Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (132 page)

Enlisted men were forced to sit outside far from the ladies. They’d scrubbed hard anyway. In sunset light, boys’ washed faces now showed pink, freckled, baked. Supplies were long-awaited—new boots especially scarce. Barefoot fellows borrowed at least one boot. Along the big-house steps, they set in ways to hide single naked feet. Boys meant to reassure the patriotic ladies.

Chaplain convened things, sparing folks his usual long-windedness. He just stood and quoted:
“Musick is an insearchable and excellent Art, which rejoiceth the Spirit and unloadeth Grief from the heart, and consisteth in time and number
. To our intense good fortune, Miss Unison Randolph shall now demonstrate.”

At her instrument’s first tart note, everybody breathed a single “Ahhh,” then, looking around, laughed at their own simple delight. Though the harpsichord did at times sound somewhat sharp, after all this recent hardship you felt so pleased to sit, newly bathed, out in the air of a warm May evening without one duty beyond listening. Given such weather, considering the talent of the girl inside, given that group “Ahh” just now and the smell of narcissuses blooming near the porch, how could a war last even ten days longer?

Folks sat through two rollicking if prickly Italian pieces. Then the ranking major asked after some Stephen Foster. “For my men,” he smiled, nodding toward the nearest open French door where eager boys in gray sat clumped. Chaplain was about to protest this too rapid descent into the merely Popular when there come such a crashing from the cellar. The young lady quickly pitched into her sprightliest of French jigs.

At the parlor’s arched door, Lieutenant Prothero soon leaned, grinning. He wore his hat. On one shoulder, he carried a wooden cask just lugged upstairs. His uniform trailed cobwebs. You could see he was drunk. Young mothers in the room tugged youngest children closer. First it seemed like Prothero had fetched up a libation for others. But chalked on the barrel’s side you could read “Maple S.” and a date. The Lieutenant hoisted this here container. As the crowd watched—as the young lady continued to splash safely behind a thousand skillful notes—he stepped towards her, smirking. Prothero seemed fixed only on Miss Unison, hardly noticing dozens of strangers crowding each downstairs room.

The Chaplain rose. But the keyboard player, glancing his way, hinted that, no, she could most probably manage whatever the young man planned.

Prothero moved towards her, passing many officers and guests. He stopped directly before the player, his back blocking others’ view of her. Music came forth with greater and greater nervous spirit. Swells of it rose. Over the ivory and ash-wood keys, Unison’s fingers made two blurs like wings. For one second, it seemed a contest was shaping up betwixt the
power of music and whatever mischief this war hero planned. Will, the groom—seated at an open window—tipped further into the chamber. He saw only how the posture of those indoors had suddenly improved in a way most locked and deadening. He leaned further: Prothero, oh. Now Willie understood.

Without ceremony or explanation—smiling, bitter—the Charlestonian opened a harpsichord’s lidlike soundboard to its fullest. Then, as if cracking a huge egg, he busted the barrel, staves splintering. Into the young lady’s instrument, across its fine workings, he dumped a gallon and a half of dark thick syrup.

Listeners inhaled one sucking hiss—the exact opposite of “Ahhh.” The Lieutenant threw cask’s slats and metal cinchings into the harpsichord’s casing. Some syrup had smeared onto his hand. This, he wiped onto decorative inlay. The surprise was: just how long music lasted. Child? The surprise always is!

Though the young lady kept on, her face had already blanked itself. You saw skin go older all at onct, her color draining noplace. Unison Randolph, age fifteen, leaned nearer and nearer the small keyboard. Her oval face was inches over ten palsied fingers yet working so. Her elbows lifted at determined awkward angles, but as you listened, syrup found and coated every wire and bolt and pick of it. Men/women/children—every person in this and other rooms slowly tipped towards the dying instrument: because they listened harder and because they seemed to think that this’d someway help it. The player—shuddering, head fighting to stay upright—resisted a minor spasm. But Unison stayed gray-faced at her post. Music lost some clarity, all edge, it soon glued over. Then just many finicky damp slappings, sticky separations.

The rooms now grew so still. For a second you could hear the river James sloshing at the bottom of the lawn, currents pushing and searching along the cliff below.

The girl pulled her fingers off the keys all at onct. Otherwise it seemed she might never find the strength to separate herself from this instrument where she’d sat daily since age nine.

Unison kept still for a second. Then she stared—not at the culprit. He had swollen to his fullest heroic size as if he’d just performed some right witty parlor prank. Instead Miss Randolph looked to other officers. And they’d just turned toward each other, trying to decide what to do next—when the Chaplain heaved forward. He lurched direct for Prothero’s throat. Others grabbed the old man, held him back. One little girl, snickering, not understanding, dodged behind a love seat, peeked above its edge.

