Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  The very day that mutual mail routes recommenced in ’65, Will, home again, posted his homemade envelope. It looked stained like it’d been to war and back, which it flat had. He sealed it safe inside a finer parchment one, knowing that Simon’s sisters and mother would appreciate the smudged history of one letter carried all those miles. Off it went with too much superstitious postage paid, off went the letter he had wrote just days after shooting their young Simon dead. He had not seen fit to add a postwar postscript saying, “Oh yeah and you should know I killed him.” Timing still seemed wrong.

  Instead Will mentioned: once sending valuable stuff seemed safer, he would mail Simon’s watch. Their getting this letter would be a test-like. “Meantime,” he wrote strangers, “believe it or not, it has only lost three seconds since Sept. 17, ’62! Simon would feel mighty proud, I bet.”

  You won’t be shocked to know that postal delivery proved pretty spotty during Reconstruction. Certain Yank mailmen felt like any bulky item shipped from the Deep South was one form of personal war compensation. (Meaning they stole stuff.) Southern postal workers didn’t act a mite more honest. (I put this in so you’ll see I got me a pretty balanced mind, child. I want to be fair.) Nothing a body sent was guaranteed safe. Even so, Mrs. Utt’s letter by return mail reached Will, prompt for then.

  Hers was a real graceful and accomplished bulletin—long, too. It sounded like what she was, wife of a small-town preacher, a man dead but still beloved and daily mentioned. The note had a round Bible tone and was a regular fruitcake stuffed with quotes and scripture, citrusy bits of preserved poems. The letter talked about Utt family gratitude, it offered funny endearing facts about the departed boy. Willie, reading it again and again, would stand before the mantel of his rented civilian rooms. Was a mantel where the perfect gold watch now sat honored in its charred picture-book case (varnished by the lanolin of a young soldier’s frequent handling). Mirror backed the timepiece and Will found he could, whilst reading aloud, study his own face in the glass. “Is this a guilty face?” he asked the face. Mrs. Utt’s words seemed honorary, a dead boy’s mother writes back and in a most beautiful hand. Felt almost like getting a note from Lincoln or somebody. Will showed the letter to his own mother.

  About his killing Simon, Will had yet told no living soul, at least not in so many words. Oh sure, for Winona’s sake he went, “We all did things we might wonder about now.” But this was as far as he vented it. Sure, he wanted to tell, but kept deciding, “The time’s not right”—and wondered what he meant.

  Meanwhile he had the fine watch cleaned. He so worried the local jeweler to be careful, the man drove Will from a shop whose window still held slave-hocked trinkets stolen from The Lilacs.

  Will rarely wore the watch, a token of respect. Whenever visitors admired it above his fireplace, the growing boy nodded, “Yeah, a good one okay, was a kind of gift.” Each time Will heard tell of another local parcel being snapped up by them greedy Federal mails, he postponed mailing Simon’s treasure North. Another week, a further six months, you know how postponing postpones itself. Soon, was going on 18 and 66. Time! Simon would’ve been nearbout eighteen by now. Will hisself stood six feet and some tall, gone huger across the back and chest, had a baritone voice as charcoal-dark as Sherman’s leavings, dark as the marks that molten ten-penny nails make in heart pine. Will told hisself, “Simon Utt will never stop being fifteen.”

  Letters from the ladies Utt drew still more mail from him, a regular exchange. He rose to the occasion. He rewrote mail and worried over his bad spelling. Some mornings, while hiking to the livery stable, Will found he half envied Simon his license to rest.—To go right from childhood to war to earning a living, it meant you’d missed so many things.

