Mrs. Lacey’s cognitive decline and periods of confusion

Mrs. Lacey’s cognitive decline and periods of confusion shape how she remembers her life and interprets the world around Fort Marcy, but they do not erase her attachments or her agency. Through Lizzy Enders’s observations, the novel shows an elderly woman whose memory and strength are failing while grief, wit, hospitality, and a specific religious fear remain vivid. Her condition is presented as an uncertain lived experience, not a named diagnosis: Lizzy sometimes recognizes a confused moment, but the landscape Mrs. Lacey describes is also one the story treats as rich in histories and enchantment.

Memory, grief, and the cemetery

Mrs. Lacey’s daily visits to her son Robert’s grave give her routines a firm emotional center. She leaves flowers and a lantern there, and sometimes carries food from the kitchen. On one visit she falls asleep beside the gravestone and does not wake until morning, an unusual lapse that she recounts lightly, saying that Robert did not mind. Lizzy, by contrast, worries about her lying on the cold ground and wants to get her back to the convent. The difference in their responses captures both Mrs. Lacey’s ease in the cemetery and her increasing vulnerability there.

Her recollections place that attachment within a long history of loss. She cannot say how long she has been at the convent, only that it feels like forever; she arrived with her husband when the fort was established. Her first husband died during the war. Robert ran away to become a drummer boy despite her not wanting him to fight, and he died at sixteen; his body was sent to her. She remembers him as her only child. After her second husband died, she became ill. These memories are not merely fragments of a failing mind: they explain why the cemetery is at once a place of mourning, daily companionship, and refuge.

Mrs. Lacey can describe her own altered state with striking candor. She says that people sometimes consider her not right in the head, but that she is happiest during those times. She jokes that old people can go out of their heads and get away with it, unlike the young. The humor neither denies her decline nor reduces her to it; it is a way she speaks about the condition while retaining authority over her own account. Her admission that she is tired, and her earlier concern that she may not be able to reach the cemetery, make the joke more poignant without turning it into a cure or a resolution.

Fort Marcy: confusion and enchantment

Mrs. Lacey’s accounts of Fort Marcy make the uncertainty surrounding her perceptions especially visible. She describes Santa Fe as both a land of fancy and a land of stark truth, where enchantment can sit beside danger. She says that Jesse James has come to hide in the fort and treats him as a familiar young man, close in age to the son she might have known had Robert lived. Lizzy, who comes from Missouri and feels possessive of Jesse James as a figure from home, questions whether Mrs. Lacey is in one of her confused moments. The exchange reveals a genuine difference in their perspectives: what Mrs. Lacey welcomes as familiarity, Lizzy receives with skepticism and a sense of regional ownership.

The fort’s population, as Mrs. Lacey describes it, includes very old gods, ghosts, and living people. She names Governor Perez, whom she says was beheaded by Pueblo Indians, and points to Delvina and Lozen as people hiding there. Lizzy again understands that Mrs. Lacey is having one of her moments. Yet the setting complicates any clean division between delusion and reality: the ruined fort is already a place of history, secrecy, and refuge. Mrs. Lacey’s imaginative account belongs to the novel’s broader enchantment of Santa Fe, even as Lizzy’s watchfulness makes clear that her perceptions can be unreliable.

A later episode sharpens the distinction between vivid belief and physical condition. After the excitement of the previous night, Mrs. Lacey’s eyes are red-rimmed and rheumy, and Lizzy thinks the night air has set her back. Mrs. Lacey believes Jesse James kept watch and proposes leaving him a note warning him that authorities may pursue Lozen. Lizzy wonders whether this is another fancy, but the proposed warning also expresses concern for others. Her confusion and her protective impulses coexist; the scene does not make kindness proof that her perceptions are accurate, or inaccuracy proof that the kindness is meaningless.

