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Dearest Sister,
The moon has roved away in the sky and I don’t even know what the pleiades are but at last I can sit alone in the dark by this lamp, my truest self, day’s end toasted to the perfect moment and speak to you. Such peace to have the house quiet—outside I believe I hear the groaning deer. The wild-eyed varmints in the traps are past wailing, and the nightjars whistle their hillbilly tunes. I can momentarily stop pretending to tend to my accounts in the desk cartonnier. The gentleman lodger who is keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood has gone upstairs to bed, clacking his walking stick along the rails of the banister, just to create a bit of tension; now overhead his footfall to and from the basin squeaks the boards. I have a vague affection for him, which is not usable enough for marriage. I cannot see what he offers in that regard, despite some impressively memorized Shakespeare and Lord Byron and some queerly fine mimicry of the other lodgers: Priscilla the plump quakeress, tragically maddened by love. Miriam with her laryngitis and Confederate widow’s weeds (the town has run out of that slimming black silk and resorts to a confused dark Union blue). Or Mick, the old Chickasaw bachelor, who keeps a whole hawk wing pinned to his never-doffed cowboy hat.
Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can also recite the bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans, one of which features a virtuous heroine torn from home by pirates—sweet Jesus take the reins. His mustache is black and thick as broom bristle and the words come flying out from beneath it like the lines of a play in a theater on fire. He has an intriguing trunk of costumes in his closet—cotton tights, wool tights, a spellbinding number of tights, some wigs he combs out and puts on for amusement, and even some stuffing for a hunchback which he portrays unnervingly and then lets the stuffing fall completely out. I don’t know how he could manage a vigorous sword fight wearing those wigs. If I don’t laugh he puts it all away. He says he suffers stage fright everywhere but the stage. He says he will help me build a platform on the side of the house, if I would like to get into wicked show business and put great joy into the hearts of simple men.
“I will certainly think about that,” say I and go about my chores.
“Why, Miss Libby, an Elizabeth should learn Elizabethan.”
“Should she now.”
“I do desire that we be better strangers.” He is bold.
But he has his own straitened circumstances which I hardly need to take on as my own, though he appears always in fine fettle—handsome in the silvery variegated fashion of rabbits and foxes, a pair of pomaded muttonchops which he says hide a bite scar from his boyhood horse, Cola. The muttonchops fetchingly collect snow in January, though he limps—some might say imperceptibly but that has the lie built right in, so I don’t say that, not being a good liar. A cork foot from the secesh, he told me. Mounted the real foot and donated it to a Lost Cause Army Medical Museum, he said, and sometimes he goes and visits it just to say hello. Well, everyone got a little too dressed up for that cause, I do not reply, claret-capes and ostrich plumes, as if they were all in a play, when they should instead have noted that causes have reasons they get themselves lost.
The smash comes soon enough, as others have declared, and a boy’s adventures know no pity. These dazed old seceshers are like whittlers who take small sticks and chop them away, making nothing but pixie pollen. I find people’s ideas are like their perfume—full of fading then dabbing on again—with no small hint of cidered urine. A good scalawag sticks to the late night cipher of her diary. Also? I myself have taken to whittling and am making your Eliza a doll from some spruce wood. Its body is like a star and I will sew it a dress out of an old Indian blanket and it will look exactly like some doddering namesake aunt made it for her.
From time to time I detect some craftiness about this particular lodger and his less than gallant crumbs of bluster. But he can blow a whistle with his eye—no small matter. He sings, “I Used to Be Lucky but Now I’m Not.” Then does that whistle out his eye.
Ha! He told me all of his people were actors, that a family of actors was not only the best strategy for the future of American drama but would eventually be its greatest subject! at which I scowled.
Then he said not really, but some of his kin were in fact politicians who conducted themselves like actors, one of them once banished to a prison ship, though another brother Ned now mingled with high society. I tried to unclench my mind and free my felt scowl into mock surprise. Then he told me the truth: he had spent years in the circus, after his quinine smuggling for the secesh. Ha again!
“Do I jar you?” he asks with his sly charm.
“No,” I say. “I am braced at every turn for disenchantment.”
“Well that might be just a little too bad,” he says. His look is like last year’s bird’s nest.
“Simply saying.”
“I understand,” he said.
He claims I have inner beauty.
“I wish it would strike outward,” I replied. “It’s best to have things come to the surface.” Among his papers upstairs I have noted letters from female admirers whose signatures he has removed with a razor. A gentlemanly mutilation, I suppose, preserving their privacy.
Well, Lucifer himself was surely a gentleman: he would have needed such manners to get around.