  That spring, a good white rental horse escaped from Marsden’s stable. Will and two hirelings went seeking the mare. Will, in black civvies now, wandered to a meadow just behind Falls’ shopping district. Wildflowers came clear up to stores’ backsides where crates were stacked and rats seemed happy. Willie stepped on something hidden in high weeds, a FOR SALE sign. He looked up from it to this “desirable property.” Nothing had ever been “done” with this border. It slid downhill from the business zone to the river Tar. Today a group of older black women, wearing huge straw hats, fished from a flat rock stuck out into willows’ shade. (Here a local nursemaid once drowned herself.) White kids, dashing from ditch to holes, yelled orders at each other, playing “fort.” Nearby, wild roses, black-eyed Susans, and Johnny-jump-ups bloomed. Those and the nameless grasses that seemed nothing much till passing wind made stroking pets of them. Shopping parents often said to kids, “Go play.” That meant here. Back when the Fourth of July meant something other than the fall of Vicksburg, celebrations happened here. Started at 11 a.m. with family picnics and ended with midnight fireworks launched from rowboats, one of which traditionally caught fire and burned to prove what a rowdy time had been had by all. “See that boat burn last night?” Marsden kept one shoe sole flat on FOR SALE, his head swerving, scouting. Around his knees, daisies worked by noisy bumblebees and silent cabbage butterflies. He wanted this territory, and as a tribute: to do nothing with. The tract was known as Meadows’ Pasture after the Mr. Meadows whose farm all this’d been. Someway, land’s being called Meadows’ Pasture seemed to double the plot’s weedy sweetness.

  Such acreage resting cheek by jowl with Falls’ commercial district (all twelve stores) forever made the town seem prettier and safer, bigger. Child, you know how vacant lots are … you never appreciate them till they leave off being vacant. Then you see how the whole balance of a neighborhood once pivoted on that lost innocent space. You ofttimes notice when it’s just too late. (Like civilian life regretted once your military one’s begun.)

  Willie heard kids playing “fort” behind the high weeds, he saw one old woman catch a little silver bream too small to keep then slip it right into her bucket. Willie decided. This place would serve as secret monument to Ned and Simon. A Southern boy might build a courthouse pillar marking some Rebel pal lost in the fight. But he was not allowed to raise no park statue saluting a young Yank he had bagged (and then been decorated for). That’d be double-dipping. So Meadows’ Pasture would—quiet-like—become the Simon P. Utt Memorial Park. All this could stay a secret from the very folks that used it. It’d never come to locals that this greenery and river bend had been spared for them.

  And yet, foot mashed on the sign—“This Attractive Location Can Be Commercially Developed to Suit Your Company’s Needs”—much as Will wanted to act here, as willing as he felt to cash in some rental homes he’d inherited, big a bargain as this plot probably still was in long-range terms, something held him back. The offer wouldn’t last, he’d need a while to swing this size down payment—best hurry—and yet he felt a powerful limit. He stood here, sun full in his face and warming his dark business suit’s shoulders. (His employees led the recovered white horse—long since forgotten—along the River Road.) Willie Marsden hoped to own this plot but, local operator and sentimental person, felt he had no right to it. Not yet. Seemed one last important chore needed tending to before he might view hisself as the type civilian who can haul off and concoct grand secret plans. “Soon.” He left Meadows’ Pasture, hangdog, “I’ll be getting it for Simon soon.”

  That’s when he knew. He guessed he had to take the watch back. Personally take it, and confess.

  Three unwed older Utt sisters had worked a sampler mailed South. They wrote on the parcel’s paper just what was inside and the unvaluable item slipped right through, unstole. Framed in black lacquer, it showed a girl, hands balled to eyes, bent under a weeping willow. It was stitched with Simon’s full name, rank, division number, and dates (opening and shutting years were set so close together, it seemed like Simon’s start and end were cross-eyed, all but exchangeable).

  Will wondered what to do with this here needlecraft. He passed it on to his scarred quiet mother for safekeeping. Boys did that then.

  Will’
s rooms had nothing very fine in them except the watch. Across its lid a stag was almost but forever not caught by hounds. “Uh-oh,” he told the timepiece, knowing what he had to do and dreading that so much. He’d take it up there and if he got the chance, in decency, he’d tell them what he’d done to Simon P. Utt, Private, USA. Then he’d come home and save that perfect field for Simon’s sake.

  4

  WILL waited for some invitation to go North. The ladies Utt asked often. That was not enough. His last summons had come in the form of a draft to go up there and win the war of Yankee aggression. He was still so scared of the old enemy. He hadn’t left his own three-county area since dragging home from Appomattox and the gloomy sight of a Lee gone weepy.

