Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  I now dashed downstairs, pinning hair back up, trying to give her room for drying off, regaining dignity.

  I settled at the kitchen table, feeling lonely and shy, face still greasy as a cat caught eating fish. Agitated. Hearing her slow creak down the steps, how old her footfalls sounded, and yet how full of promise her mammoth younger body seemed. I placed my hands on the table. I dreaded ever seeing her again, especially with clothes all on. I dreaded speech. I wanted to tell her every little thing that’d befell me since I left the house.

  My each breath skimmed just a dime’s worth from every dollar’s lungful. I pressed knees together. She hurried to her stove like that was her home plate and safe, the redbirds clean and cheap and perfect and secret with a meaning that was hers only.

  Then, leaning back against black cast iron—hands braced on its cool top—she turned on me. The front of her orange blouse was wet and this made me sick—no, not sick, but something. I wanted to breathe. I just couldn’t remember—between breaths—how.

  Seemed I had to talk. I would tell her how I’d gone downhill and seen her handsome oldest sons, I’d praise their looks, yeah, what momma could resist that?

  “I … went and saw your big boys.”

  “That what you calls them?” she said, and laughed.

  Oh Lord. It was something, the size of her laugh, big as a working two-man saw. It came out of her whole—everything she’d been saving back. As mean as she had acted, that’d been just the back side of this part ringing towards me now, like all Falls’ church bells. When I saw the fun of this, how she didn’t even mind my blundering in on her, that she won’t the least bit ashamed of using keepsake soap or bathing during workhours, I said, “Your big boys, yeah, a good one.” I laughed. I felt weak then weaker, hands over my face, sucking air, but grateful.

  After seeing her, after eating them sardines, after cackling so, I slipped upstairs, faint but grateful. How strange I’d felt of late, a kind of secret fizzing in my lower body. I now slept, but woke at dusk to see a man’s shape looming over me. I snatched up the covers, half-hid. “Sources tell me you were strolling all over Niggertown in a great mess of barking dogs, presumably down there looking for her home, am I correct in this?”

  I told him I’d been curious. “Curiosity,” he bent and whispered at my neck in a way I didn’t like, “curiosity killed the cat and also the pussy. What have you two been doing behind my back here all day? You think I can’t smell something when I come home from work?” I told him I had no idea what he meant. I told him walking Falls’ streets was my right. I told him I had nothing else to do. He said I would, very soon. He planned to purge the house of her. He said I represented him. No wife of his was going to be nipped at by hounds down there. I would be occupied with cleaning now, with cooking now. I explained that, true, she interested me, but nothing else. I dreaded saying that I’d caught her lathered, that the spread of her had stirred and scared me—and sickened me a little—but had scared and stirred me too. Darling? I didn’t yet know him good enough to level with him yet. I hadn’t told him about missing two periods. I’d asked nobody what that meant. I wondered would I die and where the leaving blood stayed put, and I suspected, don’t laugh at me, child, cancer. Being fifteen, my first thought, as he strode downstairs and fired my valuable ally in this big barn (that’s what she now seemed), my thought ran: I will die of cancer and, boy, he’ll be sorry.

  I stole halfway down the broad staircase and listened as he told this woman he’d known since birth, he’d owned since birth and then lost then hired, “I’ll write you an excellent letter of reference.” “How long a one?” she asked, and made me wonder. He didn’t answer and I guessed she was having him on someway. “You sacking me for what I didn’t do,” she said. “Three-quarters pay till I find something better or even not. Them’s my terms, slughead. Don’t and you looking at Miss Mouth.”

  He said that sounded fair. What did she have over him? He asked if she needed help moving her stuff, and Castalia told him to send for her boys and to lend them one of Cap’s rental wagons and a mule. “When you wanting me out you house, sir?” “Now would be nice. You and her, it’s a very bad mix. No hard feelings. Nobody’s fault.” “No?” she said, and the great clatter of cookware started and our back door slammed and the fruitwood Seth Thomas chimed 7 p.m. and I moved down the steps and towards her.

  I was a brave little girl. She had supper simmering deep in the closed slots of the black stove and I come and stood there in the open doorway.

