Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (88 page)

Seeing my aunts, all busy, I felt sadder still. I started crying. Each eye opened. Ladies rushed me to the farther side porch. Music stopped. Ruler appeared, squatted before me. Other young people (she barked Kaiser-like) should remain seated, with eyes closed, should allow the music to resonate continuously within, beginning
now
. Aunts—having lost their own loved one—seemed to know right off what’d happened. They huddled nearer me.

“Now,” Ruler began. “Lucy dear, whom? Whom have you lost. It’s your little Shirley, is it not? Why is it always the
one
that goes? We’d let Falls tiptoe off to its deserved doom if only it would leave us just our
one
to love.”

The three sisters had been giving my friend free lessons. I’d brought Shirl to call, aunts figured her folks had but little money, they saw how Shirl stood (none too subtle) plunking dreamy at one Steinway’s keyboard. Aunts kept their donation a secret. All as a favor to me. At Shirl’s name, I blubbered, feeling so ashamed to spoil their concert. I wanted to move right in with these exceptional women, ones unlucky enough to’ve been cheated at love early, but smart enough to have never given up on it.

“What precisely did young Shirley
do
to you?” I shook my head no, eyes streaming like broken blisters. I tried to keep things hushed so’s other children wouldn’t hear and gossip at school come Monday.

“Well,” Ruler sounded logical, “what did you do to
her?”
Again I couldn’t tell. The love subject, a difficult farm language that I could not speak.

Ruler, full of pity, straightened now. She laid one hand across my scalp, she took a stance. On me, she used a line she’d once paid me twenty-five cents to memorize by phonics (I still have it by heart). Ruler ofttimes quoted it about Maestro Wagner, at whose altar she admitted worshipping right regular. “
‘Er wurde entweder verfolget oder angebetet—zwischen diesen zwei Extremem pendelte sin Leben. ‘”

And again the Sea, who hated Ruler’s overuse of distant tongue on native soil, chimed in: “‘He was either persecuted or adored. Between those two extremes his life dangled to and fro.’”

“The women of this family!” Lake added, placid, cheated. “The destinies of the women of this family.”

I’d never heard Tragedy expanded to apply to sixty-eight pounds of me. This omen spooked me some. So I kissed my good aunts’ hands. I dragged my rope down off their cultured porch.

They later told me that—in my mood—it was the rope that worried them the most.

YESTERDAY
we sat in the lounge watching
My Children, Right or Wrong
. It comes on at one and is the show I’ve mentioned where everybody’s good-looking but it don’t ever seem to help them a bit. Honey, whatever can go wrong in their lives, does—but every single day. Tiring.

I keep up with it but not like some of them in here. I do have other subjects. I hate being what you call dependent on anything. Good as I love to eat—if I could, I’d quit food for three days at a stretch just prove it ain’t
that
big a deal.—Maybe my not wanting to lean on anything come partly from finding that everything I onct tilted towards is missing now.
My Children
—child, some days just the name of the show sets my four teeth on edge. I out-aged all of mine. But I told you that. You have kids partly so they’ll be company for when you’re as brown-green with time as I’ve got now. They’re supposed to keep a eye on you, put banisters on your back porch to prevent the Broken Hip. They’re to bring over pear preserves and your straight-? grandkids, right? They’re to keep you out of a State Charity Home like this.

Anyhow, yesterday we sat watching our program and, all of a sudden, there’s this haze over the set like the angel hair we used to trail across our mantelpiece at Christmas. The set blows up. Then comes the vilest wire stink you ever did smell. One old lady—
real
old—she cried, thinking that the entire group of all them children had burned up. Some folks get more superstitious as they age. Woman had once been a schoolteacher, and now she was back to thinking that actors were tiny and lived, blow-dried and wife-swapping, in that box year round. Today, riding her chair, same lady wheeled in here holding a tin can in her lap. She’d come collecting to have the set fixed. The Home just shelled out forty dollars for repairs. Our director said we’d have to go without for a while. But the frail teacher collecting dimes, she is just dying to know about two divorces, one murder, and who Debby’s daddy really is. I told her I didn’t have not a cent to chip in, though my heart was in the right place. She looked mighty let down. So I reached into my bedside table, wrote on a scrap of paper: “I, Lucy Marsden, offer
my total support to this here effort at repair.” I slipped that in her tin can. Well, it cheered her right up. She saw herself to be Miss Joan of Arc out gathering ransom for them pretty young folks locked in, waiting to see daylight and troubles again.

