Part 32 (1/2)

But I also know I can't find it in me to wish that my youth had had such choices in it. Modern women after all, despite the real gains they've earned, are missing out this instant on some boon the mysterious future will bring--like the final victory over cancer, which is surely not more than twenty years off, and the promise of upright sane lifespans past the century mark. So doesn't it seem a form of greed to demand everything the world can afford at any given time? Coming along where and when I did, I'd estimate I've had some real luck and nowhere near as much heartbreak as many women known to me. I think that ought to give my kinswomen pleasure or relief anyhow--but of course it doesn't, and they may well be right. Maybe I've been a blind galley slave and my main miseries were caused by men. I continue to doubt it. And if so, well I only say Thank Christ for blindness.

Once I've admitted to that much thinking, I owe the very paper I write on at least a final attempt at saying what I think my life's been and where it might take me when I head out of here. The first thing I find is, to my considerable surprise, I've thoroughly enjoyed it which is likely the main reason I'm writing this. Among a lot else it's an overflow of pleasure and thanks. Most days lately I feel I'd do it all over again, even the torments, especially if I could start out next time in the confidence of living through nearly a century with a mind and body that worked for all but four years. What kind of a challenge would that be, though, with a promise at the start?

I'm not claiming I have no regrets.

Regret stacked behind me at a regular rate in my active years, less frequently since I ”took the veil” at ninety-three, the year I broke my leg. I think most of my sorrows and guilts are owned-up-to here. In my mind at least, I've been as capable of cruelty, waste and physical harm as any felon in our vicinity. And the mind's where cruelty counts above all. To make a near-deathbed confession, though, I'm bound to admit that--if I could do it all again --the one thing I'd try hardest to improve, to have more of, would be s.e.x with my husband.

I'm not smart enough to say why exactly. I hate to repeat the only thing that's ever troubled me about it, but I think it's a problem that so many people overlook and then get damaged by. Again in all my TV'-WATCHING time--from the worst soap slop to the Mind Extension channel--again I've never heard anybody say what s.e.x is about, what it's for. And again that's not to say I think it's just for baby making. If the dark truth be told, I think I always felt s.e.x brought me closer toward G.o.d or Heaven at least than anything else I did with my husband or anybody else but you can't say that in the Christian church, not any I've known.

That was one more reason church has meant so little to me. I've seen better sights and felt stronger feelings elsewhere--well-intentioned feelings--than any church in my experience can offer. And more than a lion's share of those good things pa.s.sed into my mind and body through Palmer Slade as he worked above me, almost always in the night when

I couldn't see enough. I know that's the happiness I think of most in what amounts to my present lone state. If that seems wrong or hard to hear from a speckled crone, I'll take the penalty whenever it's applied.

So owning up to my worst and best, and trying to look as far ahead as these dim eyes can see, I think the memory of me will last out the span of my kin who are presently alive plus Mally and Simon. More than not, I truly believe they'll remember me somewhere along the scale from gladly to pleasantly. I've amounted to that much anyhow, a likable memory in a handful of minds, give or take a few natural reservations. Isn't that the best most people can claim? Mally and Simon of course could bring the deepest-dyed indictment against me and all I represent--I and all my kin and neighbors with our semi-pink skins. No way any legacy or modest trust fund can wipe the slates of any white person in any black eyes.

But the greatest wonder of that remarkable race is how slender a grudge it's held against us. Oh I understand that millions are rightly and violently mad and millions of others so stunned by history that they scarcely see plain suns.h.i.+ne above them. I've watched all the fiery riots and ma.s.sacres. There are half-starved pot-bellied black children up many a gulley in the county I live in. So why aren't all of us pink souls flat-dead in our beds with throats cut ear to ear?

And by us I don't just mean me and my kin, my Southern neighbors, but way the bigger part of white America. And in case I seem to have claimed some premature wisdom on the subject of racial relations, let me say that the little I've done to swim upstream against the current of blind white fear doesn't amount to so much as a single handful of dry dust thrown on those wild waters.

As it is, Simon Walton has keys to all my doors and my car to boot. And Mally Shearin cooks every morsel I eat, not to mention her merciful attentions to my body where one slight slip could kill me on the floor. Once they and their kind memories are dead--theirs and several of my blood kin's memories (say, thirty years from now)--for practical purposes

Roxanna Slade will be dead as King.

Tut and with no hill of gold to mark her corpse. Therefore gone entirely except for those few peculiar strangers who haunt country graveyards and read lost names on mossy tombstones.

Will that truly be it for all this effort? Have I and mine struggled on as we have just for an endless blind unbroken rest in the common dirt? All through these pages I see I've mentioned G.o.d and Fate a lot, both h.e.l.l and Heaven. Am I headed either place? Are there any such places? I certainly claim no authority whatever. But I have what feels like two real pieces of evidence, however private to me and my eyes. First I'm aware that my lasting to be near a century old is no guarantee of wisdom or foresight. Many turtles live longer than that, and I just saw two nights ago that a healthy elephant in the jungles of India may well live to be 125. (elephants of course and maybe some turtles are far superior to human beings as are all whales and dolphins.) But the point is that I'm as old as humans get to be with rare exceptions. And the main hint that I've picked up on the subject of immortality has come with my age in the past ten years. I've watched a few dozen people through their long lives and I see that, unless they go crazy or are addicts, they just stay who they were from the day they were born. I'm speaking of friends live and dead like Leela and Simon, Mally and Palmer, even poor Ferny Dane who's been gone so long I can barely see his face. I don't mean that people learn nothing from life, but the hearts and souls they bring here with them as they leave what Miss Olivia called ”their mother's fork” are extremely persistent. With a naturally good soul, that's excellent news, not so with the bad.