. Sounds simple, put like this. But if you ever been through it, child, you know the jeopardy each minute brings. One more tiny thing might set you off over some border that turns into a armed frontier. You will never see your house again. Cap put in extra hours with our blind son. What these divorced husbands today call “quality time” spent with bartered kids on weekends. Men call it “quality” to make eight hours a week feel more important in their busy lives. Fine that Cap was driving our boy around in a borrowed car. But was I too harsh in feeling it was too little and too late?
I saw our other kids slowly come to trust Poppa again. Even Louisa. First an honored guest, then asking permission for an overnighter, and then, someway, back in here. Playing like he was a human one of us again. And oh he was, I guess. I didn’t trust my judgments anymore. I avoided Castalia. Couldn’t say why. Her strength begun to irk me. Who wanted to be brave and beaten down? I wanted to have things fun, wanted to feel free.
There were nice events that happened in this period, I’m sure, but I forget them now. To wake up in your bed beside your returned husband and the father of your brood and to hear that noise first thing, a light child-scaled tap-tap along the hall toward the bathroom at 3 a.m.—because he has to go and can’t see when dawn comes so he might wait and not wake others. It can strike a person many ways. To me, it said one word, “Leave.” I wanted to save them or else take them all far far from harm. I could not, so I would spare myself for now, for them, for later. Or so my logic run.
Sometimes I’d find Ned in the pantry (crying in the darkness for our sakes, plainly, and not his). I knew he wept: because his shoulders bucked. I knew that way and not through tears. The Chapel Hill doctors told me that the tear ducts had been cauterized, were gone. Mostly Ned tried acting cheery. The nicer he behaved about the whole mess and the better he moved around the place and the harder he worked at his Braille, the readier I felt to pack by the fourteenth, D day. The closer I felt to reconsider murdering Ned’s father. Seemed somebody had to. My boy never asked for special favors. He took to Braille right off and said it was a little bit like rock collecting, recognizing dots by touch and groups of words waiting there in the far dark, spelunking. Some stormy midnights, I’d find him abed in the boys’ dormitory, fingers reading under the covers, mouth sounding out the harder words whilst staring straight ahead.
Cap was asked to do more parades all over Dixie and he’d go off with his extra uniform in a dry-cleaning bag. He had a livestock convention coming up in Richmond on the fourteenth, the day I’d head elsewhere. All travel starts local. I felt almost serene about the leaving.
We’d reserved a place next term at the best blind school in either Carolina. Therefore I could go now. I planned to first buy him lots of beautiful little new cashmere sweaters at Ekstein’s. I figured anything that’d be nice to feel of, Ned should have with him always, no matter the cost. I got out the trusty honeymoon carpetbag. Sent Cas a note and, despite avoiding her of late, asked would she come and sleep here the night of the fourteenth. She turned up to say she would.
“Where you headed?” She held the page I’d sent, folded it with care, pocketed it—evidence she’d keep back from Him. No trace. Disappeared without a trace. Castalia handed me a jar of her famous watermelon-rind pickles.
“Where?” I shrugged. “Someplace they don’t know me. Someplace else they don’t know me.”
I frowned at her like blaming her. She’d seen me, a bride fifteen, she’d known this was in store for me but what had she done to stop it or spare me? “We’ll see,” I said, to take it back a bit.
Lately, every sentence I spoke or heard had “see” or “eyes” in it. All my life people answered my requests that way, “We’ll see.”
THE DAY before leaving, came time to take all Ned’s bandages off. Us two would usually go off to a far corner of the house to change his dressings. I didn’t want the other children to yet be bothered by the sight I’d learned to look right at. Somebody must. I was his mother, I loved him.
The twins were enduring matched-set bad dreams right along in here. I was up and down all night those first six weeks after the shooting. Ned slept better than his brothers and sisters. He seemed determined to be easygoing, I tried telling him he didn’t have to. Then I worried I was spreading my own darknesses to a boy already wound in dark enough. He told me he saw more than blackness. The blind see slow colors, spots, the deeds and hidden sufferings of light. His rich curls—without living eyes to be beneath them—appeared suddenly heavier, some wig, like Harpo’s.
Once the dressings come off for good, once he’d gone downtown a few times with Lou’s help and that of drowsy (altered) Moxie, Ned called me aside. “How do they look?” he asked me. “Because I must have scars that show over the glasses, Momma. Because, see, when I walk into Lucas’? everything stops for a second then they all get real loud and come over like everything’s okay. Something must show, Momma. Lou won’t tell me. When I ask, Lou gets mad.”
“There is a little scarring here and here,” I touched Ned’s forehead, which didn’t flinch, glad to be touched, eager to know all. “Doc said these ones will fade. Otherwise you’d never know with your glasses on. Son? the eyes are like mostly blank, son. Everybody’s got whites around their eyes, yours just have more now. That’s what people see.”
“So not that bad-looking or anything, hunh? ’Cause, I need to know.”
“Folk’re just getting used to you with a cane, is all. Plus Moxie. That Moxie loves you to pieces but is lazy at times. Smart, though, our Moxie.”
“Okay then.” He was finished with the topic forever and I watched his narrow back bound off outdoors, to play tap-tap-tapping, trusting the world.
Doing breakfast dishes I remembered Mr. Stevenson’s poem “Travel,” starts:
I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow—
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie.
And, watched by cockatoos and goats,
Lonely Crusoes building boats.
Another sky. Sounded good. I felt ready as I’d ever be.
BOOK FIVE
A
Treaty
with the
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All Page 95
