Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (51 page)

Looking down from on high, cross-braced by dark boughs, the face
appears blank as yards and yards of white now drooping long as any christening gown. Lady, so pleased to see somebody she admires, grins, “You’re back. You’ll stay, my dear. I do thank you.”

Castalia, disgusted while half laughing, scrambles up lower limbs. “Wrap youself in this.”

Mistress reaches for the cloth. “But, my dear, it feels … quite wet.”

“That’s cause fire’s hot and dry, you dizzy doo-doo! Cause you so
near
a fire!”

“Clever you. Why didn’t I think of that.” And the Widow Marsden does as told but expects praise for it. Chill brings just one squeal. When horses pound back this way, Cassie clatters straight down—nearbout falling—she’s out in the open, she’s chugging toward a hedge’s encouraging cries. Onct safe, gasping hard, onct screened by lilacs, familiar hands settle all over her—pats, strokes.

WHY
, it might could be asked, are ex-slaves hiding from the very forces come to free them? Good question. It’s partly owing to years of Lady’s talk about the Barbarous Tartars North of Maryland. Partway cause of these black people’s own history with invading forces: example being them whites what slipped up a African river and tricked these souls onto a ship, and over here (Cassie’s tale). So, black people at The Lilacs, while right happy about being freed, whilst plenty ready to believe in a future, still choose to hide, thank you very much. Considering the favors History’s paid them so far, it makes a certain amount of sense.

“She living?” Zelia asks.

“Ain’t dead.” Others snort. Evidence Anne asks, “Did Lady want that sheet so she could play Catacombs?”

“Something like that, baby. She in real deep hiding just now.”

BEYOND
soldiers’ prancy foreground silhouettes, slaves see the barn become a dawn.

Soldiers don’t guess: somebody is listening from fifty foot up a eighty-foot magnolia not twelve foot from where their horses presently paw. Raiders are waiting till the mansion catches proper. Arsonists talk about recent letters from home, about what they plan doing out West onct this running-down war is won. (It’s the usual: Men intend to own everything for as far as the eye can see. America!)

They been being patriotic firebugs for so long, you’d think this chore would tire them. But, honey, fire ain’t ever routine. (Neither is land, water, or air—ask farmers, fishers, weather gals.) Hoping to get better at such house burning, being the type gents that
do
want to own clear to the horizon, they’re yet studying flames’ progress. Improving on the next plantation’s torching, fellows talk about their kids and hearths.

How soon, sugar, the terrible becomes routine. We’ve all got this dangerous built-in talent: for turning horrors into errands. You hear folks wonder
how the Germans could’ve
done
it? I believe part of the answer is: They made extermination be a nine-to-five activity. You know, salaries? Lunch breaks? And the staff came and did their job and went home and ate supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job and went home and ate their supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job.—That’s partly how you get anything done, especially a chore what’s dreadful, dreadful.—Honey? we’ve all got to be real careful of what we can get used to.

ALONE
, hid good, Mrs. M., my mother-in-law-to-be, saw nothing of her barn’s burning, was probably shaking from both fear and the sheet’s chill. I bet she tucked monogrammed percale around her. (Careless, Cas has brung her a guest-room cotton sheet, not the usual silk.) I imagine Lady tried and “toga” the cloth so that, if found here by Yanks or even by Fire, she’d look in charge, “at home.” She had lived forever from the outside in. Ethics started in her morning mirror. “What to
do
about one’s waning looks today?” Now, treed, she has time sufficient to fix the hairdo Z yanked loose. Who’ll see Lady’s toilette now? But Lady can’t. Improve herself. She’s never learned, she’s never had to. She picked a hairstyle that nowdays might be called “labor-intensive.” She can only fiddle with the braids that droop around her face. Now she uses one fine plait to bind the others. Odd to understand, her woven hairdo is semi-African.

Lady E. More Marsden hears the barn’s first roar, thinks about her dead husband, her son away at soldiering. She’s set up so high, the arms are crossed over her knees—she’s like a person in the privy, not exactly thinking, not exactly not, just there.

“Dear,” she says, quiet. “Oh dear my oh me.”

IN ASSIGNING
us the paper, Teacher Beale forced her pupils to imagine War’s effect on everybody it grabbed. Bobo Kingston, class bad boy for so many held-back years that he’d become the class bad
man
, raised one knotty arm and spoke, a bass deep enough to rattle windowpanes. “Even …
Sherman?”

