Love and Lament (21 page)

Cicero walked up to the podium, his speech in one hand, his other hand adjusting his reading glasses. He glanced out at the crowd and said he had been given three minutes to speak and he wouldn’t go on a second longer, especially in view of the fact that he couldn’t possibly top what he’d just heard. His voice was strong and Mary Bet could feel it carrying like a stiff breeze up to the rooftops, where young men leaned against chimneys and flagpoles. And then an actual breeze did come along and lift the edge of her father’s paper, his scrawled pencil filling every line front and back, as though he’d decided that one piece of paper was sufficient for what he had to say. As he spoke about growing up in Hartsoe City before the war, the page flipped over and skittered across the platform and out over the heads of those closest in the crowd.

There was a collective intake of breath as a thousand eyes shifted from the speaker to the speech, the tension rising as the distance between the two increased. Cicero paused a moment, glanced out
as though nothing had happened, and continued: “And now we come to the business at hand. The statue yonder that everybody wants to see. I fought in that war, and I was lucky. Some weren’t.” His speech, finally arrested in flight, was handed back through the crowd, then offered up to him by an earnest-looking young man. “You can keep that for a souvenir,” he said. “If you think it’s worth it … Some of those veterans weren’t as lucky. I didn’t so much mind all the marching and drilling. But the food was the worst I’ve ever seen, and it was miserable cold and wet sometimes and I didn’t much care for being shot at. But we all did what we had to, mostly. I wish we hadn’t had to, because I lost some good friends. Someday nobody will remember those people. But that statue will still be there and people will know it meant something.” He couldn’t remember the ending he’d written, and it seemed as though he should end on something uplifting, so he took off his wide-brimmed hat and held it over his chest. “God bless those brave men that died, and the brave women they left behind.”

The crowd cheered as he took his seat. They were still clapping after he sat down, so he waved and smiled, then turned to Mary Bet and whispered, “Was it all right?”

“It was great, Daddy,” she said.

Then it was time for the unveiling. A bugler blew a triumphal series of notes, and Colonel Hatch’s seven-year-old grandson, John R. Hatch III, surrounded by the nineteen other children from his group, grabbed the silk rope and began to pull the cloth covering away. He had not practiced, because there had been no need for practice—Sally Lenora Horton had witnessed the head carpenter pulling the covering off himself, heard him saying it was a cinch.

The covering was a light, nearly translucent voile that was supposed to simply fall away like silk. But it was hung up on something. John R. Hatch III, instead of being flustered, was enjoying the crowd’s gaping attention. He tugged to one side, then flipped
the rope up and, with a determined set to his face, yanked to the other side. Two other boys now gave him a hand, and more than one person in the crowd wondered if the entire statue might tumble over and crush the children and turn the day into a tragedy. Somebody yelled, “Lift it off!” Another voice called out, “Let the colonel show ’em how!”

It was then discovered that someone had placed bricks on the edges of the covering, presumably to keep it from flapping like a skirt in the breeze, and forgotten to tell anyone. With the bricks removed, the children gave one more mighty pull, and the covering flew off, the children collapsing in a boisterous heap at the foot of the viewing platform. The crowd again pressed forward as though toward a sacred icon, the thing that would make this day memorable and joyous and make them proud of who they were—even those many born after the war. The granite pedestal was higher than a man, but by standing on tiptoe people could touch the feet of the gleaming bronze soldier, as he clutched the barrel of his grounded rifle and faced north.

Mary Bet and her father left the grandstand as soon as the last speech had ended. Cicero seemed quieter than usual as he drove the rockaway, and Mary Bet thought he must be thinking about all that they had seen and done. “Did you see that little boy trying to shin up the flagpole?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t,” Cicero said.

“He liked to hurt himself falling, but I reckon he was okay.” She looked up at her father, sitting beside her with the reins in his hands, but he kept his eyes ahead. A minute later he suddenly said, “Oh!” and touched the side of his face as though something had occurred to him. “Why don’t you drive awhile,” he told Mary Bet, handing her the reins.

Mary Bet was happy to drive, but it was unusual for her father to ask her to. He stared vacantly at the road ahead, his shoulders
slumped, his mouth half open, and he began to blow air out in a random tune, not quite a whistle, nor yet quite a hum. His large, strong hands were grasping the tops of his legs as though to keep them from floating away. Mary Bet looked at him and saw nothing in his eyes but a dead forward stare, the brim of his slouch hat shading his face from the late afternoon light. “Daddy?” she said, “Are you all right?”

He nodded and kept up his mournful little tune. Another mile went by, during which he hummed, clucked his tongue, and tapped his heels, answering in monosyllables to anything Mary Bet said.

They were coming into the homestretch—approaching Love’s Creek Church—when Cicero had his episode. He began by scratching his face, which then turned into pulling his beard. He stood up and jumped from the moving buggy, tumbling over into the weeds and thistles in the ditch lining the road.

The crickets shaking in the grass. The clouds neat cutouts against the blue fabric of heaven. The air still as breath. A moment come and gone and her father lying there with burrs and fluff on his jacket and beard. Then him on all fours, looking around as though trying to remember something. He had a new leg and it had come clean off its stump, and she had to wait until he adjusted the straps. She started helping him back into the buggy and he said, “I thought something was trying to get us, and if I jumped out it would only get me and leave you alone.”