  “I heard,” I said. Castalia was alone in the kitchen.

  I was very tired but I braced anyway, expecting physical assault. I stood here, almost wanting it. She started to unload her private closet. I knew every item in there and I guessed how, tomorrow morning, the sight of that space empty would make me feel way lonelier than now even. It seemed like she hadn’t heard me but—light-headed—I grabbed a kitchen chair and pulled it away from the table. I didn’t want to look like some employer waiting to be fed. The lamp needed lighting. I dared not move. I heard neighbors talking over the back-yard fences two yards down and laughing. It was the cicadas’ one-in-seven-year appearance and they were making their insane, building noises all over town. There was enough ruddy light left to show me a packing maid, and when she glanced over here, all her fury at me was missing. I’d ceased mattering. Punishing and testing me now seemed part of her former job description maybe. For one second I wondered if the Captain put her up to it, some torture meant to form me faster as a tough little adult. She wrapped her mink-raising handbook in a clean striped rag and tucked it in a cardboard box and I saw she’d packed most everything except the clear bottle with the liquid and the skull-and-bone warning.

  “What’ll you do?” I asked. She shook her head, made a sound like some steam iron snorting to life. “Sit.” “Sounds nice.” “You oughts to know.” But all the edge was missing from that tone I’d got to know so good.

  I considered saying, “Will you show me how to make a omelette?” but thought better of it. Instead I heard a girl ask one departing older woman, seasoned enough to be the girl’s great-grandma, “What does it mean when the person misses two sets of monthlies and the sight of food makes her want to turn kind of inside out? And, Cassie, it’s like this big horse pill is dissolving down in here, like kind of burning or bubbling. What does that mean?”

  I saw her turn. I saw her arms cross and then unfold so either wrist now rested, fond, on either hip. She shook her head sideways once, so hard she swayed whilst saying, “White people!”

  And before she grabbed (I knew she would) the bottle full of toxic gin-clear liquid, before she guzzled that, a huge woman—just a bulgesome silhouette in this room full of early evening—she stepped before my chair and told me (without once lifting hands off hips to demonstrate the ins and outs) all about what went where and what swam towards a what and how long it took to ripen into humanhood and what a fetus two months old would have and not have on it and roughly when I could expect it, and what humans felt like, coming out of humans.

  How still things got then, even the cicadas tapered down a bit. First words I said after learning all that in a few solemn phrases and knowing my delivery date, said, “And you won’t be here.” Then I hid my face behind my hands. I couldn’t help it. She had more on her mind than silly me, but oh this house would seem a jail without her in it with me.

  When palms parted, I saw her back at the closet, heard clicks and grunts and saw her upper body heave back and a glint and she was drinking that whole bottle down and I was now a leopard in the air. I was not on feet but leaping from the sitting position to the falling and I’d got her massy ankles and I pulled her down as the bottle shattered against a far enameled wall. The sound of her full weight coming down against and beside me (but not on me, proper, Lord be praised) was weirdly gentle—plop drub thump thump—like rain, or water boiling.

  “Whoof, girl,” she said. “You done spoilt my brew.”

  “No, poison, spi
t it out. We’re not worth that.”

  She told me it was moonshine brewed out on The Lilacs from stolen corn, by slaves around 1860. She’d been saving it, disguised, the way maids will, as cleaning fluid. Now I’d spilled it. Had I gone through her things? Must’ve, if I’d seen the markings. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I finally told her not to forget her crucifixion amongst the staples high on yonder counter.

  I kept waiting for the old anger. I expected to be blamed for the firing and the spillage and for knowing way too little. Instead, her voice was lighter and less crabbed, far younger than I’d ever heard it. I asked her, bold—having gotten big answers already tonight—what the redbird meant and who this Reba was and would I ever meet her and might she, Castalia, ever come for supper once I learned to cook some? “Fat chance,” she laughed, cynical but merry.