We always tried to trip up Witch. It was a education how we never really could. Everything we considered a good trick question, she named a lapse of the moral imagination. Every trap we set for our beloved spinster, she gladly jumped right into—then she called up at us from the crude pit we’d dug. Witch kept hollering news of cave paintings down there, saying how all Pompeii’s citizens had been made perfect statues by the killing ash and how she could see them extra good from down inside. Grumbling some, we were all soon lowering ourselfs right into the hollow, ready for a tour, even a tour of the grave we’d laid for her.

“Especially
Sherman.
Tout comprendre, tout pardonner
. Are you aware, for instance, gallant Bobo, that Sherman endured such dreadful asthma he was medically required to burn ‘niter papers’ in his tent of an evening just to permit himself to breathe properly? How many of you children personally suffer or know someone who suffers asthma? Fine. Then you’ll feel a bit more for a gentleman in a tent, deprived of oxygen, buffeted by workaday battle smoke. Doubtless you’ve heard, Bobo, how the surrender terms Sherman proffered General Joseph alias ‘Joe’ Johnston in Raleigh, not forty miles from where I now stand and you now slouch—sit up and learn, Monsieur Bobo—were so rife with toleration that Northern newspapers soon branded Sherman ‘Handmaiden to the South.’ Sherman was subsequently jeered during the victory review of Federals through Washington. Yes, history’s never black and white, nor even gray and blue, my intuitive one. There’s always more to know, especially about the villains. Perhaps you all have sensed this from your earliest fairy-tale reading. How bland those virtuous heroines, how riveting, heated, and familiar are the crones and gnomes and witches. No giggling, class. Is Sherman our enemy? You decide. Once we depreciate others as being wholly unlike ourselves, we’ve succumbed to the same flattening they’ve practiced on us. We cannot have enemies if we choose not to.

“I speak from experience as a person who grew up in a town superstitious as the Dark Ages and Old Salem conjoined. Your town. Quite early in my professional life here, a decision required making. Would I view Ignorance as the Enemy, or would I blame the practicing ignoramuses themselves? I hate no one. I hate only stupidity, imprecision. Had I blamed the stupid, the religious, the congenitally vague for their Disease, I daresay I should by now have worn myself into oblivion. The tendency to blame gnaws more readily into the Blamer than the Blamee.

“Concerning Sherman, Mr. Bobo, you, of all my favorite misunderstood people, should surely grasp that villains in the world’s eyes can actually be Lambs, albeit huge Lambs.”

Others chuckled. (Bobo Kingston had him a police record. Peeping Tomism, breaking/entering.)

“So, monsieur, if it is human—and it all is, up to and including a perfect saturated human evil—then it rests within our understanding. If it lies within the bounds of human understanding (and what that is human does not?), then it is, however painfully, forgivable. And should it prove even tangentially forgivable, then we must must must forgive it.”

“Ma’am? I sure as heck wish
you’d
been my last judge down to the Courthouse, but …
Sherman?
Miss Beale? He burned
your
people’s place. I fish out near the chimleys of it.”

“Chim-neys. That’s hardly unique to the family Beale. Children, how many of you lost family property to Sherman’s following orders?”

From a class of thirty, eighteen fists lifted. Eleven-year-old hands, knuckled—these thirty years after. “And how many of you, had chores been
reversed, had you been given similar orders, had you hoped to end the war more quickly and save precious lives by sacrificing mere property, had you been dispatched into Northern regions among its finest homes all conveniently arrayed in a single riverside row, how many of you would have done precisely what Sherman did?”

Bobo’s huge hand shot up first. Then, for good measure, he whipped out the kitchen matches he used to light his home-rolt cigarettes, he struck one in plain sight. Any other Lower Normal School teacher would’ve got Bobo reexpelled just for “matches in class.” Witch Beale only waited for the thing to burn down, to singe Bo’s horny fingers, to make him cuss once then throw it toward our window ledge’s sprouting sweet potato.