“Daddy, are you seeing things?” She tried to keep the fear out of her voice, to push it back down her throat. He hadn’t been drinking, so what was the problem?

“I’m not sure. But it was as clear as a dream, as clear as day.”

“Was it a person? A phantasm? What was it?” She tried to concentrate on the horse’s ears, the way they flicked against the flies.

“Yes, I think so. Did you hear something?”

“No, Daddy, I didn’t hear a thing.”

She looked around now and wished there were other carriages on the road, somebody just to wave hello to, but all she could see was the sun lowering toward the tree line and, down the road, the little church steeple and cows under a wide shade tree on a tus-socky hill. Back the way they’d come, the green fields gave way to pines as the road dipped out of sight. A catbird whined somewhere off in the underbrush. “Let’s get on home,” she said, helping her father up.

The air was redolent of barn smells and fields of new crops, alive with birds and their songs, as the carriage rolled westward toward a sun dropping through a purple sky. “We’ll be home soon,” she said, clicking her tongue to liven the horse’s step. “You’ll be better when you’re lying down. I’ll get you some ginger ale, and some licorice.”

Cicero made a noise, but Mary Bet couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with her or moaning. She clucked again and slapped the reins, and the horse, surprised at this treatment, rolled his eyes toward the driver, then hastened his step for a while—until he could settle back into his normal gait. Cicero’s eyes were closed, his head lolling forward as though he were asleep, or trying to sleep. She suddenly felt so cold that she wished she’d thought to put a blanket in the carriage—but who would’ve thought to on such a warm day? She felt alone and frightened, as if there were no one in the world but herself and her father. A cart was coming toward them—a Negro on a mule pulling a load of chickens in wicker cages, and an odd assortment of colored bottles, old tools and rags, and rotten lumber. She waved to him and he waved back.

But he rolled on past and then there was no one in view, only the rise and fall of the road and the farms and a long stretch of woods. She wished they had ridden caravan-style, but her father had been in a hurry to get going.

The rest of the way back, he sat quietly, hardly moving at all, and by the time they’d alighted and were in their house he seemed himself again. Perhaps it was the strain of the day, she thought; he was unused to speaking in public, certainly not before such a large gathering. She wondered if she should tell Dr. Slocum, just to be on the safe side; maybe there was some medicine her father should be taking, something to calm him. She decided that the next day she would call on the doctor privately.

She almost forgot that the next day she and Clara were getting together to plan the next musicale and that she had promised to go over to the Dorsetts and help teach the girls how to fix a dropped stitch. And, of course, Joe came home from his job at the furniture factory and wanted to go out walking. So the day got away from her, and the next day as well, and anyway her father seemed completely back to normal. But once she had thought of the idea of bringing sugar cookies to Dr. Slocum, she couldn’t very well not do it. That would be like breaking a promise. She finally went over, five days after she’d intended to, and after his wife took the tin and told Mary Bet she would pass along her thanks, she said, “Was there something else, honey?” Mary Bet shook her head and said that, no, there wasn’t.

CHAPTER 13

1903–1905

W
HAT SEEMED TO
have changed was that Cicero didn’t look quite as well turned out as he used to. It was hard at first for Mary Bet to put her finger on the difference, but once she began to look for things, she could see them plainly. Essie was now coming only twice a week; she did the laundry, some light cleaning, and as much cooking as she was able. It was all the help they needed. One day Essie said, “I don’t want to complain about a light load, but your daddy ain’ puttin’ as many shirts and collars in de basket as he oughta.” She held the wicker laundry basket on her hip, her bulky frame only a little more hunched over the years but her face sagging with age. “Either he throwin’ things out, or he ain’ wearin’ ’em to begin wid.”

How could she ask her father if he was wearing a fresh shirt and collar? If he’d changed his underwear? That she’d noticed he was bathing every three or four days now, instead of every other?
“Daddy,” she said one day at dinner, “have you been to see that new barber, Mr. Clegg? I hear he has a new joke every day.”

“What do I want with a barber? I’ve been cutting my own hair for eight years, since your mother died.”

“I don’t think you’ve been attending to it much lately.”

He gave her a hard look, then nodded slowly. “So you’re at the age where your father’s an embarrassment, is that it?”

“No, Daddy,” she said, trying not to show how angry she was. He had never raised a hand to her, had not punished any of his children after his wife died. Mary Bet had yelled at him only once—a year back, when he was questioning her on how much time she was spending with Joe Dorsett—she’d only raised her voice, saying it was her own business. She couldn’t bear to see him hurt, and so she had learned how to guide him to a new topic. He was as easy to steer as a well-schooled horse, and so she felt she had to be gentle with him. She would always be his baby girl, the last of the nine, and could do no wrong in his eyes. “No,” she said, “you’re not an embarrassment. I just think you could spruce up some more than you have.”

He chuckled and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t reckon a weekly haircut is all that important for an old man.”

“Sixty-two’s not so old, Daddy.”

He got up and went out to his sitting room, and there was no more discussion of his hair or his appearance. The next day he cut his hair in front of his mirror and did such a poor job it looked worse than before—tufts of gray-white hair sprouted from the sides and back of his head, while his sole concession to vanity was to leave a few long strands hanging from the thinned-out top like vines seeking better ground. If he’d bothered with his beard, it didn’t show.