Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  After the livery-stable fellow bilked her, she decided to change, try self-defense. “Something wrong with me. Seem like cheaters can see Castalia coming. I gots to leastway look stronger.” So she found a pair of cast-off white man’s trousers, these matched her farmer’s brogans.

  (Lady’s all-white all-silk clothes had bored Cas very much.) First, she risked a scarf overtop her mannish outfit, then she added copper earbobs. Nice. Finally, she made a last payment on the African-bright getup of choice. Dress, hat, bag, shawl, scarf, pin, shoes. Cas wore it all one whole Saturday up and down Main Street. Her body wound in some bold national flag, she kept glaring at all shoppers she met, daring them not to admire her, and hard. When they did gape at the ten proud contradicting colors, she understood: they envied her, they wondered how she’d found all the nice tints first.

  While dressed in mannish homespun slave clothes, Cas had heard Falls’ male idlers praise her. Now, done up so, that trail of groans and checkmark whistles slacked. She figured she’d just got too sleek for them. She knew they felt it: she’d quit dressing for here. She was living Practice, becoming a Lady of New York City town. They smelled her unslave future. Weak men hated her for it.

  (Two months from now, yet living in this crate—a spot by then improved with oiled-paper windows and little home-stitched curtains no bigger than Xerxes’ ascots—Cassie, saving for her pricey Northbound fare, will feel right happy to accept temporary work as a full-time maid. She’d got offered work by three families. She was finally glad to be hired by a returned soldier name of Marsden. She hadn’t really understood all that much about them other families. At least, she knew him.)

  HIGH TEA in a piano crate can be a comfort. Folks didn’t mention how they would soon head off to clean the homes of local whites—both quick and dead. Didn’t seem a worthy topic for no in-town high-tea talk. They failed to chat about old Africa, half a dream now—rich as a dream but hard to translate into table talk. These people had come too far from Africa and way too long ago. They were yet too close to bondage here. So, naturally, they talked about the Future. What else is there, honey?

  “You usually take one cube or two, child?” Z hollered to be heard over thunder, asked the silent boy from next door. Tongue-tied, he first shook his head No—then his hand did rise, despite hisself. A single finger lifted. Next, as him and others watched, a second finger—like some snail’s dainty stubborn horn—grew beside the first. Others, finding this sign hopeful and familiar, chuckled. Lord but they knew a person’s greediness for good things. It could be set alongside your seriously doubting your ever getting much. Before Cassie repoured, Zelia took the boy’s Spode cup, she rolled in three rattly cubes like dice. “Child—don’t you worry none. You our guest. Long as we gots sugar, you gone drink sugar.”

  Sipping, he settled back, eyes half closed, hardly believing this here luxury. Such fancy talking, such sharp red-winged patterns, the real peacock feathers Xed on one wall. What ladylike refinement: strong brown hands using tea things. Honey, to this boy, awed at being here, all this seemed too good, too fine to really happen in this our world of mud.

  Folks sipped, waited, mapped it all out. They seemed to know the Future far better than anything they’d lived through so far.

  Friends leaned back, staring noplace, hands curled half prayful around small English teacups held real close against their chests. They seemed so willing to wait it out, they’d chose to hang on just a few days longer.

  He was coming. It was coming. Who was coming? What?

  THEY CALLED it By-and-By, child, By-and-By.

  IN ENDING

  SO, to tidy up our paper’s end—settle the freed folks near the river Tar at their piano crate’s warmest end, please. Set the lady of the house, the ex-house, into puddled ruts of her freed slaves’ garden. Place her son on his own two feet. He’s a ex-soldier, it being late May of the year of Appomattox. Have him getting home from all that mess as best he can. Lilac bushes that outlived the fire show new green. Crusts of brown foam still hang ragtag here and there proving, yes, trees tried blooming earlier this year.

  Now, do like you’re a bird. You can here, darling. Go on up, it’s a freebie. Paddle high, then hold—tipping—semi-quiet in pure county air. Look leisurely down upon the muddy crossroads, footpath shortcuts, farmers’ cemeteries set within their choicest upland fields. From here, what stares back up at you is like some comfortable and tragic face you’ve always known. Its features are scars. A face plowed till it understands: Living means steadily learning to live on. The most you can hope for is a life sentence.

