Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (89 page)

“I nodded to my angel from the treetops or the sky. ‘Heaven. Yes’m. Whatever.’

“Finally I went to town and told the sheriff, ‘Look, I found somebody.’ Her rich folks had offered a reward. I didn’t know. I didn’t know who-all they were, though her silk-lined cape proved something. Soon as I confessed to the sheriff, I regretted it, child. When he asked me for her hair color and all, I shook my head No, not yet. Couldn’t surrender that, not yet. I would only repeat what I’d said to him so far, ‘I found somebody. I found me somebody.’”

Poppa now reached over, touched my shoulder. “After all that poor Bianca’s lived through—that accident when she was a wee girl, plus the train mess—this latest thing is small potatoes, Runt Funny. She’ll do fine. High-strung is all.”

“Yes, sir,” said I, and held on to his hand.

THEN
for me it was Monday (oh, how I dreaded school). I saw
her
. Waiting for the bell, already huddled with that fancy bunch, she wore white. The Baptist preacher’s girl stood near Emily Saiterwaite, the Episcopal one’s. They’d decided to share her. Both were touching the back of Shirl’s new hairdo. They gossiped with each other, not her. How could my Shirley let them poke at her like that? Hair all ringed and crimped on top made Shirl (alive under this pie and crown) look older. It showed off her fine stem neck—she already appeared way richer, better, nearbout up to princess, but cooled off, too. They’d plucked all drab cloth flowers from her, they’d pared her of lackluster lace. I missed the pretty junk. You won’t be surprised to know: Tackiness has always interested me. I’d forgot that Shirl was so much taller than me. A person
had
to look up to her.

When I shuffled past their group, the Mayor’s daughter laughed, “Shh. Here comes you know what.” Hurrying, I let myself give Shirl a look. It won’t a mean look nor was there a mess of forgiveness in it, just a look. I knew she wouldn’t tell a soul what-all had really happened. We couldn’t tell, no words of ours (town talk or farm language) covered that.

I made my walk seem cocksure and boyish as I could. I crooked thumbs under my skirt’s waistband, jammed my chin out. Shirl gave back half of one ill nod—her mouth, the basis of a smile that never formed. She looked like their prisoner but, I saw, she’d picked her jail.—She’d always been a bit too easy to boss. In the privacy of our tree, she forever agreed to play Wife, a role (like Indian for massacring) nobody chooses first but somebody’s got to undertake. Maybe it served me right, losing my friend to others’ orders? But oh how fast those scuzzball hoity-toilets had got their claws into my pale blood sister!

They all now turned from me. Two caught Shirl’s white puff sleeves. Snorting, they spun her clear of my smarting face. Shirl’s lifted hair showed off, at her neck’s nap, two shy silvery fluffs—not long enough to reach up, join the plaiting. Out these wavered, looking so sad and sweet there, surprised by daylight after years spent under curls’ humid awning.

Even from the back I still admired her.

POPPA
sulked all over the house. He stood thirty minutes in our dark pantry. He helped Momma to her piano, where she sat playing back issues of Prelude of the Month—her music precise then forgetful. Pop looked off the porch and out at envying farmers, envying them. Felt like our place had been quarantined because of me and my foul mouth. Pop blamed hisself, his swampy history. He missed Shirl’s coming over, grinning at Mr. Card’s stupidest stunts. When he called her “Shirley Goodness and Mercy, follow me all the days of my life,” I knew that he half meant the invitation. Whenever Shirl told me she flat liked the way my daddy
looked
, I’d report right back to him. He beamed, “Surely not. Shirley said that about this gooney-bird face?” and he’d rush upstairs, shave, come down in plaid suspenders, yanking on them, walking bowlegged, asking, “How’m I doing?”

Now he fell into the porch swing, not even moving. I wanted to tell him not to fault old Ain’t. Maybe he should blame a skunk, a handy sponge, a weird itch. Blame how two girls got squirted by a unexpected animal. Blame how, though vegetable juice was strong enough to squelch the stink, it couldn’t stop girls’ noticing each other, couldn’t stop their feeling so warm towards one another—from clinging like the honest little animals that they were. Blame how vegetable cannot cancel animal. Only Animal can cancel Animal.

All language starts as Farm Language.

I tried lightening things by telling jokes. “Thanks kindly,” he says after a set of my level bests. “But, Runt Funny, I’ve heard those ones.” Of a sudden,
I understood: All my jokes were his. I’d never considered it before. But he’d never squashed me before by pointing this out. It was, I saw, adulthood setting in.

