Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  The sentinel on duty got to feeling so silly he fired a round of shots to celebrate. Everybody laughed. Pretty Ned shucked a rein from off one wading dray horse, he tied the four-foot leather thong to a sturdy sapling down near water. Made ready to swing off of it. He wanted to “cannonball,” as my children call it. Called it.

  Ned secured it good and tight, yelled that he got to dive first since swimming had been his idea. Nobody argued. Soldiers, older and younger with farmer’s tans, hair full of soapsuds, stood chest-deep, hip-deep. They turned to see how big of a splash he’d make. They grinned. Ned got a goodly hold, he looped one arm in leather, wrist to elbow. Wore his bugle on its red sling full-time so he could signal during emergencies. Brass won’t rust that much. He took a push off the mud shore. A slender naked boy, shiny-wet, hands and face catching bugle light. He heaved to get up a decent speed, ready to hurl hisself aloose for the largest plop possible.

  Well, what noise others’d made, those shots fired, sounds of men acting so spunky for once, it had drawn three Yankees. They’d done set up sniper’s shop in a old willow tree on the shore opposite. Dear me yes.

  Course, you know.

  NED SWINGS back a last time. For fun, the sentinel pulls off a blast straight up. Others start to whistling, slapping water, making Rebel yells. Ned, in this noise, gives a little shout that others think is for the fun of it, Ned keeps swinging, never letting loose, goes weaving way on out, then slinging in again and twisting funnier, more sideways every time. No man watching could tell Ned’s high spirits from his flinching with them bullets finding every good soft part of him. Hogtied up in air, poor child was catching everything. The sentinel stopped his celebration firing. Swimmers ceased clapping. All went still. Finally plain weight pulled Ned down. Men groaned when he fell, disappointed at so poor a dive after all the practice. Still nobody knew. Only with Ned face-first and in too long did some man’s foot nudge him, man saw stripes of dark all through the shallows, man yelled, “Child’s been hit. They’re here.”

  Then everybody plunged under. All but the caisson mules and horses—too stupid to—all but my man, my boy back then. He moved to carry out his pal. He lifted Ned from lake, lugged Ned right up onto slippery moss. Ned’s bugle was draining brown water and all the color Ned had lost. The bugle belched out gore like it’d been wounded for Ned. The living boy didn’t worry that things were splintering and popping open all around him, target number two. Didn’t notice, bent across his friend.

  The sentinel saw which tree smoke kept rolling from across the lake. He fired at drooping willow fronds till one lump of Yankee fell down splash into the water. Onshore Rebels grabbed knives from off their clothes. They swam over fast, they cut that Yankee in his manly parts like he had raped their boy, not shot him. They already missed their Ned. Seemed like he’d been nice-looking and in good voice for them. Their first lieutenant had to pull men off that sniper, then men tried to peel my naked little husband off the dead friend he kept propping up and holding on to. Willie kept pressing wet curls back from his buddy’s forehead. Kept telling Ned which girls in Falls just couldn’t live through news of this, which choir director couldn’t. Didn’t help.

  “Ain’t fair,” he called down at the perfect face, two clear open eyes. So then—though nobody’d ever known young Marsden to do so before, the child swallowed hard, whispered at the rosy ear nearest, “Hey, help me out here, bud,” bent closer, started singing, trying to. It sounded bad as expected—half-caw, much ache in it. Willie sounded plain pitiful and knew it but just hoped he might be interrupted. Didn’t happen. Nothing left the dead boy’s mouth but lake and a touch of pink, like when you brush your teeth too hard.

  Others stood around dazed, still nude—so upset they all believed everyone but them was naked. Men cupped rough hands over their privates, like shielding these from so sorry a spectacle. Then young Marsden started slapping his friend’s face side to side, and hard. Was striking like he’d just got peeved, swatting in the testing way a young cat worries what it’s hurt and cornered. And only then did some of the platoon bend down, hands resting on the child’s shoulder. “Quit,” men said, sounding like the mommas of these boys. “Ain’t fitting. Stop it now.” Marsden kept striking that excellent face. Naked fellows finally had to wrestle a live child off the slack one. It took force to. Took seven strong men—weakened some by crying theirselves—but better nurses for that.