Chaplain had prayed over hundreds of deaths, he’d witnessed the torture of many more amputees. He had seen the finest young men of his region maimed, burned, and dismembered. But through all these horrors his features showed little real outwards emotion beyond his thin lips moving in the act of rational prayer. Now two burly colonels could hardly hold him
back. Enraged by the dying of this harpsichord, pointing to it, thrashing side to side, the Chaplain screamed, “Monster! Why, mon-ster?
Why?”

Some children—feeling the strangeness, missing the music, bothered at being so near all these men after seeing so few lately—sniffled, then cried. It was only at this sound, only on hearing ladies’ rustling dresses that the governor’s son seemed to notice. He turned, looked, understood who’d sat watching him.

In other rooms, guests stood, craning around doorjambs to see why music had stopped. Prothero lifted his pince-nez, studied the assembled women. He seemed to find them suitable, even agreeable. And with an almost comic pleasure, the Lieutenant moved his scabbard aside, did a profound full bow their way. He clumsily removed his hat.

Meantime the ladies glanced elsewhere, everywhere, anyplace but him. Children wouldn’t meet the young man’s stare. Some hid eyes behind their mothers’ skirts. Other youngsters held their hands before their faces, screening him from view, dreading him without quite understanding.

But then, who here understood?

Children’s hiding from him seemed to stun this handsome boy. You saw something register. Standing at the center of a parlor alive with candlelight, banked with cut spring flowers, paved with pictures of privileged little boys and their ponies, the young officer broke into a strange fetching grin. It was not his recent leer. It seemed that something opened in his face. He panted. He’d suddenly noticed a chandelier ablaze directly overhead with pendant lead crystals, silent pink/gold light wavering on the features all about him. He smoothed back his blond hair. He gave off one closed giggle. He’d not seen so many dressed-up women and children in months, even years. He studied each woman with a shy respect, hands now laced together over his belt buckle, as if called upon to make a speech. As if he could think of nothing, but expected everyone would wait.

A one-shoed enlisted man—puzzled by the hush—flapped through a French door, squinted into this cramped parlor. There at the center stood Prothero. Two officers still held back the Chaplain. The player stayed at her instrument. Not one soul spoke. All at onct you smelled a rush of the perfume escaping from some person, like a body gas. Suddenly, great veins swelled at Prothero’s temples. He actually staggered, and, as others watched, he leaned for support against the harpsichord. Soon as his palm touched it, the young woman screeched, “His
hand.”
She leapt to hide herself behind a group of officers who’d gathered at her back. These men now advanced. Flattered, they drew nearer to the culprit.

Everybody watched this young lieutenant with a sort of medical interest, almost a horror. He seemed on the brink of some seizure that you couldn’t bear to witness, child, but dared not look away from. Everybody stared so. He knew this. It made things worse. His shoulders lowered, knees now met each other as if for the first time. He seemed to lose whole years and inches. It was like watching a real real good umbrella slowly shut.

His voice sounded higher than usual. “I see, of course,” he cleared his throat. “Only some vandal would do this. It must prove, what? How thoughtless one has become? Everybody cried the day I left Charleston. True tears. Even Uncle’s slaves, and a good deal more than they had to. My sister fainted. I was the one everybody loved. Ask them. My own mother’s greatest joy is her piano.—Miss,” he turned but saw only the girl’s dark eyes half hid between tall officers. “I can’t say why anyone, myself especially, would choose to do such a thing. I will—pay, of course. It’s that … ‘The soul … is a dark forest.’ By degrees it must come upon one. I know what it means to be loved by people. And to offer that back. It’s by degrees this other happens … Do please excuse me, all of you.—Also, I want it known, I’ve never touched that girl there hiding from me, though oftentimes I’ve wanted to. Her, I do not blame.”

Then he started for the door but slowed, looked overhead, then whipped his silver sword from its scabbard. Several ladies jumped back whining against the wall. Prothero just used his saber’s point to touch the light overhead. “This is actually not a bad chandelier.” Even his barely tapping it caused the thing to sway so—the whole room rocked with swinging shadows. And, rushing, mumbling to hisself, Prothero tripped past rigid officers, past the openmouthed Chaplain, down marble steps mobbed with young Will and dozens of others. The Lieutenant left a room’s seasick faces going from shadow to not, shadow to not.