  The more Utt gifts and news come South, the more Willie longed to tell some local soul the whole truth, nothing but. He’d been paying visits to Winona but held off spelling out events that happened after her Ned died. It someway undercut his promise of mourning his favorite Reb. Will had been decorated for ending the life of Simon Utt. Embarrassed him. The day after the shooting, soldier buddies’d gathered, and pumped Private Marsden for details. They’d seen Will—from their holes—wing the Northerner. They’d seen Will drag the pretty skinny fellow who’d tried and brain Will with a rock, drag the Yank down into a handy ditch. Risked his life, Will did—to polish off the boy newly plugged. Later, running, men spied the same Yankee child sitting in the ditch, propped up stiff, eyes shut, a perfect goner. Everybody praised unlikely Willie for his brutal work. Unshaved, guys had hung around grinning, asking did Will choke the boy, or what? “Naw, nothing like that,” Will said. “Not much to tell. Natural causes.”

  “Yeah, natural for you to cause them. Tell us how you done it.”

  Hester commenced petitioning for a medal then—conspicuous valor, imperiling his person in pursuit of the enemy—a medal Willie kept here on the mantel. It never seemed to Will he’d got the medals because he had the watch. He’d have the medal long after he’d returned the watch—this helped.

  By now the ladies Utt were writing Mrs. Lady Marsden herself, praising a son who’d bother corresponding with the family of a boy who’d died in Willie’s very arms. “Be proud of him,” Widow Utt instructed Widow Marsden.

  The invitation to go North came. It was 1868 already and Will Marsden still had his eye on Meadows’ Pasture (there’d been serious nibble and the Merchants’ Association considered buying it “for further merchandising expansion purposes,” but it’d remained as yet unsold).

  Willie and his mother were asked to attend a family reunion to be held up near Alexandria, Virginia. The old lady claimed this was too far in Will-knew-which-direction for her blood. Her burned face had healed a bit but Lady stayed hidden from all. She was far too vain to permit Virginia relations, much less Charleston ones—those who recalled her for that perfect white skin—to see brown blots and red stains ruining her hands, giving neck and forehead the sheen of parchment.

  Will reread the invitation whilst looking in his mantel mirror. He propped the engraved card beside a boy-made case. Leaning here, he did some makeshift push-ups, his own face coming nearer glass (pores) and leaving it (head and shoulders grown grosser than he could quite believe).

  When he stood before his momma’s rocker, Will told of heading North for visiting with her own kin. Then he explained, beyond that, he intended meeting with the ladies Utt. Lady More commenced whimpering. She hugged her son by the knees. Innocent of many spoken words, she still begged Willie not to venture North. He’d gone once before and only got as far as Maryland—and look what badness grabbed him there. She mimed out mailing the watch North, or maybe he should hire some young enterprising black worker to take it up that far. As he stood here, Will heard her strange hollow noises, he felt her working on his pant cuffs. When he checked, Lady More Marsden, still in this world but not always quite of it, had slipped the white silk belt off her silk wrapper. Lady had tied one end to the rocking chair’s runner. The other she’d tethered to her young survivor’s leg. To keep him. He made a funny game of hopping off from her and stopping dead but, even while he did this to cheer her, he felt her scaredness pass into him. She sat, face hid back of hands. Did Will really want to go up there? Would they let him freely leave? If he confessed, would he become the North’s last prisoner of war?

  5

  BEING a man of his word, Will Marsden stepped onto the Atlantic Coastline’s spiffiest club car, every brass spittoon polished to the point of being way overqualified for this line of work. He wore a new suit bought from Lucas’ off a wax dummy. Will picked a jacket with pockets cut roomy enough to hold a little handmade cask that had come to seem almost as valuable as the German clockwork wonder it’d protected so well.

  Now, glad for a window seat, Will has stopped by his reunion (they’re all alike and need not be spelled out here) and is headed up more North by train, this time to Maiden, Massachusetts, itself. The Utts are waiting. He’s told his kinfolk in Alexandria he’ll be back in time to buggy South with them.

