Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (24 page)

“Singing in the house
again?
I believe Castalia done tolt you how nervous that makes the folks what’s forced to be around you all the day. What you want now?”

I explained about a good book’s being gone.

Sighing, mumbling, flats of wrists riding hips, Castalia charged across the lino’s gritty worship-service sugar. She headed for the front parlor, lunged in, turned, stood facing me while thumping one fingernail against a glass-front bookcase. Shelves showed many volumes the selfsame color as the novel I’d described.

“You got you a whole roomful. Why you so set on
that
one?”

HONEY
? Honey, something had to give.

I decided: I’d either get under the brown skin of her secrets or maybe kill her, one. But, considering her girth and energy, I’d surely need help to kill the help.

NEXT
novel, I hid under Captain’s bed pillow upstairs. Got so I really wanted to tattle. On her. To him: “You wouldn’t
believe
the hoops that chunky witch puts me through most mornings.” But, see, that felt cowardly. I had just been a schoolgirl and schoolkids have a code about snitching. Seemed wrong—my going against her, easing over to the Other Side. (And which side might that be? I wondered. The white side? The man side? Boss side? Sunny-side-of-the-street side? And won’t I at least white and the rightful mistress of this gloomy manor? Didn’t I have rights? Why should my acting out my rightful part trouble me so bad?) Call it a overdeveloped sense of justice. My momma’s people were big-time owners. Poppa’s—natives of Bear Grass, North Carolina—they mostly rented (when they could afford to). Odd
it should be the renters of this world that seemed my nearest kin. I dearly hated going over anybody’s head, even over the noggin of a woman daily mangling me with such sleek and growing skill I half admired it.

“There’s reasons,” I muttered aloud some mornings. “There’s reasons,” I still tell myself today. Such a idea ain’t to everybody’s taste. It just means that history interests a person—history being “a few reasons why.” Also means you got a inborn sense of pattern. (Pattern is really just “repetition”—one line is just a line, but forty lines at cross-purposes mean “plaid.” One crank with a fixed idea is a crank, four hundred “a movement.”)

Look, what I’m saying: Seemed I needed me a project. It’d keep a young newlywed organized, might let me finally learn to breathe deep inside my own house or his, or ours, all three of ours. One midnight, I re-decided: My first mission would be tracing one enemy’s twisty route through life. I planned to either figure her or else know why I couldn’t. Lucy’d find Miss Castalia Marsden’s good side or learn why it’d been amputated early and by who.

I sat bolt upright in the bed beside my snorfling rosy pudding of a spreading man. I whispered, “I’ll investigate.” I was picturing myself tiptoeing around Falls by night, a spyglass mashed against my fifteen-year-old’s oily nose. On the trail of—what? maybe that Moriarty Mastermind called Grief, Fate, or Luck or the slippery Past—
you
fill in the blank. What
does
make everybody be so much what they are? Rebs liked to ruin Yankee train tracks, crowbarring metal into silly airborne loops that soon got known as Sherman’s hairpins. What force is always making split ends of our earnest single necessary paths? That’s the very force I planned to trail.

How could I of known that—right then—it was already trailing me?

NEXT
morning, chewing hard, I studied the woman. She sensed the change: “What
you
after, doughface?” I’d become Marse Audubon and her a wild turkey in a low tree.

I understood at least one fact about Castalia of the clashy clothes worn like posters of petition gripes. She was the single person in all of Falls (Cap included) who’d forever let me know
exactly
where I stood with her. All over town, others talked dishonest about money or religion. They denied that their families were farmers new to Falls. Everybody—white or black—lived on the slant about something.

But not her. Only that person yonder, bulldog mean, guarded as a walking fort, ruder than seemed possible in either Carolina—only she might be a fitting model for me—and why? Because she’d already showed herself to be—a genius of a enemy, child. Beloved enemy.

The Civil War and the First World One, those were the last wars where the general of one side kept his opposite general’s portrait in his tent. When he mapped strategy—or even when just at supper by his lonesome, he turned up his oil lamp—he studied the sly and worthy features of his counterpart.

