Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (61 page)

The boy only hurries here because he knows it’s hers.

When he has got six, now five feet from the glass: a standing giant in gray looks back at him. The beast is half again as tall as Child Willie should be. Like him, it turns aside, but way too slow. A uniformed shape is on its hind legs. Sad part: You can tell by the creature’s vexed face—it wants something better. You can someway tell it plans to try and maybe school itself back towards being … what? … half human again. The creature’s eagerness sickens Will the most. If only, like that great Bible King, this thing would simply go down onto all fours, would just eat grass, be done with trying. Willie Marsden presses the real beard of it. Yes, it’s a boy’s thin beard. Yellow furse shows three cockleburs tangled in. Will slides one hand clear through a great rip in the outgrown tunic. He touches something’s left nipple—this mark seems some one-of-a-kind defect.

And people have noticed him like this! Throughout two ex-Reb states, during steady hiking—strangers have been viewing this for free. The shape is worse for being—these long weeks—such a secret to itself. “When miniés stopped flying, did I think I’d gone transparent? Coming through towns, everybody stared so.—Now you know why, Willie boyo.” And he understands, this is exactly what his absent mother would reel from first. Having
others
see her at a loss, that always grieved Lady worse than any loss itself. If people gaped at her too long, and even in a manner too admiring, she’d inhale, “What?”—she’d touch herself as if some secret stain was giving her away.

During battles, for comfort, Willie Marsden decided war had one hidden advantage: Yeah, he’d almost lost a leg to the surgeon’s overeager saw. True, his side’s army—after giving up so much for victory—went and sacrificed the war itself. Fact, he’d lost his friend, his friends. But at least there was this: He’d found the terrible cure for Marsden family vanity. Might be war’s single benefit.

Willie recalled his daddy’s self-justifying scholarship—Dr. Marsden’s pleasure with his own mildness (a person can be proud of anything). Will
knew his momma’s high-handedness about her music, her beauty—things she expected the world to daily help her improve upon. Walking home, the boy told hisself: At least something good has sprung from all this ruination. At least—along with everything else—he’d finally lost
his
share of the inherited vanity.

But now his mother’s mirror tells Willie M.: His present case is maybe forty times worse than the one he marched away with.

Understanding he’s gained nothing from these three years, what breaks across the side of his neck, against the brunt of Will’s forehead, is so strong a shame he feels a moment’s blindness. Needing steadying, he reaches for the quarter’s wall.

IT’S THEN
that he hears something shift.

Something else alive has claimed this room. It has made a burrow of sheets in the tabby hut’s corner. Crimped breath can now be heard to rattle behind the mirror. Will’s war reflexes come back so swift—knees dip, weight’s center lowers, arms fling out, stick hoists off the floor—gone from cane to cudgel in one instant. The boy half stoops, primed for danger even before noticing the sound as sound. Will is about to leave the mirror (glad to), he’s ready to sidestep his reflection and check behind the glass.

When three dark fingers curl around its frame.

The boy all but cries out.

By dodging behind glass, Will finds—huddled in deeper shadow here—a prickly swaddled shape. Its matted eyes reflect all the daylight streaming from behind him. This creature acts so frightened by the staff he holds, he throws it willingly down. But the noise of wood striking flagstone floor makes the victim draw in even tighter.

On a filthy cot, she smells the way we all would if we just quit on niceties, admitting being animal. A rank gamy lanolin sweetness—like original sin. And about as hard to shake, child. Shouldn’t people at least get to naturally smell like … lilacs, minimum. That too much to ask? She clutches a picture frame against her chest, holds it like some shield or crucifix. The granny-woman tilts back, gasping. Her head looks sheared. The face shows black blisters, partly healed. Her body needs washing so bad—it’s gone gray-brown as a fresh-dug potato’s jacket. Knowing she’s been uncovered, the crone makes even worse pleading sounds. Her tone itself plainly asks, “Don’t hurt me more.”

She has failed to know him.

And, child, he don’t know her.

Stepping inches nearer, Willie first believes this squaw to be vague Old Zelia, finally unstrung like folks’d long predicted. Then Will takes this person for some mad black stranger, hiding out from damage suffered elsewhere. He leans over the hurt one. “It’s all right,” a baritone echoes in this stone vault, half surprising him. She curls deeper under one sheet, she pulls further
into the corner, frowning from the hurtful white light framing him. Her face’s whole left side is mashed flush to plaster, her one visible eye bugs out so, blinking. He can hear the wet eye snapping, snapping.