AROUND
then, he started squinting at me, he’d take a pinch of my calico dress between two fingers, testing it: “Your momma can do better’n
this.”
Poppa would hoist my braids and—like Momma—pull them to a lump atop my head. He grinned disappointment, shook his head sideways, dabbed my nose with my pigtails like repainting me. “Poor weegie, you got more freckles than your speckledy old man.”

Poppa’d never complained about my non-prettiness before. He always said my being the perfect Runt Funny was what kept me snug on the porch with him. I thought (because of this) my face was someway lucky. But now I caught him studying my ankles, my hands—Pop’s eyes (nobody’s fools) working like the appraiser folks hire to come in, tag the furniture of somebody that’s died.

Poppa commenced wearing nicer clothes on weekdays. Something about this weighed on me, like he was trying to look nice so I wouldn’t be bothered. He showed a sudden interest in our yard, strolling out there in a white shirt to clip the box hedge, smiling half-toadying to all nice folks that passed on foot. Farmers he still cut dead.

Poppa had always kept close track of the social scene that never let him in it. That season there was a full-tilt scandal: The plumpish daughter of the peanut-mill owner got engaged to a strapping Italian scissor-sharpening drifter who’d been working around her poppa’s house. The fellow was handsome but (word had it) couldn’t read a lick. Folks let out as how, when the bride-to-be’s heartsick mother asked the dark boy for
his
wedding invitation list, he coughed up two names: a circus barker from Providence and his own parole officer out of Newport News. Poppa said he was shocked, flat
shocked
that such a family had fallen to such bad luck. Pop claimed the boy should be horsewhipped and the girl must either get sent to Europe on a slow boat (to get over the romance) or else have her trust fund punished. Momma and me sat still during Pop’s high-falutin speeches. We didn’t mention how these selfsame charges had been aimed at Momma’s own marriage choice. “And if you,” he turned to me one day, “ever did that to
this
household, if you put a boll-weevil blotch on
our
fine name …” “What?” I asked, not caring. “You’d do
what
to me, you redheaded hicky clodkicker?”

I saw his face fold in on itself—double—like hands clapping—then smartly release. He turned aside. “That does it,” he whispered. “Boy, Runt Funny, that really does it for now. Cut me down, why don’t you?”

Hand over my mouth, I rushed indoors and upstairs. All kids live in secret fear that there’s one thing they mustn’t do or say. Once they’ve blurted that, love and home will never take them in again.

•   •   •

MOMMA
, after six sad weeks of this, mellowed into Mrs. Peacemaker. She tried to make me feel I won’t too underfoot. I knew otherwise but where else was I welcome?

One Sunday Poppa sat heavy in our porch swing, and for the first time in ages, I crawled up onto his lap. His arm made a easy automatic bundle of me. His face, the color of a flowerpot, grew gold and silver nibs. Along his jaw, I did Itsy-Bitsy Spider.

“You’re a royal mess okay,” he said, and wrapped me closer to his bony front. “Look, just because your old pap lives in the doghouse full-time, that don’t mean
you
got to. If you’re smart—and you are, seeing as how you take after your momma’s side and your aunts—you can choose anything, Minute Waltz. ‘Anything’ covers a peck of ground. If you’ve got all that, why in this world try and act like me? Heck, I wouldn’t if I could help it. I got assigned it.—Tell Poppa why.”

He waited. I clamped on, spooked he’d set me down, shove me away like Shirley had, like Momma did.

I held for dear life on to his shirt, like I was some baby monkey, petrified of heights but treed for good.

He pushed on, “Because you know what your old daddy thinks
you’re
getting ready for?” My cheek pressed Poppa’s breastbone. I made a questioning sound—balled and locked against him, either eye gone huge. I was about to hear everybody’s unspoken plan for me. Church bells rang. Mrs. Smythe’s canaries made their feathers sputter.

“Why, choosing the perfect fellow, silly britches.” I held on so. “Look, after all, you’ll soon be going on fifteen, right? A long engagement. How does that grab you, My Second Hand? Let’s face facts, pip, you ain’t ever been what you’d call a good student, not like Shirley and them others. Which ain’t to say you’re not smart, understand. But what your momma calls ‘higher learning’ don’t seem real likely for you, right? And you’d go pure stir-crazy sitting forever on this porch with the likes of me and her. So, what’s left a girl? What? I’m asking you. In your own words.”