When your enemy—like ours nowdays—ceases having a nose, two eyes,
one mouth, then you got troubles. You’re up against a dervish and a ghost, a evil empire. Me, in my time, us in our time—we were lucky. We knew the shoe size of the opposition.

Castalia tortured me in ways direct and sidelong. (She starched my pillowcase but not his.) And yet I told myself, Castalia never lied. Seemed she couldn’t. Even to save herself. I’d already sneaked a few truths out of Captain: how during plantation days a black girl’s backtalk ofttimes got her whipped, how his own mother loved Castalia best of all because of such steady sass and helpless dignity. And how this made things go way harder on the saucy girl child.

I learned how Castalia ran away from home and managed to get clear to Pennsylvania and how she got brought home in irons and how she rode back to the farm between Yankee bounty hunters, how she rode up the lane past the Big House and how all the other slaves disobeyed stiff overseer Winch and ran to the field’s edge to wave and watch her and how she held her head high like queen Marie Antoinette (if poor Marie had been both noble
and
right). My husband—who I loved more the more he told me about his main slave girl—said how his mother had sent money downstairs—via Uncle Primus, the black butler, on a silver tray—for the bounty hunters but would not “receive” them. How she then called for Castalia at once and how Lady More Marsden ordered her own porcelain bathtub to be filled with hot water and fine oils and with all the gardenia blooms floating virgin-white on top and how she helped the silent sullen springy young black girl to undress and how Lady Marsden cried when the hot water—striking the pink flesh wounds around the young woman’s wrists and ankles—made the strict black girl to suck in air. They both cried—for different reasons, naturally. And finally how Lady Marsden, not caring that the sloshing grimy water had spoiled her own white satin wrapper, finally leaned toward a twisted little tar-black ear protected by its picket of braids, and how she whispered, “I’ll make you anything you like on this plantation. Anything you want to be, now you’re home with me, I’ll make you that, agreed? You desire to replace Primus as head of house slaves? Done. You want to be something other than my body servant? Done too. You care to be in sole charge of the herb garden or my cutting garden? What? Name it, Castalia mine, anything. I fear I perpetually fail to understand you. Don’t leave again. What is it you want me to let you
be
, girl?”

Castalia’s wide mouth was suddenly where her homely little ear had hung and—neck-deep in suds and flowers and balms—her broad dark mouth breathed into the mistress’s pink slot mouth. “Free.”

“That’s not in my power.” The lady of the manor rose from beside the steaming tub. “Anything else. But that, my dear one, is quite, you see, beyond my will. I cannot make you an exception. I can go right up to the very edge of that. But ‘free,’ you’ll understand … if I caved in on that, you see, my much-missed one,
much-loved
one … then where would it end? That’s Solomon blind in the temple. When that the keystone goes, it all falls. Bluntly
put, it’s you or me, and much as I’ve pined for your company and much as I admire how far you got from me, I still choose in favor of
moi-même
, I fear. If and when that changes, you shall, I promise, be the very first to know, Cassie mine. Now—welcome home—such as it is, and do enjoy the remainder of your bath.”

“Castalia,” Castalia said to the retreating white-satin back. “Castalia she appreciate you being blunt. That good. ‘You or me.’ That show you learned something from Castalia’s taking off and all.”

A maid to
us
now, Castalia still expected all of this, and daily. Her redbird worship hinted at some long wait still honored. Sometimes, child, I’d catch her—arms crossed, head tilted, face glazed—but perked like listening to a sound starting from far off and maybe getting nearer. She’d be studying the big round kitchen clock. Something on her massy features told me she won’t listening to the past then—but was scouting for the future. Any future.

So few folks I knew then (and even fewer now) believed in a future. I never did. My Sherman’s hairpin mind figured out that all the good clues really rested back yonder. I imagined over my shoulder back to Carolina 1840–80 as the source of anything we might expect ahead. But her? she yet believed that something good was due her, just around time’s bend. Next month, next decade.

