Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (38 page)

I never before imagined I might meet anybody with their name someplace safe, permanent, on record for as long as the world rolls forwards. The Triplers—Bernie and Olga (see how quick a study I can be when I get all hopped up around celebrities?)—they’d showed Taw’s formula and under it had printed a paragraph—a short one, true, but a paragraph—and in a book for beginners. Someway, that seemed to me better than getting your work wrote up in a rule book for more higher-ups. It meant that this ruined-looking wheezy man had—while teaching college in a small Tennessee hill town—managed to get in on the ground floor of … well, the Physical World, or something.

“How …” I hesitated to make a fool of myself, but then, like always, threw caution aside, just jumped even into physics, feet-first. (Honey, if I kept my dignity safe on every single subject I’m ignorant of, why, I’d never say anything.) “How, sir … did you think it up? Or whatever.”

“One doesn’t ‘think it up,’ Rebecca of Sunnybrook. One
notices.”

(I felt a chill, being, my own self, a fan of noticing.)

“It had been present all along. It only required someone’s saying, ‘There. That,’ and then describing it for the record. It’s not like a work of art. ‘Art is I—science is
us.’
I simply added one more inch onto the temple. This,” he pointed to the tiny equation, four two-storied numbers and a bridging equal mark, “describes the single new thing I observed. But, enough self-promotion. Before you leave, I have two questions for you—Miss, Mrs.?”

“Mrs. but the Mister he done died.”

“More the fool he. First, your name, and secondly, why, oh why are you still in here plaguing me? Did I not tell you to leave? Do you
like
being spat on? Some do, I’m told. Leave, now. Why are you here? Who sent you?”

“Number one …” (I could enter into the scientific spirit, child.) “Name’s Lucy Marsden. To you, Lucille. No, Mrs. Marsden. The Widow Mrs. Marsden. Number two: It ain’t ruptured capiltaries, it’s rouge, intentional rouge. Plus, I’m here because (A) I’m just nosy, which is lucky, because (B) it keeps the air going into and
out
of your nose, and … well, because, well … (D)”

“(C).”

“No, sir, (D). I
meant
(D).”

“You slipped and you’re covering. I can’t abide that. Did you or did you not just now make a slack and probably senile mistake?”

“Yeah, well, it won’t happen again, all right, ashtray mouth?” And I grabbed my book, my Tripler, and reverse-wheelied right out of there.

One thing I remember from my days of flirting and the receded high tide of the lovey-dovey: You got to always leave them feeling your womanly mystery.
Burn
them with it. I figured maybe the first glimpse of me had rekindled a will to live in Taw’s ruined chest. Darling, I wouldn’t of gone back in there, even if I heard the man begging.

Of course, I didn’t. Hear him. All I heard: coughing. As coughs go—if most along this hall sound the size of potholes in the road—Taw’s was the Carlsbad Caverns. You couldn’t believe a man so thin could go down so deep. But, being me and needing this, I even let his cough seem less a tax paid for my visit than some small tribute to it. I’d upset him? Okay. He had noticed he was living, hadn’t he? That’d do for now.

How to explain all this to a person young as you? I figured it’d been a start. Every great journey begins with that first humble bunion. Twenty-one. Well, well.

I REMEMBER
rolling then to our Visitors’ Lounge, nobody around—my powder-blue Tripler pressed against me. I sat staring at the aquarium’s two surviving angelfish. Used to be a crowd in there. The two drifted around and around noplace particular, half studying one another, circling only their earlier circles but at least in there together. A bubbler coughed in gasps considered healthy for sea life. And setting here before green water, hugging my physics like some new Bible, I started to know: I
hoped
for something, and after so long without a plan.

I pictured more purposeful breakfasts, lunches, dinners in Multipurpose. For onct, physics seemed on my side, something held me straighter in my chair.

And odd: I knew that I would have to live a while longer. Just to see how it all turned out. “What is energy?” … Well, partly it’s the central heating system hid inside the question “What’ll happen next?” The most optimistic question in the world!