That’s one thing about getting on up in years. The Lord giveth and sometimes the Lord, in taking
you
away, He handeth back a bit. One woman down the hall died last week, nothing new. Room Twenty-six. But, just before, I rolled in to set with her. She was like me—the last survivor of a long line but ended up alone as if she’d been the one and only all along. I double-parked beside her bed, got hold of her nearest hand. Our nursing staff is real overworked and Jerome was probably off doing some set-and-dry-and-dye job down the hall.

Those of us still clear-thinking (more or less—I have my
days)
, we sometimes try and help out where we might. Keeps you from getting stir-crazy and thinking that the daytime shows are the onliest things left spinning in the world beyond our parking lot. Well, my patient started talking out of her head somewhat, talking about planting a three-row bed of zinnias. But when I woke from a little unplanned catnap, she was laying there looking right square at me, concerned, like she was
my
nurse. Handsome woman, always very particular in her clothes, didn’t look a day over seventy-five and she was, like me, gnawing towards her first century’s end.

“You know, Lucille,” she recognized me and everything. Sounded just as reasonable as Woodrow Wilson in his steel-rimmed prime, says, “I thought it’d
hurt
. I mean, yes, certainly it’s quite a shock to the system, ending—but there’s not the kind of pain I’d been dreading since around, say, sixty-eight. It eases you as it slides out from under the person, like a favor your body pays you at the end. I worked as a waitress at the Virginia Beach one summer as a girl. They’d leave your tip under their plate when the meal was done. You’d think: Here’s just another stranger’s dirty dish—no reward for all my smiling help—but sometimes something
was
hid under there for you. The suspense was seeing how much you’d got.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said, clutching her old paw in mine. “It’s some mercy, anyways.”

But then she was right slam back to being six, bullying me (like I was her long-suffering black mammy) to go fetch that child’s red watering can from off the window ledge. Plain, she saw it there. I made to roll over for it, humoring her. Well, she pulled on my armrest. “Now wasn’t that foolish of me?” she laughed, but, too, it was the slow heaving’s starting up. You learn to know the sound of it. I soon had to go call Jerome and our head nurse.

Still, I figure the more exits a body is in on, the clearer you see: You do have some control over how you slide out. People manage it in their own peculiar style, you know? Me, I used to think it was some dark chute you fell down. You’d be standing in line to buy some cheese, Death dropped
over you, conked you blind. Into that you’d slide: blackness and a jaw as big as the state capitol.

Now I see—it’s
in
you all along. It ain’t no net that falls from up on high. It’s there—like a gift for music, this appetite long hid, waiting. (It just happens to be your final knack, is all, and it’s one talent that—right democratic—don’t nobody escape.) Comforting to see how it’s tucked inside our marrow from babyhood forwards. No way can you stop its happening. Thing is, it’s still personal. So when old Death rears up—you can control and shape it some, it being
you
.

To Lucy here, that feels a blessing. See, I’m learning: Cradle to crypt, we get to stay who we are.

Only fair, really … we die in character.

MOMMA
, seeing me mope upstairs, called, “Well, who stabbed you?” I made sure the bathroom door was locked, I struggled free of clothes, slid into hot hot water. Before Shirley, I never sat in a tub with anybody else. But now, whenever I climbed in alone, this much porcelain looked huge as a tooth-colored mausoleum. Plus, clear water (unlike juice) made a magnifying lens the size of a oval tabletop. I hated how much of you you saw aquariumed under there—still you, but now all sprigged and changing, swollen some. I propped the bath brush at my tub’s far end. I pretended that the brush was human. “Hi,” I said.

“Sister?” Momma stood calling from the hall, jiggling the lock. “Are you crying? or sniffling with a cold? You’re crying.” I refused to tell what was wrong. She hurried downstairs, made a quick social call downhill, dashed back here. She’d never before visited Shirl’s cottage. I imagined her queenly taps (three only) at the planked door. I felt ashamed of Mom, of us. We’d been rich in all the wrong ways. I had forever played poor, and Shirl, ashamed of being poor, acted semi-wealthy. We had never been straight with each other. Maybe we should’ve
both
played Poppa or both Momma or switched more regular?

