Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  Then my right side, ear to hip, just went. Bye, it snuffed past stinging. Below between, a hurt kept really hurting. My throbbing seemed sharp as other people’s sounds. I wondered that them nearby folks couldn’t hear it. Seemed odd that the manager didn’t come running to help me, didn’t summon the Atlanta police then telegraph my momma. Not a soul arrived. Momma? I was under a man who felt like a convention of boulders. It was legal, this. I was under a man my folks had passed me on to, for him to use this way for life.

  I dared not reach down betwixt sheet and, with my good left hand, touch my opened self. I should’ve got right up and done some serious rinsing. But I didn’t know how to wash proper. They never told you nothing then. Did they think that, by sparing you certain news, those facts’d bypass you? I’m not sure which world my well-intended folks kept schooling me for, but—so far, honey—I ain’t yet hit its outmost border. Still, flat on my back, I knew my plan. Manners aside, simple self-defense come clear enough.

  My awake half would pull its sister 50 percent free of Captain. Next (I coached myself) place both your bare feet onto floorboards, girl. The cold’ll give you spunk. Why, if you see a fallen dray horse trapped under a cart on the street, you try and help it get aloose. Anybody decent will. So now save yourself—you’re at least that good. You’re a animal, minimum, which means you deserve something.

  Your carpetbag is packed except for the silver hairbrush and your new Child’s Garden of Verses from the aunts. Plus, you might just rescue some of them nice baby hotel soaps as souvenirs. Dress fast and quiet, slip on out. By train or on foot, get home, girl, as best you can—go right to the unmarried aunts’ big house. (I would forever refuse to knock at my own folks’ front door. Poppa was in there. Why did I blame Poppa most for this? He should’ve hinted. Momma probably couldn’t. Everybody at the wedding knew. All smiling, winking so. Everybody but me. Me and my innocent untouched aunts.) Except for them, I figured nobody else’d want me now. Used goods, marked way down. First, when the three unwed sisters saw me alone on their porch, they’d scold. And I wouldn’t blame them. “You left Captain Marsden, catch of the year, before one single night was over—why, Lucille?”

  But when they stepped outside, and once I told them exactly what-all he tried to pull on me (I wouldn’t have to spell out how that particular stunt had hurt a girl), aunts’d either swoon or else throw up on the lilac bushes. Then they would take me in. For keeps. To live in a clean white house forever. They’d hide a person safe from men for good.—I pictured all of this till I felt ready for escape. By then I knew I was strong and mad enough to live alone for life.

  I felt I knew how slaves had breathed real shallow whilst sneaking North and free of a owning master. Anatomy-wise, seemed like what’d just been opened in me was the Underground Railway. My left hand’s fingers now hooked under hotel bedsprings, got a goodly grip, pried the rest of me two inches freer. My jostling underneath him made the Captain stir, made him say something. Asleep, he muttered right down towards my neck.

  His breath was like the air from a big commercial greenhouse—sweetish, possible, trapped-smelling. He mumbled words I couldn’t understand. The next-door couple kept on bickering, voices getting lower as they meant it more. Stabled horses cleared their foot-long sinuses. Drunk hawkers stumbled on the street, letting out a few sample yahoos.—And Captain told me where I should put up our tent.

  He said it real plain. I straightened beneath him. Was like hearing a strange man with a extra-deep voice speak out of the darkness in the same rented room with you, same bed. It was that.—Under here, numb, I was both his legal bride and what they nowdays call “a abused child.” And it was then I understood—my aunts hadn’t given me the Stevenson poems as a wedding present to replace my old worn-out copy. No, the morocco-bound book won’t even meant for me. Was for other children, younger than me, ones I was going to have to have. But, see, I wanted it. I loved those poems, knew most by heart. And till that very second, I thought the Child whose garden of verses it’d always be was me alone.

  The man above me spoke. I listened for one reason only. Pinned, I had to. I knew it was the war that he was in—he spoke of how a brook ran near the camp, he named which horses had lost shoes. Then his tone changed, something bumped inside the dream. His body quaked, the huge calf muscles locked in tics. Captain’s voice grew much more lively by degree, moving up like notes from lower to mid-high to pure-tee screech. He yelled for chums to please take cover, fast. He sounded like somebody new, somebody more my age. Soon he was just hollering full out and I mean loud.

