Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (125 page)

“No.” I shook my head. “But he’s a old man I’m responsible for.”

Then it was nine children and not eight. And you know? it was better.

Poppa had been fronting me some cash to keep eight kids and one old bedridden gent in shoes and sandwiches. I had a brainstorm one morning, straightening Cap’s bedside tabletop. I took his pound of keys to the home of a black man who’d long worked at the livery stable. “And what’s this to?” I found myself asking. And was being told that Captain still paid rent on his dead mother’s boardinghouse rooms. No wonder we were broke. He’d
paid for Cassie’s home. He owned Winona’s abandoned digs and here he’d kept Lady More Marsden’s rooms for sentiment’s sake. For what possible reason? “‘Cause all she things still in there,” my husband’s ex-employee told me. I explained that this man would receive a commission on a maybe-profitable forthcoming sale and that I was good for it. I walked right to the boardinghouse, then, at the last minute, lost my nerve. The kids were just arriving home from Lower Normal. I explained our expedition. I told how a little girl had once gone to those grand rooms so many years ago to write a school report that got a Satisfaction Minus. Ned said that was not so good. I told him it was the most that anyone could hope for. The key fit and my children picked up on my jitters. They begged permission to wait in the two filthy rockers left on the porch. I would not take no for a answer and opened the door onto the smell of smoke. First it seemed so urgent and so fresh, I wondered if we’d arrived in time to douse a fire. And then I knew the stuffy closed-up rooms had held the smell of Sherman’s torches fifty years. Louisa bravely went over and jerked back velvet drapes and then we seen the armoires full of spiderweb chandeliers. There were punchbowls of Venice glass shaped big as real swans. I spied a set of the plain white Spode like the cup Lady’d clutched for her last addled years. I thought of her poor son in bed three blocks away—a family cursed. The kids felt nervous and got grimy quick. I did, too. I locked it up and found the name of the finest prissiest bachelor antique appraiser in all eastern North Carolina. I let him in and he acted stiff with me at first, but soon reserve give way and I could hear him knee-deep in some Biedermeier desk just whistling.

“Will you look at this,” he asked hisself, not asking, thrilled. On the sales money, we lived. I held back no furniture, no plantation memento.

I kept nothing.

O
N DAIRY CREAM
nowadays, they write: “Best if used before …” Well, faithful visitor, my last safe-fresh year was, oh, around 19 and 51. But here I am—subject to blackouts now and again, eyes most gone, but still cross and talking. Old filbert face. Jerome hates it when I run myself down. He scolds me like sticking up for a child what can’t protect itself. I just laugh.

I’d like to end with happiness. Memory stacks the deck that way, thank God. I’m lately recalling a summer before Cap’s stroke took the civilian porch off his memory’s total war museum. Before Cap blinded Ned. Some days here in bed, I’m grinning about the good stuff. Fronts of my eyes might’ve whited over like a Frigidaire’s double doors—but what’s locked behind stays crisp and cool, child. And till the end, I’ll fight to keep it safe, preserved. He was often out of town. So my final blue-plate leftover special is the perfect troubled summer of 1910.

My children would gobble any bright thing. Whatever shined, our babies ate it. They took light to be a type of snack. I warned them, “All that glitters is not food.” But gulp, then here they’d come running to me, crying. One June day in nineteen-aught-ten here’s Lou, holding the hand of our then third-to-youngest. “Tell her,” Louisa orders baby sister. “Tell Momma what you ate now, pig breath.”

I bow from the waist, I quiz Baby:
Has
she swallowed something? (A nod.) Please describe the missing item.

“It … siney,” Baby explains. “Siney” was her favorite word that summer.

Lou, bored, bossy by nature, rolls her eyes. “We
think
it means ‘shiny.’”

I give Louisa the glare. “Listen, you, we’re lucky our Baby here can talk. Just pipe down, Miss Mouth.”

“Darling?” now I’m on my knees before Baby. “Look at me. Look at Momma. Lead Momma to where Baby found whatever Baby put down Baby’s throat.”

Then it happens: my child, my five-year-old, our all-time prettiest girl, points to my third finger, to a callus, the brown married-life groove that shows what’s missing. I glance at the drainboard where I left it.

“You ate Momma’s diamond ring.”

Baby nods a whole lot, ninety fat curls jostle. She gets real big-eyed, she gulps as a test then points to one side of a neck banded with chubby folds. Next the fingertip slides lower, lower, clear down to her breastbone’s top. “It … tickle … Baby.” Hoarse, she keeps us posted.

