Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  Under their breaths, while the choirmaster slept, altos muttered: poor Winona was now cooking on a campfire in her yard, was sleeping—during summer storms and all—in a pup tent in her side yard. Somebody saw her patrolling her yard’s edges at night, lifting before her a canary cage she seemed to mistake for a lantern, seeking the one just man.

  COURTHOUSE SQUARE’S gimpy vets had spied Will Marsden walking blocks out of his way to avoid Winona Smythe’s house. He’d been back nearly a month but still dreaded that first visit. And who could blame him? Willie spent his Saturdays visiting spots where Ned and him had played. Far out past the ice plant, clear beyond Silver Lake, young Marsden was seen to wander. His new black boots were muddy from patrolling ditches where two boys’d onct trapped crawfish. Some of the old “camps” had been reclaimed by fresh batches of kids—the way birds’ll take over abandoned nests. Marsden seemingly approved. On the ground beside a tall sycamore, he left six dimes for the six black kids presently playing there. It was Nash County’s steepest sycamore and famous for that (in Nash County). From its topmost seasick limbs, you could spy clear to the poorhouse, high over and beyond the river Tar, almost to the forty steepled churches of Rocky Mount. Ned had got fired on while swinging from a sycamore. All this mattered to the mumbling young Marsden now squatting in a ditch nearby. His gold watch, still on loan from the Northern dead, rested open before him. His big dark hat rested on a forked stick jammed into the mud. Willie stared as black kids tilted the whole treetop side to side—he wore a strange stricken look. Seemed he expected the sycamore and all its children to explode in about thirty seconds. He checked his watch. Something strange was going on with Willie Marsden, a bottling-up that’d pop out soon or later. Count on it—law of physics. And with Falls being the size it was, if somebody noticed him yonder alone in a ditch, this meant—in under two hours—most every single local soul had heard.

  People worried about him, true. (There are certain men that get noticed because they expect too little from the world. You want to tell the fellow, “Hey, you’re entitled. You especially.” This lack of hoping attracts others. Seems Mr. Gloom is full of liquid secrets, banked inside him. Oh, to wheedle a few loose, it’d be like siphoning pure gold honey from a ugly dusty hive. Nurses, ministers, romantics, children—and fools—will move toward these ones. Watch.)

  BASED on what I’ve seen here in Lanes’ End Rest, I could write me a whole new Surgeon General’s Warning for Your Health, like maybe: When you lose your looks, don’t repeat don’t expect to get treated as a beauty no more. Makes sense but you’d be surprised how strong a habit Habit is. (The physical beauty part is one thing the Lord never handed me and therefore never got to giggle whilst snatching back.) I try and warn former beauties, Find something else to get you through. Get good at something. Even if that means crafts—wood-burning yet another Sitting Bull’s head onto yet another pine plaque that’d rather stay plain pine.

  We have a rougher time trying to make our new-here men feel properly noticed. Notice is a kind of oxygen. The professor across the hall told me about a experiment done at some Mexican orphanage: won’t no nurse allowed to touch the babies except whilst changing diapers or jamming bottles into their mouths—and you know, from want of notice, some of them children just died? Fact. Happens at this end of the production line too. It’s hardest on your shyest widowers and bachelors.

  Arriving alone, they keep to their rooms. Men have got this gift for prideful glumness, for rehashing long-done-with grudges. Dignity—the wrong kind—undoes many a gent, seems like. They arrive here and find four woman to each male—you think that’d give them the will to live! But no—regular happiness seems cheap to them. They don’t trust it yet (and with some fellows creeping beyond ninety). Once and for all, darling, getting old ain’t getting wise. I could give you a wheelchair tour from room to room and prove my point. No names, please.

  First thing men notice is how our Home’s roof leaks so bad. Come April showers, there’s tin and plastic trash cans lined up for catching hallway water. Your chair wheels get soaked. Your hands go black with rubbery grit. Then men discover that the food here can, some Thursdays especially, nearbout gag a maggot. To gents, it starts seeming a plot against them personally.

  Being fellows that had jobs and pension plans they’ve outlived, men hate knowing that they’re on the dole. All their lives they’ve said how Folks that don’t Work should Starve. Now they can’t work but they ain’t ready for what they been wishing on the shiftless of all races. It’s especially hard on your registered Republicans. They think us others in here, poor as them, hold it against them, or else that we ain’t fit company ourselves, also being this broke while this “mature.”