  They had to fib about the burial spot so my boy wouldn’t haul off and dig Ned up. That same night, Will did, did uncover the corpse. Private Marsden dragged it off into a clearing. Sunrise, the others found Willie, sitting there with it, Will talking quiet, his right hand pressed alongside its poor gray face. Odd how fast a best-loved “he” goes “it.” And my man’s later tragedy was trying too long to push that “it” back to being a real “he.” Like long division, honey, you can’t force a larger sum into a smaller one. Can’t nobody push a chain along the ground.

  Poor Willie Marsden, cowlicks a mess, seed packet of freckles, red-rimmed eyes, and a nose running unchecked (heir to sixty-one slaves!), he walked around numb for weeks. Boy was living through the battle of Antietam. Was not much more to him than three flies in the room with you, a little bother off at the edge. He saved back Ned’s boots, tied them to his belt, wore them saddlebag fashion. Nights, he took to sleeping with his hands poked deep into them like high warming gloves.

  Dawns he started sneaking far into the woods (and at real risk to hisself) just to practice bugle. This woke troops on both sides. Rebs compared Will’s squawking to Ned’s rise-and-shine played like some Foster ditty. Fellows studied each other, pained at hearing how bad Will was. He’d begun from scratch (with no ear at all), kept trying over and over for reveille. Seemed to believe that when he finally got it right, he could maybe raise up every soul that war’d claimed so far. And this was only in ’62. Three more greedy years of it waited ahead. By the end, it’d inhaled a respectable percentage of all males on our continent. Consider the 600,000 killed outright. One Rebel in three died. Artillery’d grown real advanced, honey. Medicine lagged back in the Middle Ages. The combination hurt or carted off nearbout twenty-three thousand in one day at Antietam. Twenty-three thousand. Imagine it, child. One time I tried counting on my fingers, just that single day’s worth, hoping to get a feel for a number of that size? Honey, I quit way before lunch.

  What a story, all them stories. But listen, before I settle into anything without my noticing—before I even consider getting rolling—if I was to, to tell you the first part, child, you, of all them ones that’s asked—I’d be doing it not just for the fun of talking while a body still can. It wouldn’t be just for Mrs. Lucy Marsden. No, it’s more for them, my missing ones. If I should spill, it’s like … to represent them. They’d want it known, I reckon. Even Captain would. Seems my family left me here to kind of keep their place. I’m one old parchmenty bookmark stuck right in the middle of a chapter where our particular group nodded off.

  I made those many meals. Then you know what happened? Sounds crude. Is, honey. All my eaters died on me. I cleaned up behind folks all those years—and me, the right-neat one—then, of a sudden, there won’t one set of bad habits left to mop up after. I always said I wanted a clean place. Well, now I’d got it. Of my nine children lived past babyhood, every last one has perished. And you know what of, child? Mostly natural causes. What nailed them was nothing fancier than—Time. My last three were in their old-age home right close by. My oldest girl stayed here with me—was the belle of this place till she went on, it’ll be eight months next Thursday. Louisa.

  Odd, that I’m left. I am, though. Still in the center, yet busy explaining—whether people want me to or not. Of course, now there ain’t much left to be in the middle of.

  You know what a mother’s day is like, even with her brood gone? Well, I look at your sweater’s nice color and I think, He will like this shade. I eat French toast for breakfast and think, She is crazy for her sweets. Many a pleasure harks on bac
k to them. Might sound strange but fact is, I’m yet looking after their interests. It’s almost like they voted for me. Too weak to stay on theirselves, they picked their scrappiest one to tarry here, to keep a eye out for their rights. A dead person still has rights, you know.

  —That’s part of why I hang on, stay honest, seek pleasure—it’s for what of them is left in me. And, too, for what of me slid off when my kin did. Living or no, we got to represent each other. It’s only right. The world is … like the House of Representatives. I keep getting elected to it. I don’t even know who’s left alive to vote me in. Is it you?

  —Okay, well, Mrs. Lucy here is readier.

  BUT, CHILD, remember, even sitting here in bed and bent this double, I still stand for them.

  After Appomattox

  He drew me out of many waters. He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them which hated me: for they were too strong for me.

  —PSALM 18:16–17

  WHEN Willie Marsden did come around, his pal gone, the war still healthy, that boy turned mean—both in battle and out. It’s wrong to say he’d changed into a grownup overnight—getting some age on you should make you kinder and not worse, shouldn’t it? But him, he came to bitter.