“Does it hurt you, pumpkin?” I shake her by the shoulders. “Tell Momma how it feels,
tell
me.”

Baby smacks her lips, tasting. Baby looks off to one side, concentrating. Finally Baby reports, “It feel … siney.”

Seems like Baby swallowed my finger and the finger is crooking itself inside her, signaling, hoping to be noticed and called back. Finally, Baby sobs. I’d been expecting that. Her yellow curls, her jumper with its animal-cracker smocking, her pearly nose, the pinkness otherwise—poor beautiful Baby.

“Are you still
married?”
Louisa, ten then, is tugging at my apron. Lou can drive you absolutely crazy. Now she bolts off, a hefty interested child, to tell brothers and sisters: Baby has swallowed their parents’ being married. I half believe her. I’m that tired. I feel illegal and alone. Captain’s off traveling with his business. Like lots of young mothers left at home with kids—I speak to my children like they’re the grownups. I talk to adults like they’re my kids.—Too, I’m swallowing mouthfuls of iron pills for anemia. Eight children, no outside help.

Luckily, my particular eight interest me. Few dull moments hereabouts. I now promise my weepy one that everything’ll be fine. She’ll see. “Whatever goes in has got to come out. Understand, Baby?” The poor child pries open her mouth, stuffs many dimpled fingers down her throat. Quick, I stop her. “No, the other end, darling. We’ll wait. It takes a while. Let’s play like Baby is a river and, say, we dropped something into one part, then we can fish it out when it floats upstream (or is it downstream?)—anyhow, you see?—not to worry. We’ll check on everything you … on all your little … you can use a whole separate potty and you’ll bring it to Momma every time, okay? Now, ain’t this going to be fun? The pot will be your own special one, and nobody else can have the use of it. You catching the drift here, peachness?”

“Yeth,” says Baby in baby talk. “I a river.”

“Correct.” Still on my knees, I waddle toward the cabinets underneath
our kitchen sink. My burnt and bent pans always end up here last thing before they hit the garbage. Here’s a old white enamel saucepan, red-rimmed, chipped with deep black flecks like worrisome moles. It was amongst my wedding gifts, some centuries before. Used to be my favorite all-time pan, especially for boiling my morning water in. I know I’m sacrificing it forever.

I hope to get Baby excited about this, like a project, see? When she acts calmer, studying her own personal pot, wearing it as a hat, trying to squint into its hollow handle, I question her. In my lightest not-to-worry voice, “Tell Momma why you swallowed Momma’s engagement ring, honey dimple. What …?” (I almost say “attracted you to it,” but that sounds pretty dumb, so I wait.) “Just … why?” I grin. She must not feel judged.

Baby acts like some famous opera singer answering reporters on the deck of a ocean liner. “‘Cause … it … siney.”

“Siney, yes,” I say. “Shiny.”

Outside, my older children sing how Baby’s done gulped the bride and groom, how this couple’s kids will all stay orphans till the bridal team squirms free again. Then certain brats chant:

I yowl for kids to shush this very instant. Cherishing her new toy, holding it by the red handle before her face like a personal hand mirror, Baby hears their teasing. She dreads the neighbors’ knowing. Baby stands here dripping tears. Her face, heart-shaped, curdles.

“Say ‘shiny,’” I coo to get her mind off what lays ahead. “Say it.”

“Shiny,” she tries. “That mean ‘siney.’”

“Yeah,” I smile at her. “Go sit on the pot.”

SHE DID
. The poor thing couldn’t budge from it, for guilt feelings. I asked a favor of idle Ruth next door: Please run to Kress’s. I wanted to ease Baby’s mind. I ordered myself a ten-cent ring with a clear glass rock about as big as an acorn. Rhinestones are tacky, yeah—but the sunshine they trap inside theirselves ain’t no different than a diamond’s daylight.

For Baby, I modeled the flashy thing. Poor child already wore a pressed-looking face, like she was straining while just walking around. “See?” I acted Lady Bright. “No hurry. Momma has got lots of rings, Tulip. You only ate one. Things take care of theirselves. Just be natural and live like usual. It’ll happen.”

This Kress’s ring was way too small. It cut right bad. I wore it full-time anyhow. Maybe it’d help my Baby to relax. I showed it off, smiling.

