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By Root 1388 0

used? This is a question I will research. Listen to me. I have to tell a story. I have to work into this, living in the French part of town. He knew Robert’s manual by heart. He liked histories and maps. The recruiting officer said, “Mrs. Oswald, there is less delinquency in Japan and those places than we have here.” He sold a bill. He was willing to sneak Lee in at age sixteen, before the legal limit. They were preparing him. They were using him already. Three photos in the yearbook and he was only there a month. People say, “Mrs. Oswald, what is the point?” The point is how far back did it go? When did they start watching him? Did he belong to them for life? The point is what about the boy in the casket? Lee in a suit and nice tie looking completely different from the scarecrow son in the newspapers and TV, a sturdy boy, broad-faced, like a Russian. Is the person they buried the same as the person they killed? Did they really kill him? Is the person who came back from Russia the same as the person who went? I have a right to ask these questions. How tall is Lee? What are his scars? I will bring these questions out in books and appearances.

I wrote to Mr. Khrushchev July 19, 1960, when my boy was lost in Russia. I received no reply. I went to Washington January 21, 1961, to petition President Kennedy to find my boy and bring him home. So—wait now, this is good—they write I am neglectful. I left my boys to shift for themselves. I drove all the way to New York in that old junky Dodge. I pulled up stakes in our Western slang too many times. When the truth is that the mother is neglected. If you research the life of Jesus, you see that Mary mother of Jesus disappears from the record once he is crucified and risen. Where is the mother who raised the boy? When the boy is dead, do they build a box around the mother? I played piano by ear. I was a popular child. I can’t give facts point-blank. It takes stories to fill out a life. Only think of Mr. Ekdahl, who cheated me out of a decent divorce and abandoned me to a life of scaring up dimes. Mr. Ekdahl is a story. Marina is a story where the details are lax. I strictly believe in my suspicions. Her statements, her way of life, she smokes, she does not nurse her baby. Marina has a manager. She has offers coming in and where is the mother? I am pictured in Life magazine in my uniform with hose rolled down. I have suffered like my son. We have the same construction.

It was near dusk now, stormlight forming at the edges of low-sailing clouds, dark and mobbed, and there was urgency, a wildness in the sky, everything electric. The minister finished reciting a psalm and the funeral director prepared to lower the coffin. Policemen adjusted their gun belts shyly. The family stood and watched. Robert and Marina had similar looks, soft, lost, pleading. Make it different, make it not happen, give him another chance, another life. Marguerite, holding little Rachel across her folded arms, showed a desolation so total it could be taken as the only thing left, all she had and was, all she’d given returned to her in a suit in a box, all fall and smash, a soul struck by ruin. She passed the baby to the minister and put her hands to her face, not touching but enclosing only, keeping the moment safe from every woe outside her own.

They lowered her youngest son to the red clay of Texas, burying him for security reasons under another name, the last alias of Lee Harvey Oswald. It was William Bobo.

Now Marina came forward and picked up a handful of dirt. She made the sign of the cross, then extended her arm over the grave, letting the dirt fall. Marguerite and Robert had never seen anything like this. The beauty of the gesture was compelling. It was strange and eloquent and somehow correct. They’d agreed on nothing since Robert was a boy but now they leaned together to the mound of earth and took some dirt and blessed themselves, then held their fists upright over the grave and let the dirt spill out, running through their hands like sand hurrying in an hourglass, lightly falling on the pinewood box.