Will wants to help the creature. He’s not certain how. She moves—one fist yet gripping the gold frame. Her other pulls the sheet aside. She’s naked underneath—he hadn’t planned to look at her, it. But the boy’s too curious about a signal she keeps making.

She shows him small burned breasts, keeps pointing at her neck. She tips here, quaking. Something like a laugh keeps breaking through her, blurring features to a smile, baring her blacked gums. She signals and signals at one side of her throat. Will’s own tired mind moves so slow today—but he begins to understand: this person is so beaten, so at the end of hiding—she is exposing her jugular to him. She presses against plaster, racked by small spasms like giggles, ones she fights in a manner almost genteel, grinning behind her hand in a way that sickens him for being someway familiar. Head tilted left, she’s offering this shaggy upright beast the right to end her.

“No,” he says. Meaning: I won’t hurt you. But a marveling sound echoes in his own voice, gets his own attention. And it’s only now that Willie sees—just where this person’s shoulder meets her throat—how the crusted darkness gives way. In one protected seam, a paleness. First, it appears to be a scar. Then, slow, Will begins to understand that all the rest is—scar. That this poor raddled creature has been fully scalded down to this—rendered—down down the way fat’s reduced to make candles, soap.

It’s now: The locked muscles of a boy’s knees give. Will seems to fall some inches while yet standing. He says just, “No. Not,” and turns aside.

She stares up at him.

Then he speaks, but to the wall. “—Not you?”

She seems to understand. Slow, he risks facing her. She begins to nod. She soon offers big-eyed head-wagging child nods. One blacked finger then taps warped glass. She keeps pointing to a family motto in Latin. She gives off small asking sounds. It’s soon plain she wants this read aloud to her. Will learned the legend by heart at age five. So, moving like somebody old, settling onto the stone floor beside her unclean cot, he quotes it and loud, and with some great simple patience seeming older than a boy’s.
“Morus tarden moriens moru cito moritum
. ‘The family members, like the leaves of the mulberry tree, shall perish, but the tree shall live forever.’”

Seeming strengthened, not onct touching him, she throws her feet over the cot’s edge, takes up her own walking stick, motions he should follow. Willie has not even brushed against her—he feels afraid to, child. Seems one squeeze from him might crack her to a hundred ashy bits.

She now leads him on a tour of ruins. He keeps close behind her. Under the one bedsheet, she’s quite naked. Scar tissue gleams across her back. Willie, staggering, numb now, hopes he will eventually forget to be shocked. Please. He tries so hard to forget the crippling family pride. (His only hope now is to lose that, quick.) He can plainly see how his mother moves.
Barefoot over gravel, she goes forward in a scurrying heedless way, so determined. Helpless against it, she’s grown right rangy, taking no care over how she looks, not understanding that. Now that Lady has started living from the inside out, and not the outside in, she’s become visible to him. She looks like a body turned inside out, flayed then tanned as saddle leather. But, odd, only with her broken like this, does the boy see how strong she has forever been. “My mother.”

Her readiness to be so hurt while agreeing to stay on, alive—it seems to Will the strangest miracle of all. (A woman whose idea of luxury was forever resting, chattering, fanned by others, blindfolded with silk.) He almost feels sorriest for her first self.

And Willie, following, head down, aware mostly of his own breathing, now feels a prickling light his scalp.
Now
he feels the deepest pride set in. That’s it—he feels so proud. Proud that—even rendered down to this—his mother’s found no choice but to stay alive, to really really want that. Cooked stupid, she has noticed her life.

Trailing Lady, studying his own hurt feet, Will needs to know: How has she eaten? Who has tended her? Willie guesses she has made this tour daily for the many weeks since everything was leveled. From a barn’s coals to the flattened summerhouse and back, she scuddles. She seems to feel that by watching each site hard, she can maybe bring each back to life—can maybe teach them by her own example. She says nothing, she leads her son past a browned lilac hedge three-quarters killed by fire.

