Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  Children playing on the floor slowly notice stillness and their own sounds stop. The baby at your shoes, watchful, keeps hold of your laces.

  “I tried and be kind to him. But first I shot him. I could say, We had to then. I might say that both our sides made us. But, fact is, I did it.—See, then we ended up in this one ditch together, soon we talked and all. I don’t guess Simon even knew it was me got him. And I never told. He had enough weighing on him right then. He gave me his watch to send up here to you-all. Then the war ended not a minute too soon. And once I could afford to and it seemed safe, I hand-brought it to you. Now you’ve got it over there. I did what I said. I never stop thinking of what happened. Feels now like it didn’t really have to. But at the time, it’s different. It wouldn’t happen now. But, look, it did. I wasn’t expecting to travel here and tell all this and then have you people forgive me right away. That’d be asking too much and I know it. See, I only made the trip so I could say it to you ladies face to face. I didn’t know others would be here, and I appreciate that, but it sure makes things harder. Simon’s watch is delivered. He did love that watch. So, yes, ma’ams, I helped Simon but only afterwards. You should know. You do now. Still, I figure if Simon hadn’t been such a nice fellow, I probably wouldn’t have walked and ridden up all this far. I’ve never been this far up before—North, I mean. That’s because of Simon, who he was, not just because of what I did to him. So. That’s about it. And, look, ladies—the other people here—I don’t mind saying—telling you all this, it’s maybe even harder than doing that other at the time, almost. Now you’ll hate me. I would too. Saying I’m sorry—that’s not the half of it. Well …”

  Speak no other sound. Folks in this here parlor seem locked stiff. They stare only directly ahead. You can hear one person’s molars grinding. Babies who acted pleased when your talking broke the hush just now, wait for reasonable gabble to recommence. When doesn’t nothing happen, some children start sniffling, looking around for parents. The baby near your shoe gets scooped up, toted out right quick, the mother glad for some excuse to leave here, leave you.

  Neighbor ladies, helping in the kitchen, are the lasts to hear. You know the very moment when whispered news reaches them. The whole house is now so pained and silent that the street’s horse traffic, a few jays squabbling in a back garden, sound extra colorful and noisy, right attractive. To be outdoors, to fly off!

  Standing neighbors back nearer the walls, just like you expected. This sudden moat has opened all around the couch where you wait. Simon’s sisters are on your left and right. The left-hand girl now rises, excuses herself, hurries to the back yard. She’s out there making piping shrieks into her handkerchief. She does it alone, not wanting to embarrass you or anybody.

  Two children in gloves knock two bells over and then right them. A great deal of time seems to pass, only real, real slow. Dear Lord, let us die or get on with things, one. Mrs. Utt, saying nothing, finally struggles to her feet. She looks unsteady and two neighbor ladies reach to help but she signals, No, she’s fine. The widow, appearing both royal and tipsy, wobbles to her own front door.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, loud, to the air of her hallway.

  That preacher rises. “‘Love and tears for the Blue, tears and love for the Gray,’ Widow Utt?”

  “Shut up,” says Mrs. Utt, sounding patient and very tired. “This is my house. I do things here. Mr. Marsden, for delivering our watch, we thank you. Goodbye, Mr. Marsden.”

  The two seated daughters stand and form a row beside the open door. Mrs. Utt’s emotion registers by making her face look neutral, almost bored with you. She holds the door open to its widest. Light seems brassbound, gaudy, full of welcome. Rude as you. You try and rise now. Can you? You really should’ve eaten. It’s a long way home, you. First lean across the tray that still holds cookies. Empty a crumbly wad of stuff from your right hand, brush it with the left. Next, stand—straight-backed, try—dazed, now move past parishioners. They turn their heads aside without meaning to or noticing. It’s like they need to keep from breathing any air your nose and mouth have tainted. They loved Simon. You killed Simon. Makes sense.

