Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  A good pet would mean even more out here than my pony at home did. If I had one I would take better care of it than I did Dobbin. I would name a good new dog Old Jeff or else after you or Castalia. Say hi to her. You are both so in my thoughts. Here it is like I am just going through the motions but am really safe with you back there. Even if something happen to me which it won’t I feel that the best part of me never even left the homeplace or Falls. That part will be staying safe with you. I can only think of home food compared to here though it is probably not even so good at table on The Lilacs anymore. It sure seem a long time since I saw the house and walk down to our part of the river. I am fourteen soon! but it someway seems longer than thirteen whole years since I could do all that. I am yours and still here. I got the socks. What yellow ones! Now I am ending this and sleeping some. Your boy Willie.

  We had passed under the rainbow arch of jailer’s cast iron. Now here came Lucas’ dear old All-Round Store, forever Falls’ best-known central establishment. “Meet you at the store” means Luke’s. Tonight I started understanding something: Might Lucas’ seems so locally well stocked because Falls’ other shops offer next to nothing?

  During the Atlanta honeymoon, I’d spied a good-sized store that sold only straw hats (and then just ones for men!). Now, for the first time in my short life, the skimpiness of Lucas’ All-Round stock, the potent joke of Bert’s overgrand sign back yonder, the lack of window screens in Niggertown—all this hit me like a small pie chucked right at my freckled local forehead.

  I was busy wondering: Had the Captain here beside me always understood the joke of this place? Had he—for years—chose not to honor it with snickers? Is that the bargain living here required? Keep a straight face forever? Pretend that Lucas’ is World’s Finest. Should a body pretend that a hill town’s social highs and lows ain’t laid out simple as a fatal chart? To be a sober citizen of Falls didn’t seem too fair a trade. At the very least, local tackiness should entertain a local person offered little else!

  I was real young, right freshly married. Others here probably considered me Mrs. Lucy Lucky. I was semi-rich and back home partway safe. My spouse was held to be a pillar of this vertical town. So, child, why should I suddenly feel so let down and tense? I slowly saw what we had going here: Why, Falls was just a town, won’t it!

  Like all them other ones glimpsed from out our steamy train window. Here were just more streets edged with yet other immortal civic elms. Porch lamps now burned all along fair Summit—less to welcome company, more to keep it at a distance. Light said, “We gave, we gave.”

  Falls was probably well intended as any soul at large in it, but just about that messed up too. A Athens city-state, I understood, we won’t. Not yet.

  Our team clattered, glad, along Summit brick and cobblestones: Here I’d started, here I would now probably live as Mrs. Married forever. Here I’d maybe end my days—and I was supposed to want to! Why should this bill of goods now so fill me with dread?

  The more things Lucy recognized, the less sure she felt. If you can’t make yourself feel at home when you’re first and most freshly home, then when can you? We passed my aunts’ boxy run-down house—the so-called Angus McCloud Mansion. Ha, place hadn’t had a lick of paint since ’81. Humongous homes said: White and Us, White and more Us.

  Honeymoon’s hostage. Having skimmed through a unbreezy Baby Africa, why should my own birthright, blocks ahead, make me feel so jittery?

  Falls’ white district won’t really titled that—was just called mostly, well, Falls. It featured 1900’s surest sign of civic progress: four gas streetlamps per block. (Unlit, Black Town was at night. The finer black homes seemed ones near enough the border to benefit from borrowed light.)

  “Home,” Captain said, and shifted reins into his left hand, the right mitt reached over and touched my neck’s bun. I appreciated it.

  Our rig was suddenly flanked by rows of enameled garden gates, by gardenias in hedges, by metal hitching posts that showed a single black stableboy painted in different overly bright clothes. We passed the goldfish ponds country ladies muddily copied. Gaslit sidewalks looked prim and creased as pathways made of damask tablecloths laid end to end for blocks.

