Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (81 page)

I broke chalk into dice-sized bits, shook them in one fist like some gambler practicing.

I was keeping her back. She didn’t know. Knocking on window glass, I waved. She wagged her muff overhead then settled again, the patience of a sheep’s wife. Behind Shirl—unknown to her—the stuck-up ones, spying me, huffed away in their own steel-colored clouds. Who could blame me for wanting to keep Miss Shirley Beautiful to my own self? There was—besides my folks and maiden aunts—nobody else. Even my teachers, knowing that our money sprung from Momma’s dowry, not no backbreaking work of Pop’s—treated me a bit harsh. Momma spoke to teachers like they were our very hirelings, which didn’t help their moods. Ma’s having the fortune made it mean less. Till I got a teacher called Beale, the Genius of Falls Lower Normal, I noticed: Ladies showed a right limited respect for other ladies’ clout. During class, teachers’d call the boys “little future governors
or better.” Me, they kept indoors writing a different “I must not …” every week. I hurried now to finish. In each sentence, a single word was missing. At the very last, I got to scrawl three hundred Ain’ts—and big. Kind of defeated the whole purpose. Ha.

I rushed downstairs to winter sun, ran up behind my quiet friend, who sat humming “Frozen Charlotte.” I surprised Shirl with a good swing-shove clear off the ground. She grabbed chains, flapped out ahead of me, squealing, “You!”

Ruffles took wing.

I NEVER
slept at her little house. I dearly wanted to. My mother seemed to fear that some strain of my poppa’s genes would grow vexed and stronger via Shirley’s downhill company. Momma seemed to fear that Falls’ poor section, the stink of its peanut mill, would abduct me. Shirl loved the story of how my folks’d met. When she and Pop and me were alone together, she’d say, “Mr. Card, tell how you saved the lady.” If Momma was around, Shirl clammed up. She never seemed to connect the broken bodice in the story with a handsome practical woman who, brandishing Falls’ fastest flyswatter, patrolled our high cool corridors.

Shirley’s big-boned folks explained to me I couldn’t stay the night—I’d feel too cramped sharing my friend’s single bed.

“Our house,” Shirl’s momma said, “is planned to be more—what you’d call—compact than yourn.” She pronounced compact “compack.” I didn’t correct her. I marveled that my own pop had picked up manners and a certain sleekness of manner compared to my friend’s folks. I managed to eat Saturday lunches in their unpainted bungalow—just a stone’s throw from Baby Africa itself.

The minute I got home, Momma always pumped me for lowlife details. “I suppose,” she said, straightening the front hall’s art folios—fanned artistically on a marble-topped table, “I suppose that you expect me to believe their luncheon china matches. It would surprise me if they even
have
a dining room, not—of course—to pry.” She never asked a thing point-blank, just gave me openings the size of a canyon. And I wanted to tell her the whole strange truth. But I saw it’d please her too much. If she married a man from a log cabin, why this glee over my friend’s lesser hardships? So instead of telling my momma all, I’d go, “Oh, they’re pretty much like us. I reckon folks is folks.”

“Folks
are
folks.”

“Why, that’s just the way I feel,” I put in to get her goat.

When my staid momma made that Republican purse mouth (too greedy for news of poor folks’ sad tackiness), I shushed up. Momma figured being rich was her biology, not her luck.

Fact is: Right on Shirley’s lunch table, there were kittens, moiling, mewing, doing worse. They were free to lap out of any of our dishes they could reach. Shirley liked kittens, but not cats. She would only have the little ones
around. I never questioned where they went onct grown. I suspected that Shirl’s obliging ham-fisted poppa made a trip to the river Tar with a weighted sack every few months. The house smelled of talcum, frying, kittens. Shirl’s folks ate grits on everything, three meals a day. The mother slopped them over cutlets and turnip greens. I hate grits. The daddy soaked his corn bread in a red side dish of vinegar. He burped into a napkin without one “Excuse me,” just said, “Ooh, that was a bad un.” He shook so much pepper across his soup, it looked like a inch of ants swimming. Mouth full, he talked horseflesh and feed prices, he wiped his lips with the back of one hairy hand, and, at meal’s end, I spotted food samples (the menu) smudged across black bristles. Like the kittens squiggling everywhere, the sight made me feel ill and excited, both.

My momma later said, “They treat you like royalty, I suppose, the two Bear Grass bears and Goldilocks?” Fact was, Shirley’s folks made so much over Shirl, I only got leftover attentions. Them two’d be running to fetch her a pillow off a bed to make Shirl’s kitchen chair set easier. The daddy, when he looked Shirl’s way, would sometimes give a hoarse sigh. You’d think he only just this minute noticed her—born perfect and grown—like Venus nudely enshelled inside our myth book at the Normal School.