  Maybe fumes from spilt corn liquor made us drunk a bit, the room reeked as she answered me, told me odds and ends, my first corners of the story of how a girl from Africa with great expectations feels waking up as body servant to the likes of my hubby and his persnickety intelligent momma. My bone side was slatted against her dough-sponge side. I some way smelled of mineral oil and day-old underclothes and a touch of vanilla extract. She smelled of moonshine and of asters.

  There’s a seam where the bitter and the lovely join, and her voice, her scent, her size all seemed tonight right there. And she was just beginning to explain—off duty—I should’ve seen the expression on my own face when my hairbrush lost its bristles, she was just conceding that—as a torturee and house slave—I hadn’t been completely without some kind of aptitude, when we heard this stirring in the hall, a muttering that locked us both and caused us to half-cling to one another among broken glass and puddled corn brew, when here came a lit lantern, held by the house owner, him followed by two gloomy young black men.

  When Captain entered his own kitchen, stepped on glass, smelled booze in pools and saw it fringing drips down the walls, when he found two females clutching on the floor beside the stove, he took one step backward and said, “Mother of God.” Someway it struck us as funny, his shock. Made us giggle some, two girls.

  And as we saw the color leave a face beside the lamp’s smudged flue, Cas thought to call, “Get them cigars ready, Poppa-daddy.” First he didn’t understand. Then I was pointed to. “She gravid.”

  “That helps. A little,” he said. The men were offering hands so we might stand again and she was soon gone. I heard him walk her to the wagon waiting on Summit. Sons carried out her personal effects. I was left here with the lamp in a kitchen full of broken glass and, seeing the broom yonder, being—preg, fifteen—a regular little Cinderella, child, I started cleaning up my kitchen for my life.

  A WHILE BACK, when you first started coming and see me, you said I ought to spill my tidbits for “history’s sake.” Oh, I don’t need that big a excuse. I like talking. Only got one subject: what happened next. Besides, “History,” who’s she? I been breathing a while, never met her once. I just saw people waking up for work and hoping to doze those twenty minutes extra. Later, you traipse in by the back door—loaded with names and dates and reasons. Then all that’s up in front of you appears to be history.

  But at the time, child, history’s just keeping your rooms neat and hoping company’ll give you a little notice so you can tuck your extras under the bed. What you call history is really just the luxury of afterwards. History is how food the soldiers gobbled at 11 a.m. sets with them at two when the battle starts, how one snack’s heartburn changes everybody’s aim. Honey, history ain’t so historical. It’s just us breaking even, just us trying.

  Darling, you know what history is?

  History is lunch.

  BOOK TWO

  Time

  Does

  That

  Simon’s Splendid Pocket Watch, Its Fate

  Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

  —HEBREWS 11:1

  CAP HE TOLD ME over time in many ways and tries, this. Man said:

  THEY’D GET too close, Lucille. You’d yell for them to stay back. They wouldn’t. You saw they had their muskets ready. Officers forced you to or perhaps knowing that all your friends nearby were watching. Maybe just the scariness of another body rushing over the hill at you. You could see their faces. It might well be a nice face. Frequently it was. Two of my three were a good deal better-looking than myself, which I admit is not that difficult. One had a pipe clenched in his teeth. I took it out and slipped it in his tunic. Seemed only decent. The boy that gave me his pocket watch, his features were regular and plain. He had silver-blond hair and not just the yellow-blond sort which is certainly nice enough. Afterwards, every time, I bent down and checked. I felt it was my manly duty, recollecting the features of each fellow I shot.

  At that age, what did I know? I mean they trained us to. The Lieutenant said, “Don’t pull on your trigger so hard, son, not to jerk it, Willie, that’ll knock your sights all off. Just squeeze it, squeeze it like you love it, like you’d squeeze your gal back home. You do believe in love, boy? As a gent, you do love something, right, son?”

  “Yes, sir!” I barked.

  In those times, a boy thirteen was bashful as a child now might be, oh, say around seven. Imagine—seven and out shooting strangers. Before the war, my father wouldn’t let me fire at quail. I couldn’t even target-practice the bottles (nice green ones) lined along a wall behind our lilac hedge. Poppa said no boy should hunt before he’d shaved. A razor hadn’t touched my chin yet, and I had already killed three. I sense that you think less of me for that, but I’ll explain, girl, I’ll venture to.

