Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (70 page)

Honey, was my own children made me turn my head back into the room. First they got me to sigh, a beginning. Then they got me propped up onto my elbows. Which let Lucy finally fling covers back, swing one bare foot at a time onto cold floorboards and a few stray guilty crayon rinds (my eyes opened from the chill—which helped). The room a wreck, dust everywhere like lintish buzzards gathered in far corners to watch me lose it all.
Before I knew why (much less
how)
, by using the bedstead as a early form of walker, practicing at the Vertical, I’d waddled off to make my peace with ragged smaller lives outside. Here comes Lady Crayola, Mrs. Spit-Polish and Heal.

My arms sprung out, automatic balancing, I tried for my sea legs again, hoping to get back on gravity’s good side. I made it to the hall (so far, so good), I depended on furniture and the wall to help me find the staircase and then get down it, inching, but proud of progress, fighting faintness like it was some bad smell you can just decide decide decide not to notice.

My loved ones pulled me back toward the fray. For a while more, I would be their chef and referee, their witness. Then I hoped to leave. I saw that now. Elsewhere looked real good.

Four to the swing, they spied a shape leaning in their kitchen’s back screen door. Ned cried, “Momma’s up!” And they hurled into air and tumbled this way, running at me, colliding till they all but knocked me over. Then half on purpose, I did fall. But they were back of me to break it. I was going down onto a waiting curl and surf of bodies I had someway borne. They were all around me on the floor. They knew not to settle on my lower body, tender, sore. Castalia laughed from off the edge of what I saw. Her laugh swerved dark and rich and striped as her mink coat lowering into her idea of elegance at last.

A convention—kids’ faces gathered round this fast-aging body, their first home. They thought I’d come downstairs to encourage them. But—hands all over my face and shoulders, ears: they didn’t none of them know that—for a while there, they were really all that kept me in the world, honey.

Every single time, my loved ones teased me back to standing. (A trick!) Castalia come up then, holding our latest. She stood over me, here on the lino with my eight now playing with my hair—me powerless as Gulliver, pinned. Cassie looked me over with a touch of admiration, a great remembering tiredness of her own. “Again,” she smiled. “Here we goes again?”

“Something like that,” said I, straight up. She stooped closer. Her strong hands put Archie, my weak newborn, on my breast and—Cas indulged herself—she leaned down, let her own big head rest for one second on my shoulder. “You,” I said so glad. And tears slid back to fill my ears.

Here we go again. Before the kids run off—forgetting to remember me for another six weeks—we were for those few seconds a unit, like one centipede with many different shoe sizes on all sides, the tired willing legs of one long long long life.

LOVE
endures all, like they tell you. All. You can’t keep somebody truly stubborn down too long. But everything sure does try, right, child? And things most certainly do seem to get bunches better at it year by year. But look, I’m still sitting up here, right? Lucy ain’t all the way down even yet. Love suffereth all and is kind—though it really should eventually know better.

Stubborn, love.

Maybe even stupid. But who cares?

AND WAS
two days later, into the kitchen pushes my old man, home from nowhere after being there too long—he’s wearing the full-dress uniform—he bears a cordwood stack of guns and rifles. I’d been setting with Cassie over coffee here at the kitchen table. She’d tucked a quilt around my slowly unswelling legs. Cap, he steps right by us, not one word, and him gone these four days without my knowing where.

“So where
you
aiming, Fort Alamo?” Castalia most hollered. He paused, right-faced, and then, with great care, set weapons between Castalia and me on my red-and-white-checked-oilclothed table.

“I didn’t hear the motorcar,” I said. He frowned to prove I had but little right to ask. Then Captain reached down, stroked stocks of guns between Cas and me. Such fondness in his touch. You could see they were old ones, you could see how some of their handles were hickory, others pinky-gold fruitwood. Brass hinges had greened a bit. Two musket butts looked notched, somebody’s scorekeeping. Ducks? Colored boys? I didn’t want to know.

“This,” he touched one,
“is
the Revolution. And that exceptional specimen there saw duty in 18 and 12. Here’s a fine weapon that thundered on our side during the Mexican Expeditionary. And this,” he lifted what looked to be a squirrel gun, no better or worse, “belonged to the great Forrest himself.”

“Let me axt you something, mister. You just give away your Ford car for these, right?” I felt glad that Cassie’d spared me saying it.

