Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (19 page)

Under a bridge, the gargling Indian Creek. It always lowers this road’s summer temperature by eight to ten degrees. Some black kids fish down there, solemn planning the size of today’s catch. The creek offers you a smell of bilge and honeysuckle, equal parts. (Here, two little Mayos drowned whilst hoping to get saved by two young Wilguses who plunged right in but went down too. Not one of them kids could swim but in the frenzy of ending, all forgot it.) Such facts—who died where—do tend to ground a returning person. Lore hereabouts often means gore hereabouts.

(Odd, I’m remembering the goose-down pillow from my room at home. If I asked my folks’ permission to take it forever into Captain’s house and bed, would everybody think this real, real weak of me?)

Ahead, a final feature before the River Road turns and shows us Home: signs for Hedgepath’s Veg-table Stand, hooray! I shift with pleasure—Georgia newspaper crackles considerable. Hedgepath announcements will claim these next three miles before the promised stand itself turns up.

Signs sure overprepare a person. Hundreds of them stutter about Hedgepath’s definitely coming up, yeah, folks, get ready, hungry yet? this’ll mean your last country chance for produce, ever. “Thousants of satickfied costumers over Time.”

Hedgepath’s spelling is so awful it makes us town kids feel superior. (We love to see adults’ mistakes made on so grand a scale. We always beg our folks to stop and buy something from any poor hicks
this
dumb.) “Ocri!” “Punkms!” “Peenup Buttur!” I swear to God, that bad.

It’s really just another part of Hedgepath’s strategy! Old man H. figures: You might believe he’s as poor at math as at spelling, therefore you’ll stop and try to gyp him.

The old geezer is justly famous for his homegrown watermelons. (Locals claim that bourbon’s someway shot into the pink of each. Even teetotalers get hooked, especially them.) I greet my favorite of Hedgepath’s signboards. A huge melon is shown over two powder-blue snow-flecked words: “ICe CoLT!”

To paint your own personal slice of Hedgepath melon, first slap on a yard-long grin of pink—use high-gloss enamel to make it look more cold and slippery. The slice’s crescent moon of outer skin is no more than a thin green curving line. Let your sign’s white background paint rush in to be the
rind of whitewall sickled betwixt green and pink. Then overtop the now dried pink, you’ll have the final fun—doing hundreds of speckledy black seeds (a joy for farm kids—daubing during one whole choreless rainy afternoon indoors). If you climb down off your buggy and stoop close enough, you’ll see: No brush is used for the black paint. Seeds are no more than many children’s fertile fingertips.

Most everybody stops at Hedgepath’s. You nearbout have to. The stand features twelve-holer privies for white folks—ventilated, wasp-free. (Six-holers for our colored customers.) Road narrows where Hedgepath placed his colorful vegetable ambush. He’ll
see
you slipping by—he ain’t above hollering at you, either, “Tight wad. Go on, then. But I’m sure
telling
everbody.”

So, you rein your horses partway owing to gratitude for any prank strung out so far. Signs’ mottoes, boasts, and corny come-ons have made dull fields into a stupid (funny) human progress three miles long. That’s surely worth
something
, darling.

Turns out: Hedgepath’s lean-to has less timber in it than do most of his nine hundred promissory billboards. You get down anyhow—doubtful, pleased, half bullied into doing this, not minding but pretending to. “Free Wader for you Hosres! Road diwrecksions free of chage.”

Right off, you find you’re remembered from your last visit. “Well, well, if it ain’t …” And you’re called, if possible, by name, called that loud and many times. Captain eases our team toward ditch bank where lightning bugs show bolder now that day’s losing face. He gets down to stretch. Of course he’s recognized right off. Seems like mute farmland itself has spoke his name and—by extension—mine.

Mr. Hedgepath weighs ninety-some pounds, he seems as springy, tragic, appealing, and overpopulated as the awful coiled flypaper dangling everywhere. Mrs. Hedgepath weighs more than the umpteen bushels of gaudy produce she sits amongst like one more mound of. These oldsters boss around their dozen towheaded children who sack goodies, weigh these, sweetly overcharge you. To perfect strangers milling here, black or white, the senior Hedgepaths say, “Seems like we should
know
you.” And the very second any stranger admits a name, older Hedgepaths snap fingers, look at each other, nod. “Knew it.
Strong
family resemblance. The very ones.”