  The couple one room away hushed their fighting. They mumbled in a more united way, guessing that some nightmared child had screamed one chamber off. Then they dropped back to accusing one another with yet more clever venom spirit.

  What went on inside Cap’s dream came out to me in bits and inches. Even when he paused, when deeper sleep let him lose interest a while, it all hooked up. When speaking started again, I understood just which direction the enemy was advancing from—a hotel room’s northeast corner. He muttered how some rabbits and four deer had scampered through camp from that way—a sure sign of right massive enemy onslaught. “Smith, Ned. Get ready, boys. Here goes again. Do wish it wouldn’t. Uh-oh, it sure is, though.” Some enemies arrived on horseback. Many more on foot. Pinned, I listened all the full night long.

  After a while, I didn’t have to. Maybe from fright, my whole right side came back alive again, hello. I could have slid free, might have dressed quick, grabbed my nicest things, just run. Poppa’d given me a gold piece I’d hid in my bag’s lining. Considering my getaway, I still paid attention. My thin shanks were cold, twitching now with questions only a doctor could answer. And yet I listened. I did, child. My young eyes stayed so wide open for so long, their outer edges dried. I forgot to blink. Couldn’t hardly swallow—soon felt like I was talking.

  Captain’s night voice had this mildness floating over it. “Bring water, could be trapped … right good while. Stay down, you fools. Told you, keep flat. I don’t plan to clean up your dying mess. No joke, over there.”

  Compared to Cap’s daylight tone, this was like holding a jar of October cider up beside one of aged molasses.

  Seemed familiar. Then I knew, of course—it was the sound of those boy eyes I’d seen.

  Braced awake, I knew when Northern forces drew closer. I guessed which of Captain’s friends were hiding where, when they’d been shot at, then when one got blasted for sure. How real it felt—his voice vibrating into my ribs. I kept my bearings all night long and by 4 a.m. could’ve sketched his whole battle onto the ceiling overtop them baby angels. His pain was like a map. It lifted and kind of led me a few inches free of my own hurt—pinned beneath it. At least for a while it did.

  Odd, I hadn’t known he had any. Pain, I mean. Everybody told me how his family’d had the great plantation before Sherman’s burning desire to tour local mansions. Everybody promised me that Captain was respected, handsome, rich, a civic somebody. So where did the pain part come in? Sure, I’d heard his war stories often enough. But good as he’d got at telling them, each by now seemed smoothed almost official. Even the raggedness of his ripe voice could feel expert as a singer’s tricks.

  It’s one thing getting a body’s battle facts, another hearing the very voice of Then in motion. The squeal of being trapped in a hole, of being that young, that spooked, and not expecting to get even twenty minutes more of life, but greedy, oh, mighty greedy for more. For the right to make further mistakes.

  His weight still crushed me. But now I started working to support it. Womanhood! My head and chest moved free. I wedged the left hand loose. But instead of reaching under sheets to touch my own casualty self, I craned up and over, found his forehead. Found it bunched in ridges like a fist. At my touch, I felt it smooth some. Just like that. What a strange new power this seemed to offer young me. A joy to hear his squeaks and warnings ease, the snores take over.

  I knew that my pain tonight was—for
my age group—equal to his. I knew that war seemed his excuse. But even then, I figured: no excuse ever excuses your hurting other people. Still, he’d once been young and in deep trouble. Here, now, so was I. From the waist down, I felt novocained with the damage this old man had shot my way. But, considering the boy my age, a boy like myself—in a definite bind—that night, forgiveness interested me.

  Forgiveness! Honey, I thought I had invented it.

  Sleeping, he no longer believed that my touch meant I wanted a rematch at wrestling. With Mr. Marsden awake, I couldn’t act this kind towards him without courting the old goat’s pouncing. One last time, Cap piped, “Duck. Or you’ll be hurt. Don’t. Oh don’t get hurt.”

  I touched his big closed eyes. I told them, “Won’t. We won’t. I promise.”