  We drew near Doc Collier’s home, usual music greeted us. How glad I felt. Doc’s homely daughters, twins of forty-five, played flute duets late into each summer night. Tonight was no exception. All a small town’s joy and grief, child, lives in them four words: “Tonight was no exception.” Plump sisters dueted by heart, not even candlelight required.

  “The ‘girls’ are at it. In fine form too,” Captain said what was right evident but I forgave him.

  Their music went—soft as a moth’s path, over wet flowers and across dim adjoining yards. Their sound was so perfect with longing, you sometimes saw young men hanging around, jumping to peek over Doc Collier’s intentionally tall hedge. Forgetting Collier twins’ daytime looks, boys were drawn here for the simple joy of healthy sighing.

  Come daylight, spying Doc’s stern devoted girls downtown (ladies who dressed as identical as two dolls on one store shelf, who favored overmuch suedey face powder and endured undergarments so argumentative with whalebone stays these corsets seemed nearbout … legislative), you felt like last night’s music must’ve been a mistake, somebody else’s. Until the next evening, no exception, when in passing onct more you heard all that skilled and wasted sweetness uncurl above wet grass. You sighed again because you believed again.

  I now fought a urge to shout encouragement over the hedge and towards their breathy porch. I didn’t—it might’ve stopped them.

  Our buggy cut past a big elm’s tree house that me and my best girlfriend had built not many years before. Strange to note how this tree’s trunk and branches won’t much different from ten thousand others I’d seen branching out twixt here and Georgia.

  Homes—with porch lights lit—appeared to swing past our buggy seat. We seemed still, the houses moved on by us like huge white lanterns on parade. Real estate told us all its twisty histories. For Cap and me, each tale was sweet as Colliers’ curling music, was plain as any Hedgepath plaque promising “from around here” fruit.

  Third mansion on the left? The home of Falls’ fourth-richest man, a guy who should know better but ofttimes does go steal useless carded buttons and boot hooks from Woolworth’s and is then caught by the saleswomen that just love turning in a leading citizen.

  Now, next door at 526 … Stop me, please, darling. I could go right on, and probably already have. A map of habits, faults. I’ll just say this tour means more (to me) because I’m showing you certain sights no late-in-the-century bus can ever drive you past again. Gone.

  Tell you what. This’ll be a forward flash in Time’s strange unguided missile of a tour. Them Collier twins just fluting away back there? They will, five years hence, run off at age fifty with a single skinny paper boy sixteen years old and wholly unmusical. Fact. A boy whose aim whilst chucking Herald Travelers over their steeplechase-high hedge impressed them first. This trio elopement eventually killed Doc Collier, did so as literal as a lead slug to the brain. Finished Doc, a man many, many others of us relied on. Everybody blamed the paper boy, who took “the girls” to Florida, where them three adopted a pretty Cuban baby and lived (if I am to believe what I been told, and if I don’t, my trusting child, who the heck will?) not unhappily ever after.

  Forward by nine years or eleven, I forget exactly which: Somebody hungry stopped at Hedgepath’s out near Indian Creek and somebody later found both senior Hedgepaths shot dead among the bright bushel baskets. They’d been robbed, stripped of their change aprons. A untold number of vegetables probably got pinched too, but who could say how many? I guess that Mr. Hedgepath had just spoke his usual to some fugitive, said, “Seems like we should know you,” which brought out some outlaw’s forty-five. After the funeral, as laden with flowers as the stand’d bear, Hedgepath’s dozen children took over the vegetable shack but it won’t ever the same and—you will not
be surprised to hear—the institution has since closed. That’s part of what’ll have to happen onct its dark date comes due ahead.

  So.

  Home. I mean by that: stories that you know, the stories that know you know them. So you both can hush—can pass on by each other with gentle understanding. Meaning: you can gloat but very quiet, and in perfect taste.

  I MEMORIZED my husband’s war mail home. Nights, I asked him for tales of life on the slave-days plantation. I was hoping to get news of my helper’s early years. She soon interested more than he did. Cap now took me for granted. I’d gone Fact. Castalia honored me with cunning daily hate I half appreciated.