  Hardest yet: Approach three waiting women. Nod once. Not to touch them or they’ll scream. Best use the porch rail, slow, ease down stairs, then drag along the brick path, unfastening the garden gate. Finally, how grateful for the street. To pull on your big black hat, leveling its brim. You can only move with a great solemn slowness now. Admitting the truth—instead of lightening a person like you’d hoped—has flat quadrupled the pull of Northern gravity, enemy. Every step requires a decision, means a chore, a treaty. How many shoe movements are now between you and the desired sane southerly direction?

  Oh, just to reach that far street corner. Once there, turn back, since you need to know. The crowd stands mashed on the front porch, all watching hard, most mouths open. The one sister who stepped out back now studies you from behind a side-yard fence. To see the Southern soldier leave, she’s parted hollyhocks. Everybody bunched on the porch holds on to one another. All but the children. For one second, you feel almost wicked—yeah, pretty mean. You know that if you reached quick into your jacket pocket, like going for a pistol, they’d all dive clear off that porch and into flowering shrubs. Be kind of fun to see. For one second, feeling giddy (it’s full sun and lack of food and your hurt feelings), you consider doing this. But cruelty passes (takes too much energy). It passes as it mostly does with you. Sometimes it seems things might go simpler for you if it stayed, the meanness. If so, you never would’ve come up here for this.

  Maybe you had to. Maybe you’ll be glad. Maybe it was all to help you forget Simon. You pat for his watch in your ripped pocket. Seems somebody stole it from you. You lift one arm, but slow so as not to spook one soul. You choose to wave. You need to see what folks’ll do back. Three adults, not family but neighbors, react with half-mast hoisting of their wrists. But those hands fall quick and in shooing gestures: Go way. Only children hand-flap back at once, not knowing better yet. Nobody stops them. Then the lone sister in the side yard—invisible to those on the porch facing you—she nods, she releases blooming stalks. Those close quick before her face.—Not planning it or understanding why—somebody like you is taking off a new brown jacket. As others watch, the like-you person out here in the sun lays that on the dusty Yankee road. Next shed the fine black hat, place it atop the coat. Only now can you turn. You can finally leave here. It’s done. In this world, anyway, you know you’ll never see or hear from any of these folks again.

  Mostly you will miss your mascot watch, which is Simon, or was.

  IT’S a neighborhood. To walk, hatless, in shirt sleeves, feeling harmless and addled but real old, to aim straight ahead, wherever that way winds up going. To feel, at noon, so like a ghost. And not even your own ghost. It’s the sun, you tell yourself. It’s not eating, it’s being in the wrong place at the worst possible time. Later you’ll learn you’ve had a fever these four days but, for now, as usual you blame yourself.

  You soon find the street gives way to a river’s edge. Docks far off and here are two huge factories. Smoked red brick and massive chimneys that push out smoke as black as the war’s worst. There are many windows so workers inside can see to work. In most windows, corners of silver machines keep turning.

  You are down near water, then you see how in every window, beside the silver loom that she must operate, one small girl stands looking out—one head per window looking at you hard like in some uh-oh dream. One child, seeing you notice her, waves. Notice how her right hand wears a metal bracelet. She’s a child and has no discipline (like you at twelve). For her own good, it looks like the Yankee factory has hooked her to her machine until some whistle sounds. Big gold letters set in brick over the windows full of children spell: “McClellan’s Indigo Works, Unltd.”

  Water lapping over a nearby dam and hissing through far waterwheels that drive the factory—it’s blue, but blue as anything store-bought. Factories like this one
won the Feds’ war for them. Maybe this plant helped dye the uniforms that made one side’s soldiers not in gray. With nothing to lose now, you ease down a mudbank and stand, shoes sunk into the blue marshy shore. River’s bottom mud is so blue it’s gone purplish, seems furry from leaked tannic chemicals. Then, slow, you see how certain logs angling your way fourteen feet offshore are really fishes, pretty good-sized ones.

