Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (22 page)

Once when I was a real little girl, I came upon Red at sunset in the alley behind his small store. Mr. Chow sat on his back step eating noodles from a bowl, sat stitching these into his mouth via two sticks. Food moved, a steady white lanyard, threading one tailor’s mouthy buttonhole. He sat unseen, nicknameless, non-smiling, glasses off, blinkish, curled there, staring out at a daisied cowfield, Meadows’ Pasture, which is now the interchange of US 64 and Interstate 95. He was so alone and just blank. Imagine living thirty-odd years away from family and, maybe worse, hidden from your own language. I felt his daydreams to be far-reaching as a Chinese scroll stitched every inch by hand, gift-wrapping the world from here to his birthplace. He never saw me. I ran home as fearful as if I’d come upon somebody naked, somebody naked and hurt. That’s our tailor.

We now clatter past “Works of Bert—Blacksmith of Choice. Bert … Prop.” Rental horses pull us under the arching brag of Bert’s wrought-iron masterpiece. It’s a mammoth sign made after being described by our twelve-member City Council. It spans two lanes of traffic—its motto greets shoppers and likely water fountain users. This major example of the smithy’s riveting art will later grace Falls’ only postcard. The thing is black iron filigree and its legend cannot be easily read against a nighttime sky. Notice Bert’s fine work, the Eiffel Tower’s crosshatched conviction, Old English lettering cut from heavy-gauge sheet iron. Several letters are now half blocked by sparrows’ beardy nests that, tonight, give our arch a certain Wild Man of Borneo carnival look.

Thing says:

Bad children steadily dare each other to spoil the sign but cleverly. Considering a half ton of bolts, nuts, and sprockets, you never hope to remove even one comma that’ll surely outlast even Judgment Day’s full stop. Instead us kids cover certain letters with cardboard. You force exposed words to spell what
you
want.

The best such stunt I recall eclipsed much of the line “Get the Smartest of World Merchandise, Leave Your Cares in Falls.” It soon read: “Get … Smart … Leave … Falls.” I doubt that Mr. Da Vinci, after putting final touches on his Mona Lisa, received more backslapping credit in li’l downtown Vinci (Italy) than did our young rapscallions the morning after.

“How’d it even
come
to you, Junior?”

“Oh, simple, nothing much. I saw it in a golden dream from God, is all. Why?”

The culprits were mildly scolded but not before our Mayor admitted, yeah, it’d been a “pretty good one.” He honored the sheriff’s request to let this one instance of hooliganism stay up through the weekend. White farmers and black sharecroppers were soon streaming into town and doing the turn-of-the-century equivalent of taking Polaroid pictures:
looking hard
, then shaking their heads and
looking hard
again.

Boys were famous clear to Monday morning. Weekend business jumped by fifteen percent.

When electricity came in later, a natural first downtown project: let’s go light Bert’s sign with 450 tungsten bulbs! The forward-looking shop-teacher who’d rigged the thing climbed overhead for the grand illumination. A good-sized evening crowd gathered. The line around the water-bubbler shrunk briefly. Adults stood open-mouthed, practically panting for a suitable Edison-Ford-type display of Future Progress. Oh how we believed in today’s silvery Now whilst sunk back there in that mud Then!

Our metal monument was jungly with primitive wiring, all voices hushed. The trim young manual-arts teacher perched proud there, winked down at his delighted bride who’d hired a photographer out of her own pocket. The teacher signaled, the cameraman aimed, and somebody hit the power switch. Our future-looking citizen (ignorant of how short a fuse said future really has) learned something sudden about the glamorous jeopardy of a coming age. We all discovered that this particular iron made a pure conductor. The teacher was killed—instantly, so I’m told. The photograph, of a molten lightning bolt boiling mushroom-shaped above midtown, proved overexposed. WW I lay dead ahead. If we had kept that photo of pure light, pure release and rage, we might’ve learned something urgent: a brochure for the coming Spectacle. But who ever learns at the time, child?

