Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (104 page)

I reread the thing, liking how Mrs. Williams went just by the Mrs., keeping her mystery gypsy first name to herself. She sure knew her local market.

SO MONDAY
, during school hours, I left my lap and crib babies with Castalia. Then it was me in my good hat and shoes, with a dollar’s change and my excellent rings stashed in my bag. One bell was marked just “Mrs. Williams, Specialty: Futur.”

Here in Falls you can’t throw a rock without hitting some Williams or other (Shirl was one). When the uncombed brown-eyed child—still barefoot—peeked downstairs, I asked to see her mother. “Her Seester!” cried a woman’s husky voice from inside.

The second-story apartment door swung open on a wide sour soothsayer breast-feeding the most beautiful child. Room’s wallpaper showed every early layer like a cut tree shows all its hidden holy rings at once. This room had four cots, a spindly card table, one radiator, and, atop it, a clicking tin pie pan full of water. On one low ledge, a hot plate glowed. Its pot sent off spicy steam that smelled of curry, paprika, something. The girl went back to cooking, she unscrewed the lid from a medicine jar, dumped orange pellets into some mess of foreign stew.

“Howdy,” I told the grumpy older woman. I’d hid my wedding and engagement rings—not wanting to sway her or give a free ride. Of course, certain rusty grooves showed on finger number three. Mrs. Williams said she already knew what I wanted, but why didn’t I ask anyhow? Her accent was a puzzle. I
think
that’s what she said. “Okeydokey,” I explained a bit more than I’d planned to (like usual!). Said as how when the Opera Company of Raleigh did their show here last May? there’d been this fortune-teller in it with some elixir of love and that’d given me the idea of getting mine told someday. “My, you know, future, destiny, what have you?”

“Unh,” goes she, nodding a lot. “Chess I subspeck.”

Then she motions I must sit in the chair at her card table. Tabletop’s loaded with her children’s blocks. The baby is smacking to beat all. Since I’d got Cassie to babysit, I must say I felt someway disappointed at finding kids packed in here.
That
destiny, I knew.

About sixty alphabet blocks were stacked between the soothsayer and yours truly. Hoping and be helpful, I commenced to clear them while she fished out her cards, tea leaves, crystal ball. Well, you know, that woman slapped my hand! I quit tidying. (If I’m left in a bus station long enough, I’ll try and clean it up. Just nerves, I think.)

Setting opposite me, she said nothing. Her ears’d onct been pierced but the only decoration left them was two long holes. These seemed to show that Mrs. W. had used, not gems, but bricks. She flared a testing look my way. I quit gaping at her lobes. I knew to ease two quarters from my black change purse. I laid coins on the table. (Glimpsing rings in the bag gave me comfort—my secret life!)

Uneven towers of red wood bricks were heaped between me and the huge sullen woman. I couldn’t quit studying her suckling child, someway envying his pleasure. Dark lashes rustled with the joy of feeding. One reason I knew his sex, he was buck naked, a stranger to the hygiene of circumcision. Mrs. W.’s nipple, wider than the boy’s mouth, was exactly as black as it was red.

She peeked over the small city of blocks, spied my coins, then lifted one wrist of her feeding baby. She waved his slack hand, swatted it toward blocks’ three steepest points. Some clattered off the table. Most stayed. Then Mrs. Williams placed her son’s arm back on his chest and bent across him, studying my fallen letters. Half her child was eclipsed under the free-swinging breast. Hid, he whined. I tried studying my blocks, my seeming destiny. Red letters were carved on two sides. Silhouettes of familiar animals decorated the others.

She pointed to one marked P. (I’d got me a porcupine—good sign?) Mrs. W. stared me dead in the eyes. Her pupils were too black to read.

“You,” she said, “know Pain.”

“So far so good.” Then I half covered my mouth—hadn’t planned to give that much away. I wanted Mrs. to guess who I’d been so far. I hoped she might predict what and who I’d get to be next. I figured, for the fifty cents, it’d be a buy. Errands I understood. Fate, not.

Her fingernail scratched a U block next.

“I see,” Mrs. Williams said, “local travel.”

“Local?”
This miffed me. My husband had once told me that the word “gyp” is based on “gypsy.” “I got me a question, Mrs. Williams, ma’am.—Can I
call
you Mrs. Williams? Little joke there. But how can it be ‘local’
and
‘travel’?”

Preparing a answer, she cleared her throat. Her son (or brother) sucked on.

