Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (135 page)

“Take me,” he said, plain if croakish. First, alarmed, I thought he was being lovey-dovey again. (When I bathed him, he still revved up right manly but he’d mercifully forgot what-all to do with it.)

“To … where, sug?”

“Back … to tree, war, Ned’s tree where … back, please, Buttermilk.”

The nickname got me. “Really want to see all that mess again, sug? Think it’d help you rest more easy? That it?”

He held his massy finger up before his face. “One,” a sleepy voice said. “Once … more. Poor Ned. Lucy? they shot Ned.”

“I know. Was a loss to all of us. Yes, they did shoot him.”

SO WE
went.

I’d become a good driver while taking Ned to schools, learned from Cassie’s third-oldest son, handsome gray-eyed Antwan. I stopped by a Lucas-Hedgepath service station—another business owned by our great merchants’ families’ enterprising inbred children. (Tied to Falls by inherited property, they stayed put, unlike my scattered tribe.)

“You think you’re up to this?” the fellow at the pump asked, a second cousin of Ruth, our old neighbor. (She’d killed herself at thirty-nine when Willard finally broke his cherry-blossom silence to petition for a legal divorce after all that time. He couldn’t just stay merrily gone, could he?) “Sure,” says I. “Been before.”

Cap was in the car beside me. The filling-station man give us every map of either Carolina and Virginia. I was determined to do this last thing right for my Captain. Figured this would put me well ahead on what little of the tally sheet he might still remember.

Castalia helped me strap him in with rope. Man couldn’t sit up, chin’d be on the dashboard otherwise. This was, I believe, the world’s first seat belt but did I get one nod of credit for inventing it? Not a penny.

The joy of knowing how to drive—having a purse temporarily stuffed full of green, a brisk October day, the chance of maybe later doing a surprise side trip and seeing our daughter, the top nurse. The sky that day glowed the color of a dare.

“You know where we’re getting ready to go, sir?”

“Get,” he repeated. “Get … even?”

“Darl, we’ll get to Virginia and maybe we’ll get you some nice car-trip memories. But ‘even’ is one thing nobody ever gets. Not even you.”

He seemed cheerful, hearing our destination. The few neighbors that knew our mission come down to the fronts of their yards and waved. Cap saluted for the first time in six months. I said, “You do know, don’t you?”

So, back to war yet again. Would it never end? We passed the Mall, flattening a spot where the beauty of The Lilacs mansion once literally stopped traffic on land and water. Where the Big House stood, a Toys “R” Us! We’re the gods’ playthings okay, darling. Toys “R” Us!

Then all up into Virginia did the happy couple tool. Me helping him with the ropes and then his zipper. This was in the roadside weeds. We never stopped at rest rooms because I could hardly squire the Cap into the Men’s side. The Ladies would’ve squealed seeing shoes that huge in the next booth.

Took me two days and at least one fleabag motel I checked us out of fast on account of pre-used sheets, imagine. On up to Gaines’ Mill. Onct in the town proper, I aimed forth from there, fanning in all directions, asking
farmers of both races at the few farmlike stores left. Mostly there were basket shops and cute antique places that would, you knew, charge you a fortune for something they probably “aged” in their garage last weekend.

Two men told me that such a lake was long since landfill, ancient history. “Who you got there in your Chevy, ma’am?” “A old man what fought at that lake. He’s needing to see the spot again.” “Well, I declare. Not the Civil War, you know not. He must’ve been a baby in it, how many are left? I do declare.”

I hate being interesting to strangers. Now, honey, don’t sulk. I wouldn’t count
you
—you? a stranger? After all
we
been through together? Why you’ve kept on coming back remains a central mystery that warms my heart.

Him and me wasted two more days searching, Captain wearing diapers I’d made from some old dormitory sheets. You have to really love the other person, since this was previous to the Adult Pampers that are very bread-and-butter necessity at Lanes’ End Rest here. I invented seat belts
and
Adult Pampers. Meantime,
People
runs dumb articles on Dog Groomers to the Soap Stars! I ask you.

Another day and him all-a-fidget like some child.

I got testy, hearing his ropes creak. “You still even interested?”

It was a mean thing to say.

“They shot Ned,” he told me. Then he repeated the same thing for forty minutes, put the emphasis on a different of the three words each time. “Didn’t they?” he ended.