The sign survived its un-illumination. In metal’s twistiness and stubborn lace, in the way Bert made its edging of six hundred used horseshoes’ doily toothsome rows, you could see the man’s lifetime of shoeing beasts, his years spent fixing hay balers and, during hard times, making simple doorstep bootwipes. You saw all the rivets Bert ever put into any busted item that’d looked too weak to accept even
one
mending tack. That doggone Bert! Gigantic yet tender. (Hardly able to speak three-word sentences, he had once, at age ten, made some baffled girl a Valentine card out of shredded lard cans,
metal.)
Bert was blessed with the hidden heart of a artist clanging in him like All Saints Episcopal’s pure bronze bell. Why Bertram, a bachelor living with Mom till age forty-two, later went and did what he did to the youngest Harbison boy—no, the second from the youngest—that’s anybody’s guess.

But Bert’s metal message outlived even his own endless prison term. He eventually slipped free of four federal prisons. Iron bars were his pals, his joy, and hobby. They yielded as the younger Harbison (a beauty, everyone admitted) had not. Bert could’ve given Houdini lessons. Once loose, he got recaptured listlessly. It was the challenge, really. He
had
to be working with metal. Escape was just his latest excuse. Finally the Feds wised up as a homespun ballad, “The Legend of the Slippery Smithie,” gained favor in state pens clear to Canada, a song that brought on a faddish spate of files in pies. Feds stuck Bert in solitary in a new cell, entirely cement. He stayed right beside its only metal, one iron doorlatch he kept stroking. But that was only three inches square, just a pig-iron alloy, impure and not enough to sustain an artist. Cut off from the Gilded Age, Bert let cement’s damp hit him like rusting guilt itself. Nostalgia for the grandly metallic took poor Bert off quick.

“Get … Smart … Leave … Falls.” This I recalled my first night home, minus a hymen. Was poor Bert telling me something?

I’LL STATE
what’s overevident: Hell hath no fury like a servant wronged.

I’d charged onto the scene just in time to catch grief for Miss Castalia’s years of Marsden slavery. But me?
I’d
never owned her. Never rented her. Never really wanted her in this house. “Hi,” I had grinned. Well, honey, that didn’t exactly bowl her over with my charm. So I decided, I’d learn hard facts, but quiet and eventual. The one wise thing to try at the start: Keep well out of this storm cloud’s way. I called myself “darling” a lot then. “Darling Lucy? now you just let this Castalia person get used to having you around, okay, darl? Only fair. She’s got definite seniority. Then, gradual-like, maybe the two of you will make peace. A little Appomattox coffee sipping at that kitchen table. Right, darling? Right.”

I was fifteen. Fifteen means: in a hurry. Fifteen and lonely in a big house, that makes you in a extra hurry.

I thought the founding of our major friendship might take us, oh, three weeks to a month, tops.

Live and hope.

THE WEDDING
presents were yet lined on borrowed banquet tables in my parents’ parlor. People still arrived to look at them. In Captain’s place, two blocks away, I felt myself to be a convict remembering some former freestyle life.

I was shut up alone all day, feeling bartered and nicked. I was visited by my legal parents on Friday-night state occasions, and then only with my husband’s advance permission. Captain chaperoned my time with them. I’d been a wife fully two weeks. My folks were eating here at the Captain’s house and I was expected to ring a little bell that meant Castalia should come in and clear away our soup bowls. I jiggled the bell once, wincing at how bossy four inches of silver can sound. In she barged through the swinging door, her wide back hitting it with such a slap, my folks both jumped. I grinned, worried. I tried and help Castalia lift my soup plate and, in doing so, knocked over the bell and dropped my napkin. “Oops,” said I. Captain and Poppa were talking about a sewage bond issue or something fascinating like that. Mother stared at Castalia, not trusting her a inch. Momma—victim of a childhood accident involving blacks—swore Good Help was impossible to get now, postbellum. And Castalia, stooping beside me to retrieve the napkin, was whispering hot against my ear, “Touch that ding-dong one more time tonight, gal, you done for, hear me?”

“Ah-ha,” I said, and I giggled.

Next course change, I rose, pushed toward the kitchen. Cap asked why I didn’t just ring (he’d trained me before my folks showed up). “This seems less formal-like,” I smiled. Momma groaned.