  My fourth married week, she offered to clean my new silver hairbrush, said only a blind person wouldn’t notice how filthy the thing was. Well, I figured this little chore might help to bring us closer together. In a new red-rimmed white enameled pot atop her wood-burning stove, she boiled my wedding gift for going on fifty minutes. Half hour into this brush’s Saint Joan purging, the kitchen begun smelling of my hair, my skin flakes, my hygiene, then my whole short lifetime. Castalia’s comment was: to throw open seven windows and then stand flapping the back door, to and fro, fanning hard. And all while holding her nose. Doing this, she laughed. Whilst successfully torturing me, Castalia’s pleasure sometimes led her to lighten up some. But if I—spying this—grinned any, she clamped down that much harder. I wanted to make her laugh full out and legal and just onct. It soon become my life’s new goal.

  (Child, did you ever get a full taste or whiff of your own basic dander? Too much of it can startle you into thinking, Me, direct from the tube? Am I fully that much me? I wanted to splash vanilla extract all over the steamy cabinets. I grew so embarrassed, it seemed nearbout funny, even to me.)

  Then I couldn’t help notice—my English brush’s badger bristles floated, doing a circle dance amongst the churning foam. “Uh-oh,” I pointed, smiled, tried not to sound real accusing, “unless I’m very much mistaken …” and I jumped up and down once, pointing at damage. Using pickle tongs, Castalia fished forth one sterling handle, bald now. “Dingy thing. Look like its time had done come.”

  That night I sneaked behind their (my) (our) house, spared a monogrammed silver stem from out the trash. Still have it around here somewhere. Odd, what you save.

  DAYS, I had her “helping” me. Nights, I had him helping hisself to me. Ain’t we got fun.

  Soon the single hiding place left young Lucille—awake or asleep—was far into them blessed novels. I never wanted to leave their inner hearths. “Little did young Gwendolyn know that stormy first night in the Baron’s castle, how, waiting just beyond the thick stone wall, a …” Some books seemed squat cozy galleons, sails sewn of woolly broadcloth. Others were Arab tents made from windblown sand-battered bellying chiffon. In my ideal sheltering book, I would want one wing done in every style—stone, glass, sod, igloo ice. There should be lots of different fresh foods stocked along feast tables in each annex. I love it when the prisoners of a story have to, like me, eat.

  Though my young eyes were good, I’d pull double pages close before my face—wanting to live back of mule’s blinders. After lunch, I all but galloped to my dim front parlor. I kicked shoes off, settled on a chaise, drew my knees clear up to my chin and book. I finally learned to lock the door to prevent a certain cleaner’s zeal. And I would soon be oh so suddenly lost to the worries of the local. The novel dwellers’ Gothic woes made my own ones seem no worse than introductory bunions.

  A helpful somebody must of noticed my single source of joy.—The day before, in this here book, a governess was about to be trampled whilst wandering some foggy pasturelands of England. Today that very volume so full of danger, tea, and first wives was gone. On my hands and knees, I checked everywheres. Finally I worked up nerve sufficient to go quiz Big Woman, gentle-like. Barefoot, I padded towards the kitchen door.

  Then, seeing what I saw, I wanted to evaporate like the water boiling on yonder stove. I’d found Miss Castalia talking to twenty some redbirds lined like targets atop her stove. I went dead-still. Ignorant of being watched, the woman bent largely forward, her curtsy making manifold accordion pleats of most substantial flesh. Then she crossed herself and stood quietly a-muttering, “Redbirdness, Give her Strength what sufficient unto this here sad redbird day, O redbirds of the Reba Woman, see me through it and …” I eased inches over against hall wallpaper, my mouth open, palms flattened against walls. Seemed I was witnessing something nobody ought to see.

