Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (71 page)

Five years before my mother’s mishap, Angus came inland from coastal indigo growing, home to hear his oldest girls play six-hand pieces in their teacher’s parlor. The elder sisters McCloud were then real young but musically already mighty good. Angus felt it. Though he lacked formal education, Angus—with his pure pitch for quality—knew this in the very gristle of his kilt-worthy calves. Family talent called for “seed money.” The man didn’t even wait on recital applause to peter out, he bounded right toward the telegraph office. Angus, man of action—distant acquaintance of his idol, Mr. Carnegie—wired direct to Steinway and Sons in New York City, New York. By next train, causing great interest at Falls’ little station, here came three matching ebony/ivory concert grands in crates of boat-sized and seaworthy-looking blond wood. A minor Steinway cousin actually rode along to “install” the things. Such are the benefits, child, of buying only the you-know-what. A party at the house was wrote up in the
Falls Herald Traveler
, photos inclusive. I’ve seen these yellowed newsprint pictures of my square-jaw grandpa and his plain musical girls. The Indigo Baron is shown being taught scales at three different concert grands by three thin gifted daughters. One giggler hides her face behind a raised hand. Another uses sheet music plainly marked “Humoresque,” that camera-shy.

DETERMINED
to succeed here, Famous Maimie Beech soon doled out unexpected treats for good behavior. She’d granted just such privileges at earlier homes, even to her little white boys. For some reason, they loved it, too: Beech let them plait her silver-black hair. In back-yard sun, Nurse unpinned her cap, set it atop her Bible. She pivoted Bianca on a high stool opposite and child fingers were soon maundering all over a dignified woman’s nobbly head. Senior McClouds and three older girls smirked, worried, from their house of windows. Miss Maimie rested down there in daylight, patient, nodding forward like some African-and-Tuscarora elder saying Yes. She spoke lanyard hints as corn rows sprouted off of her. Beech’s hairdo—under Bianca’s loving if stubby touch—come out somewhere betwixt Medusa and a Maypole.

Nurse and girl soon set to work on one another. Seeing this felt wonderful if creepy. Maimie would brush Bianca’s mud-rich curls around a long expert black finger. Maimie tallied curls aloud like treasure. Bianca would quote rhymes she loved to scramble: “King is in the countinghouse counting out his honey. Queen is in the parlor eating bread and mon-ey.” The brat—tongue pressed between baby teeth—improved Maimie’s hair into a mass of plaits each ending with its own rag bow. Miss Beech’s scalp soon looked to be some dandelion seed puff sprouting kite tails.

You saw this talkative pair enjoying long strolls across the county (leathery-black six foot one/marshmallow-pale three foot two, hand-in-hand arms swinging). Maimie, nodding toward bees, mud, hogs, explained: “What’d I tell you? ‘Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’ It
planned.”
After hiking through Meadows’ Pasture and beside the bright river, Bianca rushed home with major news: Jesus could walk on any water He chose and whenever He liked, couldn’t He, Maimie, hunh? Tell them … they don’t know anything.—Maimie, pure authority, nodded. Onct. Though the McClouds had surely heard about His Knack for the Buoyant—why did it seem like Maimie’d just made it up? And if she had, who here would contradict her?

When Bianca made a clover bracelet for Nanny, Beech wore the thing till you found its last brown twigs sprinkling the mansion’s Oriental rugs. Nurse and child settled in back-yard clover, shooing away bugs, weaving jewelry for each other. The Indigo Baron wandered out, smiled down. “Ye take bees, for instance,” he began. Beech, somber, nodded. Angus asked if his favorite ladies knew: Bees weren’t even native to North America but, like him, came over on a boat. Like him, they soon slipped free, diversifying, which meant “branching out.” Even by 1750, bees still hadn’t buzzed beyond the river Susquehanna. But Indians soon called them “white man’s flies.” Indians learnt that such bugs moved a hundred miles in advance of the troublemaking westbound settlers. Fact.

Maimie sat here, appearing knowing, nodding but amazed. She took this bug news right downhill to friends. Bees? they asked—brung across the water in rope hives, captive as slaves? Whites had shipped in America’s every bee and black and bird, too? Hogwash. Nobody believed Maimie. Which only made the Mansion McCloud mean more to her.

On Bianca’s bad days, Beech hand-fed the girl. You’d walk in, you’d hear this seemingly joyless old woman stifle certain nasal buzzing sounds, a spoon had just been flying around one crimped pretty mouth. Maimie hushed saying, “Miss Flower? Open Up. It Me. Here Come You Main Admirer, Marse Bumber Bee …” Feeling your presence, child and nurse would practically leap. Bianca gulped down that spoonful so quick, she chewed hard, nervous as if caught at spy activity or kissing.