“Attention, my War Crimes Tribunal. A confession has been rendered, a life, albeit a Northern one, now rests in your hands. How many choose to exonerate our volatile Goth of a young officer here? Search your hearts, young judges. Here’s one Bobo Kingston, Jr., admitted Yankee arsonist, throwing his life upon the mercy of this our Southern court. Our heritage is infinitely richer in culture and civilized graces than was the winning side’s. Alas, however, our refinement sprang from a feudal system basing the well-being of a few upon the ownership of many. Yet even now we remain a more literate lively culture than the child-hiring factories that vanquished us. Having survived Tragedy’s wheel of fire, we are now ready for new health. This single hope has kept your Old Lady Beale (oh, I know you’ve given me various epithets) coming here to you day after day for these fifty years. I feel it. The Periclean Age is just about to crest, my pillars of the new Doric order. That stated, here languishes the apparent assassin of our riverside hilltop temples,” she gestured.

Bobo set scratching one ear, not able to follow how he’d just become the very guy he’d called the scummiest of lowlifes. Witch stepped over, placed a hand on Bo’s massive shoulder. (She touched us all and often—unlike other teachers.) Now, stroking sad Bobo’s gristle—with Bo half smiling, sleepy-acting—the Genius of Falls Lower Normal asked us, in a slow and glowing final curtain of a voice, “Can you forgive him?”

It carried.

IF SHE
could teach me to cozy up to
Sherman
, seems I might feel more for poor Lady Marsden, treed. The house about to burn was one that I, by marriage, would have owned and occupied. Maybe just the way Bobo hated Sherman (jealous of the General’s pyromaniac free license), I shy away from Lady Marsden. Probably there’s more of Mrs. Priss in me than I feel easy with.

The Book says we’re all dead level in the eyes of God. Our Forefathers claimed everybody’s created equal (of course, by the time you get delivered
nine months later, seems like social class, skin color, looks, and health have pretty much knocked the pins out from under Conception’s fair shake). A decent tale maker should—like the Constitution, God Almighty, or Witch Beale’s philosophy—offer what was once called Equal Opportunity Employment. Except for twists of fate, the villains could, along the way, have become the hero-saints, or vice versa. Versa vice. I want to know what, close to burning, Lady Marsden felt.

It’s our duty, imagining each other.

So, I admit, yeah, I
partway
know what Lady E. More Marsden, out on a literal limb—April 7, 1865, 3:45 p.m.—sat hoping.

SHE
intended to be rescued. (It’s everybody plan.) Maybe she deserved it. (Probably we all do.)

THE HELPER
Lady pictured wouldn’t look like Castalia’s darkling Linking Youth. Maybe Lady’s hero was some knight from Walter Scott or Dumas, the Daddy. Lady lived so accustomed to Service. She sure needed it now. Her saint would share with Cassie’s Christ’s haberdashers’ thorns and blood. But Lady’s feudal warlord would also enjoy her dead husband’s knowledge and surface wit. He’d have the strict Christian nobleness of Robert Edward Lee hisself. Lady’s Man would boast the flashiness of J. E. B. Stuart, the fierceness of Nathan Bedford Forrest (a future founder of the Klan), hybridized with General Mosby’s scholarship, bolstered by Beauregard’s manners—and on and on. Okay … so: Where is he?

Clinging to this trunk, one ear turned toward her Chinese bridge, ready for the tattoo of chivalry’s silver hooves, the mistress can’t help picturing all her nearby rooms. She must know: even He can’t save them now.

Lady Marsden imagines rooms so clear—they might be her own lungs’ brocaded linings, satiny-corridored intestine walls. “My interiors!”

In downstairs chambers, she understands: ain’t too much left but side tables, tacked carpet runners veering room to room and meant to guard her parquet between parties. But on The Lilacs’ second floor and third—everything rests just where it’s been since her dead mother’s time.

Now, holding on to this tree like it might save her (it is
hers
, after all)—forehead pressed to bark the way a lady in her childhood picture book leaned against back armor plates of a saddled knight galloping her off from danger, with the face well masked by Castalia’s wet sheet—Lady’s eyes close, eyes are tearing with first saw-toothed whiffs. Her tree starts rolling, a strange storm of wind currents sucking—scrolling—through the opened lower house. And she hears everything she ever owned start ending.

(When this lady turns in bed at night, when one of her fine bones crackles, she surely knows if it was her elbow or the third vertebra down. Like that, nested this close to furnishings nearly as dear to her as her own skeleton—Lady Marsden reads each pop. Child, her last moments of being so alive become near-miracles of hearing.) You know how lobsters make
no sound till plunged—brightening from black to red—into their final boiling pot? Lady’s things become a martyrs’ choir.