  After the new men have been socked in here two weeks, we know if they are going to get the joke or not.—The un-laughers? the what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this types? well, they just die out quicker. It’s simple. But if you see a fellow take a little interest in My Children, Right or Wrong, if you catch him asking what happened to each character before he come in on the middle, and if he speaks to you at dinner in Multi-Purpose and makes it to breakfast a few days a week, if you learn what he done for a living and which part of it he was best at and what he misses most, well—maybe he’s going to be with us for a while. He’s in on the prank, see? and knows it ain’t just a stunt at his expense. It’s here for him to chuckle over too.

  Trouble is: what a body has got to laugh off—grows bigger and bigger, don’t it, child? Soon you have to be a regular glutton for cruelty jokes. You got to laugh at them wicked Helen Keller ones and be li’l Helen reading them by hand off of a waffle iron. Near the end, bad jokes practically come sit on you, hollering down, “This strike you as funny? that grab you? this break your funnybone or this? this?”

  But “Lanes’ End Rest”? I think the name is tacky and that the government should be ashamed and change it.

  7

  ONCE Marsden made sure his own mother was alive enough to carry on, hid safe in a boardinghouse with Mr. William Morris’ wallpaper and a servant girl around the clock, he steeled hisself for visiting Ned’s. Couldn’t be a chore that even your smoothest boy looked forward to. There’s all kinds of bravery and—for some boys—social calls require a gumption in the league with Battle Nerve. How do you tell a widow that her single child is dead? Is it better to blurt out one loaded sentence or to first roll a long talked mattress under her—then hit her with it, making her fall more safe?

  Of course, Will had heard how she received the letter. He didn’t yet know which of his division officers’d wrote the thing. Local talkers described in great detail how—on hearing—Winona flopped into front-yard weeds. And yet, Will felt the death had not yet been announced. Wouldn’t seem true for the Widow Smythe till Marsden hisself strode over, knocked, told. He put the visit off for a while.

  One evening, safe in darkness, he waited outside her gate and studied the side-yard campfire, saw a figure cooking one spitted duck or turkey, turning it slow with a soldier’s own patience.

  FIRST seeing Willie back on the streets of metropolitan Falls, most citizens didn’t know him. Boy’d grown that much. He’d come home six foot one and turned grave as a young deacon. One local—seated on the often reenameled bench outside Lucas’ All-Round Store—finally said, “Now I got it. I’m ready for a wager. Looks to me to be a Marsden—a Marsden out of a More. His late poppa’s hatchet face under that pale skin his messed-up mother used to be so famous for. Any takers?”

  Nowdays, it’s hard to imagine a time or town where your own genes announced you at forty feet. Some ways, of course, it’s awful, having seeming strangers know—on sight—which two clans combined to form the stew of you.

  But—in the end, you knew you were home because home knew who you were.

  AND WHERE am I? A glitter in my poppa’s sea-green eyes—him still a towheaded farm boy far out into the poorest part of the swampiest county in either Carolina. I am the luster on the pearly nose of my rich infant momm
a (her rolled by in a white wicker baby carriage with its own attached white silk umbrella). Captain Marsden strides so far ahead of me in time, my own folks came of age noticing him around town, grown and sad, black-suited as a cast-iron weather vane—one character that children steered clear of.

  FINALLY, fresh home and brilliantined, the young man set out, bracing hisself to do his duty. Will first stopped at Lucas’, bought the widow some horehound candy. Then—looking like a longtime suitor trapped in clothes too-new—he strolled over, swallowing hard, unannounced.

  Everybody knew exactly where he was bound, of course. They’d been waiting. A few people trailed him.

  Marsden shoved into the yard, he overstepped bones of a dead campfire, he knocked on the tent’s center pole, waited, cleared his throat, finally bent at his knees. Only a clot of blankets in there. At the house’s front door, Willie tapped. Polite, neighbors hid behind the japonica bushes next door till something either did or did not happen next.

  Winona at last opened. She looked like insomnia packed into one outgrown black dress. She wore cologne. She smelled terrible but tempting. Winona smelled that day like a jelly doughnut.

  Will, standing on the lady’s stoop, felt dizzy. He had to stare clear down at her. I have grown, he decided. He’d once arrived here and asked, “Ma’am, can Ned please come out and play?” Then he always gaped far up at Winona’s great breakfront bosom, her solid chins. Today he felt perched on two high tin kitchen stools, his new God-given legs.