I agreed. “I sure wish they hadn’t of. Why, if Ned Smythe and his wife and their kids had become our kids’ friends, wouldn’t that’ve been ideallike? if your Ned had come home and hitched up with somebody I considered worthy company, some woman, well, like … Castalia,” and I laughed. He did, too. I almost had a wreck, seeing—or thinking—he’d maybe understood.

Finally his “They shot Ned” made me stop to ask again concerning bodies of water hereabouts.

It was another pottery place, a big stone barn, and inside I found a shaggy boy throwing this slick vase at his kick wheel. He sat there shell-backed and when I spoke over his classical music, he jerked but threw hands far
from
the pot and, thank God, didn’t spoil it. Even in surprise, he was graceful. I described the MIA pond. I told more of the story than I usually let out. Music played and a aged finch hopped to and fro in a pretty wicker old-time cage like one of Winona’s.

The potter cleaned his hands on a filthy apron he wore, so crusted it seemed a starter garden with armholes. He asked, “This pond wouldn’t have had a mill on it, a gristmill?” “Sure did.” Thought I’d said so, getting addled, hate that. Happens a lot lately. I fell last week. I don’t want to talk about it.

He walked to the back of his studio and opened the wide doors and led me out onto a kind of stone ramp beside a suburban pond.

He told me how his girlfriend’s mother had inherited this bankrupt gristmill. At the pond’s far end, cedar-shingled homes clumped, all alike.
And yet, just short of a motorboat dock, some older trees had been saved back. I pointed across water, “I think that’s where it happened.”

Potter said, “And the participant is actually in your car out front?”

“The one that lived is.”

So this boy hurried out there with me, checked, said, “Wow. Some patriarch. Looks positively Mosaic.”

“He’s way older than me, always was.”

“I saw that at once, of course.”

“You’ll go far, son,” and I climbed into the car, thanking him. Imagine driving right up to the right gristmill. He told me I couldn’t pull close to the water on that far bank, said he’d follow in his jeep and he’d help. The potter turned over a sign on his studio door, it read: “Closed Creatively.” No comment. He locked up like he was going to Paris, France. (The modern world! the trusties are the last ones to be foolish enough to trust others.)

Our old Chevy followed his jeep, mud-flecked as the potter hisself. I think his name was Wade or something. Wayne. Call him Wade, I could find out if I really had to know.

He finally pulls down a dirt road I never would of found. “We’re here, I think,” I told the Captain. And from nodding in sleep, he went to being so fully awake. He had come alive so quick that it seemed to me (for a instant anyhow) his whole senility had been faked. As a personal convenience. As a decoy, waiting out death. I left him in our car while me and the boy with clay in his longish hair patrolled the shoreline. We passed deep ruts and I asked him about them—Wade said it was from the motorbikes young kids ride all back in here. I pictured those tires passing over the unmarked grave of young Ned Smythe, Confederate, and thought he’d like that, twelve, thirteen hisself. “Bike noises travel across that lake like you cannot believe, drive us up the wall. We thought we’d found the end of nowhere after Manhattan. You never have, I guess.”

“No,” said I.

He took my arm, polite boy if filthy. We had to gallop down a real steep bank. I think his name was Wade. Waylon. No,
was
Wade, definite. I walked, wondering would I know the sycamore if it jumped me. Did it even matter if I found the exact one? But yeah, it always matters. Has to. I’d come this far and, if only for myself, I wanted to do this right. Wearing my nice little linen dress with the light jacket and a new leather belt, flats but good ones. As Captain lost interest, I’d took to seeing Lolly monthly and buying clothes a bit. Along lake’s edge, Wade and me stepped over milk cartons and used French letters. There was clots of junk mail in bright IOU colors. The mess made me sad.

“It’s awful, I know,” the potter apologized.

“You
didn’t do it, you want it
nice
. Don’t blame yourself for what you didn’t do, Wade, Dwayne, no, Wayne.” Or whatever. Definitely Wade. (Memory is a muscle—one that needs constant flexing. Lose it or use it.)

•   •   •

I KNEW
which sycamore. It told me. Fact. A wind come up and leaves turned sides and it was the granddaddy of them all. It stood on the little hill but most of its land had been lost now to the lake and all these roots showed like them twists on the surface of some great brain. But the whole tree was yet alive, I saw that.

“And somebody was killed here? Skirmish?”

“Snipers,” I said, and looked quick across the water, just checking.

