Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  Most everybody stops at Hedgepath’s. You nearbout have to. The stand features twelve-holer privies for white folks—ventilated, wasp-free. (Six-holers for our colored customers.) Road narrows where Hedgepath placed his colorful vegetable ambush. He’ll see you slipping by—he ain’t above hollering at you, either, “Tight wad. Go on, then. But I’m sure telling everbody.”

  So, you rein your horses partway owing to gratitude for any prank strung out so far. Signs’ mottoes, boasts, and corny come-ons have made dull fields into a stupid (funny) human progress three miles long. That’s surely worth something, darling.

  Turns out: Hedgepath’s lean-to has less timber in it than do most of his nine hundred promissory billboards. You get down anyhow—doubtful, pleased, half bullied into doing this, not minding but pretending to. “Free Wader for you Hosres! Road diwrecksions free of chage.”

  Right off, you find you’re remembered from your last visit. “Well, well, if it ain’t …” And you’re called, if possible, by name, called that loud and many times. Captain eases our team toward ditch bank where lightning bugs show bolder now that day’s losing face. He gets down to stretch. Of course he’s recognized right off. Seems like mute farmland itself has spoke his name and—by extension—mine.

  Mr. Hedgepath weighs ninety-some pounds, he seems as springy, tragic, appealing, and overpopulated as the awful coiled flypaper dangling everywhere. Mrs. Hedgepath weighs more than the umpteen bushels of gaudy produce she sits amongst like one more mound of. These oldsters boss around their dozen towheaded children who sack goodies, weigh these, sweetly overcharge you. To perfect strangers milling here, black or white, the senior Hedgepaths say, “Seems like we should know you.” And the very second any stranger admits a name, older Hedgepaths snap fingers, look at each other, nod. “Knew it. Strong family resemblance. The very ones.”

  Which makes visitors feel good. It’s a trick. Guests recognize this but are semi-flattered anyhow. They’re pleased enough to buy a little something. Which is all them Hedgepaths ever intend. About to leave, even Cap shells out a few pennies for sun-warm tomatoes—ones so unlike these Styrofoam things you get in markets nowdays. (That’s the modern world all over, child, growing food for how it looks. Once you’ve bought a California tomato, and tasted its blank chalk, you been exceptionally well suckered—can’t take it back.)

  Ones stuffed into our bag this evening are spotty, marred by picking—but so full of a ornery over-alive red-dirt flavor. They’re definitely “from around here.” Maybe a pound of such tomatoes don’t in 19 and 00 seem worth a whole nickel—still you hand five cents to the nearest Hedgepath. And you pay because of a kind of happy pity. It tells you you are home. Again you have found this bargain of a joke.

  —Uh-oh, we’re almost in sight of town, it’s just beyond that turn! Falls lies directly ahead unless the place burnt or is some dream I’ve had for fifteen years running. Leaning forward across my honeymoon valise, careful not to squinch new produce—I squint around a bushy curve. “Oh, look,” I say, more to myself than him. He does, though, look.—First I love his joy at being back. Then I think I love him.—It’s easier if you love people. Remember that.

  Falls—a cusp or bump—becomes one definite green swelling. It’s inlaid right on the horizon going sunset pink, Falls shines with gas streetlamps being turned on one by one. Our road straightens—like owing to respect. All roads (in Nash County) lead to Falls—or out of it. Our buggy veers rightward. My left shoulder touches my husband’s solid right one. I allow that to continue. I’m pleased recalling: Since Captain Marsden is from Falls too, however much we might could differ through our life ahead, we’ll at least have this. A language spoke by just eleven hundred other souls on earth. (Plus you, child. See, I am slowly teaching you that ramshackle romance language. Ready or not, by the end of this and me, you’ll be right hideously fluent. You will then have to take Forgetting Lessons. I am ninety-nine, and mine are scheduled straight ahead.)

  Evening—perfect hour for return. Daylight has held on long enough to see us to our door and then retire upstairs like some good servant.

  “Looks splendid waiting, does it not, Lucille? I assume you’re reasonably happy to be back.”

  “Yes, sir,” I nod. “It’s nice knowing … everything. I mean, where stuff will be and all.”