  If I hadn’t jostled him whilst trying and save myself, he might never have spoke out in his sleep. I might never have known.—In some ways, sure, he was just another slave-driving pile-driving villain. But, too, he’d stayed a child damaged early on. That night, he seemed all heavy and all light at once. Which of the two would I pick to see and stay with? Maybe both, a boy and man dancing forever on each other’s toes.

  Finally, the sun—without even meaning to—helped me. Sun turned those young angels overhead as pink as raw roast beef, made them seem beef-real. I knew my pain was a match for the sleeper’s piled atop me. Equal pain for equal work! But I calmed myself by whispering verse till the hotel roused in knocks and sweepings. Tears creeped from eyes’ far corners and tickled both my ears full. And yet I kept on quoting, quoting one of those I knew:

  My bed is like a little boat.

  Nurse helps me in when I embark.

  She girds me in my sailor’s coat

  And starts me in the dark.

  At night I go on board and say

  Good night to all my friends on shore.

  I shut my eyes and sail away

  And see and hear no more …

  When he woke, heaved sideways, scratched hisself while looking around, saying, “Where the …? Oh,” when he sat up—his broad bare back to me, it felt almost matter-of-fact—with me still here, a stiff beside him. Felt semi-natural, seemed like what it was already … a kind of marriage.

  We ate breakfast with the other vet. I had just got my Purple Heart in secret, purple something all right. I sat sipping tea, nibbling on a scone. Above the marble tabletop, I was Miss Teacake Priss. Underneath it: the Circus Lady That Gets Nightly Sawed in Half, only for real. Seemed the Captain hoped to hold off discussing what’d happened upstairs, wanted to postpone asking how I was, had I endured it. All my busy forgiveness in the dark meant I’d got not one wink of sleep. He’d snored right through. He said he sure felt fit this morning. “Nothing like a good night’s log-sawing,” Captain stretched. The other veteran, a gentleman, at least had the decency to lower his eyes and look away from me.

  Was three miles clear of town before I spoke. We were riding north along Sherman’s southbound route. So near to Atlanta, everything’d been burned twice. Soil still looked pitchy. No tree in sight stood over twenty feet tall. You’d see fine old trunks but they were only charcoal. I sat waiting for some news from my bridegroom. I sat thinking this must be a omen—tooling through a war zone on our first married morning outdoors.

  Three miles and many trees of the sapling class later, he says, “Things,” then quits. “Things do get easier, child, with practice they do. We’ll have you relaxed in no time, we’ll get you kind of … a little …”

  I finished for him, “Broke in? Kind of broke in?”

  Cap said he’d planned to state it a good deal nicer than that but, yeah, relaxed, whatever. He sat so straight-backed then, he got to fiddling with the reins. The horses’ ears stayed up like horses were listening in. Let them. “You’ll see,” he tells me. “Time helps, child. Things improve. You’ll get used to everything. Maybe even me included. It’s a sort of bill of goods, the whole married setup. You take the easy with the less so. I might not be smooth, but I’m not a bad man, either. Of course, I guess I’d be the last to know, if I were … but still …”

  His crabbed tenderish voice showed me he was trying for my sake. But why hadn’t this not-bad man helped me out last night? I kept still, ashamed of sounding like a bad sport. Nobody hates being a bad sport like a fifteen-year-old tomboy whose momma is a fainter. I looked over at him.

  Now, for me today, child, a fellow of fifty would appear practically a infant. But to a girl so young, one who’s known no sleep the night before, a girl just split netherwise with no more ceremony than a melon rolled off the roof, Mr. Marsden looked as old as I do right now. Maybe even longer in the tooth.

  A bright morning, and he sat there, mahogany brown, steel gray, meat red—green country pulling past him. Lines fanned out this side’s bright eye, lines printed there from his squinting at the world three times longer than I’d been alive. Oh, I knew the fellow half liked me. But, too, I figured he liked Momma’s money—and me, her only child. (I understood that Momma’s bratty childhood fame and snooty ways made folks forever believe her to be piles richer than she was.)

  And I wanted to like this man back. I did. Right off, I knew it’d go way easier on a person if she could. So I smoothed my skirt over either knee and tried again to feel how good we looked together. Nobody, studying us today, could probably tell. Unless them handsome bellhops peeked, then snitched. So I told myself, “Enjoy the view, darling.” (I believe it was the first time I ever spoke that overused word of mine “darling” to any living soul, and I said it whilst trying a mothering rescue of my own self.)

