Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (105 page)

So, from this bed parked at the creaky end of the century, I see now: Gurney Harbison, the discriminating tastebud, he was just our first one locally to come down with it.

Nice family man, Bible believer, excellent baker, he, among us, caught the Twentieth Century first.

BUT STILL
mostly all innocent of that: the Fad of the Sleepover struck sudden, struck giddy. All Falls children felt this epidemic need to wake elsewhere. (I knew the feeling.) Kids were test-driving far-flung wallpapers, trying other mommas’ breakfasting techniques. Girls Lou’s age longed to be harassed by girlfriends’ older brothers, boys named Lex and Ray, boys whose rooms stunk of used sock, hair oil, and secret sun-colored stains stiffening the mattress. Ned bragged that him and his pal Billy Preston had Peeping Tommed a third pal’s older sister who owned a vanity dresser with a heart-shaped mirror and its own lace dress full-length as Cassie’s crispy mink and that the sister talked to her mirror while pressing her own eyelashes with what looked like some ice tongs for the human eye.

Got so I never knew whose children would traipse downstairs come morning, or where my missing were. On the wall under my kitchen Seth Thomas, I seriously tended the growth chart of our kids’ shooting-up. The Sleepover Fad confused such stats—stray initials entered, meaningless heights. Everybody’s got to get into the act. Finally our superintendent of schools sent notes home: “Parents: Re: The Rash of recent Pajama Parties. Please restrict to weekends since school-day sleeplessness results. Books claim that children like routine and so does local higher education. Bands of children tend to sneak out bedroom windows and meet up with other bands. The Methodist church was just found occupied by ten sleepers (several straight-A ones, in fact) at ten on a school day and there is no telling what happened right there in God’s House. Parents are to use discretion and for once, please, a little common sense.”

I well remembered fibbing to my own folks and I knew when my own brood did me: “Her mother says it’s okay with
her
if it’s okay with
you
, oh please, Momma?” We had Ned’s Billy with us the night Captain set to work making Duck Lore seem deeply educational for one and all. Billy acted impressed. “Fine boy, that young Preston,” Captain said—he always sounded like some army recruiter, judging twelve-year-olds.

At dinner, Cap asked would Ned please run fetch a duck decoy from the garage. The man had been pure charm the whole night and I knew something was in store. He could work it like a faucet. Once Ned got back, all eyes, Captain held a wooden drake, quacked it along over interested
head. He said, “I admit, this does look reasonably fake. But …” He turned the thing so we now stared straight down onto its back and upper head. “Say you’re eighty feet up, and this has all
your
colors on it, and you’re fatigued, you’re looking for your own to rest with, well, who does this appear to be? Why, the very image of your favorite first cousin, perhaps the love of your life.”

Our children smiled, glancing at one another, both cautious and amazed that their father was acting his old best self again. He said he’d show us where each sort of decoy should go so each breed feels easiest on a given inlet.

The vinegar cruet became Canada geese, who always land close to shore. Our pepper shaker proved how pintails settle farther at the pond’s quiet end and forever in pairs. “Pintails and geese mate for life,” Cap gave me a smirk I didn’t understand. “You children might think animals are too crude to find the love of their lives and stick right with her, would you not? You’d consider that only higher forms such as your lovely mother there and myself would have undertaken that. But Nature is a wonderland of virtues.” I stymied a groan.

“Ducks are smart and pigs are smart but pigs can’t fly,” Baby intervened.

“Correct,” goes Poppa, not impressed. He shifted dessert plates, proving that certain ducks always face into wind, so your decoys must do that, or else live ones’ll think, “Fake,” they’ll fly right on. Teals and widgeons and black ducks tend to keep to theirselves—you can’t mingle wooden those with others.

“But here’s what we call the pièce de résistance.”

“Tabasco?” Ned asked.

“This is not Tabasco, son. Get your eyes checked. This is our life-sized painted-plaster great blue heron. My friend the Lieutenant Governor keeps one in the trunk of his car full-time. You know how nervous herons are? Ducks know so too. And this becomes our very trump card, fellow hunters. Ducks in the air spy a jittery heron down here, acting calm. It acts upon them like the all-clear bugle. The false heron stands a yard tall and is placed off to one side all by itself, this is what we call a confidence decoy.—Can you say that?”