  Marsden asked that others please call him “Ned.” When they wouldn’t, why he’d curse them something awful. Later, he told all this on hisself. That’s one thing I have to say about the Captain, he did admit stuff. He’d call to me through our back screen door, “Lucy, guess what your loved one’s gone and done now.” “No telling,” was my usual answer, “go ahead and hurt me with it.” All his life, most of Cap’s finer stories had him making the tale’s main mistake. Mine too. Him—mine.

  Men finally buried Ned in a new spot (without even benefit of crossed sticks, hoping to hide him from a friend’s digging. This meant Ned’s exact burial spot was lost forever). Will dug up half the woods, looking. After this, it got where men had to watch Willie to prevent his stealing out alone at night. He went—silent as a genius Tuscarora—on one-boy raids against the enemy. Hadn’t gone fourteen. No need to even shave yet but here he was crawling off into the dark to cut the throats of men his daddy’s age, his granddads’. Some nights Corporal Sal Smith, father of six, asked others’ help—they tied a flailing Willie onto his cot. They hoped to halt his slipping off and getting killed. Seemed he wanted to copycat his one friend. Willie planned going wherever his chum was—up to and including noplace whatsoever.

  The next few weeks, most everything that can happen to a soldier jumped this particular one. He got taken prisoner with his buddy, Smith. The day those two got loose, Will was shot in the left leg. He later fired on a Yankee boy. Then—confused—Will pulled the bleeding victim right into his own hole and hiding place. Those kids were so scared they had to either get acquainted fast or strangle one another. They soon talked. Before the child died—he asked Willie to make sure that his heirloom pocket watch got returned to a waiting Northern family. Will held the watch and jotted the address when his target went and died on him.—All this would prove confusing to a fellow fifty-some. For a body thirteen … well, I started to say, Is this fair? That is one of my long-standing failings, honey. I can sit here in a bed at this charity rest home, me half blind and owning nothing much past old letters, Captain’s scabbard, Momma’s best brooch plus a sterling thimble or two. And I’ll think back to what some loved one had to live through and—getting real riled—Lucy will holler, “Wait one … that ain’t fair.”

  “Grow up,” snaps a retired professor in here. “Don’t you even know yet, Lucille? You, a resident of this hellhole. ‘Fair’? At your age?”

  My favorite candy-striper, newly fifteen, she calls me “super-innocent.” Look, I don’t have to put up with that! Ain’t fair.

  But the odd part, I never want to quit at least expecting fairness. Even after all that’s snagged me and mine, I want the lack of “fair” to always shock me. The best storytellers on earth, child, they’ve all stayed semi-furious defending something, expecting something—expecting something better.

  ANYHOW, Marsden’s losing Ned, his seeing what followed, it changed so much in him. Even war’s ending didn’t switch that around. When your appendix is gone, you’ve still got the scar proving right where knives went in to find it. Something was taken clear out of the child. And Reconstruction, honey, why it never reconstructed that. I spent my whole life trying and put it back and make it up to him. (I’m still trying. Hear me?) Well, news flash: You can’t. Make it up to a person.

  Hard to know what things were like back then. From here, child, it looks like how they fixed up Williamsburg all neater than a shopping mall. (Williamsburg! You can learn more about the past by studying a tenant farmer’s unpainted house weathered silver, than by talking with some chipper summer-job college kid wearing a white wig.) You been to Gettysburg? one perfect dull old park now. But you think it looked like that or smelled that way? what with horses being horses and the people dying of them fevers nobody even had no titles for? In the fighting, if a boy got shot in his knee, say, and if lead was hard to get at? why, no time for fancy surgery, off that whole leg came. In every army doctor’s bag, find a good-sized saw. Later, Captain remembered (both in bad dreams and stark awake) the piles and piles of hairy legs, whole separate arms—some more tanned than others—wedding rings still shining on the third fingers of some. Sights a child don’t soon forget. Listen, honey, things was raw then. It was something.

  • • •

  SO AFTER the Civil War, so called—and I’ll quit gabbing if you’ll tell me what was so doggone civil about it—Mr. Marsden hiked clear home. Walked.

  Onct back, Will got hisself bathed, pruned of wild-man hair that’d make Absalom look like some witch-hazeled drugstore smoothie. Home in Falls, the child hoped to try and set things right, blend in, play like nothing much had happened. During the stroll from Virginia, Will planned the rest of his days the way you’ll do after getting one of life’s big reprieves. Decision: Marsden’s remaining years would be orderly and quiet as his last three had not. But even while mapping a clean future and trudging plantation-wards, Will picked up some southbound body lice.