Something had just changed me. I bent forwards from my chair. I did a silly thing. I pressed my creasy lips against cold glass. First the fish darted off, then calmed each other. Finally they drifted nearer, checking what my mouth was. Food? Maybe something good.

But, darling, why
him?
A yellow crank, a chain smoker who spit on folks? A man who’d lost all but half a lung? Somebody penniless and vain and mean? Still, I’d got interested against my will. I needed to know more. A person she still feels things. I’d seen something I wanted.

DON’T
laugh at me.

D
OC COLLIER
attended me during that first pregnancy and he did fine till my eager-beaver daughter arrived early. Doc was off someplace in the country, hard to trace. And here I was, waddling around the house in socks wet from the water fallen with a great playful weight (like the sound Castalia made that time I tackled her). So I asked a neighbor to fetch Cassie, but quick. I saw her basin first, then the two dark hands gripping it, and all the rest of her came sudden in the door, wider than when last we met, and she clanged the basin down onto the floor beside my bed and pointed at the basin. “Goes in there,” she said then laughed.

Cap had been in the room, I sent him somewhere. Also banished my own mother, who, no good in emergencies, was literally tearing her best hankie to shreds. Both these folks appeared right grateful for Castalia’s presence. I looked up at her holding the brass alarm clock, timing my contractions—totally involved with my lower body, my crowning child, my legs’ position. Cas kept checking from lower Lucy regions to the clock’s face like seeking some family resemblance—but she was not studying
me
. I can’t tell you how relieving I found this, darling, having somebody treat me just … factual. It let me know: Every drunk downtown on Saturday had costs some poor woman nine months, then this. Put it all in perspective. I now wanted to do good for my child and Castalia, in that order. The big woman was in control down there and her sympathy was impersonal. That someway made it feel just enormous, bigger even than skinny me felt: subleased to
a girl child weighing (you ready?) nine pounds and two ounces, and a first child too.

Smarts.

Beneath me, as Cassie got me stooping over the enamel basin white as me and round as Mother Earth, as she got me to squat like black women delivered then—I studied the ivory-colored palms of her black-backed hands. An amazing sight (when, once, I briefly took leave of the pain whilst on the verge of passing out). Beneath me I saw colors—the beet-blue baby’s advancing pliant head, the cord so red it seemed orange, and glossed with my own entrail leavings plus the baby’s packing slop and luster, plus those coal-toned male-sized hands easing a child out of my unlikely! Then pain reclaimed me as raw matter. My entire nervous system went on red alert, and the niceties of coloring lost all charm. Loan-shark oxygen threatened to call back its controlling interest in my lungs’ continuing.

I saw Castalia’s satchel full of items familiar from the closet in my kitchen, the needle and thread now meant something new. She doused a terry rag with wintergreen, she pressed into its fold real mint leaves from her yard and, with my child squalling in my arms, the feel of Cassie’s hands mashing compress across my forehead meant a benediction that could only be delivered by a child-bearing woman to another who’s just managed that. “Thank you,” I said to the ceiling, meaning her. “Welcome,” came her umber voice without a trace of usual irony. But then I knew she hadn’t said “You’re welcome” to my gratitude, she was greeting the little goon in my arms. “Louisa,” I said, “for the lady what wrote
Little Women.”
“Good enough,” Castalia told me. I asked her to say the name out loud to make it real. She did, first to me and then to her, right close near Louisa, who quieted. “She know,” Cas remarked.

“Who
know?,” I needed it again. “Louisa do.” I laid here under mint and wintergreen and how glad I was that Doc had been far out, important and untraceable, in Edgecombe County. Captain and my mother were soon close up, and it hurt me to notice how, between their sides, under their arms, a shape retreated, gathering equipment and stealing towards our parlor. (I’d never wanted a servant around, and I certainly did not want
her
being just a servant.) “Not yet.” I reached toward Castalia’s great cascading mass of back. So these other white adults called her in again, they acted understanding but disturbed. “I still here, not to fret none, Baby Momma.”

