Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (67 page)

I heard them stop their long crawl up. Then, without one little gripe (God bless them), I felt both souls ease, branch by branch, back down to me, towards ground, and breathing a bit longer.

To this day, I don’t know if he’d of hurt them. It was something I felt. And listen here, I knew him, didn’t I? I knew and know that man.

When they dropped back into my sight, I expected they’d act peeved. They each bolted over and held on around my hips—like they’d been scared all during and were just waiting for some order stronger than the old man’s.

Well, we all stood on firm ground, shaking as a group. Well, when he seen how they’d turned back, had tricked him and were safe on land with me, oh the things he said.

Older children hid their eyes, like that’d help shield them from what he bellowed at us from on high. He was rocking side to side, the whole tree rustling, creaking, pitching with a man’s unnatural weight up top. He yelled I was a turncoat, a lady Yankee spy that’d helped them burn his family’s place, a camp follower, worse. Then he let limbs go. One hiss covered him. Bits of bark came sifting down on us. No telling how long we waited. It was so hot. The end of a long humid summer. We stood. We sat. I saw Ned notice a whitish rock he wanted to collect but felt too polite or fretful to go after. “Grab it,” I told him, and he smiled, dashing over.

Finally we heard Captain start his own glum climb downwards. Whole flakes scuffed off the sycamore’s wallpapery trunk. Bark drifted down before our upturned faces like so many ashes or diplomas. Parchment all around us. First his black-buttoned shoes bobbled into view, then dark mud-crusted pant legs, striped jet-black silk socks, and then the rest of him. On the tree’s far side, away from us—he fell, landing square and heavy, one wet thud.

When he rose up, the man looked over one shoulder, his back to all of us, him muttery, bent in. The face looked puffed, ruddy from being so angry, like some venom had worked loose in him. He hunched over something. He had cut a piece of the harness to carry home. Kept holding it close up to his chest and beard, like we planned to steal it. He moved twenty feet across a clearing, stood guarding the thing like a splinter from the Cross itself.

I figured he needed time alone. I told him, We’ll be waiting in the Ford.

“Don’t
leave
me,” he spun our way, voice pained, pure child now.

“Won’t,” I promised—stepping nearer, playing totally unscared. “None of us can drive it, remember?”

We’d waited an hour and a half (Ned had gathered half the white rocks of Virginia). Cap finally turned up—breathing like he’d swum that lake. He smelled of bottom mud, his face looked neutral. He held the harness mashed between two hands like some small life he’d trapped.

THE WHOLE
trip home, Cap said nothing. Didn’t eat. The children tried to keep hushed but that lasted about ten miles and who can blame them? Usual noise gave me such comfort now. I listened to many wayward bits of their jabber. Baby was trying to make her baby talk understood. “Baby
miss,”
she repeated a good bit. Not easy to make out, yet forever poised, that one. The others teased her. She seemed pretty able to take it and I soon quit fighting for her. Cap stopped at diners now, not groceries. Didn’t seem to care about saving money anymore. Whilst we ate, staring (guilty) out the restaurant window, he’d stay right at the wheel, like being another part of the car. Underway, he went slower than before, a perfect driver, with that bit of leather clamped betwixt his wide red fist and the black steering wheel. After we’d finished our diner breakfast, Ned or Lou or me had to step before the Model T and crank the motor, get her going. Cap would not climb out. Them whole two days bound home, I never once saw him go to the bathroom.

We started seeing landmarks we knew. I hoped he’d turn, by degree, more into hisself again. The children commenced pointing at things. “I
knew
that was over there,” Ned boasted as we rounded a curve. A fancy lattice gazebo on a farm lawn—six funny whirligigs spinning at its six corners, one little jigsawed farmer chopping wood, another cow-milking—all inspired by wind into a joy of blurred enameled moving parts. Then, one half-burned barn. A low creek without no name. These all felt famous. To me and us they did. I loved hearing the kids predict sights I thought that only I had noticed. I recalled my honeymoon return. I remembered my own husband’s long walk from Virginia wearing hand-rolled tow-sacking shoes, fifteen, every step a decision. We passed four charred chimneys of the Marsdens’ spoilt plantation home. Captain, our Captain—speeding us back into civilian life—man never even glanced The Lilacs’ way.

Finally just outside Falls’ Baby Africa, Castalia’s place. Unmatched non-painted shanties seemed to have grown in a circle the way mushrooms’ll spring up after May rain. Her house’s wood had silvered to the color of a nickel. She’d made her outhouse from a Bull Durham backstop thrown out of the ballpark. Its sides showed a salad of red paint and chopped lettering. Gave you something to read whilst sitting in there.