  Maybe it’s your hunger, or the being numbed from wanting to be liked back there (or, if not liked, forgiven), maybe it’s the sun or your being too far from home farms and cozy Falls, maybe it’s being in this risky zone of industries that mean your country’s future. Whatever makes it so, there are many good-sized carp just under this tinged water and they are looking right at you. Chemicals have turned each fish a bitter poison-blue. To see them clearer, you must wade out three feet more. Soon as your shoes and stockings are soaked blue-black, you know you should’ve taken them off first. No matter. This far north, who’ll see?

  Fish don’t shy or backswim but hover out there, studying you like during some appointment you have kept. They hover in this strange formal horseshoe shape, gathered like some tribunal. There’s something odd about them and—dim at first—you notice they don’t have usual pointy thick-lipped fish heads. No, their front ends seem shovel-shaped as human faces. You see how their eyes ride high in front, how their noses are long. Their eyes, unblinking, seem intelligent, fixed right on you here.

  Mouths are going like chewing the fouled water they’d rather not, they’re belching taint, trying to find a last safe pure part. Then, left to right, you start to recognize the faces. Features of men you knew during the war, the guys that didn’t make it. Is this a fever? Third from the left is one you shot who had the pipe in his mouth, and on one end, you read Ned’s pale dimpled gaze. He’s being punished. Seems your war dead have been sent here, swimming in the country’s future, living in the upstream leavings of a dye works. Three down, Simon’s face, the dark brows all but joining at the center. How he gapes at you, fins fastened just beneath his jaw. Then all the fishes, dorsal fins going, churn up bottom storms of gravel. Swimming in place, they reverse to look up at the mill’s four smokestacks, dark towers billowing darkness, shooting flames, spreading a yellow soot that takes itself to be some golden future.

  People downstream drink this blue. People nearby breathe this stink. Your side, the farm side, lost to this. This is what it is now, and will be.

  Maybe this is everybody’s punishment for a civil war. Factories that helped make arms now turn to this and get better at it. You turn your back on all the children in the windows chained to moneymaking gear. You wade out of the leakage future. Think of home. Remember Meadows’ Pasture waiting, pure.

  You’ve seen what you’ve seen here. On dry land—your shoes are squishing with Yankee progress, some mess. You—innocent of food, stripped of your timepiece—find the return ticket in one pants pocket, find it’s soaked half blue. You wander through six ordinary neighborhoods till one woman comes right up to you. Her hat is covered with a Eden of false fruit, smaller than life-sized (manufactured), and she tips her head and the harvest clacks and she asks if you are lost or have you been in some accident “or what?” She gives you the chance to answer. “Oh,” she nods into your silence, “another veteran? You were in it, right? Yes, we see this all too often. What you boys gave!” You nod at “veteran.” You try asking about the train depot but instead sign something with your hand. She calls her young son and he leads you there. The child takes your hand as if he knows he leads a blinded person, which you have sort of become, given all you have been through here lately. Much of it will never be explainable, even by yourself and to yourself, much less to some talky magpie little lady you will marry and who’ll ask to hear it, to hear all.

  The boy pulls you towards a station’s gilded cage with a glass front. One black man is swabbing off the depot’s white marble floor, the child leads you across its wet. A silence seems to follow. You stare back and see a Yank crowd looking your way. Blue-saturated footprints trail right here to you, no mistaking blame. A captive ticket taker in his gilded cage is thick-lipped under a green visor—fish-faced in a strange glass tank. You pull out your return ticket stub, half dyed blue. “Is it still good?”

  Your relatives, leaving the reunion, are supposed to give you a buggy ride home. Somehow you manage to turn up just as they stand fussing in the lobby counting baggage. You wear no hat, you’re in shirt sleeves with suspenders out for all to see, your brown trousers are stained most black to the knees, your dark shoes look blue. “What’d, you breaststroke South?” your so-called witty cousin says (because he wants to be called witty, not through any wit or merit of his own). Then you’re in the back of wagon, jostling home. They seem to know they mustn’t ask you how it went.

  7

  ONLY when kinfolks cross the unmarked Carolina border, oh Lord, just the smell of that, the sweetness of home turf and actual honest green after all the nasty acid-blue—it does sure press in towards you like a starter cure.