My lodger rhymes again with rain—what is the point of that? Still, I am afraid I’m too often glad of his company. Thus he has full board at a kind price, plus my bettermost chamber, the brass bed with the Job-tears quilt, the cabinetted tub, and the window with only the one paper pane, the rest being glass ambrotypes of crippled young men which I found on the curb outside a retired war surgeon’s house. They fit nicely between the cames. When the enlivening light shines through them, in rose and gray, it breaks your heart.
Charity, our mother used to say, is more virtuous than love, and in some languages the same.
Desire, of course, on my part has been shooed away by the Lord. Though sometimes I think I see it, raggedy, out back among the mossy pavers, like a child cutting across yards to get to school.
One sees a darting through the gum trees and hickories that have come back from the winter’s scorching freeze. Oh, yes, I say to the darting thing, the fluff of a dandelion clock or a milkweed puff: I sort of remember you.
Now as I write, a fierce rain has begun to fall on the roof. The owls in the garden will suffer, their wings having to dry to fly. Honey, I have sent your Harry a birthday letter and a grayback with pretty Lucy Pickens on the front. I have heard Miss Pickens was mad as a dog and vain as a cat, but every type of money and mindset is still permissible here. If no bank up there will take the grayback he will have to put it in a scrapbook. You never know what will become a collector’s item—words to be carved on my headstone. Also, REST YOUR HORSE AND BUGGY HERE—that one for visitors, there being no graveside ostler. Hold your own horses, if I’m not as ready as I expect to be. I have also sent Harry some old rebel coins for pounding into cufflinks.
Though greenbacks are preferred, I still will take from my lodgers whatever the savings and loan will accept, even the new Canadian money which is coursing about, though I would prefer some wampum or a beaver pelt and am not above taking jewelry, since the Union men, and everyone posing as Union men, are having trouble getting their pension pay. I take silver ingots or rhinestone buttons or large sea shells if they are pretty and you can hear the sea. All is tradable somewhere because we live in a forgotten way in some corner of the beginning of the end of the beginning. I don’t know who I really mean by “we.” But it does seem this place has been handed some moment in history then grown fearful and impulsive about hanging on to it. A useless lunge. Sinful even. A good scalawag sticks to her diary. As I said.
Once in a while the river floods, giving us the sense that we have once more got to sacrifice before we can start over yet again. I’m grateful my house is on a hill, high above South Sunken Road and a better place from which to pretend to see you. And why is it pretending? Occasionally I know I do. I am here for you and with you. Transportation to be determined. When the clouds swirl and marble the night sky like meat fat, the antimacassars on the clothesline, not taken down at night, flip up in the wind and are my fretted firmament and all my stars. I look through them and on up into the trees, which carve the horizon like a jigsaw. Peek through, sister mine.
Someone at the pots and pans store was speaking of a neighbor woman who has become a bitter old recluse and I piped up that that was going to be my own fate and no one kindly took it upon themselves to disabuse me. Everyone simply stared in bright-eyed agreement. I fear they have seen me muttering to myself on the street. Once, I swaddled a burn on my arm with a dressing, and then when I was out walking began to swat at it, thinking it was a large moth that had wrapped itself around me. I should wear a duster and one of the new pancake hats that are all the rage. I should take up ornamental farming with guano. When I have my visits with the pastor, our Saturday tea in my own front parlor, it strikes me that he is the lone soul to try to argue me into a more cheerful condition. “What is there to be bitter about?” the pastor asks me. And I say, rudely stitching up a nine-patch quilt right in front of him, “Well, sir, to take the long way around the barn, I don’t always know, but I do feel there’s much: I cannot see life, what it’s supposed to be: I’m stumped and mystified and frozen in place. Yet other times, I realize, regardless, there’s a lot to be thankful for. It’s perplexing! How’s a soul to know?” And he looks sidelong at the floor and chuckles as if I’ve once again accomplished the pointless feat of outsmarting a man of God at cards. But I am the empty-handed one. I am the dummy—a card-playing word I’ve picked up from the courting lodger who has taught me a new game from India or Canada or Australia. He has been to all. I am the partner of the declarer, says lodger Jack with a wink, as he essentially plays the game himself—I prefer Whist or Faro—with me saying, “What do I do now?” Which stands for the whole thing. But also makes me wonder about the pastor’s other calls. They must be dirt-dull and full of pitiful sick people for him to linger with me and my spiritual paralysis. In the afternoon he swirls the tea around and pretends to read the leaves. “God has plans for you.”
“To wash the dishes,” I say, already weary of God’s plans. Once the handsome lodger passed briskly by in a velvet cape, out the door for his walk, touching his wide-brimmed hat in our direction, while the pastor was there in the receiving parlor with me but we paid little heed to one another. Another time the lodger, in a topcoat blue as crab blood, breezed out and I said to the pastor, “He’s a flouncer.”