“I have a museum here. They make more autocars. As for masterpieces such as these, this are all she wrote.” Then he started piling them again into his arm—weapons stacked clear to his beard.

I stared at him. “And where you plan to keep them things, sir? Oh, by the way, nice of you to ask, it was a boy.”

“That a fact? Well, how about that. Cause for celebration. I’m putting them under the bed, where a person’s guns belong. In handy reach. Too many children in this house for me to feel easy hanging firearms over the mantel.”

“First sane thing you’ve said, husband.”

“Besides, they’re far too valuable.”

“Thank you. As their mother, I thank you.”

“The firearms, Lucille. These museum pieces. Aren’t you pleased? Don’t you understand what we now own?”

“It’s just guns to me, darling.
One
is one too many by
my
lights. And now we have no better way of getting to church than the old Pat and Mike method. So I ain’t exactly bouncing up and down, no. Been busy, got other things on my mind, I guess.”

“It takes imagination to understand our nation’s history, Lucille, and
how these items gracing your own kitchen table figure in that struggle.—Requires imagination.” Arms loaded, he left the room and us.

I set here looking at Castalia. She shook her head. Her mouth was all pursed with irony but her eyes burned full of redbird fury. I pretended not to notice. I had enough on me without further fearfulness. I dreaded knowing what was coming next. Even in advance, I half understood. Even now, even stuck safe here in a Home where serving ladies with hairnets make three meals a day for me, I pull back from saying that next part. Like, by polevaulting over what’s ahead, I can maybe leave it wholesale right out of my life. Can you, darling listener, handle a few detours?

But, of course, our bargain: A person’s got to tell. Tell it. Tell it all.

Just, please, not yet.—Okay?

E
VEN WITH
the nine, even mostly managing alone, I never wanted a servant to boss.

Momma grew up in a household staffed by twenty-four black helpers. Most tended the yard and horses. Her enjoyment of good service got stunted early on. The accident taught her. She passed such fear to me, her only daughter. Even at my present age, I try helping every waitress who tries serving me. “Here, honey, that looks
heavy,”
I stand, sometimes jostling her tray, sometimes spilling stuff.

Momma’d just turned five when this here mishap grabbed her. It proved nearbout fatal. She ever after blamed a certain nurse, one Bible-believing older lady named Maimie L. Beech. This woman dozed off whilst minding the white baby. Accident. Child Bianca floated in a coma for three weeks. Neighbors brought casseroles enough to pave a modern-day patio.

Bianca’s poppa—the “Indigo Baron” of Falls, North Carolina—had three smart older daughters. But he favored his unruly baby. With her now drifting beyond help and love, past the power of money, young Angus McCloud nearly lost his mind.

ONE
poisoned baby girl, my future momma, had been considered the local hellion of all time. Darling, this is truly saying something in Falls: Brat Capital of the Tidewater. Wealthy Summit Avenue spoiled its kids because it really could.

Soon as Bianca learned to walk, other walking and crawling children hid from her. Some parents did, too. The town’s fire chief all but ordered
the McClouds to keep li’l Bianca “observed” after what’d happened in a flammable shed near the lumber mill. She was bad about matches. When Angus donated a fire wagon to Falls’ Volunteers at a brass-band ceremony, his youngest was discouraged from attending. She was off kicking the Collier twins in all four of their shins. Hopping around, these decent older girls asked, “Precious, why
us?”
Bianca spat back, “Go check the mirror, bug-faces.”

HELP
! Maimie L. Beech got summoned, a last resort. Among certain rich folks who’d spoiled their children seemingly past help, Miss Beech was called the “secret weapon.” Nobody knew this woman’s method, nobody asked. She herself had been a orphaned slave girl doing laundry in a Pastor Beech’s home. His six rowdy children started orbiting around Maimie like bees fretting one brown honey log. She did nothing to woo or humor them. Fact is, Maimie scoffed, pinched. Kids couldn’t get enough of her brimstone disposition. Maimie was the single household slave that didn’t fear these devils. They sensed this and admired her for it. Kids’ wildness soon tamped down some. Preacher noticed. Word spread.