At each blackened foundation, the woman props herself up on her stick. Like at the stations of a tour, she makes such pitying sounds. Finally, faltering onto the stone porch, she points, lets the stick’s end drop, stirs ashes still smoking in some spots. Seems she hopes to offer each pile the will to rise. Lady keeps going, “Unnh. Unnh.”

“Yes,” he says like to a child. “All gone.—You do know me, don’t you, Momma?—It’s Willie. It’s over. I didn’t get killed. I’m home. I can see it’s you.”

They’re both standing on the stone veranda of nothing. When he speaks this, the second he says it—she nods to show she’s recognized him, to prove there’s still a little memory left—which means a bit of hope.

And it’s just now that both these people seem released—sprung like from some trance that’s run years too long. It’s now that Lady E. More Marsden finally shoves away a stick that’s held her up and, spinning, drops toward flagstone. With what great glad energy, she falls. Will catches her, but must break her toppling by going down hisself. Even in collapsing, their hands are on each other. And only when all possible falling is done can they sob. They do and do. It might sound comical to you, child, if you yourself had never cried. You have.

To them, these noises are more satisfying for sounding like beasts’—just so many gulps, brays, yelps. Sounds are way below anything as dignified as language, far under the best hopes of a civilization refined as theirs was.
They keep pulling at each other, one trying to jolt the other like fighting to recollect some important errand they both at least recall forgetting. With un-words—her in peeps, him in strange broad trombonish blasts—how they comfort each other!

Sun begins to try and set. Barn swallows still spin around blacked chimneys. A May breeze rises. On the third-floor mantel among intact figurines, one French clock’s pendulum is stirred by wind. Unexpected—the bedchamber’s white onyx timepiece, all sooty now, gives three unasked-for gongs, then falls still. The two former owners below, they laugh at its happening. They chuckle and hoot, they cackle together. And scream together. And scream.

NEXT DAY
, wearing a overcoat some neighbor has lent him, riding that neighbor’s only mule, Will turns up at Falls’ best boardinghouse—he carries a child-sized person wrapped in a borrowed quilt so that nobody might see her and laugh. After his bossly trip to the livery stable to announce he’s back and has lived through it all and is taking over—he soon fills his mother’s rooms with what furniture Castalia’s managed to save, masterpieces she hoped to maybe sell for herself, or maybe peddle to her former owners, but certainly to save, which she has done. Was a warehouse’s worth and though it yet smelled of the great fire, it all got packed with Chinese box-in-box skill into double rooms, chairs handstanded upside down on chairs, mirrors making much of far too much to start with, chandeliers like great marine catches hung up for dockside drippish weighing.

And, thirty years later, it’s just me, a stubby pigtailed schoolgirl knocking on that door, three sharp pencils slippery in one hand, a list of hard-strict questions (don’t push me) bunching in my other. I’ve come, ready to pull from the Mummy and others such rude facts as braid and latch and link semi-together till—it becomes this story I’ve just told.

BLACK
, white, and lilac. Well, darling, I got me a Satisfaction Minus. Miss Beale never did give a Satisfaction Plus, not in her whole half century of teaching here. When Emily Saiterwaite (hooked on teacher praise) asked why not, Beale only replied, “Satisfaction Plus, in
this
godforsaken bush-league wilderland?”

I didn’t even mind the Minus all that much. Poor grammar was ever the millstone/albatross strung around my neck.

“While Lucille would patently prefer unbridled narrative to the discipline of composing a history theme, one nonetheless senses she has posed many difficult questions to many willing persons from various walks of life and has made, from all she’s gathered, this lurid showy pie. True, she fails to use the semicolons required but the pupil does attempt an organization involving a three-color scheme. She hopes, This Reader believes, to demonstrate how relative our moral standards truly are, how war can reverse forces even so seemingly immutable as the planet’s very colors. Perhaps
Lucille collaborates with history too readily—as if its terrible pageant were being daily staged to simply amuse, horrify, and entertain our little friend. Even so, she has spared herself no end of legwork. Lucille has, I believe, when it comes to the spirit of events chronicled here, entered in. With Lucille’s theme, as often occurs in both my own historical vision and in History itself, I am left wondering what worse could possibly happen next. Seemingly, something always does, does it not?—Lucille’s acknowledgment of suffering as a constant, argues, I believe, the beginning of this child’s compassion. Therefore—dear one—Satisfaction Minus.”