Or else if the lodger casts a disapproving eye, I say to the pastor, “He’s a Catholic.” But when I have to say nothing at all, all three of us wordlessly and indulgently appear to understand everything, and for a moment life has grace. Unlike those moments when the lodger strolls past, finds me alone, and twirls his cane at me then fires it like a shotgun.
People don’t think I know who they are. But as mistress of this house I sometimes have a lead on things.
How I miss you still. The other day I remembered how we would sneak into the match satchel and suck on the blown out ones, getting all the crazy juice out of them, craving some mineral or other, and then line our eyes with the blackened tips. And so I did it again just to see how it would make me look today and all I can say is this town has no need of yet another homemade Cleopatra. Although I would look right nice with a big old snake dangling from my breast. Done in by the copperheads just says it all. Everything says everything, and all says all.
I have reached a tiredness with the housekeeping and so the whole place has lost its spank. Most weekends and holidays I cold harbor it and the lodgers find their meals elsewhere, usually down the road at Wilmer’s. And though Ofelia still comes by to help with the laundry, and place the wash water out in a basin for the thirsty, fatally curious squirrels, and bring in new water from the well and heat it up on the hob, it is never enough. On Mondays, despite the handsome lodger’s request for baked duck (the buckshot would crack a tooth), Ofelia puts a calf head or a hambone in a soup pot and boils away, adding a tin of turnips, every last shuck and nubbin of leftover corn, an age-old can of goober peas. To supplement there is a yam cake, a cottage cheese pie, a cabbage from Mr. Stanley Woo’s cart. Once a month she makes a quite gruesome hog maw which we eat for days. For breakfast I take a banana and in the center of everybody’s oatmeal place a single slice, so they can look at its man-in-the-moon face. The floors grow smudgy and the cornbread dry—good for a panade. I can hardly tell you what I do with the squirrels (well, all right: I drown them with a contraption like a see-saw that dumps them in a tub of water—harder with a duck—and then you whack them if they don’t fully drown) but at least the stews don’t have pellets in them. Maybe a soapsud or two but not in a way that you would notice unless perhaps one suddenly feels one’s conscience a little cleaner.
But all is wearying here at South Sunken Road. I remove a cobweb, and another one soon springs up wide and eery as a fairy hand. The flour moths flicker in and out of the cupboards and I let them. I have not got a good handle on the grandfather clock and sometimes would rather see an actual grandfather standing there than see that mechanical face spinning like a mad devil not telling you how it does what it does. Whereas an old man will tell you everything.
When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore, as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen. Those are the moments that I then sit and imagine you and wonder what you would say. Reminiscence is an earache, you would declare. Although I suppose I myself am a type—brooding, prim, not as Christian as I pretend, anti-madamic, as the courting gentleman has remarked. Many of my lodgers—the card players and magicians, the bushwhackers, Jews, and Shawnees—are filled up with the new culture: electricity, railroads, hot air balloons, and the western desert still contriving one silver rush after gold then silver again perhaps for more pictures of soldiers and wars, causing everyone to bust out on a boyish freak for a place with Dust or Butte or Scratch in its name, hooting and humming and carrying the large load of their former and perishing hearts, everybody going farther than they should. The Westward Ho of the disabused soldier. There is now a wooden sidewalk on our main street that is good for getting them there—three blocks worth at any rate. The whiff of boondoggle is in the air. Yesterday I saw a large credulous sow trotting down the wheel-rutted road as if it had heard tell of something and eaten her litter so as to be free to investigate. Though probably she would end up gorging on some forgotten boy’s body in some field after the rain somewhere. The farmers’ pigs still root up dead soldiers in the ground.
You don’t even have to be near a battlefield for that. Some of these boys were deserters and stragglers and all were hungry and shot and now years later rummaged for as livestock feed.
As for the Westward Ho, many of those towns are likely not to take. A hub can turn into the end of the line, even for a credulous hog evading Ofelia’s maw. But there is no disenthralling a determined creature! let alone these grizzled mystery men with their secrets and gold necklaces and their money to pay a dentist to pull out all their teeth once they hear of some mecca somewhere—Dimmit River, Turkey Miller’s Plum, and suchlike. It all threatens to become a limbo when rumors and auguries of other heavens blow in. Some of these gentlemen have become stationary spectators, having stopped their restless movements some time ago—their hearts no longer consulted. Although no one’s heart gets consulted on much, bedeviled, dragged behind, twitching.
Well, darlin girl, sorrow and bitterness must be pushed past, and when one stops to look about, there life is! an inland sea in a landlocked place, the world again ready to barkle you with its fossils and warts and other unwanted larksome gifts. I am personally unreconciled to just about everything.
But all will be well if the creek don’t rise.
Yours every time,
Eliz.