  A colored livery-stable worker helped the child to kill such mites, using diluted sheep dip. (It’s a miracle anybody lived for even six weeks back then.) Our town barber, Stark of Stark’s Scissor Tonsorium, sheared Will’s dreadlocks. The ex-private felt ashamed to be seen publicly whilst looking so ragged. In a hotel room, with the help of the colored worker’s carrying hot water upstairs, Willie bathed and rebathed. Nine rinses went from charcoal black to murksome gray, then semi-dinge till turning clear as teardrops. The boy watched layers float from him till it seemed war was just some mold or stain. Being so young, at first he thought he’d washed it off that easy.

  Marsden wrote a letter, had it hand-delivered to Mr. Lucas of Lucas’ Ail-Round Store. “Dear Mr. Luke, Yes I am back. You have surely heard as you always did hear most every little thing. So since I am … back, please bring me over a suit of clothes such as a fellow like myself would be wearing nowdays. I never was that fancy of a dresser. I am I fear perhaps a good deal out of touch lately. Socks too. I am truly back and truly yours Willie Marsden. O Yes Best to Doris. I am also good for this credit-wise and know I need not mention it but just do not care to take anything for granted in trying to start over right.”

  The black suit, the huge hat, the button-up boots looked like what a wax dummy in some store window would pick for itself. Dressed, shorn, talc-powdered by barber Stark pleased with one whole quarter’s tip, Willie soon looked ready to attend a funeral, maybe his own. This getup became the Captain’s civvie uniform for life. Honey, so few men have eyeballs for anything except the profit margin and is the lawn mowed. That was my Captain. A stranger, looking for a child of ours, once asked Marsden to please describe our little girl. Cap went, “Well,” and held up fingers of one hand like for counting off the features of his well-loved flesh and blood. “Well, she’s kind of �
� she’s about the size you would expect of a person her particular age and weight. Now her hair is in between brown and not, only lighter, and the eyes … what are her eyes, honey?—But why am I trying this. Her own mother’s standing right here. Men shouldn’t have to describe.” It’s a point of view, honey.

  And yet he slowly became one of the better storytellers in eastern North Carolina, which is—truth be told—saying something.

  Just back from war, Marsden installed his momma in rented rooms. He didn’t talk to her about his own sad deeds in the historic mud of Virginia and Maryland. She couldn’t yet speak, which spared her mentioning bad local luck—her getting in the path of Sherman’s firebugs. The Marsden farm had been leveled. Though she still lived and breathed, this lady’s personal best—her character, the priss and fun and fuss of her—was mostly leveled too. Her ruined face and arms and chest spoke three words: Scorched Earth Policy. In twelve minutes, she’d gone from Beauty to Monster. A story there.

  So, two well-brought-up souls just sat together. He would clutch his large hat on one knee. She would hold a teacup, sometimes a full one, more often empty, always white and always Spode. She slept with this safe in her palm like some child clutching its toy. And she never rolled upon or broke the thing, and rumor has it she was buried holding her favorite bone china, comforting in the casket with her.

  Lady Marsden’s two boardinghouse rooms were stocked with most of her plantation’s famous furniture. It’d been spared from Sherman’s flames by Mrs. Marsden’s slave girl, one Castalia. The fine Empire fixtures had—unlike poor Mrs. Marsden—escaped all fire damage except the stink of smoke. (One time as a child of eleven, I was let in there. The rooms were dark, thin paths ran betwixt best furnishings from a home of seventy-odd rooms. The smell of the mansion’s burning had lasted thirty years, was sucked deep into brocades, it coated apple wood and glazed the gilt. These rooms full of charcoal stink and marble masterpieces were occupied by a woman whose face looked like a rawhide fleece-lined moccasin left six months in the rain. Just the violence of her place’s smell scared me witless. This smell seemed so “old” to me at eleven. Seemed the war I sniffed harked back to Sparta/Carthage, not just Charleston and Atlanta.) But I get ahead of myself by getting behind. It’s a pattern with me, sugar. Look, ain’t nobody perfect. Here at first I’m trying hard to keep this all set in line. It’s tough, being a good housekeeper for pretty much total chaos.