Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (9 page)

A FEW
of the Courthouse vets had died. One of the basket cases had perished (the literal basket cases). Friends set his wicker in a coffin and the coffin in the ground. You suspected that the many grizzled talkers yet at it hadn’t seen quite all the action that they bragged on. Their tales smacked less of a foot soldier’s weedy ditchside view, more of on-high command gossip from, say, a
Harper’s Illustrated Weekly
, only rewrote from the Southern slant. Skirmish by skirmish, vets’ memories tend to spit and polish. You could hear the same stories come around again and again, heroism swelling by the minute.

History was daily being reshaped downtown, even by the quiet ones. That’s one thing about tale-telling and history both: It takes two. Listening is belief. A body cannot go on record alone. You cannot tickle your own self. Try it. (I’m glad you’re here. Lunch is soon. You booked, after?) Seemed every soldier telling in the town square believed the ward been a wide bell—and he hisself the sounding clapper that’d given it all sound and meaning. Men had long since titled that long squabble “The War for Southern Independence.” Even after we lost it, Falls’ natives called it that—especially after we lost it.

Odd, Marsden’s very silence first brought him a warrior’s reputation. Pays to keep quiet. A hard lesson for some of us to learn. Folks watched Willie. Mothers told their daughters to pay him special attention. His fortune grew in plain sight. Plus, having got better-looking with age, he was now within calling distance of Not That Bad-Looking.

He did continuously right by his burnt momma. Lady More Marsden now went to bed at sunset, avoiding lamps and candles and the matches they required. Even ate her soups cold. Lady hung her fire-scorched coat of arms on a real plaster wall covered with paper featuring vines and sets of manifold blue birds, facing each other. Her and the wallpaper acted like nothing ugly had ever gone on hereabouts. (Wisdom and forgetfulness, they sometimes move hand in hand. My own smartness, such as it is, rests with
remembering. But here in this Home, worked up with insomnia at 4 a.m., I too have prayed for the total eclipse of this memory. Of course, I never mean it long.)

Some Sundays, mother and son would be seen to buggy out towards their blackened homeplace. She had once been quite the talker—even considered “a conversationalist.” Lady would sometimes sigh words, but only social ones: “Sends regrets.” Some days she seemed not to know quite who she was. Other times she understood all too well. Willie spread a quilt on a low hill overlooking four smoke-black three-story chimneys. She held the empty white Spode teacup like it was some angel’s egg that God had given her to guard. The two people ate long speechless lunches packed by Will’s new maid and boyhood love, his mother’s adored (overworked) former body servant, Castalia. Once the sun started to take its business elsewheres, here came two Marsdens back past the city-limits sign and toward streets’ safety. Silent with each other, they were mighty glad to be so still, him in black and her—face hid beneath heavy veils—wearing a white silk wrapper she’d taken as her own kind of simplifying uniform when still a young girl of renowned good taste. Those were the times when a boy could love his mother right out in the open and say nice things into her ear and offer his arm and buy her pretty extras and even be admired for that. Why is it, child, that our present century has been so doggone hard on motherhood? I been a momma nine times over and I now want what they nowdays call “my perks.”

Son Marsden had inherited three farms. Two of them, Sherman’s forces had turned to little more than bumper crops of carbon. But even blacked, the acreage underneath still held, one river and six clear creeks yet flowed through them. Marsden owned the livestock yard that rented livery to folks unable to afford a personal horse yet. Plus, he had some beachfront sand on the Atlantic. Of course, he’d lost all his daddy’s slaves (plus the children and grandbabies of his granddad’s early investment—like split dividends). One-fortieth of all black folks in Falls were still called Marsden (the phone book even now is full of Cap’s side-pocket kin).

Downtown, ex-slaves still answered to the name, but not so often, and never when called. Wandering Main Street, some older black people would touch their straw hats when their former boy-owner passed. Old people winced like still expecting a direct order from him. But Saturdays (market day, the day folks drank), younger colored people might wink Willie’s way, giving him slow cagey grins. They could now say, “Afternoon,
Marse
Marsden. How it go? Seem like the top rail on the bottom. You working hard or hardly working?”

Once, two young fellows, sons of former Marsden house slaves, spit on the wooden sidewalk right before his shoes. “Back wages,” one smiled. Courthouse vets seen it happen. They got excited, eager for a scrap. The one Reb left in a basket begged to have his hamper’s head end lifted. But Marsden, chin up, took a giant step over the wet spots, just moseyed on his silent way.

HONEY
, I got to say here: I believe things might’ve gone easier on us later if Wee Willie Marsden—fresh back from war—just hauled off his first day home and pitched what today’s science calls a Major Nervous Breakdown.