After three smoke-free weeks, Beech invented a extra treat for polite little girls: they got to go downtown with Maimie’s five best women friends: Saturday lotion-and-notion shopping at the Woolworth’s store, hooray! Maimie called her favorites the Sisters. They were Beech’s age or younger but their shapes bosomed where hers slatted. These ladies were as hardworking, faintly medicinal, as fully respectable and semi-religious as their boned corsets. They moved in a talcumed pigeon-breasted rack, all talking at once side by side under similar wonderful hats. You saw their dark cluster window-shopping led by one bossy pointy white star of a child. Bianca, meeting whites she knew (most everybody), loved introducing all of Maimie’s friends by name and very slow. Just more of her mischief. Castalia
knew Beech and friends. Cas had no time for them: Freed from slaveness, they signed on for a white Jesus, gossiped about white bosses, lived for Christmas bonuses, married the men they lived with, named their daughters Letitia or Mary Grace. Cassie’s own pals made everything up—from their home-rolled redbird religion to their children’s names.

Bianca, well served, now got to hold Miss Beech’s hand throughout dinner. Nurse supervised each spoonful, she napkined Baby’s mouth clean. Even when the Governor came for Christmas, Maimie was allowed to sit right at table. Otherwise, my momma flat shrieked.

Elder McClouds did feel twinges of jealousy, they admitted these but only in jokes. You almost missed Bianca at her most overwound. Still, there were reassuring flare-ups. Especially if Cook, against strict Angus orders, left out tempting kitchen matches. But four months of Maimie: and Bianca started seeming like somebody nicer, if maybe somebody else, somebody
less
. Four months’ Jesus tales offered like bribes of promised powers, four months’ stern hypnotizing care and feeding (“Open up, it’s me”). Sure looked like Nanny’d half tamed Summit Avenue’s champion Rounder.

TO HIS
paneled upstairs study, Angus summoned this miracle worker. He sat toying with a inkwell made from twelve deer hooves all on point. Behind his massive desk, in glassy golden frames, a fine collection of arrowheads—arranged on honey-colored velvet, by size, like money.

“Come in.” He admired Beech’s strange heron-long limbs, the silver hair kept seriously knotted behind her like some hostage that—if not watched—might try some funny business. Angus McCloud looked straight into her black Bible of a face.

He asked Beech to sit, please. She would not. She seemed to expect reprimand. Instead Angus smiled. The fellow dispensed charm like twenty percent interest accumulated daily. He handed Beech a blue business envelope. “Your bonus for managing … her. But tell me, miss. Off the record like, how do ye
do
it?” It was his favorite question. He put it to many men and a few women. Asking this, Angus always seemed to beg for some sexual-type favor, his eyes twinkled that much, you felt his palms were sweating and God knows what else. The world was a secret formula like his personally improved richly rewarding powder for home indigo dyeing. When it came to necessary celestial blue, he’d cornered the international market.—The man usually got a answer.

Maimie L. Beech met his gaze with a stare that was a dye: a stare too darkly like Angus’ own to be transparent till it dried later. Looking into these jet eyes—Angus saw one word waiting in each slot: “Patent” “Pending.” He nodded, touched the inkwell’s doe cuticles, for luck. He felt the washing joy of it—Beech too was his, the verrra best.

This woman’s lot in life might prove real dicey, but—given that—she knew her value absolutely. McCloud leaned forward, reviewing the amount he’d stuffed in her envelope—enough?
“How?”
He was still waiting.

She studied her dry hands. “You maybe after Maimie’s secret, sir?—Don’t half know it my own self. Maybe that the secret. Got something to do with remembering what worked last time.—Sir, could be it come from Maimie’s having … you know—Talent?”

He laughed hard enough to slap his upper leg, causing the deer-hoof thingie to skitter over desktop, spilling not a drop of ink. This let Miss Beech risk one pleased snort, gnaw slightly on her lower lip.

“We’rre going to get along just fine here. Sense of self-warth. Nothing like it, Beech. Hold on to that, ye hear me?”

Came shouts from downstairs. Whilst Maimie let herself be buttered up with flattery and cash, Bianca’d requested the head gardener’s six children to please strip naked. Her being the boss’s kid, they did so. Bianca next locked them into a gazebo. She set it cautiously afire. Dragged up to Poppa’s study, Bianca was soon being severely scolded by her folks, loud, “Why? Tell us
why?”