I heard the barefoot girl, interested, face our way, tapping one bare sole on dingy linoleum. (It’d needed straight bleach and ammonia by now.) I heard the child licking steady as a cat along the wooden spoon. And when I next looked across my alphabet of fate at Mrs. Williams, I found that all of her appeared suddenly blue—like hid behind some midair shower curtain. I figured the spirit world had already spread cataracts across my sight. Jumpy, I leaned forward when I saw the Mrs.’ nostrils flex, I noticed her son retching like resisting milk’s bitter new taste, I heard the woman tell me, “A far-off child … in dip dip trouble,” she screamed this as she spun toward the hot plate, crying, “Sees,” “Cease,” or “Sis.” The pan and wallpaper
were all on fire. Flames showed blue and orange, smoke filmed my view still more. The girl turned her face toward the wall and just stood gazing like at some spectacle she’d paid to watch. Mrs. Williams grabbed a apron off a chair and—lugging her baby—rushed beating at the flames. I swept past her, snatched a hot pie pan off the radiator, and pitched water on the hot plate. It shorted out at onct, with a sinusy snarl. Then one nasty chemical stink sure rose. Wallpaper, stained dark, smoldered now.

“A far-off child in dip trouble?” Maybe she’d got her wires crossed, picking up her own bad news instead. I slipped back to my place, took up my purse, kept stalling, not sure what was polite. I did feel entitled to getting my money back. Local travel and a distant kid in trouble? Come on. I needed these coins for Louisa’s college fund. Mrs. seemed mad I’d spoiled her hot plate. She stomped nearer, bent over colored blocks, pushed the fifty cents my way. I picked up one quarter only, left the other. Then I set the first one down again, superstitious. I backed, half smiling, into the hallway. A black janitor, busy sniffing, bolted past me, hollering at her, “Fire
again!”

I got down that flight quick.

Once home, I wondered if I’d been seen down near the peanut mill and if so why did I mind. I sat, rings still hid, in my good clothes at my own solid kitchen table. What had she predicted? After ten minutes, I recalled my babies waiting at Cassie’s and walked down there, but very slow. “Pain.” “Local travel.” “Child in trouble.” Whatever happened to tall dark handsome strangers? I deserved a refund.

And yet, that morning helped me decide: I would make sure my kids had decent winter clothes. I’d ask Castalia if she’d come and housesit till the Cap hired somebody permanent or remarried, whichever came first. It would not be actually abandoning my babies. More like saving some of my own self. For them. For later.

These decisions shpcked me and yet didn’t. Was it him I was escaping or them or Falls or his diehard war or all of it? How long had I known I’d have to someday clear out?

Seemed I had to hurry.

I was like a bar of gift-shop soap. What of me would be left, after everyone was done with me? Their best compliment? It’s all gone!

Local pain would now travel far. I’d leave before a child got into trouble.

Mrs. Williams became a bargain. She let Lucy see, destiny was cinched, fate was elsewhere.

IF YOU
cannot trust the trusties, watch out. It was 19 and 10, a pretty good year, and the local donuts (Castalia’s staple) were ideal, thanks to Gurney Harbison, unlucky sod. His ill luck told me, “Pack, quick.” Now, looking back, I see, was Gurney caught it first, all of this.

He’d been a member of the town council that commissioned the Gateway To The Peanut Basket arch, Gurn also served as superintendent of Sunday School at First Baptist, plus he was a fanatic about his yard. Nice quiet redheaded modest fellow till things changed and sudden. Harbison had been regular and sentimental as we
were
then: a sucker for kittens, too openhanded with his six sons. To the Lutheran Orphanage, he donated much-craved week-old jelly donuts (their filling beloved for being so cherry-red ruby-red). Foundlings remembered Gurney in hundreds of nightly prayers, powdered sugar dainty upon moving baby lips. Gurney Harbison turned fifty. Some blamed that. Others guessed his slaving over deep-fat-frying all those years had battered Gurney’s gray matter. For whatever reason: He woke one Monday feeling he must have three bake shops in three
other
towns. He’d been a local grinnish sort of guy, ready with a joke, lazy with news. Now he bought a fast horse and in all three distant bergs hired rough overseers to push Harbison’s addicting jelly donuts. Every fry-shop worked, and soon Harbison had scads more money but piles more woes. He resigned his council seat and—after he missed Sunday School four times running—was asked to let others take over. He cussed the Preacher who’d remarked how careworn and gray our once-pleasant Gurney looked. Dark countable rings were gathering like franchises under either mother-office eye. School plays featuring young Harbison boys as pilgrims, bunnies, and The Green Leafy Vegetable Food Group were now attended only by the Mrs. (One son, starved for male attention, wandered into the scary anvil clutches of Bertram, the genius smithie, slow to rouse but soon breathing crackles and sparks like his bellows.) Gurney, altered, soon took flowers to Lolly, asked the still-around-here favorite to be his mistress. Loll both refused and announced she planned telling pretty much everybody, which she sure did.