My full-time momma kept retesting the doorknob. She knew something but wanted to hear my own reason for crying. I finally hollered, “I ain’t crying!” Well, then she really roared like I’d never heard a person do. I slid underwater for cover. She kept hurling one shoulder against door. Screamed I was a wicked wicked child to go on using that dreadful word—and after Ain’t had just cost me my one and only friend on earth.

“How, can, you, still, say, it, child, how?” She struck my door hard, risked ruining her pianist’s hands. She staggered to a hall table, grappled with something and chucked it (the huge pink vase she’d never cared for) down our stairwell. The sound—across marble foyer—scattered purest terror.
In water, I lay whimpering as Momma cried:
“Ain’t
is the dagger you have driven through your mother’s heart. In our town, as of right now, you are truly dead, child. Even the horse renter’s daughter has dropped you cold. You have nobody now. Satisfied? You are not yet thirteen. A corpse cannot make her debut. Socially, Lucille, you’re a little … blue little dead girl.—My life is over.”

I was in water, shaking. Water was so cool now. “Monster,” she was kicking busted crockery off the stairs. Doc Collier was called. He stuffed her with many a pill, ordered her to lay flat prone in a dark room till strength came back. I worried she might use returned strength to throttle me. Poppa, sullen-acting now, hid me from her all Saturday and Sunday. He acted hurt, treated me like I’d purposely left Shirl, not vice-a-versa. Saturday night, I looked out my bedroom window, saw more things dropping, heard breakage chime our brick walk. From upstairs, Momma was throwing forth all bedclothes. She’d tossed two mantel pug dogs. In smithereens: matching Stratfordshire cockatoos she’d owned since she was six. I laid under covers listening: Pop tried talking loud but nice, then loud, then slapped her. Next a stillness dropped with only me awake right in the middle of it, me the cause of everything. I felt like a tooth so rotten it prays to be yanked clear of where it hatched and stayed and spoiled, a thing so brown and bad it longs to be thrown away forever. On the city dump. Maybe, for good measure, burned. Yeah. Burned, too. (I want to be cremated. Pretty soon too, child. I probably said that.)

Sunday on the porch—with her tucked in bed upstairs—he acted like his lady wife was dead, like Momma was a form of Shirley—too perfect and so, lost to us. “I told you about my greatest day of all? In Bear Grass, was walking to shoot pool, carrying a cue I’d whittled from aged hickory. I’d sewed a little broadcloth sack, riveted on a suitcase handle to give it the official look. Hiking along train tracks, thinking nothing. The 2:04 that never stops in Bear Grass seemed to slow down on my left.

“Its blamed whistle was sure blasting when I hear a splinter and a sound like forty gallons of water, a huge balloon breaking over the cowcatcher. That was the horse, hit. Woods stood off to my right and I catch a rustling amongst the highest limbs, Runt Funny. Then I seen a thin trailing cloth fall into sedge grass. We’d had rain the night before and so our ground was soft, a mercy. I took the falling thing for maybe some eagle swooping off its tree-limb perch. I go over. It’s a very pretty young lady face-up, eyes closed, her wearing a cape. Cape was lined with white silk, it rested open all beneath her like wings fanning out. Her bodice had been tore but not so much as to look cheap. A little blood was on her but that was scattered too—artistic-like. Up ahead, the locomotive grinds still, great scuttling and sudden shouts. I didn’t rightly connect all that to what I’d found here. Not right then. I dropped my pool cue, I fell onto my knees beside it. (I didn’t yet consider it a human but some bird or angel fallen from on high.) I mashed my ear to her/its chest, a beating, good. ‘Sammy, you appear to be
in such luck, boy,’ I told myself while pulling her cape as a kind of sled into deeper woods. Then—after dabbing at her face with spring water—I toted her on home, she weighed next to nothing in those days, child. I hid my pool cue to go back for.

“Them at the train, picking up the pieces of her cousin, noted how half the horse was on one side of the track, half on the other. They believed that she must be scattered, too, a mushy goner. People who’d watched the foolish buggy chase from the train’s smoking car, they told our sheriff, ‘A girl was with the unlucky gent, handsome girl—pity, really.’ We had her three days all to ourselves before she come to. Ma and Pa acted impressed I’d found her. I was always lucky about finding things, but never a whole girl! I used to set near her pallet, watch her sleep. One day she opened her eyes. Someway I knew she’d know me if ever she woke. She seemed to, too. She looked around like thinking that our plain cabin was some stage set or a joke. ‘Am I alive? This is Heaven, is it not?’