Libra

After some hours the horror became mechanical. They kept racking film, ru

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 co

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.

Your honor, I ca

I am going through a death and it is hard.

I intend to research this case and present my findings. But I ca

They will search out the environmental factors, that we moved from home to home. Judge, I have lived in many places but never filthy dirty, never not neat, never without the personal loving touch, the decorator item. We have moved to be a family. This is the theme of my research.

I arn smiling, judge, as the accused mother who must read the falsehoods they are writing about my boy. Lee was a happy baby. Lee had a dog. This is the boy who spent only one month in attendance at Arlington Heights High School before he entered the Marines when we were living on Collinwood Avenue and there are three pictures of this boy in the school yearbook. Now, why do you pick out this one boy who is in school so briefly, of all the boys and girls there, and make him the subject of three photographs? People say, "Mrs. Oswald, I don't get the point." You don't get the point? The point is how it goes on and on and on and on. That's the point. The point is how far back have they been using him? He used to climb the tops of roofs with binoculars, looking at the stars, and they sent him to Russia on a mission. Lee Harvey Oswald is more than meets the eye. Already there are documents stolen from rne. There are newspaper clippings stolen from my home by one of the branches of secret police. I am all over the world and they are rifling my files.