  You can be innocent of knowing about the birds and bees and so forth, and still manage shooting others effectively. Wartime was not a bit like what your schoolbooks doubtless try and tell you, Lucy. One thing, it was far and away muddier. To recall, it seems Virginia and Maryland were mud puddles with state capitals. We had far less food than anybody admits. Half of our division—the ones left standing—suffered scurvy by the end. You hear how an army moves on its stomach? Well, in that case, for the last two years we had, as you might put it, not a leg to stand on. We got corn pulled out of any field we passed (farmers and their children stood right in the road too, begging us not to steal it). We ate dandelion greens. Bad food, plus being fairly often scared my three years in, it meant at night I’d sit up in my blanket. A chopping noise had waked me. I’d come to smiling, Lucille, I believed the sound was my own bossy mother having servants cut up apples to be pies in our home kitchen. But it was simply my new adult teeth chattering. I would stretch back out, eyes open, arms locked against my sides. I’d get quite spastic, shivering so, and in July.

  Antietam Creek, they named the battles after nearby bodies of water, villages, and churches. By then I was an old hand. My first few months in I had missed my folks’ farm but—after even half a year—it got so I’d lay awake missing the time when I missed everything the most. I was so young, the last thing that happened seemed the largest thing of all.

  Had a plunge-loading flintlock, adult-sized, unlike me. You come to and it’s already in progress. You’d find yourself resting belly-down in a fairly comfortable ditch. I became a connoisseur of gullies, holes, burrows like rodents might enjoy. “A good hole.” Rebs fought each other for first dibs on the perfect gully. A decent makeshift grave, hand-dug, might, if picked correctly, keep you out of yours a little longer. And it is in just such a rut, with other soldiers bent double or hunched flat, dodging mostly left to right before your view, it’s there, in sight of the Dunkers’ church, that you spy one stiff-legged fine-looking Yankee boy. Notable because he’s coming right along the farm fence and towards your chosen hole here. “Hey,” you call clear across the meadow at the soldier fated for you. “Hey, this spot is mine. I dug it and am in it, go away, or else.”

  But the fine boy in blue acts deaf. He moves nearer. In a type of trance. So, go ahead—chuck a handy rock at him, Lucill
e. Better that than a more permanent volley. You do, the stone strikes him quite effectively on his upper leg. Not noticing, he comes right on.

  He’s one of dozens, hundreds out there—but he has your name on him. You see it. Your battle happens on this afternoon in a meadow full of flowers—seems odd. How the bees and monarch butterflies don’t notice one thing strange. They fly, busy, in circles from flower to weed among the blurred lines of bullets. One big yellow farm dog, dragging its broken rope, pads everywhere, nose down, tail going. Yesterday this was a pasture, mostly his. The field’s being beautiful makes combat here (using that beauty to be cover) seem a good deal less necessary, my girl. The stillness of the hot day makes this scrambling feel uglier and crabbier, smaller. There’s such a thing as knowing when to quit but, uh-oh, that blond boy has been lockstepping, he has marched twenty-two feet closer since we checked last.

  “Turn back,” you cup hand to mouth. “Look, do, because, or else, see?”

  To be thirteen, underfed, so subject to long fits of nervous shakes. And now his rifle has shifted, its butt moves against his shoulder as he strides. There is the minute when you doubt you can think straight, followed by a sharp second when—to live, you know you must. You have been trained to squeeze that trigger like it’s everything you love. You’d best fire now. In deciding not to shoot, you’re opting not to live a minute longer. Is that what you want, is it, Lucy?

  Okay then, give a warning shot. You’d better. You tell yourself, while mashing a beloved musket into place, barrel steady on your ditch’s bank, “This is just a way of wishing that one sleepwalking soldier elsewhere, not dead, more just gone.”

  His gun is fixed right on your head. Two ticklish inches between your eyes know this. You wince a bit and fire above him. Doesn’t even slow the fucker down. Excuse me. His face stays very dull and you holler at it, “I told you, go back, last chance, don’t make me.”