Cassie had kept expanding the stilted mink cage herself. It grew by seasons like big wasp nests do. Thing now wrapped around her shanty—so she could hear whenever dogs stopped in to run the minks, make them lose weight and dull her future coat. Its single tube of screening looped round her lot like a long tossed fur stole, a boa maybe. Her four youngests were playing outdoors—towels tied around their necks as capes. Her baby—hearing our Ford come chugging—bolted from the outhouse trailing a towel
cape, pulling up knickers with one hand, waving the other. “Look,” Lou called. “It’s Leander, Reba, Aubergine, and Antwan. Stop, Poppa. Look, they really want us to.”

“Do. For the children.” I reached out and touched Cap’s arm—he flinched like my fingers were live coals. Ford coughed on, past running kids. I turned, glad at least Castalia hadn’t seen.

As we pulled down Summit Avenue toward our place, children stayed quiet in back, we passed our town librarian supervising six high school kids. Their arms were stacked with towers of books. The librarian nodded Yes, grinning. Then we approached Winona Smythe’s home. The house itself was present but her yard was now just flat lawn. A crew of neighbors worked with saws and they too smiled on seeing us. Without Winona’s jungle, the whole street looked bald. “Gone!” they called when Cap slammed on brakes, jumped out.

“Where to?” I hollered.

“Thin air!”

We all patrolled a home now totally purged of its Winona-ness. Weird for 1910, its lack of weirdness. Ladies who’d said for years—“Ooh but I’d love to spend one day inside that health hazard,” they sure had. The house reeked of ammonia, of everything but the ticklish history of dynasties of yellow birds.

Captain stood in the small second bedroom. He was leaning in its doorway.

“Near as we can tell,” the Mayor’s sister’s husband explained to Marsden’s back, “she just took clothes, her birdcages, and the bed out of here, her late son’s, near as we can tell. All the doors were open. That got my wife’s attention. No note, no nothing. We’re not even sure who owns the place.”

“I … do,” said the Captain. Then I saw it come to him—there might be a note for him, one Winona’d mailed to our home. He got us home right quick. I said nothing. I knew not to. After his recently trying and lure my babies up the tree, after finding that his Thursday pal since ’65 was fled—I kept real real still, child.

I worried how all this would change him. I recalled his saying the one word, “betrayed.”

Soon as we pulled up before our own house, Cap stomped indoors. Cassie had seen that mail got stacked on the hall table. By the time I’d supervised our rumble seat’s unpacking, and started making the first few forays indoors lugging stuff—I found envelopes thrown everyplace, him seeking the Widow Smythe’s reasoning. I was unloading the boot of our Ford when my husband strides out right past me. “Nothing” is the only word he says. Headed downtown, the man was already wearing his full-dress uniform, feathered hat and all. He wore that getup for a week, ten days. Put it on for General Forrest’s birthday, July the thirteenth. Come winter—when he got it out for Lincoln’s (and not the day Abe got shot, but
his horning date)—well, then I knew the Captain wanted to
live
in the thing. He pretty much did.

Mrs. Peahen quaked to think what plumage-saber rattling lay ahead.

Home again, our car covered with great sprays of red Virginia mud, I myself set to cleaning with a unhealthy vengeance. Ned’s latest mineral trove stayed underfoot all up and down the back-porch steps. (I would not let him tuck rocks under his bed—the place where his poppa stowed guns.) Ned says, “But they’ll get rained on.” “Honey, where you think they been since God wore knee pants? They
love
rain. That’s what chipped them off of mountains and made independent rocks of them. They lap rain up. Rain’s their … travel agent.”

“That true?” He squinted, moist gray eyes fixed on me. I touched his humidor curls. “Go think about it,” I told him. “And if Momma’s wrong, come tell her something truer.” You got to keep them busy, honey. Was one thing I was good at.

ALMOST
immediately on getting back, our Baby started talking plainer. She’d been goo-gooing whole sentences for weeks but now we sort of understood them. She made sense earlier than any child I’ve heard of. This, for her momma, proved both a novelty and a pain. Her
starting
words were: “Bay might
miss.”
Meaning: Baby might miss something. You couldn’t leave that one anyplace by herself. Try and you’d hear a tiny bubble voice say, “Bay
does
miss.” I felt for her, I knew the feeling. Mostly we just left her cradle parked smack in the middle of our living room. Not nine months old, but you couldn’t put a thing over on that one. Had to be the center of everything from Word One, honey. Pretty as the cover of a candy box. Everybody said so.