Declining strength and the care she receives

Mrs. Lacey’s decline is also measured in what her body can no longer reliably do. She tells Lizzy that she is failing, that her mind is going, and that she has many ailments and feels weaker each day. Sometimes she can scarcely summon the strength to visit the cemetery. Lizzy offers to come for her, a practical response to a change that threatens the routine most important to Mrs. Lacey. By the time Lizzy sees her after the cold night and excitement, concern has become more immediate: Mrs. Lacey appears sickly, and Lizzy recognizes that the outing has worsened her condition.

Care around her is made up of ordinary accommodations as well as concern. Sister Roberta keeps Mrs. Lacey’s medicine in a small basket and places beside it sweet coffee with milk and nutmeg. She explains her willingness to bend rules as justified when disobedience helps someone in need. The medicine and mug give the relationship a concrete, domestic form: Mrs. Lacey is not only an object of alarm but someone whose comfort and treatment require continuing attention. Lizzy, too, moves from wanting to escort her home after finding her asleep at the grave to offering to help with the journey when Mrs. Lacey says she is weakening.

The narrative does not specify a medical explanation for Mrs. Lacey’s memory loss or periods of confusion. Instead, it offers observable changes—forgotten time, an account of being ill, diminished strength, and episodes Lizzy identifies as moments of fancy—alongside Mrs. Lacey’s own comments. This leaves room for the character’s experience without making every unusual statement authoritative. Lizzy’s perspective matters, but it is also the perspective of a child who is learning how to interpret an unfamiliar place and the adults within it.

Religious fear and the limits of certainty

Mrs. Lacey’s clearest stated worry concerns what may happen if her mind fails altogether. She fears that the nuns will baptize her Catholic before she dies. She is Methodist, but has no paper to prove that she was baptized, and she knows that her confusion may leave her less able to defend her wishes. The fear is therefore not abstract: it links cognitive decline to religious identity, institutional authority, and the possibility that others will make a consequential decision for her when she cannot speak clearly.

Her proposed safeguard reflects the same mixture of vulnerability and local belief visible in her stories about the fort. She tells Lizzy that a bag of asafetida around the neck will void a baptism, claiming to know this from the highest sources in Santa Fe. Lizzy is incredulous and asks who told her; Mrs. Lacey refers her to Dolores la Penca. The episode shows her seeking a way to preserve her Methodist identity, even through a remedy whose authority Lizzy questions. It does not establish that the remedy works. Instead, it makes plain what Mrs. Lacey fears losing: not simply control of her mind, but control over the religious meaning assigned to her.

That fear becomes urgent when Lizzy later says that the nuns baptized Mrs. Lacey Catholic before she went into a coma. She asks José whether asafetida can void the baptism; he has never heard of such a practice. His response turns away from ritual technique toward a belief in a loving God who does not punish people for their religious uncertainty. The exchange offers Lizzy consolation, but it does not answer the practical question Mrs. Lacey had raised or restore her ability to choose. Her cognitive decline thus carries consequences beyond memory: it exposes the gap between her stated wishes and the decisions others can make when she is incapacitated.

Narrative significance

Mrs. Lacey’s periods of confusion resist a single, settled interpretation. Lizzy distinguishes some of her claims as fancies, while Mrs. Lacey’s own account of Santa Fe joins old gods, ghosts, living refugees, and personal memories in one landscape. The book neither confirms every perception nor makes confusion synonymous with emptiness. Robert’s grave, the lantern, the daily flowers, and the feared baptism anchor her in concrete attachments even when her sense of time and surroundings becomes uncertain.

The contrast between Mrs. Lacey’s humor about going out of her head and her fear of what others may do if her mind goes altogether is central to her portrayal. In one moment, she describes altered consciousness as a freedom of old age; in another, she anticipates that it could make her religious wishes impossible to protect. Her decline is therefore both an inward change and a change in her dependence on other people. Lizzy’s attention, Sister Roberta’s practical care, and José’s reassurance do not undo that change, but they show the forms of companionship and interpretation through which Mrs. Lacey remains present in the story.