  ASIDE from earlier sightseeing on foot near Antietam Creek, Maryland—Willie’d never set foot north of the Virginia line. Falls’d always felt quite north enough, thank you. What he saw from this slow train to Boston started scaring him. The shock part was, child: plain streets, simple trees and houses, regular horses, rivers running blue and brown, even barbershops striped the same two-tone as Stark’s Scissor Tonsorium. He’d expected—what? bands and drill-unit soldiers busying every town square. Will expected more Yankee homes to be painted holy Federal blue. Will felt like Northern shadows should be someway denser, maybe proving bluer than your sunnier Southern gray ones. Slow, along the train ride to Maiden, young Marsden understood how much the color of a Yankee uniform had, like four years’ cataracts, tinted and blurred his whole picture of Unionists’ pastures, Federal cities. In Delaware, he saw a splendid magnolia tree all starred with full white blooms. He felt tricked. If the whole North looks just like the South, what had all that whole mess been about? Though his moneyed family once knew the North real well, though his granddad, Judge More, attended Harvard College, Will had grown up when the South kept to itself, all haughty, separate. The boy should’ve known better but didn’t.

  He stood windblown between train cars, lashed by cinders, keeping clear of Yankees. The more northerly this train got—the more Willie feared that his drawl might bring him bodily harm. He refused to eat in the dining car. Waiters wanted you to order out loud, and with three strangers right at your table, the three then tried and “draw you out.” No thanks. Besides, who knew what they might slip into the food of a reverse scallywag, a carpetbagger with a boxed watch rattling on his person? Willie kept one palm cupped over the plugged pocket of his new brown suit. If people looked at him, he stared away. In his trouser pocket, he had many bills of Confederate money, like some ID badge to give him anchoring strength. Sitting near the Pullman window, staring out like somebody on their first weekend jaunt to Mars, Willie felt like a unemployed spy still sneaking peeks but doing it freelance now, on no side at all, and noticing what for who?

  The trek from Alexandria took him nearly three days, seemed weeks. One reason time did so funny, the boy refused to eat. Anything Yankee. He would drink train water in small paper cups but only after he saw children do it, and when they seemed to live afterwards, rushing back for more. Willie understood right off, he’d not brought sufficient money. Overnight on reaching Boston, he couldn’t afford a hotel and so slept sitting upright at the South Station (not the North one). He had his return ticket, he figured maybe he’d come so poorly prepared as a kind of accidental penance. He’d brought plenty of folding money but it was mostly the losing kind, Jeff Davis on it, already the stuff of bad and bitter jokes.

  Will traveled by buggy then another short-line train then wagon again and finally, on foot, he entered a little town outside of Boston. There was still country all around the burg called Maiden. He had wired ahead from Washington.

  Once pas
t Maiden’s city-limits sign, Will heard the watch grow louder. Or maybe it was just Will’s being off trains and wagons, plus maybe hunger. Still, the instrument sounded as if it knew what home was. Will kept his right hand, like for comforting the thing, on its decorated pine crypt. Five and a half years’d done slipped by since Marsden nailed this crate together while waiting rescue inside a surrounded barn. By now, Simon Utt would be twenty. (But, of course, Simon wouldn’t ever be—he’d never have to.)

  Will showed a stranger the Utts’ address (he still dared not speak). The Yankee quacked instructions. Will nodded and, lips moving, went over his prepared speech again. Today, at last, he’d tell. He had found, in three years of Winona practice every Thursday, telling was good for what ailed you, the soul and so forth. Under his big black hat, he felt like some foreigner, a hawker of bad goods, an undertaker and a bounty hunter—mixed.

  6

  DEAD Simon’s mother, still dressed in mourning, proved stout and pointy, sleek as a seal. She paced her cottage porch, waiting. Though Simon’s dad had been deceased these many years, his family yet lived in a brick home beside a matching church. The Utt homeplace looked small but extra tidy. Like a cottage on a candy tin. It sported yellow flowers spilling from window boxes. Great honor-guard stands of rouge-tinted hollyhocks surrounded the place.