Which makes visitors feel good. It’s a trick. Guests recognize this but are semi-flattered anyhow. They’re pleased enough to buy a little something. Which is all them Hedgepaths ever intend. About to leave, even Cap shells out a few pennies for sun-warm tomatoes—ones so unlike these Styrofoam things you get in markets nowdays. (That’s the modern world all over, child, growing food for how it
looks
. Once you’ve bought a California tomato, and tasted its blank chalk, you been exceptionally well suckered—can’t take it back.)

Ones stuffed into our bag this evening are spotty, marred by picking—
but so full of a ornery over-alive red-dirt flavor. They’re definitely “from around here.” Maybe a pound of such tomatoes don’t in 19 and 00 seem worth a whole nickel—still you hand five cents to the nearest Hedgepath. And you pay because of a kind of happy pity. It tells you you are home. Again you have found this bargain of a joke.

—Uh-oh, we’re almost in sight of town, it’s just beyond that turn! Falls lies directly ahead unless the place burnt or is some dream I’ve had for fifteen years running. Leaning forward across my honeymoon valise, careful not to squinch new produce—I squint around a bushy curve. “Oh, look,” I say, more to myself than him. He does, though, look.—First I love his joy at being back. Then I think I love
him.—
It’s easier if you love people. Remember that.

Falls—a cusp or bump—becomes one definite green swelling. It’s inlaid right on the horizon going sunset pink, Falls shines with gas streetlamps being turned on one by one. Our road straightens—like owing to respect. All roads (in Nash County) lead to Falls—or out of it. Our buggy veers rightward. My left shoulder touches my husband’s solid right one. I allow that to continue. I’m pleased recalling: Since Captain Marsden is from Falls too, however much we might could differ through our life ahead, we’ll at least have this. A language spoke by just eleven hundred other souls on earth. (Plus you, child. See, I am slowly teaching you that ramshackle romance language. Ready or not, by the end of this and me, you’ll be right hideously fluent. You will then have to take Forgetting Lessons. I am ninety-nine, and mine are scheduled straight ahead.)

Evening—perfect hour for return. Daylight has held on long enough to see us to our door and then retire upstairs like some good servant.

“Looks splendid waiting, does it not, Lucille? I assume you’re reasonably happy to be back.”

“Yes, sir,” I nod. “It’s nice knowing … everything. I mean, where stuff will be and all.”

He adds: “Ten days away were just too long. I miscalculated. Could well have made it seven. Five perhaps—and with less business, more pleasure. In future I’ll remember my mistake.”

“For your
next
honeymoon?” In sight of home, I grow more sassy. My panties rustle like some Woolworth Easter Basket’s clean excelsior.

“For my next with you, Lucille. In, say, ten years, we’ll do it all again.” When he sees I don’t exactly hop for joy, Cap adds: “Only better … A person learns …”

Learns what? I want to ask but I am semi-scared to know. Besides, I’m too busy straightening the skirt’s waistband, getting my attention pinned. Eyes are latched on the strange hill town ahead gleaming conch pink, valuable, porcupinish with competing church steeples.

Dead ahead, disguised as some hicks’ make-do watering hole, I recognize it, child: the celestial city.

REMEMBERING
the homecoming, still waiting for its comforts, I’d dozed in the bath, knees tucked under my chin. I heard two folks still downstairs, talking, catching up like brother and sister or worse, gently teasing each other.

Once I dried, once I saved a face-down gardenia from drowning, once I put on night things and unlocked, allowing a door-rapping homeowner into his own bedroom, I noticed some provisions set yonder on the hallway floor.

Castalia’d left a marbleized tin basin full of hot water—two thick towels stretched overtop to keep it steamy. Nearby, on a pretty saucer painted with cardinals and berries, one yellow bar of strong lye soap. I undid a crystal cruet, I sniffed the splash of vinegar set here like for to dress some salad. Old-style birth control, it was.

By now, of course, my maidenhead was just a singed and burning memory. And yet I understood nothing about the fertile seepage once a person’s seal gets broke. Concerning nature, I knew the names of every woodland bird and flower from Manteo to Murfreesboro. But I recognized not one plumbing fact about that nearest feisty animal, my waist-down self. Those days, child, if you’d asked me what “douche” meant, I might’ve guessed: “The French word for a product of Holland?”