  Only now do you revive some. You feel less watched. You say to kin, “I will never go North again. I make a solemn oath before you-all.” Nodding. You see they’re scared of you. They maybe smell it on you, how you killed three people.

  They also smell you—plain you. You lift one arm and ooh-ee, too much. You sniff the fear—it’s partly chicken soup, part it’s pig iron, mixed. Fear stinks. “Fine,” the witty cousin says. “As you wish, you never have to leave home ever again. Suit yourself.”

  “Thank you. I will never depart our holy state. Here, the monsters can’t find me.”

  Nobody talks until reaching the town of Norlina, where you water horses. You haven’t eaten anything for five days. Afterwhile, a person stops missing it.

  Back home, Cuthrell’s Jewelry Pawn Store won’t be open until nine. It’s 6 a.m. Your relations drop you off, glad to. Few Fallsites up yet. Or is it Fallsians? Your mother once said, “Well, I know these small-timers and I call them The Fallen.”

  You can hardly wait to buy the town’s best watch, the platinum one, Swiss made. Here, you don’t need cash. Your face means credit.

  This early, Meadows’ Pasture is all dew. Later today you’ll do the banking paperwork required to buy this acreage, a tribute.

  To wander out into this field that you know will, by sunset, be yours—meaning everybody’s. Simon’s, Ned’s, the war dead and the civvie living. Through sedge and past wild roses’ thorns, downhill to water. Pant legs wet, two rabbits brazen, sunning in a clearing. One old apple tree grows tilted near the river Tar’s shore. Already green pips hang here. Though they’re sour and you must chew about ten of these to get one apple’s worth of nourishment, your stomach growls, grateful. Your tree, your apples, in your own civilian stomach. This river is called the Tar for the black deposits found downstream—tar British soldiers cursed, tar that slowed Brits, made them name the whole state Tarheel. But though the name is dark, its water runs as clear as anything, a lens enlarging the clean bottom, silver minnows there, harmless, just fish.

  Near one rock, a glove is tacked. It has fish scales on it—somebody wore the thing while scaling their catch. A little note says, “This anybody’s?” You tell yourself they wouldn’t do that, not up there.

  Find a place in high weeds. Still in shirt sleeves, it’s comforting to hug your knees and blue-stained pant cuffs. Lean back against the tree. There are meadowlarks. Church bells signal 8 a.m. in different denominations’ register.

  —NO ARMY will ever take you again. If a fresh war breaks out (and you, alas, suspect one will) you would sooner put your sons (as yet unborn, admittedly) on ships to foreign countries, Africa, anyplace. Anything is better than losing a boy to death—or even not losing him, even just letting him go through it, letting him come home with a headful of this you have. The town comes alive with sticky tender commercial life behind you—brooms on entryways, awning squeaking up, somewhere a cash register tries its tinny heartless musi
c.

  When you wake, the sun says early afternoon. You’ve slept so long. Maybe there’s still a breakfast to be had, three eggs, wheat toast, grits, raspberry jam, lots of serious coffee. Now to go and buy the Swiss watch you’ve long studied at Cuthrell’s, a instrument that doesn’t show the moon, but chimes. Merciful, it doesn’t warn you with “Work For the Night Is Coming” (as if you didn’t know that). Swiss, it’s jeweled to be quiet. This is good as the other one, more modern maybe but just as fine in its own way, right? Then you’ll go to the bank to buy Meadows’ Pasture for everybody and yourself.

  YOU’RE wolfing breakfast served by a waitress, her little daughter, Lolly, crimping her doll’s hair in one corner. The widowed waitress knows your entire story or thinks she does (that in itself a comfort). “I love to see a man eat,” she says, and you chew, looking her over, like considering doling that fine favor her way. “Eat food,” she says, and you both laugh, you with your mouthful. You must go see Mother, to prove you lived, you’re back. This waitress’s every Southern “sugar” helps you feel resettled and more real. You wipe your mouth on the cloth napkin and lean back. Out the window you know every soul you see and many wave. “Back?” some mouth through glass.