Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (96 page)

The next afternoon, he heard a mule approaching and he moved out of its way. But on the creature’s swayback proved another Johnny Reb, real old. He gestured Willie up onto the thing. Men didn’t speak any more than their tired mule did. The three seemed one thing, reunited. The owner of the mule was yellow from the jaundice, the whites of his eyes the color of late forsythias still blooming all along this pretty Maytime road. The mule was all but white with dust. To Will this seemed in keeping with a world where ruby-throated emerald-blue-green birds come out of woods to sum up your inches, only natural: silently offered a ride on a white mule by a yellow fellow. At a crossroad some four quiet miles later, the mule distinctly coughed. When you are on said mule, its cough means more to you and you feel that cough’s high-up hitching seriousness. This, Will knew at once, had been a last cough. He knew because his crotch was in the saddle of the rattle and his sensitive crotch had been rubbing against the back (couldn’t help it) of one old yellow man. The zone between Will’s legs was becoming a area of increasing and fairly shameless sensitivity (as I would much later discover). The mule spun left then two-stepped right and staggered like some melodrama’s drunkard. A single back leg buckled, the other copied it, just as folks say a camel kneels to let passengers off easy, the mule’s right front leg caved in and only when the riders had dismounted did the creature let the left front one totally go. And when it hit the road that polite beast was dead. Dust lifted off of it like some flour soul was rising.

The owner muttered something like a prayer, patted the poor thing’s
mangy pelt, and sneezed. Rising, staggering some hisself, staring waves of hate back here at heavy Willie—he left hinting how Willie’s growing weight had killed the creature, which it maybe had.

SOUTHBOUND
Marsden, back on foot, would pass northbound blacks. Sometimes they spied him from a good ways off—his soiled gray uniform trousers. Ex-slaves, though free, took nothing for granted where ex-Rebs were concerned, they sometimes hid in woods while the gangly boy dragged past, depending on his staff, laden with clatterish glass and metal extras. Will, polite, half guilty feeling, played like he hadn’t noticed them—also polite, half guilty, lurking off in yonder alder bushes.

For a while, Will felt he was the very first Reb walking home, but as he got nearer the Carolina line, he found that others had beat him. Some hadn’t been lucky. Maybe they had tried too hard. Propped against one county mailbox post, a fellow wearing a Carolina insignia. The man had got to the hallowed border itself but perished from out-of-state wounds. He’d chose this public spot to die. Hoping to do all he could to make sure his corpse’d be honored—he had, poor thing, shoved up the mailbox’s red metal flag. And he’d rolled his right sleeve back to draw attention to a hand that held a envelope, his people’s address inked there plain. “Let them know. See they fetch me home please.” The body sat there, dignified, undead-looking. A cat sat beside it. Two little girls stood staring at it. One, pointing to the corpse, said, “Look, mister.”

Willie nodded. “Go home. Go tell your momma to come help.” His own deep voice scared him. Will’s presence scared the girls more than a dead man had. Girls ran. The cat did not.

NIGHTS
, Wee Willie tried sleeping in strangers’ barns—but any sound could wake him—he’d come to, he’d already be standing, his arms flung out and whirling a protected zone around his upper body, so automatic this desire to guard your head, your eyes. (Seemed he’d spent half the war: with arms wound around his skull like some schoolboy warding off one single threatened blow.) He again woke standing in a barn in blackness in the middle of strangers’ property outside Crewe, Virginia—woke because somebody very male and bass-voiced had hollered, “No, you don’t!”—woke boxing toward what turned out to be one snaggly-sounding insomniac hog, and the man that yelled at him was him, him warning him away.

A NORTH
Carolinian can tell when passing over the Virginia line into green home safety. Let it be night or noon. Let the blindfold be satin, let it be burlap, just keep them North State nostrils open-eyed! Almost at once, things smell different. Don’t believe Virginians. They’ll say their soil smells historical. They’ll say Carolina smells of dirt farms—not soil, child,
dirt
.

For us, for him, the air at once refines some. It smells not of wayside but the houses beyond. Scent tells you there are not just weeds but plants
set in window boxes all along this road—petunias grown from seed each year, from seeds saved back from our last try at home pride. These might be hidden beyond shrubs and hedges but your nose opens. Takes scent in as clue and ticket, lets scent out as sigh.