  He adds: “Ten days away were just too long. I miscalculated. Could well have made it seven. Five perhaps—and with less business, more pleasure. In future I’ll remember my mistake.”

  “For your next honeymoon?” In sight of home, I grow more sassy. My panties rustle like some Woolworth Easter Basket’s clean excelsior.

  “For my next with you, Lucille. In, say, ten years, we’ll do it all again.” When he sees I don’t exactly hop for joy, Cap adds: “Only better … A person learns …”

  Learns what? I want to ask but I am semi-scared to know. Besides, I’m too busy straightening the skirt’s waistband, getting my attention pinned. Eyes are latched on the strange hill town ahead gleaming conch pink, valuable, porcupinish with competing church steeples.

  Dead ahead, disguised as some hicks’ make-do watering hole, I recognize it, child: the celestial city.

  2

  REMEMBERING the homecoming, still waiting for its comforts, I’d dozed in the bath, knees tucked under my chin. I heard two folks still downstairs, talking, catching up like brother and sister or worse, gently teasing each other.

  Once I dried, once I saved a face-down gardenia from drowning, once I put on night things and unlocked, allowing a door-rapping homeowner into his own bedroom, I noticed some provisions set yonder on the hallway floor.

  Castalia’d left a marbleized tin basin full of hot water—two thick towels stretched overtop to keep it steamy. Nearby, on a pretty saucer painted with cardinals and berries, one yellow bar of strong lye soap. I undid a crystal cruet, I sniffed the splash of vinegar set here like for to dress some salad. Old-style birth control, it was.

  By now, of course, my maidenhead was just a singed and burning memory. And yet I understood nothing about the fertile seepage once a person’s seal gets broke. Concerning nature, I knew the names of every woodland bird and flower from Manteo to Murfreesboro. But I recognized not one plumbing fact about that nearest feisty animal, my waist-down self. Those days, child, if you’d asked me what “douche” meant, I might’ve guessed: “The French word for a product of Holland?”

  So after Cap climbed into the four-poster big as a yacht boat, after he said kindly, “Welcome home forever, my chosen bride,” after he then grabbed me yet again for a little house warming romp—I someway managed to crawl back out the bed. I took up that basin’s hot water, went in and washed my hair with it! Castalia’s hints at wifely hygiene were lost on me. Later, when motherhood struck, you could’ve knocked me over with somebody else’s feather. Did I think that having my hair squeaky-clean might keep me a simple and skinny girl forever? I didn’t think. Just trusted. The Think part often comes after the Trust part, don’t you find? Think can take a larger and larger cut of a person’s energy while the percentage of Trust sometimes wanes and thins and whittles.

  I opened eyes the next day early, found my old new husband dressed for commerce. He rubbed his hands together, ready to traipse downstairs toward Castalia’s java and ample breakfast (I could smell corn fritters and bacon coaxing him through floorboards). Soon the front door would slam—Cap bound for work—he’d leave me alone all day … with her.

  A handsome witch-hazeled man now settled on my side of the bed, brown beard showing comb’s teeth marks. “You mustn’t get up, Lucille. I intend to make sure you’re spoiled and most shamelessly. Especially here at first. Enjoy it, my Lucille. Come eleven o’clock, I plan to study the clock in my office. I’ll picture you as being still quite warm here under my coverlet. Ours. I’d prefer it, I think, if you were to move over and sleep on my side. Maybe even slip into one of my Egyptian-cotton nightshirts. Charming, yes. Third drawer from the top. Quite a picture you’ll mak
e for an old workingman. I daresay I shall be smiling from seven till six. But will I explain my doing so to any living soul downtown? Never, my Lucille.”

  “Yeah, but won’t they know anyways, mister?” I whispered, though we were two married people alone on the bed. “I mean, your first day back off a wedding trip and all? With you fifty whatever you are (no offense) and me just gone fifteen? … Even if you was to smile just a tad, they’ll guess, sir. So please don’t even smirk none. Grinning means telling.” I clutched his beefy paw. Bristles growing thick on its back were surprisingly soft. I kissed the baldest knuckles, I told the hand, heavy as a Sunday beef roast, “Something happened to me in Atlanta, sir. I don’t yet half know what it was. But I beg you—don’t let on to anybody. Even if some nasty men ask. Please, sir, don’t snitch on me.” He lifted my braid’s brush end—he dabbed it over the tip of my nose. Tears stood in his gray eyes. This amazed me.

