Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (16 page)

So. Honeymoon, him and me, a one-girl battle of Bull Run and you can guess who the bull was and what he aimed to run at. Now, in Northern histories of the war, they say, “Yanks at Fort Sumter were fired upon without no cause nor provocation.” Darling, that was me all over. And on my back to boot. Concerning bees and facts and birds and life, nobody told us girls zip. Zero. We had to find out at the time.

Nice hotel outside Atlanta. Soon as we arrived, Captain found him
another Antietam-surviving vet. They seemed to sniff each other out like brother dogs. Well, the two men started comparing notes, hill by dull and bloody hill. Captain left me in a tearoom off the lobby—all potted palms, polished brass, tassels on the tassels. I sat arranging my pearl-gray hem over my buttoned boots so everything’d look its best. My braids were hogtied in a honeymoon bun, Momma’s strong hands had secured them there to keep me from gnawing on them whilst nervous. (Momma said, “I don’t want to
hear
you had hair in your mouth, understand me?” Poppa demonstrated a person fishing a single curly one off the tongue. Momma blanched like this was smutty—a prediction for me. Myself, I only caught on a good bit later and I didn’t think it was either funny or too kind.)

Setting there waiting for Captain to quit talking tactics, I bet I was prettier than I thought I was. Everybody fifteen is basically pretty, ain’t they? Just nod. Captain finally got our luggage upstairs with a handsome bellhop’s help. But when Cap came back down (hurrying so he could continue battle chat), he’d left the wallet in his dusty greatcoat. He called me over while jawing with the Georgian. (Odd that every lobby and bar had another Antietam survivor when you remember how the twenty-three thousand got killed in that one day.) Cap asked me would I please run up and fetch his money. He handed me the room key. I felt flattered, like I was his favorite trusted daughter, not his wife.

Upstairs, I fumbled in his pocket. First I found a sealed envelope with our Falls druggist’s script across the back: “Have Leander hand-deliver to stockyard … French Letters for Capt. Marsden’s Honeymoon.” I shook the thing. I didn’t know that my husband could read French—I imagined him quoting foreign mail at me like poems. Another skill to be impressed by.

Next I pulled out a hinged leather thing all worn from handling. I took it to a window, hit the little latch. It opened on a shiny tintype—a beautiful person stood pleased-looking under a mat of ringlets like a halo, only loopy with too much body. The choir robe’s starched collar rested open, the face wore only half a smirk. The face looked like it’d just started to consider becoming conceited but had decided against it and yet wanted to be given the wee-est bit of credit—even for
that
.

Downstairs again, I handed Captain his billfold to pay for the several whiskeys he had ordered hisself and the new friend. Then I mentioned as how I’d found this too—I pulled out the picture case. He snatched it so fast his huge hand made a testy blur. He checked to see if I’d hurt that daguerreotype, he spun to see if the other vet—off at a pastry cart—might’ve noticed my mistake in bringing the picture.

I had to ask, “Who is she?”

“She!” says he, half roaring with a laugh. “I like that, she! This isn’t just some she, Mrs. This is my dearest friend on earth, ever. Was male as I am now. My late friend, Ned. I’ve told you.”

“You said he was pretty. But I thought you meant only to you.” I grew quieter. Slow, my hand lifted to my own cheek, fingertips comparing this
decent living face with the one saved under glass. Fingers knowing which would always be the plainer. If I’d had a braid loose, I would have gnawed the thing damp or brushed my thin lips with it, for comfort. “It’s just,” I told my husband. “I never before saw his likeness. It’s fact … a real beauty.”

“He was.” The Captain opened the picture, pulled it nearer to gray eyes.
“Is.—
Waiter, some tea and cookies for the little lady here. Thank you. That all right, tea and cookies?”

Then there was further war talk. “Did you by chance know Gunnery Sergeant John B. Morris, exceptional fellow, spine aplenty, severally wounded, and assuredly blessed with grit to spare, was he. Notably clever with his hands, too. Why, I believe it was on the eve of our first day’s battle, a lateral jamming had occurred in a firing pin on one particularly testy …” They really talked like that. History’d turned their daily talk to tin. How little bearing it had on anything that mattered, child. I tried to appear listening. Mostly I wanted to dunk my cookie in my tea. Didn’t dare. “You’re married,” I told myself, and it was like I’d said “you’re royal” or “you’re dead.”