On a clovery bank, Will stopped to replace yesterday’s bees. If he ever let the whole bunch of them perish, he knew he was done for and lost. The man later told me how, shortly after he left his pals (maybe owing to the constant motion of growth whilst walking?), his male member stiffened out, permanent, it seemed. What he had instead of a compass: his jar of bees and his trouserful of blood. It all but led him home, a dowsing rod. Was it the idea of Home that so excited a boy or was it his picturing Momma or Castalia or the soft red mud along the river Tar? His certainty stayed most solid and almost visibly growing during his seven weeks of southbound march. Times, he told me shy—and don’t say I’m keeping nothing back from you, darling—he had a hard time making water, was like trying to get a upturned drainpipe to aim a thread of water downward please. In town, he shifted the heft of his sword, the load of bee life, the dangling bugle over the unsightly lump, his infant part turned infantry armament. (Infantry is named, as you might could know, for those infant young ones who went out to fight in a early crusade.)

Meanwhile he walked. Mornings, calves and blisters hurt you. He’d long since been barefoot as any Indian holy man wandering the world with a begging bowl. But by noon he got limbered, your leg moves for no better reason than that, a second back, the other leg done so. There’s a kind of momentum that momentum gives momentum. On. I’m almost done and there.

At a general store near Sharpsburg, N.C., Will finally met a notions salesman, who said, “We know some
Carolina
Marsdens.” “Same,” the boy could hardly speak for grinning. He stood scratching head lice that’d bloomed in every crook of him just after he crossed into his home state (lice eggs seemed waiting for a decent setting to hatch in). The salesman asked where Will was bound. The man said he had been there, along the river road to Falls, not three days earlier.

“Is The Lilacs standing?” Will managed to ask. He and the well-dressed gent were now sitting on crates outside a store. “Don’t know the names of all those farms, sir, but most were burned. Prepare yourself. I hate to tell this to a young man who looks as … much a veteran, sir, as do you. But while you were away up there, Sherman pretty much had his way with us. Diddled, we’ve been. And savagely. Everything fine got leveled. Everybody low is trying to rise up and rush in. You never saw anything so grand as the black folks walking up and down the streets of Falls in their mistress’s old clothes. I hear tell that some Yankee whites have put up a nigger to be mayor of your town. He can’t read English but can spout some Latin. You figure it … I don’t want to get you upset in advance. Could be you-all’s place was spared. Hope so. But son? don’t count on that is all I’m saying.
You think the
war
was a shock. Sherman made a point of wiping out all monuments of ours worth remembering. In the 1812 one, the English burned the White House up in Washington. This go-round the pagans from Washington have come to us and burned every fine white house on every river in our Holy Land. Sherman took the best. He should have left the very tip-top ones. Only civilized to. What will we show your grandchildren, boy? They’ll think we made the whole thing up, about how good it was, how grand. We’ll never find the money or the will to build such ones again. Each mansion might’ve one day become a museum. Each already was. The jackals … is their sleep troubled? I dearly count on that. As a salesman I had the honor to be admitted to many such homes in a three days’ buggy ride. I tell you, young man, Solomon in all his glory … ashes now.”

And the two just sat side by side—the salesman appeared not to mind Willie’s scent. The two looked out onto the noontime main street of Sharpsburg. They stared at six square feet of bleak and glittery dust.

Finally the salesman apologized, learning that the boy was one of those Marsdens, those proud people with the very beautiful lady in the house, the lady people only saw at her own parties, ones that persons such as sale staffs never got to go to. “I apologize if I offend, but might I offer money, such money as I have on me?”

Will noted that several silver coins were being held before him. Mostly they looked very clean to him. He took them, careful not to hurry, glad to speak his thanks. He started to offer repayment, soon as he was settled at The Lilacs. Then—for many reasons, polite and practical—did not. Accepted. He’d learned to take what others gave.

“That’ll do for food, sir,” the man went on. “But might you need cash for a room?”

“A what?” Marsden looked over—he’d slept outdoors or in tents for two and a half years. The idea of a House!

And finally, this commercial gent volunteered his buggy. He would drive Will the last six miles toward whatever was left of a fine home.

“No,” Willie said very loud. “It’s just I want to tell my wife and children—when I get some, if I do, sir—that I walked down clear from Appomattox.”