They did. They went for it. It scared me. My own brood. They sat gaping where I did—at the smooth oval of table space he’d cleared so we might imagine landing, imagine trusting it after a long night on the wing. Our eyes did now. Land. You saw how attractive it’d seem if you hadn’t eaten since the Chesapeake Bay or earlier. Sad, that your need for food, shut-eye, and friendly company was what’d get you hurt.

Ain’t it always the way?

“Nothing to it,” their poppa showed us his palms. “Just total and complete expertise, years of patience and simple know-how.—So when you see Daddy here come home with a earful of birds, next time you’ll better understand
what skill is exercised in bagging them.” My husband leaned back, pleased, thumbs in his vest pockets.

“Can I say something now, Poppa?”

“Proceed, child. Might we venture at its having to do with ducks’ intelligence?”

The twin nodded, disappointed. “It was just that ‘ducks
are
smart.’” “True enough. Not as smart as you or me, but to give you an example: Even after you
shoot
the duck, there’s no written guarantee you’ll get it home.” Cap claimed that, if a duck is winged but not yet mortally, the dazed creature will do anything to keep from being taken. Anything. That’s one reason a truckload of dogs must follow your limousines to Duck (N.C.). You better hop into your boat quick, get out to the downed bird. Even then, if it sees you coming, a duck that’s hurt but far from killed—it will plunge underwater, see? It’ll clamp its bill to any stick or reed and will hold on down there with all its might.

“Till it dies, Poppa? They drown … by choice?” Lou asked. “Taking their own lives?”

Sad-acting, respectful of the breed, Captain nodded. “It’s quite something, isn’t it? But a fact of nature. You have to hand it to them. Marriage and suicide. Both they understand. Both they practice. Ducks have willpower. That’s why hunting them constitutes such fine sport.”

“It wouldn’t be fun if ducks just
let
you?” Lou asked.

“No, that would not, my girl, be sport, it’d be …”

“Murder,” I entered the conversation.

“Yes, perhaps, as your mother puts it with her typical succinctness. ‘Murder’ … no fun. You need a competitive intelligence to make it fun. Look at everything we’ve done here just to draw them down to us in the first place,” and he gestured around at our table rearranged. My bread pudding in its pretty yellow bowl was cold as death.

Cap went on talking—a great talent at it, center of any party he chose to adopt—a great confidence giver, often set off at the edge at first. Our babies and their guests sat asking smart questions. I cleared away dessert, uneaten. When did the kids last forget to jump on my handmade sweets? I moved around the edge of our crowd at the lighted table. I seen Ned, quiet, smiling, feeling honored, soaking up this lore of how to trick beasts we only respect because: they’re smart enough so we can try to gyp, to lure on down, to blast them.

I stopped at my sink, I shifted pudding from one bowl to another the same size—absentminded. See, I was picturing, with my own children’s low murmur and comic quacks behind me, I was seeing the whole thing but from the duck’s viewpoint. For her to spy the perfect marshy spot, to oar the air on down toward it, a spot turned rosy by dawn which means, light itself a confidence decoy: “Here, finally.”

You’re scanning all the signs and are, say, nine feet from the water when
a outcropping of weeds pops up the shapes of spindle sticks that empty fire and smoke and cold, you’re on your back, feet up in freezing water, your left wing shuddering. You flip around as best you can and see a boat, occupied, splash towards you, a dog, huge figures seeking you here in the wet, and now, by choice, by will, just as all that nears you—local travel, down you go with such determination. It takes each scrap of your last strength to plunge as fast as you can from giveaway light. You wriggle straight down till your beak hits a bent stem, furry with silt, and as you bite on it very very hard, your air all leaving you in bubbles sent toward the dark of a boat passing right above. And you, clamped here, eyes on bottom mud, now drown, but do so dignified, because you’re still your own. Because you chose this. I leaned against the cold metal sink and looked at my own outline in the night-blacked window before me.

“Hey, where’d that fine dessert fly off to?” my husband calls in four more minutes.

“I threw it out, I think.”

“But isn’t that it there, just in a new container? You’re getting dottier, old girl. Louisa, go fetch us our dessert. Might be a little cool by now, but your mother’s bread pudding’s worth eating at any temperature, am I right?”