After Freedom made her a semi-free agent, young Maimie Beech found she had a skill that sure beat ironing all to pieces. Decades gone and monsters later, Maimie was much sought after. J. V. Vining, Sr., had nearly got J. V. Vining, Jr., age eight, thrown into military school or a state reformatory or some weighted sack suitable for river tossing. Maimie turned up, she stiffly tended the boy for two months, he showed first melting signs of being almost human. Now “Vining’s Cotton Mill” bore a extra gilded plaque: “and Son.” Maimie got part credit and a bonus big enough to help her buy the little riverside home.

Other McCloud servants were soon jealous of a new-here woman given nothing to do but mope around the energetic youngest. Castalia remembered seeing Maimie around town, a spindly steepled lady nearing seventy. Maimie admitted to some Tuscarora blood. This showed in her thick straight hair, the stalky high-boned face, something in her surefooted stride. Beech’s upper lip wrinkled every quarter inch with a ruler’s evenness. She wore a cross-shaped brass locket she touched right often. Her nurse’s cap looked pinned to her—some unopened envelope. She was long-limbed and springy as the daily switches she forced some brats to go cut for their own whippings. Beech jumped at loud sounds. Everywhere, everywhere, she carried her dark Bible big as a child’s tombstone.

First, Maimie served as Bianca’s jailer. No stranger to shinnying down drainpipes, the child often slipped away. Baby Bianca collected neighbors’ rotting jack-o’-lanterns (she’d slyly waited for a nice frostbite decay to set in). Then the scamp sneaked indoors, pulled over a chair, climbed up, mashed four spongy pumpkins apiece into metal workings of her sisters’ three signed Steinway grands. The older McCloud girls cried but proved saints in not biffing little sis. Angus’ eldest three, in dark high-buttoned
clothes, were tidy yet unbeautiful as furled umbrellas. They enjoyed just the kind of impractical tastes that female children of self-made men were then supposed to have. The day of the pumpkin mash, my momma—a pointy quail-boned crinolined little thing—took a lawn mower to the neighbors Persian cat. She did. The cat survived but its feelings never recovered. It developed facial tics and therefore whiskeral tics, too. Every few minutes, its whole fluffy head went off like a alarm clock. Something to see. Legal action was mentioned but Angus McCloud paid nextdoor cat owners fifty-five dollars—held to be a fortune in them days.

Doubts were soon expressed about Maimie’s secret powers. Had she met her match? Nurse kept muttering from the Bible she carried room to room the way some women honor their purses. Miss Beech stuck right in there. To Bianca, the woman quoted scripture: How if you spare the rod you just
are
going to spoil your child. Nobody knew what private punishments went on. Momma later hinted about
somebody
making a certain child kneel in prayer position whilst bare-kneed on a purposefully sandy floor. The squatting Naughty was then made to pray while forced to hold a heavy flatiron level at each shoulder. (Was this Beech’s Christian ritual? I wouldn’t be the least surprised.) Honey—what’s nowadays known as Child Abuse, folks once called Just Good Maintenance.

The McClouds soon noticed their Bianca did seem tired, then worn calmer by a notch. All around the mansion and back yard, Bianca listened to Beech’s tales of wicked children and harsh angels. The child’s face grew sullen—a bruised, building reverence for her jittery and Pilgrimish Miss Beech.

BEFORE
his favorite’s accident, Mr. McCloud, Glasgow-born, figured you got pretty much what you purchased. Till then, Angus made almost a religion of cash value. Hisself a foundling, he’d become a ship’s cabin boy. In 1839, he sailed into the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. He liked its looks. It appeared familiar—the way unlikely Heaven seems familiar to so many. Unnoticed on deck, a little scrappy redhead spoke under his breath: “It’s on these shorres that Angus herre’ll found … whateverr Angus here can find to found.” Thirty years later, he sure had. McCloud employed over three hundred souls, he owned five freighters for transporting his cotton bales and the patented secret-formula blue dye. This local legend believed in something called the Verrra Best. His brogue burred “Verrra” till it seemed to mean even more.—You did things right, because you did things once. Your every transaction and employee lasted you jolly well forever. A king couldn’t beat the quality of McCloud’s major household items. What ever outranks the verrra best? Made you a potentate on earth—and certainly in Falls. Your four daughters: princesses exempt from everything but Poppa’s
treats. Angus’ favorite hymn: “Under His Wing, Everything Prospers.” Of McCloud, locals said, “Whatever the rogue touches …”