  He said that I moved him so, did I even know? And, he added, very little had stirred him thusly since the sixties. Cap said my modesty—probably a source of genuine pain to me just now—simply made me mean more to him. Made it mean more. He said we were our own secret, forever. Marriage was private-like. We could do whatever we liked for and to each other, see? Nobody would know. “Not even the maid?” I asked, quiet. He smiled, considering this a joke. Cap said my first day’s job would be just staying snug-as-bug-in-rug right here abed, all right? Castalia herself would bring up a tray for me. I just had to say how I liked my eggs—he’d pass along my order. I swallowed, hard.

  I was to wear whichever of his nightshirts I liked best, ones she’d ironed so perfect (no starch for sleepwear, ever). “And do definitely leave your pigtails trailing down like this, Lucille. You appear no more than nine years old, especially mornings when your face is a bit puffed as it now is. So many freckles. How can I explain your appeal to you? Probably imprudent to even try. Lovely effect altogether, though. Your charm’s probably the last thing you recognize. I’m sure I remain quite blind to my own, such as it is, or was. And I do thank you in advance—I’ll be picturing you in bed here every hour on the hour and half hour. Agreed? You wake for that alone. Then roll directly over and, in your most spirited manner, drop straight back to sleep.

  “And should you, while I’m gone … take the notion (don’t mind Captain’s mentioning such things) to … touch yourself or whatever … feel free. Do. Only natural in a person of your age. I shan’t be home for hours, can’t be helped. ‘Absence makes the heart’ … and so forth. Now, is our day’s schedule quite coordinated? You’re to trust the chiming of the old Seth Thomas downstairs. Leaving, I shall set my pocket watch by him. We’ll be … connected seven to six. This little gambit pleases you, does it? Now, give us a long parting kiss. Excellent. Oh, my dear girl. So, is Lucille amused by our first day’s battle plan?”

  I nodded.

  Look. What the heck else was I going to do?

  3

  WELL, a routine commenced. He lumbered down them steps, ate hearty amid the clank of silver on crockery. Lively talk, half-bawdy laughs from my two elders. Then off he waltzed to the World of Earn. He left Lucy here in the House of Pay. Left me unprotected from two hundred pounds of dusky grudge presently a-storming round the kitchen below. I’d never wanted a servant to boss.

  Once Cap closed his home’s front door, once he strolled, whistling, toward a garden gate, when he stepped onto sidewalk where I heard him greet three other walking-to-work gents by first names, once he moved past earshot, that same second such a racket of plate clattering and chair shifting banged from one floor under.

  Last night I’d asked Cap if this Castalia person lived in. “Not now,” Cap said. My thoughts wrapped clear around these words. At least she’d been banished—maybe for that I should feel grateful? Years earlier, his family had owned her, a slave child purchased at age three—imported like some handy portable Afro agricultural product. This much I’d already got out of Cap whilst under covers: From age ten onward, she served Captain’s spoilt beautiful momma as her main “body servant,” whatever that meant. Years after Emancipation, Cap hisself bought Castalia a cottage seven blocks and a continent away downhill in Baby Africa. She now worked here six and a half days a week, leaving our ready-made dinner—on day seven—warming in the oven. What else could I learn about the venom factory presently bowling butter churns around the kitchen?

  I’d just been given direct orders to keep in bed—prisoner of sheets till shops’ closing time. Well, that type slackness just won’t within my personal makeup, honey, not even on day number one. Sure, I was tired. Sure, seeing my own bloomers across the way—lined with black and white and red all over—made me feel unwell. Yeah, I was scared to face Big Woman downstairs, fixing me either breakfast or arsenic or the two in one. But if not now, when?

  Even so—keeping to my own truce side of the huge four-poster, I did dawdle a while. My palms pressed flat over mattress edges, legs kept swinging like a kid’s would. I was. A kid. I wondered how I might could ever make a older sadder person such as her admire and maybe even enjoy a person such as snub-nosed little me.

