He begins to merge with Oswald. He can't tell the difference between them. All he knows for sure is that there is a missing element here, a word that they have canceled completely. Jack Ruby has stopped being the man who killed the President's assassin. He is the man who killed the President.
This is why Jews are being stuffed in machines. It is all because of him. It is the power and momentum of mass feelings.
Oswald is inside him now. How can he fight the knowledge of what he is? The truth of the world is exhausting. He lowers his head and runs into the concrete wall.
And Nicholas Branch studies the psychiatric reports. He reads into the night. He sleeps in the armchair. There are times when he thinks he can't go on. He feels disheartened, almost immobilized by his sense of the dead. The dead are in the room. And photographs of the dead work a mournful power on his mind. An old man's mind. But he persists, he works on, he jots his notes. He knows he can't get out. The case will haunt him to the end. Of course they've known it all along. That's why they built this room for him, the room of growing old, the room of history and dreams.
Sunday night. Beryl Parmenter sat watching TV in her little house in Georgetown. They were showing reruns of the shooting.
Over and over. The screen is full of broad-shouldered men in hats, all around Oswald, who is bare-headed, his features whited out by glare except for his left eye, shining darkly. Jack Ruby comes into the frame, bulky and hunched. His hand is bright static around the gun. The picture jumps. The surprise and pain in Oswald's face remove him from the company around him. He is alone, already far away, the only one not wondering what has happened. A cold moment of stillness after the shot. Then everything flies apart.
She didn't want these people in her house.
The camera doesn't catch all of it. There seem to be missing frames, lost levels of information. Brief and simple as the shooting is, it is too much to take in, too mingled in jumped-up energies. Each new showing reveals a detail. This time she sees that Ruby carries dark-rimmed glasses folded in his breast pocket. Oswald dies unchanged.
Why do they keep running it, over and over? Will it make Oswald go away forever if they show it a thousand times? She knew exactly what Ruby was thinking. He wanted to erase that little man. He wanted him out of here. He didn't want to see him or hear him or think about him. Just like the rest of us, Jack. We want him out of here too. And now he's gone but it isn't helping at all.
Beryl had admired President Kennedy. She'd even felt a small personal involvement in his rise, a sort of landed interest, inasmuch as the Kennedys had lived for a time in a brick house on N Street, practically around the corner, when Jack was a senator. She wanted to feel a satisfaction in the death of Oswald, some measure of recompense. But this footage only deepened and prolonged the horror. It was horror on horror.
She didn't want these people here. But she felt morally bound to watch. They kept on showing it and she kept watching. She had the sound turned down because the voices of reporters made her cry.
She'd been crying all weekend, crying and watching. She couldn't shake the feeling she'd been found out. These men were in her house with their hats and guns. Pictures from the other world. They'd located her, forced her to look, and it was not at all like the news items she clipped and mailed to friends. She felt this violence spilling in, over and over, men in dark hats, in gray hats with dark bands, in tan Stetsons, in white caps with shiny visors and badges pinned to the crowns. The little hatless man said "Oh" or "No."
After some hours the horror became mechanical. They kept racking film, running shadows through the machine. It was a process that drained life from the men in the picture, sealed them in the frame. They began to seem timeless to her, identically dead.
Larry was in the cellar cataloguing wines.
She began to cry again. She wanted to crawl out of the room. But something held her there. It was probably Oswald. There was something in Oswald's face, a glance at the camera before he was shot, that put him here in the audience, among the rest of us, sleepless in our homes-a glance, a way of telling us that he knows who we are and how we feel, that he has brought our perceptions and interpretations into his sense of the crime. Something in the look, some sly intelligence, exceedingly brief but far-reaching, a connection all but bleached away by glare, tells us that he is outside the moment, watching with the rest of us. This is what kept Beryl in the room, this and the feeling that it was cowardly to hide.
He is commenting on the documentary footage even as it is being shot. Then he himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes another kind of knowledge. But he has made us part of his dying.
They replayed the sequence into early morning. Beryl stayed in the room and watched. The telephone rang for the twentieth time. She didn't move. The pain entered Oswald's face. She wasn't taking any calls this particular wintry weekend.
25 November
The road curved uphill through the burial ground, past jack oaks and Chinese elms, above grassy swales tracked with grave markers, and two dusty police cars moved slowly along, unaccompanied, an incongruous stately pace. At the top of the rise they stopped outside a pretty sandstone chapel to release the mourners to their organized grief. But it seemed at once that something was wrong. The family climbed out of the cars and there were Secret Service men and cemetery staff gathered in the archway, showing the grim pride that low officials take in a despised duty. The wind began to sing in the east, sweeping out of the reaches of industrial prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth, and Marguerite Oswald stood outside the chapel in a black dress and black-rimmed glasses, holding the new baby in her arms, the granddaughter whose birth they had kept from her, and her face wore a look of helpless pain. Because somebody canceled the service. Somebody ordered the body removed from the chapel. Because the chapel was empty. The body was not there.
They called many ministers, Lutheran men of God, but no one wanted to pray over Lee Harvey Oswald. This is the reason, your honor, they were in the utmost sheepish hurry to put my boy in the earth. Robert was crying bitterly, trying to get them to return Lee's body to the chapel for a brief service, an appearance in a holy place. So then I intervened and said, "Well if Lee is a lost sheep and that is why you don't want him in church, it escapes the purpose of a church. The good people do not need to go to church. Let's say he is called a murderer. It is the murderers who need a church. Isn't this what Jesus teaches?" They were in such a hurry to bury Lee Harvey Oswald they forgot to notify the men who carry the coffin to the graveside, so news reporters teamed up to move the body. I have many stories, your honor. I have stories I am sure you do not know. I am the mother in the case.
Hurrying clouds now. The wooden coffin rested on a bier above the open grave, with a massive concrete vault below, vandal-proof, a thousand years of peace. The family sat in dented metal folding chairs under a faded canopy. Robert Oswald was between the widow and the mother, each woman holding one of the little girls. Reporters were restricted to the far fringes. No friends or well-wishers allowed, not that any were clamoring to attend. Secret Service men and uniformed police stood around the canopy, many with hands folded in front of them, dipping their knees in turn, and there were armed guards stationed along the cemetery fence. The joke among reporters was that Fort Worth was taking better care of Oswald dead than Dallas did when he was alive. Robert was trying not to break down again. He was a man of earnest bearing, dark-browed, with neatly trimmed hair, a sales coordinator, a hard worker, looking older and more responsible than any twenty-nine-year-old from here to Texarkana, as if young Lee's truancy, the defection, the undesirable discharge, the lost jobs, all of it, had planted him in a stiff shirt for life.