Without knocking, Maimie rushed in. The blue envelope still plugged her uniform’s breast pocket. She posed—arms outstretched—between the girl and parents. Everyone acted startled by her doing this—especially Beech herself. She answered the Indigo Baron’s dangling question.
“Why?
Marse Satan. He
after
her. Times, my baby here just feel so left out, them three sisters all in a clump. Satan got
His
Eye on her.—And I tell you: she
shy.”

Hid behind a white uniform, the child grabbed its starchy hem. Tears came to her great eyes, she tried blotting these onto Maimie’s crackling whites. The cloth was too stiff for absorbing much, teardrops rolled as if down plaster.—But, listening, Baby Bianca suddenly found she
was
. That. That Maimie’d said.—Only Maimie Beech truly knew her.

ONE
of Angus’ competitors tried luring Beech away, hoping she’d come “break” his own namesake scamp and son. He offered Maimie a goodly raise—she snitched to Angus. A lover of loyalty, McCloud gave her this exact amount right then and out of pocket. Bianca now semi-behaved. Maimie’s love had done it. Miss “Secret Weapon” knew no name for her secret weapon. Talent? No, more Love.

Her brats shaped up because Beech got them totally used to her own terrible complete attention. When she arrived mornings, kids could spend thirty minutes telling Maimie what she’d missed since they spoke last night. She taught them to mistrust their little playmates and everybody but the Need itself. She then met the Need completely. Everything Beech knew and guessed, she told them. Her earnestness, they felt. Kids met it with their own. In these soft spoiling households uphill, she offered them a single certainty, one gauging straightedge. Maimie then scared her brats: They might lose their Maimie’s love. How would they like
that
, hunh? Who would
they have
then?—
Her love was strict as the Old Testament contract. God often told His chosen children, “I’ll call you ‘chosen’ if you choose Me back …” And if not, His brood got extensive wilderness, boils, bears, bugs, the deaths of favorite children. Maimie’s love, like His, kept a flashy mirrored sweetness spelled across its front. (This, the hiring parents saw.) But, behind, you found a hundred slapped-on crusted layers of black lead. And yet, this very blackness made the mirror mirror.

Maimie was a strict addiction for which there won’t a known cure. None except her kids’ outgrowing it, their being packed, weeping, off to school. Children soon found: Learning to read was not a fair exchange for having been so lovingly decoded under Beech’s complete attention.

Thanks to my feisty mother’s smoothing-off, Maimie’s reputation now lifted past nanny, more towards governess almost.

LIKE MANY
of us, this woman worked hardest to hide one precious secret—and it was the very secret everybody knew about her first. No fair.

Arriving at McCloud’s hiring interview, Beech hand-delivered fourteen excellent references. But these were notes she couldn’t read and, see, sugar, that’s the secret. One letter claimed: “Beech is a genius with children. My little Sandra called
her
‘Mother’ first and, though my blood just absolutely positively boiled, I saw how, in most ways which mattered, Maimie L. actually was, alas. So be it.”

Maimie Beech’s major vanity? Pretending she “had” reading. (Some letters she herself handed Angus lightly mentioned this.) He instructed others in the house never to tease poor Beech about it.

Like I already told you, she carried her Bible everywhere, often opening and closing it, glowering around, daring anybody’s doubt. Beech used the Book as her moral guide but, too, her pedigree in these fine homes.

Prior to doing for one self-styled Baron of the store-bought color Blue, Beech had served born blue bloods. These aristocrats pinched pennies, tried saddling Beech with changing brats’ diapers
and
washing them. “Plenty talented
launderesses
around here,” she threatened quitting every time.

But not in Angus McCloud’s openhanded home. Everything he touched … From Maimie’s first day on the job, his forty-room house—with its stained glass, its mantels like altars—seemed almost a weekday white folks’ church, some church you’d never have to leave. “McCloud’s Mansion”—it sounded worthy of the 100 Psalms that Beech had memorized. Corridor walls were paved with thirty paintings of one castle. The place rang all day with three pianos, players good and getting better. Skylighted rooms sprouted potted palms even taller than Miss Maimie. Though Maimie knew that the word “Psalms” had more sighs in it than Palms did, she’d seen such plants in Sunday-school lithos. She let herself enjoy blending the Bible with
this house. Before the accident, while chasing Bianca through downstairs chambers, Beech seemed to aim towards palms, smiling, eyes shut as stray fronds whisked her face. On the huge stairwell (a makeshift pulpit when won’t nobody around), she mumbled the sweeter Psalms. She recollected her favorite book’s incense, its cedar tabernacles and marble steps, its chimes, the pretty sounds of captive nations’ native tongues offering praise to the Lord.