I felt thick-mouthed, slow. I leaned harder against him. People seeing me from the street wouldn’t think it a bit strange that a child my age could sit in her poppa’s lap, and yet what was this poppa hinting? He caught my upper arm, just a wee bit rough, proving he was asking me for real here.

I mashed closer, wanting to be either safe or noplace at all. “Tell Poppa. What’d be good for you, gal? What comes next? What? I’m asking here.”

I swallowed and tried it, “Perfeck fell …”

He nodded, “Perfect fellow. Glad … Glad that dawned on you, too,” he wagged his head Yes. Only then did our swing move.

I was just coming up to fourteen. “And don’t you worry,” he squeezed me in a nicer way. “When it happens, Runt Funny, and once you’ve moved, you won’t be able to even keep me out of your house. Why, your momma
and me we’ll come visit most every Sunday you want us to. You see if we don’t, why wild horses …” I held this man. Had to. Who else?

I felt too bushed or dulled to cry. “Runt? You in there?” he tried and tickle me alive. He made his best worst face. His hairy nostrils looked like burrows where shy animals live. It scared me suddenly, a whole grown man this close.

“
I’VE STOPPED
blaming you,” Momma told me at dinner. “I think of it as ‘we’ now. You worked to capacity—some genes have held you back, is all. We are poison. Even when certain persons try speaking to me downtown, it feels a good deal forced. Invitation-wise, this household is a ghost ship,
The Flying Dutchman
, return to sender.—Lucille, no cotillion would touch us, not for a sizable bribe. Believe me, I have made certain overtures. And even if we
should
turn up on a list now, I couldn’t go through with it. I mean … it’d be like traveling all the way to the New York Dog Show and expecting a blue ribbon for …”

“Enough,” Poppa yelled, struck the table.

“For some three-legged animal. Some three-legged dog!”

She wobbled from the table, coughing up the stairs. Two of us were left.

Since she’d dashed off like a child, that made us left here, a couple. He said, “Pass the butter beans.” I did. I knew, if we were the couple, our marriage was a bad one. I missed her being here. I knew she tried. I forgave Momma’s not yet feeling ready to forgive me. Years I’d seen the woman playact at being hurt over little snubs. Now that she really felt it, deep, her pain scared and stirred me. She wore the same dress all one day and clear into the next. She bumped into the furniture like some old-timer losing eyesight.

Before the skunk, she daily planned my debut guest list. Worried which florist to use. Now when Poppa recalled the down payment on my gown, when he asked if we could get us a refund—Momma give him her most unamused look to date. I was her one child and her schemes for me had always felt a mite ruthless. If only I’d been born as simple as Shirley, that willing to take orders, born as pretty as my onetime friend—store dummy for others to dress up and sell things off of. Not even I thought my face was such a bargain—I tried not to blame Momma for agreeing.

She played piano more. Stayed home all afternoon, the house dark. She left windows open even on cold days so Summit passersby would at least hear how she was the sister of fine piano coaches. She sat rigid: her very upright spine, three octaves of ivory. She concertized, as she called it: This was the large daily favor she doled out to a wormy undeserving world. During her open-windowed afternoons, Momma only risked pieces she knew perfect and by heart. This meant repeating the same five numbers, always in the selfsame order. She never made a single mistake. But Momma had no confidence in one new piece she’d learned for twenty years.

Came the Tuesday afternoon I sat bathing, thinking about nothing—grateful for that. One floor below, in our dim front parlor, Momma stayed after her music, reliable as wallpaper, the same, the same, the same. Then I looked down and saw, between my legs, this long red stripe, a kind of cylinder in water, pushing out past knees. The thing went frayed and feathery at its far end. When, fading pink, it reached my ankles, I stopped smiling. For a second, crazy as poor Shirley with her fit of Ain’ts, I thought that tomatoes’ color had been saved in, then sent out—some stranger knickers-level form of weeping or remembering. But by scooping up bath water near my face—by touching myself—I found: This was no juice but my own. All the red in white me, leaking out.

Slow, moving like somebody real ancient, I crawled free of the tub. I kept eyes aimed forward. I tied on my baggy robe. I went barefoot down carpeted stairs to Momma’s music. There she sat doing her reliable cross-hand runs with no more ado or mystery than a person making toast.