Then it got darker. Then we were headed (Cap and me) toward being locked in the same room as man and wife. I saw two sleek bellhops my own age watching us and laughing, knowing more than I did. “In for it now,” the prettiest one said and made his eyebrows go.—Could you slide a wee bit nearer, honey? Fine. I need to look at somebody during.

CAP
and me were no sooner alone together. He locked the door. His husbandly happiness seemed exaggerated by recent whiskeys, he leaned back against the door he’d locked. He whipped off his necktie then its stickpin and flicked those down. He grinned whilst the long unfastening commenced. Pants unbuttoned in them days. There were many buttons on those pants but—even so, child—not near enough.

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I saw what-all had to fit where. He stepped nearer. A tumor, tree-root deformity. He had definite plans for what to do with which parts. I figured
he’d
thought up the deed. I didn’t have no idea on earth it was what you’d call a … classic activity.

He was pushing fifty-one, and I mean pushing. Game as any dozen itchy roosters. And me? Skin-and-bones pitiful—no bigger than a dime. What-all he wanted to get me doing, honey, it was just this side of surgery. (You know when I said how, in battle, if lead was hard to get at, docs just took the whole leg off? Well, was something like that, only in reverse, like going in and using the whole blunt leg instead of tweezers.) Somebody had saved
his
leg, so why could this fellow not, in turn, save me?

His hairy shoulders, crops of bristles sprouting on his back—my thin white ankles bent way up against them massy shoulders. Oh dear me. Oh dear dear
dear
me oh my. Cannot imagine, you cannot. Of course you can, but even so. Man had to mash a feather pillow in my mouth, see, I was screaming, not as a polite sign he should ease off, no, screaming to bring
outside help in through yonder bolted door. Men’s pictures are up post offices for slimmer offenses than he tried on me that night. The hotel manager would not have cared to hear what noise I had banked up in me by morning. You think that when Cap got done with it onct, he stopped? No way. Seemed he hoped to prove what a live wire he still was, whatever his age. He offered steady proof of what I might expect for good, for life. At fifty, he could’ve given goat-glands lessons. Was his first honeymoon, and it was mine. Only, he’d been practicing up since 1860. Me, I was innocent as mutton.

How old are you again, how much time we got left? I know I asked before—but, on both counts, it’s forever changing.

RIGHT
after, he dropped off to sleep and still on top of me. Talk about a heavy sleeper. I thought he’d died on me. I felt myself to be a small brown hearthside throw rug caught under the hugest possible loudest-patterned hotel-lobby carpet—Rhode Island trapped underneath and way out in the middle of all gaudy Texas.

I lay looking up past one shoulder’s fuzz. Hotel ceiling had plaster baby angels mashed across it. Like a pie meringue of wings, curls, chubby elbows. I pitied those angels—bare to strangers’ eyes night after night. I felt for everybody. I thought, Well, this is married life so called. I remembered my mother, awake in our house and missing me, having to make do with Poppa’s stunts and fond teasing. I really could’ve wept for her. Chances were, she’d been through this mess too.—Jokers, mates were
all
jokers underneath, just waiting to try stuff, sick!

I heard horses knocking in their stable out back. On the hotel’s first-floor veranda, tipsy salesmen bragged about their wares. A man and a woman one room away kept speaking in low tones—real angry but locked forever at this extra-reasonable level, sounding the fiercer for that. Maybe a brother and sister? No, married probably. I heard him snarl, “I’ll never get over it this time … never.” You could tell that they just loved to fight, how it was mostly what they had. I listened only because: no choice. My right arm had gone pins and needles from the pure weight of Captain. My chest was getting rheumy. But from the waist down, I burned so. Thigh muscles popped and spasmed like frog legs come alive in their final frying-pan jig.

Then my right side, ear to hip, just went. Bye, it snuffed past stinging. Below between, a hurt kept really hurting. My throbbing seemed sharp as other people’s sounds. I wondered that them nearby folks couldn’t hear it. Seemed odd that the manager didn’t come running to help me, didn’t summon the Atlanta police then telegraph my momma. Not a soul arrived. Momma? I was under a man who felt like a convention of boulders. It was legal, this. I was under a man my folks had passed me on to, for him to use this way for life.