During lunch, in the middle of saying something, the momma would jump up, whip a comb and brush set from her apron pockets. She used a sawed-off broomstick as a guide to forming cigar curls. Spiraling yellow hair around the thing, she set to work remaking a even better Shirley, curl by curl. The hairdo was so complicated that—when it was done—you felt you’d watched somebody build a chest of drawers from scratch.

At her own place, Shirl changed, she made sure we talked about what
she
wanted. In my house, she tiptoed and followed everybody’s leads. Now, with her mother’s hands still scooping at the finished hairstyle, Shirl asked me across the table, “What do you
really
think of Emily Saiterwaite?” I worried, looking at Shirl’s parents in the room. Shirl said, “It’s all right, they keep up.”

“Emily’s a total snit,” I admitted. She was the Episcopal preacher’s daughter I’d seen scouting Shirley.

“And what,” Shirley’s mother started, shy, “do you reckon young Emily thinks of … well, our Shirley here?”

“She thinks she’s pretty,” I admitted, though it was against my own interest.

“She never tells
me
these things,” Shirley told her momma, about me.

Her mother asked if it was true that Pastor Saiterwaite of All Saints Episcopal had once proposed to my own momma, as had both the handsome Streeter twins, including the one presently our mayor. I shrugged, “So Momma claims …” Shirley’s mother said it was kind of Momma, marrying the farm boy that’d saved her. Mrs. Williams claimed she’d heard that certain boys in Bear Grass now hung around the train tracks, wandering weeds, seeking
their
heiress. I didn’t know if this was meant as a joke or not. Again,
I shrugged, but smiled. I hated hearing other grownups describe the curiosity of my folks’ uneven marriage.

But Shirl’s parents did love me. Of all Summit Ave’s rich brats, only I paid court on their prize. The family cottage had low ceilings (unlike our rooms’ eighteen-foot lids where shadows and thick plaster moldings made their peace with the spiderwebs my scared momma called “Yankee lace”). Shirl’s tight house kept the smells so strong, made two red hefty adults seem way larger as they fidgeted around her beauty.—My own folks were both right good-looking—even Poppa had a fine straight nose and high cheekbones. And yet I’d only turned out a little less than regular. But here sat Shirley, a masterpiece sprung from nowheres. Seemed like her rawboned folks, without even needing bodies, had
believed
her into the narrow front bedroom, they’d dreamed their child alive.

My job, her parents made clear, was to help others notice, spread the word from mansion to mansion along Summit—big news: a thing had happened over by the peanut mill, this here ample pearl and miracle delivered by accident.

Still, I won’t allowed to sleep at Shirley’s itchy kitten-smelling beauty-parlor dollhouse. I begged to. Nobody’d let me.

ODD
, if folks on Summit weren’t ready to admit her total beauty, the children of Baby Africa considered her just this side of a fluffy tinted goddess. Sometimes—on the way uphill to my house—Shirl would make a side trip to this vacant lot adjoining the colored section. A house had onct stood here. Now just a few sample bricks hid among the weeds—just a stone staircase with a landing at the top and steps leading noplace. Shirl—in full crinoline glory, hair just done perfect by her momma’s farmwife hands—would come and stand here like onstage. I waited on the lowest step, fatigued if respectful, looking up. She faced the poor black section and soon children would be glumly stealing out across the rubble. They whispered at the sight of her there, patient, stiff. Sometimes she held out the hems of her stiff yellow dress, mostly she just stood—appearing a bit bored—but like it was her duty, letting them inspect her, offering them inspiration and incentive. Kids would approach in little groups—dressed worst than the poorest whites in town, wearing castoffs we sometimes recognized as having once clothed our classmates. In bands, a step at a time, they drew near Shirley’s level. She waited, stiff as some celluloid Kewpie doll on a stick sold at the fair. Black girls, hair in ropy plaits tied with rag bows, would finger the hems of her stiff clothes, they dared touching one yellow curl while Shirl waited. Bold as any flag and just about as passive—she let them admire. Once a very little boy grabbed Shirl’s hand and held it to his mouth, but she jerked it back, not mean, just stern. “No kissing,” she said. So—if Shirl won’t yet admired uphill—down below, she had been practicing ways to accept certain tributes, practicing a lot.