  I planned sneaking off when Cassie rose fast, grabbed a sugar canister off the counter, gobbled two big handfuls straight. Made me feel ill to imagine how that tasted going down. Burned probably. Then she clawed around inside whilst talking to herself about somebody by the name of Miss Reba Holy Red of Bird of Red. I prayed for amnesia. Then I prayed to know who Reba was. If Castalia was to whip around and catch me here, she’d kill me. Yeah, she’d scald me with the water chortling yonder. From white sugar, the woman pulled one spiny dark item. It had several points to it, thing appeared barnacled. Little threads of sugar kept spilling from all holes of it. She kissed the item. Then, doing a strange agile spin, Castalia turned most massively in place three times. Sugar flung loops of white into daylight, sugar sissing across linoleum. This gave me a chance to try and slip off towards my safe distant parlor.

  Failing to either breathe or notice not doing so, I was tiptoeing backwards, barefoot, frowning at each chance of floorboard’s creaking. I figured: Castalia must glue hairs over every cupboard door before daily leaving work. How had she turned our kitchen, our personal food into redbird burnt offerings and some strange altar? Someday soon, I’d have to check all that. Really I would. I’d scout the closet where she hung her coat and stacked her gear. I just needed planning time was all, I just needed some voodoo information and somebody else’s courage, nothing more.

  “Who that?”

  I flinched. “Just me. Me coming to see you, matter fact. Funny you should mention it.” My fake and shiniest girl voice.

  I thumped her way real loud, no choice. I only longed to retreat inside the tree house of my missing novel, to read my hubby’s boyhood war letters, to pull the rope ladder up behind. Noisy as my advance was, I decided to maybe hum some for good measure. (Hum a hymn.) I found her there, face set, arms crossed, leaning against the stove, real ready for me. “Singing in the house again?”

  “The Church’s One Foundation!” I justified myself, tried.

  “Singing in the house again? I believe Castalia done tolt you how nervous that makes the folks what’s forced to be around you all the day. What you want now?”

  I explained about a good book’s being gone.

  Sighing, mumbling, flats of wrists riding hips, Castalia charged across the lino’s gritty worship-service sugar. She headed for the front parlor, lunged in, turned, stood facing me while thumping one fingernail against a glass-front bookcase. Shelves showed many volumes the selfsame color as the novel I’d described.

  “You got you a whole roomful. Why you so set on that one?”

  HONEY? Honey, something had to give.

  I decided: I’d either get under the brown skin of her secrets or maybe kill her, one. But, considering her girth and energy, I’d surely need help to kill the help.

  11

  NEXT novel, I hid under Captain’s bed pillow upstairs. Got so I really wanted to tattle. On her. To him: “You wouldn’t believe the hoops that chunky witch puts me through most mornings.” But, see, that felt cowardly. I had just been a schoolgirl and schoolkids have a code about snitching. Seemed wrong—my going against her, easing over to the Other Side. (And which side might that be? I wondered. The white side? The man side? Boss side? Sunny-side-of-the-street side? And won’t I at least white and the rightful mistress of this gloomy manor? Didn’t I have rights? Why should my acting out my rightful part trouble me so bad?) Call it a overdeveloped sense of justice. My momma’s people were big-time owners. Poppa’s—natives of Bear Grass,
North Carolina—they mostly rented (when they could afford to). Odd it should be the renters of this world that seemed my nearest kin. I dearly hated going over anybody’s head, even over the noggin of a woman daily mangling me with such sleek and growing skill I half admired it.

  “There’s reasons,” I muttered aloud some mornings. “There’s reasons,” I still tell myself today. Such a idea ain’t to everybody’s taste. It just means that history interests a person—history being “a few reasons why.” Also means you got a inborn sense of pattern. (Pattern is really just “repetition”—one line is just a line, but forty lines at cross-purposes mean “plaid.” One crank with a fixed idea is a crank, four hundred “a movement.”)

  Look, what I’m saying: Seemed I needed me a project. It’d keep a young newlywed organized, might let me finally learn to breathe deep inside my own house or his, or ours, all three of ours. One midnight, I re-decided: My first mission would be tracing one enemy’s twisty route through life. I planned to either figure her or else know why I couldn’t. Lucy’d find Miss Castalia Marsden’s good side or learn why it’d been amputated early and by who.