Our beloved baker soon jumped at loud noises. I saw him check his pocketwatch a lot. Donut donations to orphanages stopped. Sugar-deprived orphans now prayed for Gurney’s doom. He accused lifelong menfriends of being jealous over his new bracket, said their small-change problems didn’t interest him now. All we could find to say of his sudden hurryings, his polluted moods: “Maybe Gurney had a real bad temper all along?” “Gurney’ll be his old self in no time, watch.” “Gurney needs more love, but Gurney
had
so much, he gave it up.” The more he succeeded in sating the discriminating tastebuds of three counties, the less he enjoyed our free and easy present. He never hung around the Courthouse Square with pals, sunning, watching hicks make much of the water bubbler. He quit listening. No fun lately, The Jelly Donut King.

Then, a final strangeness as, one October afternoon, sipping milk to coat his successfully expanding chain of peptic ulcers, Mr. Gurney Harbison patrolled the curb before his home. Wearing baker’s whites, he pressed a pale shoe against walnuts scattered on Harbison-owned sidewalk. For years the neighbor’s tree had dropped such nuts across Gurney’s curbing. If you’ve ever cracked black walnuts, child, you know they leave permanent tobacco-colored
stains. Gurney’d never mentioned just how much such splotches bothered him. The plump neighbor stood yonder raking his lawn. Gurney called the fellow closer, pointed to the pavement’s yellowing, whispered, hoarse, “Fifteen years of filth from you. I know your plan, and there are limits. You people keep fouling everything I own. This is where your kind gets off and my kind takes charge, you fucking pig.” How mad
was
Gurney? From under his starched whites, he whipped forth a brand-new forty-five, the price sticker still gummed, pink, onto its muzzle. He instructed his neighbor to clean up these nut stains, and he meant
now
.

“What
with
, Gurn?” the gent sensibly asked, smiling, hoping this was April First but knowing this was Autumn. Seeing the business-end of a pistol’s solemn snout (has there ever been a
witty
gun?), the neighbor chose to fall upon his knees and—with the pistol still watching very close—decided to prove additional good faith by clawing at nuts’ markings using his very fingernails.

“Lick it up.” Gurney’s voice was now cut off from everything but the voice itself, his sadness had even lost the community feel of others’ sadnesses bordering his. “Said to
lick
your mess up, dog, lap it, you.”

The neighbor bent, either weeping or chuckling, he pressed his tongue right onto gritty pavement and—for his trouble—caught a slug just at the base of his skull. He then stained the offending stains with his own mortal losings as Gurney walked directly to the bank, withdrew a lifetime’s savings and, grabbing two sweetrolls from his downtown shop (raisin I am told), jumped his fast horse and rode out the east end of town while, at the west, a crowd gathered near one neighbor, dead of what? Killed for what good reason? And nobody understood. 19 and 10.

This, see, was new.

GURNEY HARBISON
never got recaptured. I think our law enforcers were afraid to. They could determine no motive and that scared them most. The dead man had not owed Gurney one plug nickel, the gent had never touched Mrs. Harbison or even the prettiest son. What if Gurney had killed the guy only for a sidewalk’s stains? We remembered how our baker had overnight grown somber and ambitious, how lovelessness had claimed him like of some unknown virus or ague. How listening stopped. Our Falls
Herald Traveler
wrote weeks of editorials guessing what could’ve gone wrong. Often mentioned: Mr. Stevenson’s popular
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, news since it appeared in 18 and 86. Only now do I understand: that book is about a man caught between the old age and the new, a gent turned brutish by times way worse than him.

Now, of course, daily newspapers are full of such killings. People walk into grammar schools and shoot kids they’ve never even seen before: because last week’s paper described somebody walking into another school and shooting other unknown kids and because something in that appealed to them. Gurney’s change of heart, child, has become a way of life. That mammoth
rage at little things, it’s old-hat standard equipment now. Even those of us who
say
we do not understand it understand it a little.