Returned, I got busier than need be. I do that. He stayed away more. I rarely knew if I’d see him at dinner or no. By day, you never witnessed such housecleaning as mine on returning. Now I understand that it was superstition.
His
voodoo meant driving north, cutting magic charms down from trees. Mine seemed to involve purging dust kittens from our upstairs halls. Maybe I’d been inspired by seeing Winona’s yard timbered and purged of muskrat nests. Got so evening itself looked like a form of dinge trying and settle on all my just-cleaned home surfaces. “Oh no you don’t, darkness!” I bleached the linens till some got tiny holes at their edges, shaming me. I believe I thought—don’t laugh—that I could someway clean his sadness from his life and mine. I’d get our one white house just perfect.

Someway, everything felt changed.

Since the tree, our kids acted half afraid of him. I saw him notice. I regretted how that kept him from the house still more. He went to poker games and steeplechases. On the Outer Banks, in our lieutenant governor’s company, he shot many a innocent duck.

Nights he did eat at home, our table talk grew sparser, his and mine. The children gabbled on—like trying and take up the slack. They stared at
him a bit too much. Cap left off telling me his stockyard news. I risked making a joke about the sheep counter that divided by four. On the foot-treadle Singer, I made myself a new dress—a nice flashy gray worsted. I feebly hoped to get his attention. Not that I wanted it, but more to cure him. What am I saying, darling? Of
course
, I wanted it. I asked Cassie’s advice. She said he was remourning his young Ned, and then to come home and find Ned’s momma needed mourning too. Rough on anybody. I saw that. Still.… Our kids’d bravely ask him to pick them up and twirl them in his arms like usual. He looked down at them like they were Martians talking French. The man’s moods turned more dark, they really lasted now. Earlier, his tempers were what you might could call Washable Blue—now they ran towards Permanent Royal Black. Too dark to ever wash out, too dark to look through, into or past.

At Lucas’ I bought petunias—last of the season, marked down. I lined clay pots in our kitchen windowsill. Some smell, but did he notice? I volunteered to be the Room Mother for all six of my children in school. (That’s a heap of cupcakes, honey.) I ordered new lino for our kitchen floor, paid for it from a fund I’d personally set up to get my Louisa into nursing or social work school. I begun to find my sadder husband better-looking. Strange, his straight-facedness had begun to working on me. He’d quit paying nightly social calls on my side of the bed. I thought, Now we are back from the Front—we’re finally ready to learn to love each other right. But, you know me, I was always thinking that. My nature to. The sight of him dragging up the porch steps, slow, at six—it broke into a whole new zone of my heart (Sorry for Our Appearance—We Are Expanding for Your Shopping Convenience). It was my heart’s fatty rind, a annex that I figured he’d done used up years earlier.

On the road I had feared him. Home, I mainly pitied the fellow. That made me need him more. I hoped, at the very least, for Cap to come home every night, to do what he said he would. Well, he didn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. But he sure did not.

One odd thing, after seeing the tree again, his hair went white. And real fast too. I thought he must be dyeing it—or else that he’d finally quit. Almost seemed like my own scrub-bleaching of the house was having some effect upon his temples. Ten weeks, four months—and by deepening wintertime, my man’s mane and beard showed no color in it whatsoever. His momma’s hair had done that, due to Sherman. Happens, I’m told. Doc Collier explained to Cap: A shock can do it. Our GP then asked the Captain what
his
shock had been. He said, “Nothing I didn’t know already. Is this exam about over, sir?”

Downtown my man gathered crowds—him in that outfit, the gray wool, the white hair and beard now setting it off more. I remembered when he’d been
shy
about his war doings. It got kind of tacky, his dressing like that so much. I stayed home alone more. The house I’d hoped would lift his spirits after work each day failed to air out mine. Frost got the petunias. I
kept busy, though. I had them IOU class-mother cupcakes—I decorated for Halloween, Christmas, and could it already be Easter? I tried to encourage Baby to do more with her first language than complain and brag. I visited my parents, who were running down like rusting clocks. I watched this with a cool sad eye that scared me some. I crocheted booties for my latest one, due any day. I’d already wove enough booties to stock many of the East Coast’s looser unwed mothers. I could stitch booties while cooking and helping with math homework and talking to Castalia in code about which person on what street had done what smut now. Little pitchers have big ears. I made more booties still, it kept me moving, busy. Only when I stopped did I tend to collapse. Sitting quiet, I remembered the long trip north and my old man’s strangeness up a tree and even back on flat land. Like Winona, he seemed disappeared.