Back then folks called it The Blues or else A Spell, or maybe Necessary Bed Rest. (Sometimes this rest could run on for decades. Many a local person took to the bed—pinned there by experience—and never quite got around to ever standing up again. Becoming a invalid was considered a right valid way of dealing with not being able to deal with not wanting to try and move one step from your bedroom ever again.)

If, when he first got home, Will had climbed to his upstairs four-poster out at The Lilacs, and if he’d had the meals brought in, if he’d spooned down soups and puddings—baby foods—if his single job had been no harder than watching sunlight move all day across a blank clean upstairs room—maybe recovery would’ve found him. If only he had called in a best friend and told all the gory banked-up tales. (A cow not milked for two days straight can start to die of souring unasked-for excess.) If Will had admitted to being so young, and gone ahead and cried a lot and let hisself be held by women like his momma (or better, by me—not within a stone’s throw of yet being conceived—but willing, even so), then—however slow it took—young Will might’ve first stepped, leaning on the wallpaper for help, to his second-story window, then peeked at the post road’s commerce till, finally feeling strong enough to creak down the spiral stairs onto the huge porch, he might first nod then wave then call at others still active with their roadbed lives. If only, by degree, Willie, hurting, could’ve been sucked back—gradual—into the healthy stupid lovely world!

But him? He just earned money. He made his downtown posture be the ramrod sort that mothers bullied their bunchy kids with. Him? The very Thursday after Winona chucked place settings his way and for years of Thursdays afterwards till the woman disappeared—here the vet hiked towards Winona’s jungled yard. Weaned on duty, skilled at marching, this fellow was so knee-jerk male he never considered saying, “To heck with this. I need rest. Been clubbed back of my head and just want some quiet to mull it over in. Got severally jumped, feel weak, can’t manage such mess yet! Count me down for a few months. Call me girlish,’ go ahead.”

Turned out: His best friend was no longer somebody you could cry to, having become instead somebody to cry over. Will’s upstairs bedroom was now just so much open air for pigeons to enjoy and barn swallows to measure off in swooping spins come evening. His momma’d never been able to cook him chicken soup even in her prime, though she might’ve liked the chore of decorating a sickbed tray with a sprig of lilac, say. Now she barely knew who she was (meaning—in the South after the war—who-all she’d
been). So, Will, having grown many inches taller on the long walk home—the only child of his own mother and a single living memory of another lady’s missing son—what could a fellow do?

He thought of
them
—is what. He walked to a weedy gate, he toted further candy and bad news. He forgot to know or help or nurse hisself.

I’m not blaming him.—No, what am I saying? Of
course
I blame him. But I guess I blame both him
and
circumstance, a ply that’s famous for being hard to tug apart, sugar. I blame … the war, I reckon. Something should fess up. I blame, I blame … and yet that don’t stop my feeling for the brave dumb boy. I want to call, “Sit down. You’ve earned it.”

Instead, another Thursday afternoon devoted to selfish weird Winona Smythe.

NEWSPAPER
serials of the day were full of bereaved mothers comforted by their dead sons’ returned war pals. Ofttimes a killed boy’s sister married her shot brother’s handsome friend. The pal said, “Bill died in these arms, Irene, and you, his sister, will now live in them forever.” The End.

But no citizen of Falls considered Will’s weekly Thursday trips the least little bit romantic. He never missed. Neighbors would look for him just at one o’clock exactly. Years later, even during hailstorms, he’d appear, holding foodstuffs and—some said—a envelope of cash from his own bank account, crouching under some umbrella cut by falling pellets. Here he came on Christmas, if it fell on Thursday. Turned up during a hurricane named Pearla and, the week after, when Summit Avenue stood three feet deep in water—why, will you look here? a gent paddling a rowboat he then moored at her rusted garden gate and waded indoors wearing his duck hunter’s hip boots, toting a sack of horehound like blood plasma you’d bring some shut-in.

Indoors, onct she’d seated the young boy, once she accepted his chicken, and the horehound had been offered, plus a beautiful piece of quartz crystal found near the spot where they’d both lost their only Ned, the sullen widow canted back against less than spic-and-span horsehair, said, “So. Now. Tell.”

“Ma’am? Tell? Tell what, ma’am?”

“Tell all.” Her tone meant it. “Every week I give the selfsame order.”