MOMMA
overheard two preachers’ wives make wisecracks concerning a certain young somebody’s contrary Bear Grass grammar. When I explained I probably couldn’t change, Momma stopped speaking to me. For three weeks. Shirl and Poppa shuttled room to room as go-betweens.

During this long hush, I found myself watching Momma more. I wondered why somebody as smart as her would be so fearful of others. Any biddy on our block could spoil the woman’s week with just the hint of a snub. When Momma finally spoke my way, she took another tactic. The woman set me down and started reading me a long English novel, four whole chapters at a time.

I hated the scenery parts most. In a story, a little dew goes a long way. But, bored as I was, my sense of justice made me start to notice something. All the servant characters talked funny. Being poor (cooks, gardeners, fish sellers) tripped these people into speaking real unschooled, dropping off h’s. It made them offer a chuckle for any reader rich enough to buy this book. I hated that. Momma, slit-eyed, seemed pleased to note me fidget whenever some low-class person had to talk, and she really got to be a actress—making every maid as broad as Pop’s jokes about Republicans. Poppa sat, surrounded by shavings from his sassafras whittling, snoring nearby. Finally, I crossed my arms, announced, “Ain’t fair.” Momma closed the book, shut her eyes a second, asked, “What ‘Ain’t’?” (She could sure handle that word with tongs, I tell you.) When I spelled out my gripe, she looked so overjoyed I saw I’d been set up. She explained I was right, of course. Said she didn’t want any child of
hers
getting stuck into no minor funny character part. “You’ll become a lead when you sound like a lead. These ‘Ain’ts’ are pure mannerism, Lucille. I agree with the Englishman as how ‘naturalness is the most galling pose of all.’ My child, whenever you get tired, when you lose the will and forget to concentrate on this fixed idea, why you become as grammatical as anybody.—So, which will it be, scullery help or leading lady? Choose. Now. Which?”

I caught her drift. But, feeling mad about this old unfairness—the gyp to my dad’s hick parents, to Shirl and them ones downhill—it made me stick still closer with old Ain’t. Seemed a point of honor.
Somebody
had to.

Times, I did try otherwise. At school and especially around Shirley’s folks, I struggled to sound legal. (If I talked like a lowlife near them, they’d think me unfit to be their daughter’s helpmeet.) But I figured ri
ch
folks shouldn’t like a person only because she spoke fancy. Good grammar is a type of conspiracy showing others you know code words, proving you belong by birth and bank account. I got so I enjoyed being grouped with Shirl and other rougher downhill children. Struggle as I might, I never changed
enough. Whenever I grew happy or excited (happened right much in them days), I fell back. Poppa’s salt canceled Momma’s sugar. And, out my mouth, that shameless old toad Ain’t leapt forth, warts galore, scaring everybody but me. Me, and Pop. And Shirley, who forgave. Plus, my unwed aunts.

MOMMA
hadn’t spoken to her three older sisters for nearly sixteen years. They lived not two blocks from us. In a town the size of Falls, you
know
when somebody’s cutting you dead. The sisters occupied their birthplace, the inherited McCloud homeplace, one twice the size of our excess house. This one had gables atop gables, a garden house big as Shirley’s whole home, and it all needed paint. The only garden was whatever perennials sliced through ivy and high weeds.

My aunts—like lots of folks who live together from birth till old age—had divided up who to be. They were each good at different-type emotions—they respected one another’s territory. You couldn’t quite think of them as separate, more like three plants sprung from one pot—root-bound, leaf-entwined hybrid ivies maybe.

The three girls had loved one boy. He’d gone off to college up North, he’d come back sick, he’d published one poem in
The Atlantic Monthly
while studying at Cambridge. The poem, my mother said, a little high-handed, was about spring—how everything looked bleak and bare till your buds came and your birds got back from Florida—not all that original.

The poet signed his work with his middle name only, Randall. He had ghost-colored skin, he drooped across furniture, looking boneless. The sisters played piano for him constantly. My stern Scottish grandpoppa didn’t like artistes. Grampa Angus McCloud had turned into a gruff old self-made stiff. His opinions were writ large as the handlebar mustache he oiled and nursed. He was one of those men of the day who bragged on his four girls’ purity, men who ofttimes managed to keep the virgin bevy a few rooms away throughout men’s long old age. If it hadn’t been for Momma’s train wreck, Angus McCloud might’ve had a perfect track record. Ten years before my pop turned up, Granddad worked to discourage Randall, beloved by the oldest three girls. Randall—when finally pressed about which adoring sister he would marry—got tactful: his color improved and then, roses in his cheeks, the poor boy died of consumption at age twenty-three. Randall had no aptitude for marriage.