I swung open the portholed door. “Castalia, if it’s convenient, I believe we’re about r …” At the stove, back half towards me, she was wolfing down what looked to be three doughnuts at onct. She meanwhile held two ceramic redbirds near her face. Mouth white with powdered sugar, she’d been whispering to them birds. “Oops,” went I. “Fish course’s done.” She turned full on me, her eyes each offered me a separate hex. My destiny itself went cross-eyed.

She had to swallow major portion of doughnuts but, gulping done, she spoke in bass tones. Her mouth let powdered sugar fly before it like them big-faced snow-blowing Winters you see—full-cheeked in the upper left corners of old maps. Mouth said, “Ever hear of knocking, brought up … barn?” Then the mouth chewed more, more.

I DIDN’T
like to whine to my husband concerning a certain person’s domestic sniping. I was afraid my Captain would stop liking me—I was afraid he’d keep
on
liking me.

From my upstairs windows, I’d see other girls my age go idling towards the schoolyard’s swing set. They looked up at this house. I hid behind new eyelet curtain, ashamed to be envied and lonely, both.

Eager to get myself a schedule (besides recalling a bearded gent every time Seth Thomas chimed), I soon noticed what other married ladies did at this tony end of Summit. For now I copied them. Desperate, a body tends to fall back into lockstep, hoping to blend in whilst trying and gather strength for later’s wild lunge elsewhere. (Running-away-from-home already interested me.) Wives of young Summit lawyers and businessmen tended to read novels from two to four each afternoon. (Reading a novel
before
breakfast was considered a wickedness done only at the bawdy-house four miles from Falls, a establishment known as Miss Pettibone’s Young Christian Ladies’ Academy pour les Arts Equestriennes. More about which later.) So early in my job as Mrs., who was I to argue with daily novel reading? Seemed a form of playing that wouldn’t let all Falls see you shinny up some sap-covered tree in your best dress.

After lunch, once Cap had hiked back downtown to work (oh, how happy I grew—seeing him charge in around one, full of news of dollars, generous with low stableboy jokes), off I’d run to hide in a dark front parlor.

I lifted the book before my freckled face. Street sounds held me for a while: the Thorps’s yardmen (identical twins) raking in rhythm. Some child rolling her metal hoop along our sidewalk. But soon these ribbon sounds fell away like lines allowing one soft dark hot-air balloon to rise, drifting free. Words on the page had just quit being words, were panting past language into that breathing life of their own when—uh-oh—I spied the many crystal baguettes in our chandelier get to shifting, tremblish overhead. Soon they chattered like molars left at large in Antarctica. By now, all I held was a husk of paper, coded squiggles stamped across it. Could’ve been Egyptian Braille. I’d only lost: meaning, fun, my place forever.

Into the murky parlor, one huge shape comes thundering, its back toward me. This wide person starts sweeping—up dust flies all over my reading room. Said person gets within six feet of my chaise (where I hadn’t been hurting a fly, only trying to please). Hearing me shift while fighting back a sneeze from the sudden dust—she jumps about three feet straight up, one hand clamped against her independent bosom.

“Oohf,” she snaps, “you sure give
me
a turn.… If it’s one thing Cassie hate, it be a sneak, sneak.”

Accused, of course, I closed my novel, one finger marking my place.
Again I apologized. I asked for lessons. Maybe I could learn … to cook?—or even do dishes, anything. My mother (a glutton for housework herself) hadn’t prepared me so hot. Couldn’t I help Miss Castalia around the house, please?

“You?” She grins, looking me over. “Help?”

Then Castalia rumbles out, muttering about underhandedness, pure-tee laziness. “Lucy, darling, give her time,” I told myself. The crosser Cassie treated me, the more honorary “darlings” I issued my own self. In silence, deeply personally alone, I soon grew right obnoxious with those.

Since Castalia jumped at the sight of me every afternoon for weeks, got hard to believe I’d surprised her all that much. I begun worrying: Maybe Peace won’t going to come so easy as I’d thought.

Along with English novels full of mist and manners, I snuggled up and read my husband’s boyhood letters from the front. They made me feel different about the charming fifty-one-year-old who had lunch with me, who lifted my nightgown’s hem from behind without exactly asking. The ink was brownish red like pokeberries or blood. Words’ plainness was the plainness I still saw sometimes in good gray eyes across the oilclothed table from me.