So after Cap climbed into the four-poster big as a yacht boat, after he said kindly, “Welcome home forever, my chosen bride,” after he then grabbed me yet again for a little house warming romp—I someway managed to crawl back out the bed. I took up that basin’s hot water, went in and washed my hair with it! Castalia’s hints at wifely hygiene were lost on me. Later, when motherhood struck, you could’ve knocked me over with somebody else’s feather. Did I think that having my hair squeaky-clean might keep me a simple and skinny girl forever? I didn’t think. Just trusted. The Think part often comes
after
the Trust part, don’t you find? Think can take a larger and larger cut of a person’s energy while the percentage of Trust sometimes wanes and thins and whittles.

I opened eyes the next day early, found my old new husband dressed for commerce. He rubbed his hands together, ready to traipse downstairs toward Castalia’s java and ample breakfast (I could smell corn fritters and bacon coaxing him through floorboards). Soon the front door would slam—Cap bound for work—he’d leave me alone all day … with her.

A handsome witch-hazeled man now settled on my side of the bed, brown beard showing comb’s teeth marks.
“You
mustn’t get up, Lucille. I intend to make sure you’re spoiled and most shamelessly. Especially here at first. Enjoy it, my Lucille. Come eleven o’clock, I plan to study the clock in my office. I’ll picture you as being still quite warm here under my coverlet.
Ours. I’d prefer it, I think, if you were to move over and sleep on my side. Maybe even slip into one of my Egyptian-cotton nightshirts. Charming, yes. Third drawer from the top. Quite a picture you’ll make for an old workingman. I daresay I shall be smiling from seven till six. But will I explain my doing so to any living soul downtown? Never, my Lucille.”

“Yeah, but won’t they know anyways, mister?” I whispered, though we were two married people alone on the bed. “I mean, your first day back off a wedding trip and all? With you fifty whatever you are (no offense) and me just gone fifteen? … Even if you was to smile just a tad, they’ll guess, sir. So
please
don’t even smirk none. Grinning means telling.” I clutched his beefy paw. Bristles growing thick on its back were surprisingly soft. I kissed the baldest knuckles, I told the hand, heavy as a Sunday beef roast, “Something happened to me in Atlanta, sir. I don’t yet half know what it was. But I beg you—don’t let
on
to anybody. Even if some nasty men ask. Please, sir, don’t snitch on me.” He lifted my braid’s brush end—he dabbed it over the tip of my nose. Tears stood in his gray eyes. This amazed me.

He said that I moved him so, did I even know? And, he added, very little had stirred him thusly since the sixties. Cap said my modesty—probably a source of genuine pain to me just now—simply made me mean more to him. Made
it
mean more. He said we were our own secret, forever. Marriage was private-like. We could do whatever we liked for and to each other, see? Nobody would know. “Not even the maid?” I asked, quiet. He smiled, considering this a joke. Cap said my first day’s job would be just staying snug-as-bug-in-rug right here abed, all right? Castalia herself would bring up a tray for me. I just had to say how I liked my eggs—he’d pass along my order. I swallowed, hard.

I was to wear whichever of his nightshirts I liked best, ones she’d ironed so perfect (no starch for sleepwear, ever). “And do definitely leave your pigtails trailing down like this, Lucille. You appear no more than nine years old, especially mornings when your face is a bit puffed as it now is. So many freckles. How can I explain your appeal to you? Probably imprudent to even try. Lovely effect altogether, though. Your charm’s probably the last thing you recognize. I’m sure I remain quite blind to my own, such as it is, or was. And I do thank you in advance—I’ll be picturing you in bed here every hour on the hour and half hour. Agreed? You wake for that alone. Then roll directly over and, in your most spirited manner, drop straight back to sleep.

“And should you, while I’m gone … take the notion (don’t mind Captain’s mentioning such things) to … touch yourself or whatever … feel free. Do. Only natural in a person of your age. I shan’t be home for hours, can’t be helped. ‘Absence makes the heart’ … and so forth. Now, is our day’s schedule quite coordinated? You’re to trust the chiming of the old Seth Thomas downstairs. Leaving, I shall set my pocket watch by him. We’ll be … connected seven to six. This little gambit pleases you, does it? Now, give us a long parting kiss. Excellent. Oh, my dear girl. So, is Lucille amused by our first day’s battle plan?”

I nodded.

Look. What the heck
else
was I going to do?

WELL
, a routine commenced. He lumbered down them steps, ate hearty amid the clank of silver on crockery. Lively talk, half-bawdy laughs from my two elders. Then off he waltzed to the World of Earn. He left Lucy here in the House of Pay. Left me unprotected from two hundred pounds of dusky grudge presently a-storming round the kitchen below. I’d never wanted a servant to boss.