Prothero stayed away for two full days. Willie fed his blooded horse. He felt ashamed of all assigned duties that now connected him to the infamous gent from Charleston. Some claimed the man must be a Northern spy. Only this could explain his incivilities to women, such affronts to the joys of Southern standards.

When the Lieutenant did turn up, his uniform looked torn like he’d been wandering through swamps as punishment. Prothero appeared milder now. You could see his face more clear—it lacked earlier bloat and pride. He looked thinner. He acted so ashamed of himself you felt sorry for him despite everything he’d done. He avoided meals in the big house, kept clear of its owners. He ate alone in his tent. During the next day’s drill, he overpraised his men, which just upset them. Someplace he’d found extra oats and, by hand, fed these to his badly treated gelding.

The division received orders. It marched away from the fine house, the grounds in bloom. Two kind Randolph ladies waved further lace from their veranda. Many soldiers looked back. Three days later, when a flurry of fighting commenced, when it came clear that there must be a running charge across this contested field, others crouched low. They were waiting, waiting for Prothero’s famous forward lurch. Those officers who’d slacked their own charges when Prothero arrived now checked over their shoulders. Stooped, muskets at the ready, men braced to hear the terrible yell. But, silent, the Lieutenant held back. First Prothero looked around. Seemed that he, too, was waiting for some leader’s sound. Then—starting to understand what
was needed, slowly finding others’ eyes all on him—the blond boy straightened his shoulders and, inhaling with greater and greater gasps, visibly steeled himself. Setting glasses on his nose, making the sign of the cross in air before him, he quietly said to those nearest, “Would now be good?”

The Rebel yell he gave that day sounded strangled by embarrassment at its own rooster crudeness. And when, on foot, he struggled up across breastwork and out into the sunny open spaces, Prothero’s gait seemed weighted. His slowness endangered others and—rushing by—they knocked the boy aside. Prothero’s face was set behind a terrible grin, apology. He was just struggling to catch up, was just calling others’ names, when a cannon volley struck him full across his chest and spun him clear back twenty feet into the woods.

THE CHAPLAIN
, despite Christian principles and his breadth of learning, looked broken now. Despite a strong partiality to founding families, despite having onetime sipped bourbon with the boy’s important father, Reverend stayed unforgiving about that harpsichord’s ruination. “Why?” he kept asking—speaking of the instrument’s ending, not a certain young man’s.

Past the division’s new encampment, just beyond horses tied in rows, a former cotton field was presently sunk deep with mud. Here fellows were to bury Alfred Huger Fraser Prothero III.

They learned his full name off his papers.

Though the division had moved miles inland from the river James, the harpsichord’s owner someway learned about this death. She buggied six miles through a war zone and at real danger to herself. Miss Unison Randolph arrived just after the burial service commenced. From their field with a new hole in it, men watched her carriage advance. Men turned to see her high-stepping this way across the bog. She half smiled at her trouble in unsticking each foot from mud like gumbo. Her pursed mouth showed disgust at sloppy sounds each small boot made sucking loose. Clutching her handbag, she kept skirts’ hem wound against her shins. You saw she’d worn her best calfskin boots, ones far too good. Four black armbands had become five. The men here respected her long trip and the trouble she’d taken. But they remembered how she’d compromised herself with the dead man. They felt sure: If
they’d
got killed, she would not be present. Even so, Will and others nodded as this girl, sixteen now, took her place amongst them near the open grave.

“We all must fight,” the Chaplain had been saying, and he took up there again after a somber bow. “But, I fear, this young man
enjoyed
said activity too much. I believe, as he promised, he had been quite the decent boy before war changed him. Diatonic gone cacophonous. And I consider that he understood what dreadful things he’d done of late—especially toward objects
worthy of veneration. Difficult it is to understand such wickedness. To approach the one beautiful thing: to end the one beautiful thing. I must tell you,” he smiled at the newly arrived young lady, “how every season in my Glee Club, one boy walks in who is plainly gifted with the most perfect ear. He is elected what we call ‘pitch pipe.’ Others—less skilled—place their voices near to his as possible. This makes them all more nearly correct. Our Saviour remains that for each of us. He is the variable bassoon that we—His orchestra—must tune to, if you will. No one is so unmusical that he cannot hear the perfect guiding Tone and—through it—find his own true voice. Though I do admit—this particular youth here proved as nearly pitch-deaf as any I’ve encountered.” Others stared into the open grave or at the tips of Unison’s spoilt boots. The Chaplain looked only at the sky. He could not bring himself to speak of Prothero’s finer traits. Instead, the sermon turned one boy’s killing into the topic of tone-deafness.