Later, clearing the dessert bowls, I saw how kids had someway respected the table’s free space. They left every eating utensil in its position as a confidence decoy. They were afraid to touch these changed things, things they handled every day. I went to put things back right. I was briefly spooked to touch my own trusty salt and pepper shakers.

But I did.

MY WEEKLY
show still gave me a booster shot I craved. To get letters on church stationery from as far off as Wilson with my name spelled right and
typed
. Well … all this finally helped me leave but—by then—it was too late.

I was setting up the Sunday puppet stage on Saturday, readying my run-through for my Daniel in the Lions’ Den—a instant classic, I felt it in my bones. In comes our thin-lipped preacher. Baby was working with me, offering vocal tips. Preacher leads in the same committee that’d begged me to come be useful to Our Lord, Preacher had a funeral air. He told me my puppet lessons had been appreciated but, unfortunately, were
“too
good.” Baby come up and stood beside me. It was her first unpleasant experience with Theatrical Management but, thanks to her later well-known stage career, I am glad to say it was not her last.

I told Preacher I couldn’t think of a crime I would prefer to that of making the Book too vivid for young thirsty Baptist minds. I said that my swan-song sho … visual aid might well change his opinion. “That seems unlikely,” he said, looking at my tinsel stage and all them little rope-maned lions I’d worked on till 3 a.m. “There won’t be ‘a show’ tomorrow.”

Baby wedged between me and the preacher. Looked like she was screening me from him. The child gave him a martyred Lil Gish eye-roll that could
make Saint Paul like girls, that could melt a ceiling fan and, holding onto my legs, Baby bleated, “She … Teaches … Us … God.”

I saw even the preacher bend a second. He recovered, smiled as much as a person minus lips
can
. “You’re young,” he said.

“And you …” Baby pointed at each face in turn and spat out with a mad vamp’s power, “jealous. Jealous. Jeal-ous!”

“Come, dear,” goes I, grand as Sarah Heartburn. “Pastor, Have your people bring my supplies to my headquarters, please? You’ll find the street address written on the Figments’ Dressing Room Door. Oh, and this is my last day ever in
your
so-called House of God, Weldon.” (His name was “Weldon” Otis. And I’ll risk saying: I hope he’s frying in Hell this very second. I just do.)

My child and me left there in perfect step and with our noses held up. We were plainly Bianca McCloud’s adoring female kin and—in Baby’s case—also that star, Lady More Marsden. Only when we were well off consecrated ground (so called) and far from those crows in black did I turn to Baby. I said, “Times, I’ve wondered about your character, child, which can—we both know—be right self-interested. But you must understand you got just unbelievable acting talent. It was good, what you did. Made me feel wonderful and I do thank you for that.”

But this close to her face, usually so controlled, I saw I had completely misread her. She stood here crying, not caring how she looked. She was stunned at them turning me out, furious over it. A child, she hadn’t seen it coming like I had with that first round of wonderful un-Baptist applause. She hugged me there and said, “Momma? I will miss you.”

I knew she meant Me, the puppeteer celebrity. But, too, I heard her mean more. I heard her life beyond me starting. I heard her guess my restlessness. I heard her own. We were sure related.

But, see, what I’d got out of the puppet thing was: Ned’s being so good about building the stage and choosing me that perfect music every week (a early form of disc jockey, now I think of it). I’d got Lou’s “Was good.” And now this strange tribute (and great performance) from Baby.

I’d had my golden public moment but, like always, I gauged it most by how my loved ones saw me there, where I was happiest, making things up around the house.

I LEFT
six weeks later to the day. But by then, see, it was already too late.

I DATE
the changes from our Ned’s twelfth birthday and that magazine article. A year after Cap’s picture appeared there, here come
Liberty
into our lives, switching everything. They wanted the vet’s formal picture, in uniform of course. Our nine kids should line up like a army in our back
yard. Each child (“Over my dead body”) should shoulder-arms one rare gun from Poppa’s collection. (I’d spent all afternoon wrestling my brood into Sunday clothes, then this magazine man says he wants them in “play togs,” he said—a bachelor for sure. Later, I saw that the Yankee he
wanted
them to look like hicks. The worst was: They
did
, looked just like the dolts the fellow’d hoped for.
We
did. No fair.)