  “I’m back,” said he. “But, our Ned he’s not. I’ve come to tell you. That. See. Something happened.” Will began to explain, slow, about the millpond, the high spirits, mules being in already, that tree yonder, a loved one’s swinging out over water.—Winona, not having asked Will into her home yet, screamed. Neighbors (who’d gathered owing to some sixth sense that gossip fodder sends, electric, in the air) left japonica’s cover. Get those casseroles ready.

  Canaries, hearing Winona, screaked. The widow ran deeper into her place. She tripped. Will followed. She barged away from him. She fell. He lifted her. She escaped. Winona struggled. She hit him on the shoulders. She screamed at him, “Deserter.” She pushed Will hard. Then, turning, toppled. Will propped her up. She cursed him, “We sent you off together. He would be home today too. You were a unit. I distinctly told you, ‘Guard him with your life.’ Well, here’s yours, all grown up and clumsy, nothing much to look at, but where’s our Ned’s, William? He started out so splendidly, he’ll most certainly stay fine when you stop this prank. Show me. Where’ve you hid him?” And she pressed closer, poking through Will’s jacket, her fingers digging far into the pockets of his new trousers. She held the gawky kid against hall wallpaper. He now clutched a candy sack up against his Adam’s apple. Winona, finding no sign of her son anywhere on Will, soon struck his shoulders, his chest. He stood making low sounds, face so long, eyes half closed, head turned aside—expecting nothing, accepting everything. Only when Winona moved to knee him in his sudden grownup’s groin did Will draw up one leg, block her jab.

  She quit then. Seeing his blank features, Winona fell directly against him, sobbing in a way that scared canaries flying all over her house (only now did Marsden notice them, loose—circling her, trying to be her favorites, a black planet’s beauty pageant of yellow moons). Seemed that birds would go crazy from her noise. Flying, they each gave off these flaky little mica chips of sound.

  Out front, more neighbors glommed along the fence. Two men were eating sandwiches. It was getting to be a club. They worried now, less for the widow than her young visitor. “Poor thing,” they said. “A whole war. And Winona to boot.”

  The front door stood open. Folks could hear her strange unnatural sounds—unnatural because they were (your hair standing on end, your arms’ skin curdling) so natural, so often felt—and yet real seldom heard. Especially rare here on expensive Summit Avenue, where every bush was called topiary, where many people’s first names were last names, where—unlike the county—no black dog was called Blackie and no white one Snowball. On this refined tree-lined street lived a person named Winona who would do absolutely anything she felt like, and anytime she chose. She should not be allowed to try such things and still have this remarkable address. Being weird, weird even for ’65, made her a dangerous person, it meant she’d maybe probably come to a real bad end. Everybody knew this. Even Winona. Winona especially. But, honey, that made her just act the wilder.

  Meanwhile, indoors, unknown to spectators but explained to me years later: Once Widow Winona had sobbed a sufficiency, once she’d begun acting semi-recovered, she grabbed the young man by what was left of his new-clipped hair. Right in the hall, whilst jerking his knobby head with each word spoke between her clamped teeth, she made Willie M. kneel, “Where/were/you/when/they/got/him? Where, were, you?”

  Soon listeners out front heard another sound, bass-baritone, buckling up under hers. “Now him too,” folks told each other. Of a sudden her craziness—just railed against—got more dignified. (Emotions sure are mercury quicksilver.) Will’s joining her in grief made neighbors see that—if they had lost a pretty only child like hers—maybe they’d feel nearbout as wronged.

  But just then, plates started busting.

  Neighbor dogs came running, barking. Breaking crockery hurt dogs’ ears. Folks considered it selfish of her, pitching such a tantrum after she’d had so much time to prepare. Couldn’t she just comfort a returned soldier? “He didn’t kill her damn son,” one fellow said.

  “If you put her in a book,” somebody shook a head sideways. A wit answered, “And I would, too, put her in one, if it’d get her out of here.” Members of the Books and Issues Luncheon Club nodded.