“Good. Stay.”

I needed her here to tell me that this strange wizened mewing toadish
… shape
was complete, regular. Human. Just having Cassie’s bulk near the bed let me relax finally, sobbing but not crying, pure release, and a single thought rose up out of my head, child:
This is my house
. I won’t no longer a bartered kid adults could trick or bully. I was the mother to Louisa first and foremost, though I’d never even got to tell the girl one story yet. My child. And lying there, so calmly, I knew: I would kill to keep her being safe with me in a nice white house forever.
Mine
.

Then I saw I had been yelling that. I looked around my bed and my mother wept to see me made a mother with a child helpless as she had been a child. My husband shook his head with pride or shock and his huge Rebgray eyes were wet too. Only Castalia’s burned dry, amused. She was getting a kick out of me yelping
Mine
. I made a face at her. We laughed. It caught the others out.

THIS
I must say:

Having babies is one thing in life I
know
I didn’t make up.

I do have this tendency to embroider on the decent muslin truth. You noticed? My momma was born right well-off, so to me, she’s a heiress. Poppa loved his low pranks—he come to seem nearbout the Mark Twain of the Piedmont. But, if anything, I draw back from overstating the pain and wonder (they can amount to the same thing) of toting then spilling nine six-to-ten-pound young ones. And me myself just ninety-six pounds dripping wet when the waters broke!

How children get here—in my wildest fever dreams, I couldn’t have invented. (If you put it in a made-up book … who’d believe?)

Folks oohed and aahed that somebody skinny as me could have so many children so fast. I figure it’s like a jar of olives, once you get the first worked loose, others topple free more easy.—Folks don’t call it labor for nothing. Only my favorite midwife give me comfort. Any hour of the day or night, Castalia’d come running with her basin, all two-eighty-odd pounds of her on the move PDQ, her yelling, “Hold off, Cassie’s come, goes in here.” That helped. You know how some doctors say a person can’t remember pain from one hurt to the next? Ha. For pain, I got a photogenic memory.

SOON
as each of my children could talk, I started coaching them in their sums and figures. A Normal School teacher once told me I had a real knack for things mathematical. One day and one day only, she swore I was real college material. I run home and told Poppa. He must have thought my teacher said College of Material—wanted to send me off to sewing school in Rocky Mount. Even with that much training, I’d of been extra thrilled.

I always did have a good attitude. That’s been my problem, see. My regrets come not from what I did wrong, but every silly thing I did right. Odd, how all along I figured I was a one-girl rebellion, little Miss Red Mischief. It’s insulting to look back and see: They considered me Miss Easy to Boss. My golden award—if I ever get one—turns out to be: Best Actress in a Supporting Role. And all along they told me it was the starring part!

Meaning, I was a married lady, alone in a house, making the best of it.

SEEMS
the more you learn, the less you know, and five years into marriage I was
still
in bed with Captain Marsden. Still serving under him. During daylight, he could be okay company. His stories got better with practice, a good thing—since he repeated them right often. Times, I liked having him underfoot. Right after breakfast, he’d stand, pull at the double V’s his vest bottom made—then, serious, the man would draw out his platinum pocket watch, set it by our kitchen’s Seth Thomas. There was something in his steady look then, preparing to leave the house for work, not really wanting to—like taking our strength into the world with him. The man could charm a person—little jokes he’d heard. He’d come home from a buying trip and tell the children that he’d seen one farmer who had hogs so skinny the man had to knot their tails to keep them from sliding out the cracks in the fence. “Lucy,” he tipped back in his kitchen chair. “Yesterday I was privileged to meet the world’s foremost sheep counter. Fastest in our nation. I asked his secret and, you know, he actually told it to me.”

Our children, eating pancakes, listened. “And what
was
his secret, Captain?” (We had it down.)

“Man said, ‘It’s easy. I just count their hooves and divide by four.’”