I dared not reach down betwixt sheet and, with my good left hand,
touch my opened self. I should’ve got right up and done some serious rinsing. But I didn’t know how to wash proper. They never told you nothing then. Did they think that, by sparing you certain news, those facts’d bypass you? I’m not sure which world my well-intended folks kept schooling me for, but—so far, honey—I ain’t yet hit its outmost border. Still, flat on my back, I knew my plan. Manners aside, simple self-defense come clear enough.

My awake half would pull its sister 50 percent free of Captain. Next (I coached myself) place both your bare feet onto floorboards, girl. The cold’ll give you spunk. Why, if you see a fallen dray horse trapped under a cart on the street, you try and help it get aloose. Anybody decent will. So now save yourself—you’re at least that good. You’re a animal, minimum, which means you deserve something.

Your carpetbag is packed except for the silver hairbrush and your new
Child’s Garden of Verses
from the aunts. Plus, you might just rescue some of them nice baby hotel soaps as souvenirs. Dress fast and quiet, slip on out. By train or on foot, get home, girl, as best you can—go right to the unmarried aunts’ big house. (I would forever refuse to knock at my own folks’ front door. Poppa was in there. Why did I blame Poppa most for this? He should’ve hinted. Momma probably couldn’t. Everybody at the wedding knew. All smiling, winking so. Everybody but me. Me and my innocent untouched aunts.) Except for them, I figured nobody else’d want me now. Used goods, marked way down. First, when the three unwed sisters saw me alone on their porch, they’d scold. And I wouldn’t blame them. “You left Captain Marsden, catch of the year, before one single night was over—why, Lucille?”

But when they stepped outside, and once I told them exactly what-all he tried to pull on me (I wouldn’t have to spell out how that particular stunt had hurt a girl), aunts’d either swoon or else throw up on the lilac bushes.
Then
they would take me in. For keeps. To live in a clean white house forever. They’d hide a person safe from men for good.—I pictured all of this till I felt ready for escape. By then I knew I was strong and mad enough to live alone for life.

I felt I knew how slaves had breathed real shallow whilst sneaking North and free of a owning master. Anatomy-wise, seemed like what’d just been opened in me
was
the Underground Railway. My left hand’s fingers now hooked under hotel bedsprings, got a goodly grip, pried the rest of me two inches freer. My jostling underneath him made the Captain stir, made him say something. Asleep, he muttered right down towards my neck.

His breath was like the air from a big commercial greenhouse—sweetish, possible, trapped-smelling. He mumbled words I couldn’t understand. The next-door couple kept on bickering, voices getting lower as they meant it more. Stabled horses cleared their foot-long sinuses. Drunk hawkers stumbled on the street, letting out a few sample yahoos.—And Captain told me where I should put up our tent.

He said it real plain. I straightened beneath him. Was like hearing a
strange man with a extra-deep voice speak out of the darkness in the same rented room with you, same bed. It
was
that.—Under here, numb, I was both his legal bride and what they nowdays call “a abused child.” And it was then I understood—my aunts hadn’t given me the Stevenson poems as a wedding present to replace my old worn-out copy. No, the morocco-bound book won’t even meant for me. Was for other children, younger than me, ones I was going to have to have. But, see, I wanted it. I loved those poems, knew most by heart. And till that very second, I thought the Child whose garden of verses it’d always be was me alone.

The man above me spoke. I listened for one reason only. Pinned, I had to. I knew it was the war that he was in—he spoke of how a brook ran near the camp, he named which horses had lost shoes. Then his tone changed, something bumped inside the dream. His body quaked, the huge calf muscles locked in tics. Captain’s voice grew much more lively by degree, moving up like notes from lower to mid-high to pure-tee screech. He yelled for chums to please take cover, fast. He sounded like somebody new, somebody more my age. Soon he was just hollering full out and I mean
loud
.

The couple one room away hushed their fighting. They mumbled in a more united way, guessing that some nightmared child had screamed one chamber off. Then they dropped back to accusing one another with yet more clever venom spirit.

What went on inside Cap’s dream came out to me in bits and inches. Even when he paused, when deeper sleep let him lose interest a while, it all hooked up. When speaking started again, I understood just which direction the enemy was advancing from—a hotel room’s northeast corner. He muttered how some rabbits and four deer had scampered through camp from that way—a sure sign of right massive enemy onslaught. “Smith, Ned. Get ready, boys. Here goes again. Do wish it wouldn’t. Uh-oh, it sure is, though.” Some enemies arrived on horseback. Many more on foot. Pinned, I listened all the full night long.