Winona explained that a good possible starting place might be the day those two babies left here, marching, holding hands the way boys that age still will. The day a courtly officer refused to let canaries go along. She announced, right off, that if Ned
had
taken along Von Himmel I, her very best Harz Mountain warbler, if the boy’d agreed to use the rubberized cage cover she’d had made special to keep out Yankee dampness, she felt sure their Ned would be here yet, charming, alive, and far superior to this leaden “friend” who could only say, when asked a simple question, “Tell
what?”

Will sat poker-stiff, right thoroughly tongue-tied. His mother’d onct been praised for the speed and nobility of her parlor talk. His poppa, with a scholar’s streak, had been known to corner farm-equipment salesmen with ironic tales of the wandering Phoenicians’ alphabet. And before trooping
away from here, Will had hung out with a sociable buddy, plus a handsome talkative slave girl. But Will Marsden was always one to keep his mouth shut. Till now, he’d mostly profited from that.

“It’s details I’ll want from you,” Winona said. “Start by reading the letter telling me my Ned got killed while he was scouting up a tree and you off somewhere swimming, I believe. I want to see you read this man’s letter.”

Her stubby hands popped open the top button of her ample black bodice. Will looked away quick. But he’d already glimpsed, blue with shadow, the double chin of his pal’s momma’s left breast. Her cologne was like several bakeshops and one of her breasts would have a larger waistline than young Willie’s. She forced into his fist a black-edged envelope long since folded brown from handling.

Will saw the return address. “Not Lieutenant Hester.” He shook his head.

“I suppose they shot him too.” Winona was a blunt-type person, honey.

Marsden nodded. “You met him, ma’am. He’s the one wondered would battle be canary suitable.’ He got asked if we’d fight in rain, he said, ‘Depends.’ The very day before Lee signed it, Hester was eating in the officers’ mess, ma’am. One thing about Hester—he knew when everybody’s birthday was. He must have looked up our official dates, I guess, in records. But there on the field it surprises a fellow that anybody’d know, much less celebrate. Hester would do a little something. A candle on a johnnycake and everybody singing. It made you feel better, just did. He’d done that for our colonel. They were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in there. Tent flaps were down. We weren’t officers. We were outside but we could hear the song. The marksman couldn’t have seen Hester. Was just luck. Bad luck for us.”

So Will told Ned’s mother that this here document would sure be a really hard thing for a person who just got home to read now, thanks anyway.

Was then that Winona Smythe rose, stepped nearer, got Will by the hair of his head. Tightening her grip, she moved him off the bird-messed couch and down onto a newspapered-and-feathered floor. He was soon kneeling square in front of her. She settled opposite him, like she was a queen of hearts in black on a black chaise. To be fair, she didn’t know quite what she was doing, probably. No. They were both yet reeling from who they’d lost and how they lost him. Fully forty years down the line, they would still be reeling. Will didn’t understand why such pain should be required—but he refused to break her hold or strike back or to leave. Must be part of a gent’s duty. Being on all fours, panting, the letter wadded in his paw.

“Don’t wrinkle it, you. Read me it. You can read, can’t you?”

“Yes’m.” Felt like a whole plug of his coarse brown cowlick might pop out, but this burning did give Will something to concentrate on. He was almost grateful to notice only one particular point of ache. She was right: Ned had been finer made.

With her fingers still locked around Will’s bristly forelock, with his brow pressed most against her knee now, with Will’s large hands tucked under
the hollow a bent spine made as he stooped here on crusted
Herald Travelers
, he did open the envelope in a fumbling hasty way, half hoping she’d release him. And then, not knowing why, not planning to, Will Marsden kissed the black cloth stretched over her knee, she let loose of him. Breathing hard, his face a smeary mess, one sickening apologetic smile in force, he backed along the floor, patted behind him for the rocking chair’s edge, got up onto the hobbling thing, pretending nothing’d happened. Willie told me decades later—when drunk, of course—that, as he clambered up, he found he’d experienced a certain manly stiffening below the waist. Part of it was gratitude for so small a pain as yanked hair roots. Part of it was how much Winona looked just then like her dead boy. Only somebody who’d known both forever could really see it. Her voice’s roll, ears’ fleshy downy lobes. Then, shaking his head sideways, Willie opened the folded pages—reverently setting the envelope aside. Will read it for the first time. “Dear Mrs. Theodore Smythe, We sorely regret to inform you that during the early PM of August 12, 18 and 62, your son …” He halted. She barked, “You’ll thank me later.” Winona became like Miss Beale, the Athena of Falls Lower Normal, a teacher so hard and strict that everybody despised her while they “worked under her” but onct they’d lived through it—onct they found how much of the Rev. John Donne they’d memorized—locals claimed she was the best thing that’d ever got its claws into them. Who knows, child? maybe we love the hardest things we get to live through because we someway got to live through them?