“That’s not your
real
ring.” Louisa can be right whiny when she puts her mind to it. “You’re nobody’s wife now,” Lou points at me, using her left
braid’s tip. “Or maybe you’re just the wife of Baby’s stomach. I bet it’s fake. Yeah, that’s probably just a one-cent
toy
ring.”

“Will … You … Shut … Up?” I mouth across the kitchen, but our darling, hurt, dashes screeching down the hall. Then, timid, Baby scuffs back, grabs up Pottie. (She’s made a pet of it. In her loneliness, she’s named it Mr. Pottie.) Baby pouts off, shy and wronged. She turns back and, full of self-pity, a family disease, full of it even for
her
—she puffs, hugging the saucepan even nearer, “Baby’s onwy fwend.”

It about breaks my heart. It does.

SHE SWALLOWED
my ring at a bad time—but then it’s always a bad time, you know? Still, I was bushed just then. Cap stayed gone weeks at a sweep then, selling and buying livestock. Kept gallivanting off, jawing with other vets about the happy bloody olden times. I felt every inch the vet of the vet. He left me high and dry in the gory present. Doc Collier had explained: Since Archie’s birth, my body lacked so much iron, I could eat our entire eight-burner Wedgwood cookstove and still not break even.

Was one of them moments: I’d finally get the children all pajamaed, watered, tucked in, and storied out. Coming down the stairs at last, I’d settle on our landing’s window seat just for a second so’s I could rub my lower back, just so I could look out on a sidewalk clogged with family trikes, bikes, scooters.

In them years, at such a time of night, you never heard one sound you couldn’t name. The Wilguses’ collie and the Thorps’ corgi-mix stirred each other up, barking over nothing. The Orange Blossom Special, two minutes fast, outraced its whistle. (That’s how long ago this happened: some trains ran early!) Doc Collier’s buggy creaked on home: he’d visited a tenant farmer’s wife weeks overdue. Wind in the trees—you knew whose elms and which direction the breeze came from and what it meant for tomorrow’s weather. A nod later, still slumped in the window seat, I reopen eyeballs: on morning and, already, my children nearbout late for school. What kind of mother is that? Eight hours’ sleep was just a blink in the bucket of my swarming backlog. So—this here ring thing seemed the straw that broke the spine, meaning my own.

But—as will happen—Lord be praised—disasters can often interest you the most. They make you feel like a Sherlock, hired to solve your own sad case. They perk a person up and prove that World Drama is basically a homebody.

Tell me: How do you usually get your valuable rings out of
your
Baby’s sweet gullet?

I don’t plan to make you ill with the crudest details of my ring search. Let’s just say: Motherhood! Let’s say I borrowed many old newspapers from the neighbors. These unmarried people hoarded paper for just such family emergencies. But, not having no families, they lent their bounty to us instead. Seemed our house stirred up troubles enough to keep a radio soap
show in daily episodes forever. Times, it felt like I had more problems than Dick Tracy. I asked poor Ruth and other neighbors to please not tell the ring news to our well-meaning pharmacist, deal-maker, and jack-of-all-trades, Luke Lucas. Folks agreed but grilled me.

Why’d she swallowed
that?
They had every right to ask and, of course, each did. “Because,” I admitted, “it was siney … shiny. That’s all Baby’ll say. I just slipped it off whilst washing dishes. Always do, scared I might otherwise lose it down the drain.”

“It surely seems that’s precisely what’s occurred here,” one old bachelor smiled. (These non-parents can really Monday-morning-quarterback your life for you!)

“Yeah.” I fought sounding surly. “Yeah, sir, it’s a drain, okay. But the human body is the one drain that gives back. You wait. Just watch.” Then I remembered to thank him for his extra
Herald Travelers
.

“See you in the funny papers,” he hollered after it. It was something people said then but, that day, I took it personal.

I FED
my lover of shininess prunes. Many stewed prunes. I whispered it’d be Baby’s secret food. She asked me to eat some, too. “Baby feel so … only,” she confessed. (She meant “lonely.”) Baby acted scared these prunes was poison. So I gobbled the same number, matched her prune for prune—and paid for it afterwards. Seemed the least I could do.

I begged our other children not to tease her. And they tried. Kids fought not to giggle but it struck them as funny. Ofttimes, it did me, too. But I could not let on.—I worried I’d mess Baby up. I pictured Baby—years later—in the office of some counselor or social worker, certificates paving his walls, and Baby’s mouth near his face, telling him the many mistakes I’d made. I imagined him going, loud, “She did
what?”