  Meantime, down the oak stairwell, a certain helper now chose to drop a twenty-pound frying pan. Seemed to take metal two full minutes to cease making every single sound that crashing metal can.

  There are many kinds of wake-up calls. This, child, had been one of them.

  4

  ALMOST home, my husband he’d touched far corners of his brown beard like some Catholic might tap forehead and shoulder blades. The man had half grinned behind whiskers—maybe as excited as me about being back? I pictured him, a beardless boy of fifteen, hiking home from a war in Virginia and on foot, so eager to see Falls. Maybe even more thrilled than I was tonight, safe back from my bloody Bull Run Honeymoon?

  Captain checked his pocket watch. “You’ll soon be properly greeted, my Lucille. I tarried back at old Hedgepath’s in hopes of making precisely this happen.” And—grand as some junior-trainee God—the gent smiled, pointed one forefinger at the hill—now.

  Sure enough, bells of our churches commenced a Babel of clanging. My breath all but locked. Gongs from far ends of Falls unfolded, overlapping in air like petals of some metal artichoke. Bells chimed slow or fast according to denomination. (Years later, I understood how much my own notion of each religion had got shaped by whatever order its bell announced the hour, and in what tone. Nobody can now tell me that this won’t decided partly by theology, not just via each church’s sexton’s zeal or sloth.) Though all these outfits were Christian, none could agree. Not even on the time of day—much less the angel dance-attendance records atop a much-contested straight-pin head.

  First Baptist always sounded off the earliest, maybe as one way of continuously staying First. (Those days, most good American bells were cast around Philadelphia and cost you a good bit. Some of Falls’ earliest examples had got melted down for cannonballs during the war. There was a cut-rate bell broker in Birmingham—but, like my granddad Angus McCloud believed, you always get what you pay for.) Baptist bells won’t meant to lull you into no false cheer. Their bronze seemed mixed with pig iron and brass. Tart notes scolded you: Years are dicey, Hell is real, Time will go on gonging just this quick, so Get Right with God, Quick, Brimstone Bait. (No Baptist steeple ever bothered to announce the quarter hour at fifteen and forty-five after. Fundamentalists only registered their clocks’ basic bottom and top—hell or high water.)

  The choicest bell in town was the rich Episcopalians’. A masterpiece, it was big as two wheelbarrows joined like famous hands, in prayer. Bronze pure as a museum statue’s, its tone come mellow and boozy, old as Europe. It had a most forgiving aftermath—like a retiring senator taking it all back. Sometimes (Mondays especially) it failed to even ring. The sexton, like All Saints Episcopal’s parishioners, drank and admitted so. All Saints’ building was Tudor, its steeple antique brick, Falls’ tallest. Nearby towers—Lutheran’s starch and Methodist’s high-collar—were white frame. (Lo
cally brick was considered far classier than wood.) These two white churches forever seemed swan-necked on tiptoe, both turned toward All Saints. White steeples near the brick one seemed ladies in cloth coats claiming not to want the floor-length fur that they keep ogling.

  Falls’ Catholics (all nine families) met, secret as Masons, in a different home each week. (We heard as how they moved their 24-carat life-sized Mary statue under cover of darkness each Saturday night. Nobody’d ever seen it.) The local Jews—prosperous, learned, standoffish except whilst in their stores—buggied to Raleigh fifteen times a year for their non-Sunday Sabbath. This was mostly so their children could meet children of like faith. (A trusted Gentile head clerk was left to manage big Saturday sales in the clothing emporium and to lock up.) Our twenty Jews had a odd place of local worship. Wearing clothes too fine to ever be sold by a store as local as theirs, they gathered in one stone gazebo behind the Eksteins’ giant home. This gazebo had a latticework extra-pointed star above its roof. The star was covered in climbing yellow roses that seemed to try disguising this symbol as any old genteel trellis. No bell drew attention to their rose-draped gazebo synagogue. We heard they discussed novels and poems in their services. Strange.

  Finally, our Presbyterians didn’t plan to let no bell get near their church. They considered such bauble trappings frivolous. And this too, child, seemed pretty much in keeping and predestined.

  (No black church owned any bells larger than the hand-held schoolhouse kind. Black churches sang their steeples.)