“Say no more,” the other held his hands up.

Will explained he knew he should take these coins into this store here and buy food. “Cheese’d be mighty good, I thank you for the money. And then I should set off while there’s six hours’ light left. I could make it by this evening, I bet, with the cheese in me but …”

The piece-goods dealer asked, “What, son?”

“I’m scared.”

The other fellow told him, “Under the circumstances, son, that is very wise.” The salesman asked leave for a last question: Why bees in a jar?

“For direction. And company. It’s been pets.”

Then Will stood and turned so fast toward the salesman that the man tipped back. “You know what I’m most scared of? The very most of all? The
thing you got to watch or it’ll kill you quickest? You know what that is, sir?”

The other shook his head No.

“My feeling sorry for myself.” Willie said it staring straight ahead. Then without goodbyes he stepped indoors and bought some cheese they wrapped real nice for him. The salesman watched him walk away, jangling, steady, half out of his mind.

You already know, child, what he found at home.

C
APTAIN HATED
being ceremonial out of town. Older not-from-Falls vets recalled he hadn’t been a officer, just one walking-home boy who’d overdone. Now he was in his sixties and these men made certain remarks. Mr. Marsden’s hide couldn’t stop such insults. Back he’d come to me with a headache, sensitive as some nun-loving girl mocked at school by Antichrists. In Falls proper, he lived safe from such questions. His looks, his vesty sureness, the family name—all these gave Cap a goodly credit line.

One day after our ninth was born, he took the spur train to Tarboro on hog business, sat reading another moving memoir about Stonewall. The colored porter, recognizing Cap on sight, sneaks up, says low, “Er, excuse me, Captain. We couldn’t help but to notice, me and the boys yonder, that you fly is right fully unbuttoned, sir, thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes,” my husband tells the book, not raising his eyes. “I wear it this way sometimes.”

When Falls’ Daughters of the Confederacy asked would he please go lead their big yearly parade in Raleigh, Cap hemmed and hawed. They said
Liberty
magazine would be there, the photogravure. Finally ladies flattered him, “Simply your manly duty to.” Them’s fighting words. Ladies iced a cake like the Confederate flag. Nothing meant what it
had
meant. Gals used marbled batter, red and white. They hoped it’d appear patriotic. Myself, I couldn’t eat a bite. To me—looked like the locomotive wreck that’d tossed my momma into my poppa’s life.

Ladies planned squiring my man to Raleigh on a chartered train, all picnic hampers, cloche hats, bunting. Day before, they gathered in our back yard to primp him. They’d decided that such white hair and beard needed more of a blue-gray cast to it. Six slim younger D of C’s stood out back wearing pastel smocks. They sopped a crimping rinse (donated by Lolly’s Palais de Beauté Féminine de Falls) throughout my only husband’s beard.
Gals now had his white mane up in pin curls. If he didn’t look silly! But you think
he
knew it?

Focusing on certain narrow Junior League waists, Cap sat grinning like some hog admitted to a heaven all mocha mud. At my kitchen window, I mumbled toward chipped dishes I rewashed. Captain held still like posing for some City Hall portrait. It was just a hairdo!

One girl on a low stool filed away at his big hand, a manicure. Maybe showing respect for Cap’s death-dealing trigger finger? I refused to join in, wouldn’t leave my kitchen. Nobody out there missed me or exactly begged. Three of my children were playing on nearby lino, face-down near my ankles, coloring. Our Seth Thomas—clicking reliable on the wall behind me—sounded to be on
my
side. “I know, I know,” I heard Time say.

Then Cap (who’d earlier done some swilling from his sterling flask), he asked his young Society manicurist, blond, did she care to see his authentic one-of-a-kind minié scar? Since most of these well-off girls were residents of historical homes, the one said, “That’d be interesting, probably. A person has to care about history, self-defense, especially around here!”

Covered in his barber’s bib, marcel lotion dripping white minié-sized beads off his spit-curled beard—my husband—in plain view of me and neighbors and the D of C’s—leads this flighty matron into our toolshed-garage. Before he closes the door, man winks back out at nervous others. Worried, they laugh. (I felt most ashamed of having anybody see our garage’s insides: his mess of duck decoys, last year’s rotted lawn furniture. I’d
told
him to clean that place.)