“Imagine. And he knew them?”

“Loved him. He was here when it happened. Kids, both of them. Left home holding hands the way girls that age would.”

We trudged back to fetch my Captain. He’d someway untied hisself and got his uniform tunic from out the honeymoon satchel where he seen me store it. He’d tore a hole in the old rose-patterned valise instead of using its clasps, but there he stood, ready. As we drew nearer, Wade said, “Your husband looks like God in Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam.’ What a noble head.”

I said, yeah, well, Noble is as noble does. I asked if that was like
Michael-
angelo and he said, “Actually Mick, I’m told, is correct. Mick-alangelo.”

“You don’t say. Live and learn.” I thought of Momma’s
An American Child’s Sistine
folio I won’t allowed to touch with my grimy mitts and blood-sister bandage. Odd how jumbled every moment is.

Down to water we got Cap, him trying to stand at attention while we tried and keep him easing along pitched red clay banks. “He knows,” the potter told me quiet over Cap’s shoulder.

“He knows,” Captain agreed, embarrassing Wade. Wade didn’t understand Cap was referring to Ned. Cap meant: knows we’re here, Ned does.

We led the old soldier to the shade under that largest sycamore. I saw how its huge shadow had stunted lesser trees struggling near but under it. Captain stared up into the thing. “Right,” he said, and gave me a look of the old wild intelligence, and even a little sexual something underneath. I loved him then!

“You’re most welcome. We got fewer kids along this time, don’t we, honey?”

He beckoned me to stoop down where he rested in the weeds. Wade turned away from what he expected to be some tearful tender scene maybe.

Cap pointed up its trunk. “There’s more,” he said, and rubbed fingers together. I knew then he meant the harness, maybe a grain of it still up there.

I WANTED
to put all this behind us. The chances of discovering any findable horse tether this many years after, it seemed impossible, but you are either
in
on something or you’re not. I stepped out of my flats and leaned against the sycamore trunk to pick off a few corn plasters that might get in my way and—considering the strapping helpful Wade blinking yonder—might be also unsightly.

“He expects you to …” Wade pointed at its top, ninety feet above.

“Yeah, oh he
expects
… he’s still good at that.”

“To
climb?”

“You got it, honey. And I still can, I bet. Was onct a pro. Someways I never have felt more relaxed than in a tree house me and a good girlfriend built.—Whether I’ll find what my husband’s hoping, that’s another matter. But I didn’t drive all this way not to least
try
. Here goes nothing.”

“Wait,” I told the Cap, like he had a choice. I bent and he caught my hand, he kissed my knuckles. I said, “Don’t expect. It’s later than you think, century-wise.”

His face was spread rosy with widening memory, the old light, the old poison maybe raring up on him but seeming sweetened some. All I need, thought I, is his dying on me
here
. And yet, as I set my handbag in a prominent spot, that really didn’t seem so bad, Cap’s exiting here. I might borrow a shovel from Wade. I’d dig a slow but good-sized hole, just past complicating tree roots. I’d buy a nice jug from that boy and set it at the head of Cap’s grave, a purchase to thank Wade—Dwayne? no, Wade—for helping. Sweet boy.

He now offered to give me the first hoist up. He laced his fingers and knelt, stiff arms V-ed before me. Touching his shoulders, I stepped up. His powerful palms joined, toughened, under my sole. And just the feel of my weight swung in young Wade’s fine hands, it gave me a sudden twinge. “Oooh,” I said, old enough to act right trashy for a change. “Oh, honey, but all them sinews feels
so
good.” He laughed, breath on my leg. “Two, three …” And then I was up. Heavenly breeze.

Hadn’t been inside of a tree for years, tens of years. Leaves of years and time. Felt like being let in some temple/home. To arrive high and invisible in the safe hollow of it. Talk of a Child’s Garden of Verses. Here was what a person had, just shy of the flight I’d always longed for. I went on up, slow, but limb for limb, I did him proud. Did me proud. Did Shirley, Cassie, Reba, Maimie Beech, and fearful Momma proud. I really scouted for some cinched spot, traces. It mostly was a smooth-barked good-climbing tree. You didn’t burn your hands too bad.

“Call me,” Wade hollered due sky, “if there’s a problem or …”

“Thanks, but I like it. I can see your mill. You’re lucky to have a whole stone mill and all. Must stay cool right along. Your wife pot too?”