  UH-OH, here comes shy William More Marsden backing through Winona’s front door, his hat is in hand, palms are lifted, trying and soothe her, all while ducking to keep tossed crockery from his general eyeball area. Then out the open door Will’s just exited, one canary flutters. It lights in branches of a scrub tree growing on Winona’s lawn. The watching crowd makes a sound blending “Ahhh” and “Uh-oh.” Then neighbors hear Winona give a shrill two-fingered whistle. She hollers, “Von Himmel the Fourth, kindly get your butt back in here, I mean immediately if not sooner.” And like magic, the bird flies direct through the door, precise as a thread entering its needle. For Pete’s sake.

  One green saucer (looking to be Limoges—which makes Summit matrons grunt all the more) rolls through air, spins just above a young man’s scalp, finds solid brick footpath feet beyond him, and busts with dainty yet maximum noise. Marsden backs through the front gate and through well-wishers who’ve parted. “Sorry,” he says. He holds his new black hat in both hands, keeps turning it round and round like some pot that he’s trying and make perfect on a wheel. His strange sinking smile aims at all these people, seems to ask forgiveness on behalf of a bereaved hotheaded mother and for the whole conniption-causing war itself.

  Bidding everybody a good day, Marsden resettles his Pilgrimish headgear and stalks back to work. A green platter big enough to hold a turkey dinner for fourteen divides on bricks into many more than fourteen portions. Neighbors—not wanting to again be called Buzzards and Their Leech Infants—leave quick.

  Walking downtown, Will finds a sack of candy yet palsied in his grip. He must use his left hand to pry open the clawed right fist. Moving to his place of business, wearing outsized clothes, he looks like a kid disguised to seem somebody full-grown. Which is exactly what he was, darling—he’ll turn sixteen next November.

  HE’S THE MAN I married and, in telling this part, I see why. Later, it got harder, child. But, here, okay, true, I am yet his wife. And I still consider “Willie” to be a good name for a person’s husband. Not like these ones now, where everybody sounds like trying for some slinky moving-picture star. Your off brands—“Nigel” or “DeWitt.”

  My home kitchen counter had tin cylinders lined on it. Spelled in a honest delft-blue script that hoped to look like cross-stitching: “S
alt” “Sugar” “Corn Starch.” I can still picture each tin and—between giant “Flour” and the smallest “Baking Soda,” I can easily imagine it spelled out—a word: “Willie”—another daily staple.

  8

  SURVIVING friends of Will’s dead poppa took aside the tight-lipped heir. They gave him one business tip, important when the currency is topsy-turvy as the South’s was ’65 to ’71: Do Not Barter.

  To the family stockyard poor farmers were bringing wads of useless Confederate money. (It’s now available every Saturday nowadays at the Big Elk Browse ’n’ Buy Mall Flea Market at higher than face value. Moral: don’t ever throw nothing out, honey. You hear me?) Yankee money hadn’t even healed itself yet. Farmers brought the best things they yet owned. Marsden decided to barter. Word spread. Word will. Soon his front office was heaped with silver tea sets massed under green canvas tarps. A stray red hen built her nest inside a crystal punch bowl. Hired hands made bets: when would the chicks hatch—you could see the eggs right in there under her. Around this nest, columns of Wedgwood dinner plates piled like huge coins, service for forty-eight cashed in to help buy one necessary ginger mule. Marsden’s stable loft soon looked like Ali Baba’s cave or a certain barn glittering with the Wise Men’s safe-deposit loot. In straw: six busts of Dante wearing what looked like the same shower cap, Shakespeare bearded but bald (must be a comfort to bald men). The four marble Walter Scotts and six plaster Jeff Davises were going cheap.

  Older merchants still held out for cash on the barrelhead. Marsden only trusted what was real. The war had taught him that, made him literal. Thanks to such trading, this boy who’d walked home from northern Virginia’s Children’s Crusade, he soon started growing richer. “No small talk,” county folks said. “No talk. But a right straight shooter. He’ll nod if you got something he wants. He’ll hold up a certain number of fingers. That’s the price. You take it or leave it, no hard feelings. Reckon the Feds cut his tongue out? I seen his mother at church one time, about the prettiest silliest woman in the history of the world, plus all of Nash County. Now a solid mass of scarring, so they say.” Safe inside others’ guessing about him, enjoying a type of skittish dignity, Will entered his twenties like a lamb, bounded out of his thirties like some lion. Once he crossed the threshold of forty, he finally commenced to publicly talk. He’d been rehearsing on Winona every single Thursday all those years, and at gunpoint, practically. Like late bloomers in everything, once the fellow let loose—he sure made up for lost time.