Here she was, waxing and sweeping for others. She was already in her early fifties maybe—though she looked decades younger than my man. But instead of feeling shortchanged, Castalia’s long, long wait seemed to half prop up her hopes. Sure, her doubts were plainly huge as these here hopes, both had long since widened like her body. Her hope upset me, like her four square inches of beauty did. I wanted to shake her, ask, “What are you waiting for? Don’t you see it’s over? Where’d you learn to believe like this? Notice what’s happened to you. Wise up.” Something about her holding out for the impossible reward—it made me mad for her, then
at
her. I seemed lucky but felt so little joy in it. She had so doggone little, and yet there was some quality like royalty waiting to return in glory to some deserved throne. I can’t explain it, not exactly. But I did notice, child.

Not since I composed school papers for the late great Witch Beale at Lower Normal, not since those history assignments drove nosy kids like me into asking frenzies, not since then had Lucy so wanted to know a set of facts. And this much come clear as I sat up in bed that midnight staring straight at (and into) darkness: If I could figure out Castalia, I’d maybe know more about my husband here beside me. If I could ever get half under the rock of him, my own foreground would sure be a clearer row to hoe for life.

So, beneath all of it, I had personal Lucy easement at heart. I don’t admit this, child, for apology—I mention it to brag. History is self-interest.

Even then I saw that my own stake was with the others. Harry Houdini—lowered in some bank safe into a river—didn’t wait till
then
to figure out the lock. He’d worked on that while still safe on dry land. He did his homework
before being lowered to likely death. I would now do mine. I had a hunch that us three—him, Castalia, me—Wynken, Blynken, Nod on this unlikely life raft, we all someway/somewhere overlapped. We would go down together.

I felt it even then—a Mississippi of ice water waiting far, far ahead.

I had my work before me. I had my wits about me. Now …

NEXT
morning, my head full of her that day’s color scheme: salmon pink, cobalt blue, turquoise, and silver jewelry, the pale purple of a foxglove’s throat, I set about my crude detective work outside the home.

And Nancy Drew Her Own Conclusions, sugar.

Castalia always did marketing on Mondays. I announced I would be downtown and shopping too. “Do tell,” she muttered. She was putting on her tiniest hat, red. (The dressier the occasion, I noticed, the more Carter’s Little Liver Pill-sized did Castalia’s hats shrink.) I followed her outdoors, she hadn’t said I could but didn’t quite forbid it. Once, midstride halfway to the Courthouse Square, she spun around and stared my way. Basket looped over one wrist, she set heavy hands on stouter hips and rolled her overexpressive eyes, showed total disgust with tagalong me.

“Free country,” I announced from thirty feet.

“That what
she
think!” come the tired answer.

Her wicker shopping basket looked suitable for carting home a living goose or John the Baptist’s head, unshampooed. When Castalia Marsden stormed into a shop, causing the door’s bell to ring with extra alarm, one moment’s silence fell among the salesgents in their boaters and aprons. Smiles faded, jokes hung open like drawbridges halfway there.

She shut the door behind her like preventing any other customer from ever getting in here. Closing time, and she’d best be treated right. Castalia seemed to possess blackmail material on every white (and black) salesclerk in this town. (As a possible former beauty, as the total recall of all other maids’ gossip for three counties and fifty-some years, plus a darned good guesser, Castalia controlled whatever dirt could be dug up on most all males in buggying distance. Her first glance at salesmen said, “Who you kidding?” Her glance said, “All males are guilty until proven guilty.” Weird enough, I noticed, menkind sure seemed to agree. They gave back sheepish looks or tense ones. But innocence? they knew not of, to go biblical for a sec. And if the man
hadn’t
erred quite yet, Castalia could determine exactly what he’d do
if
allowed. This was power, darling. She carried a headful of which girls’ or even boys’ hindquarters this one strapping church-deacon dude at the counter
had
been known to check out whenever he believed—mistakenly in fishbowl Falls, North Carolina—the coast was clear. Castalia’s knowing this part gave her lots more clout. Was another way of believing in the future—
her prediction of each upcoming crime and carnal fall. Her counting on his
knowing
that she knew!)

This meant, among other stuff, that Castalia got—in stores, from such men—real deals.

I learned this on my Monday number one.

The white butcher served her
before
helping a waiting Caucasian lady—and all while he gave Mrs. Whitey a silent look that hinted, “I’ll explain later. You’ll thank me for getting her out of here first.”