  Was then I saw the stain. It’d spread from underneath me all up around and halfway across my lap—gray piping was now sogged purple with it. I couldn’t look down no longer. “Enjoy the view, view, the view.” I only stared at farmland, a third-degree war burn we buggied through. I saw a woman behind a cabin, she boiled clothes in a black pot. Her broomstick poked one family’s thankless filthy shirts. Agewise, she fell betwixt Momma and me. Something about this white lady standing on history’s scorched dirt, something in how—this early in the day—she stooped (so willing!) toward the steam of others’ dinge. It made me want to scream for her, for the Captain back then (a child I saw would not rush out at my first invitation), and to scream for me, oh yeah, me too. Then I couldn’t help but to notice—I was. Screaming. The washing woman jumped. When she turned my way, part of me went, “Oops,” another figured, “Good. Stare! I’m being kidnapped. And everybody agrees it ought to happen. Come help a girl. I’m bleeding here. I need another lady’s aid, please, ma’am.”

  Beside me, as I hollered wave on wave of it, spit fleeing in strings and spots of light, whilst I sat pointing at the colorful ruined lap of me and then to the man and back to damage done by him, Cap appeared right palsied. He lost all color, he give our mare and gelding one steadying cluck, “There, boys.” He gawked like I was some lunatic lady that needed chaining to a attic wall for her own sake and others’. Oh and it was my good dress too. The traveling outfit my unwed aunts had spent two months of nights on their side porch making be so perfect. Soaked clear through. Me, bumping on that buckboard seat after all I’d been through down there last night, dress wet heavy in broad daylight and I ain’t talking with perspiration either, honey.—The night before, he’d called out, “Don’t. Oh don’t get hurt.” Right good advice. One wise child warning another. A voice I recognized like I had known his boy’s eyesight. And I figured I should now definitely duck or dodge or hide myself, but where? Where was safety? Honey, from then on, there won’t no cover anyplace for me. Darling, I was on my own for good. All of this was legal. It’d grabbed me oh so soon, so soon.

  THESE Japanese machines understand plain English? Should I talk less bold about activities in B-E-D? Okay, I’ll say all of it straight out. You can trim the troubling parts after. I ain’t foulmouthed by nature, but it’s time for total facts. Seems like I’m finally getting limbered up some. Okay, okay here, child.<
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  I do have a load of stuff to spill before my breath takes its long-overdue vacation. Unless I’m wrong, and if you’re willing—it might partly get told your way, child. Seems a miracle, but here I am—still trusting strangers at my age. Well, a body’s got to. No matter what. That’s the bargain. Good honest face you have here. Keep it that way.

  FEELS easier with you settled closer. Look, you don’t think I’m just some mean old gossip, do you? Because I’m not, not really. Gossip’s what woes and vices happen to strangers. Stories come from nearer. They’re from in here, up here, and yeah, Lordy, down there too. Maybe especially from down there.

  My stories are mostly housebroken, they know the key’s hid right under our Welcome mat because who’d think to look in a place so bold and innocent? Plus, all my stories are true. That’s what bowls you over, ain’t it? Keep your tales around long enough, they won’t go bad on you like leftover food. Oh no, they’ll improve, honey, they’ll upgrade nearbout to legend—Mr. Bread Mold shifted clear uptown to Mrs. Pencillin.

  And young as you are compared to me, you better get your stories in order, child. Because a person’s life, it’s just about a week. You’re getting dressed for school on Monday morning, Momma’s two rooms off calling, “You’ll be late again, sister, and no written excuse from home this go-round, Miss Molasses in January,” and by the time you try and put your foot through your pantaloon’s other leg hole, you find it hard to straighten up because you’re a woman of eighty-odd and your spine, why it’s rusting already. Here you are, Momma long gone, no hope of another note of excuse ever again, and you’re still stepping into schoolgirl britches so out-of-date they look plain silly, even to you. You perk and find yourself alone because, hey, it’s late on Thursday and I mean your only Thursday, ever, child.