  Nearer town, the settlement of black squatters shows. Six miles off, a figure plunked out in her garden gasps during rain. Along the river’s twist, see great black bite marks where plantations stood. Then notice a getting-home soldier, seeking shelter from the rain, dodging under tobacco barns’ tin roofs. Each force and person of the old days moves back toward each other, old strands, new knot. Everything seems so simple from up this high. In fact, it’s so simple it’s impossible to understand. So spoon on down, settle on a fence post, tilt your head, fake being just another watchful meadowlark—draw nearer the last things we must see to end this right.

  The King is in his countinghouse counting out his money.

  The Queen is in the parlor eating bread and honey.

  Lady’s been gnawing final collards. Moving row to row, using her stick—everyplace she goes she pulls the heavy needleworked family crest behind. Does she consider this a pass card like the ones she signed so her slaves might ride for supplies in Falls, might slide past owners’ patrols? Nights, she must abide the sounds of large-bodied animals scratching, trying and get at her in the quarter. Lady’s been forever accustomed to third-floor safety. Now, one hour before sunset, she must begin to pull the logs and branches across her shelter’s door. One hour past midnight, she’ll hear the first arrive. Their snorts and snufflings sound as hungry as she feels. Lady, after trying a long time, finally finds her voice, screes straight up, something like “Who, who?” Some beasts scurry off. Others—hearing—only paw the harder to get at her. Mornings she finds fresh burrows dug half under her barricade. Are these dogs, raccoons or wolves or foxes, rabid Yankees? Is it the Bogey Ghost of the Swamp that young overseer Winch onct jokingly confessed inventing? Now she believes in it.

  Most neighbors that’ve chanced onto The Lilacs’ grounds consider Lady either dead or spirited off to Falls. Some owners out this way were killed—most by fires, a few as freed slaves’ first act. From her hiding place in the woods, Lady hears one young woman call her name. Lady onct offered this girl a beauty tip about a person’s always moving, white, amidst a guarding armada of oiled dark torsos. Lady bends still lower in the elderberry bush, stays out here till dark, long after her neighbor’s given up and buggied off.

  Sometimes just at dawn, once she’s dug free of the quarter’s barricade, the Widow Marsden goes on her cane, moving back and forth in the burned home’s side yard. Her soles keep testing wet grass before her, toes scything through the green. Like a person who has dropped—into high weeds—her only house key and is now hunting the one item that might let her back, back in.

  Not two months after the fire, her son enters Nash County. He moves along the highroad towards his home. He has passed the other showplaces, burned. Cool Spring and Ashland. Willie was once boated by slave oarsmen to fellow rich kids’ birthday parties, to the docks of all these homes, with Uncle Primus posing, hand in shirt, at the Marsden rowboat’s helm.

  Now, passing burned familiar gatehouses, Will won’t let hisself quit hiking—he just trudges on. He knows he will be finished once he stops. “Mustn’t expect,” the gawky ex-soldier tells hisself. “Mustn’t even mind its being gone. Why should ours be different?” Almost home, he’s scared that he’ll be recognized. When he hears a wagon coming, Willie jumps off the road. Hides in a ditch. He spent last night at the edge of a lake, standing up—stunned after one half-glimpse of a certain spindly somebody reflected in
the water. Oh, to be home. On land you own, who can really criticize you?

  Before he turns a bend that gives all southbound travelers their full and sudden view of The Lilacs set uphill among its famous hedges, before he braces hisself for a vista that makes many first-time passersby pause here, Will Marsden says aloud, “I believe there’s not one stone’s left on another stone.” And nods to prove he feels this, and deep.

  He knows he won’t be savoring the foreground’s red Chinese half-moon bridge crossing double lily ponds that barbell out to either side. Bridge won’t lead now to a winding white stone drive bordered by famous lilacs and—three hundred yards up on the slope—the drive will not now curl around the big white place fronted by four guarding marble pillars. No. Portico ain’t likely to be there, shielded and half hid back of five humongous magnolias. Gone, the windowed dome—his mother’s bedchamber conservatory—topping all. Nope.—And Will accepts this. He does. Having hoboed clear home from Virginia, ignorant of how he’s grown eight inches taller in the last two months, with so many dusty miles to warn hisself from hoping, how easy he can picture all that’s lost.

  So the haggard boy says in advance, “Nothing, I expect. Less than that.” Stronger for speaking this aloud, he takes a goodly breath, he turns the last bend, he stares. He falls down in the road.

  THEN—so tired—Willie, on his back in wagon ruts, laughs onct.

  Setting up, brushing at hisself—he uses a good stick he’s found, gets to his feet. Struggling to appear almost jaunty (for whose sake?), Willie nears a red bridge. First he tests it, pressure from one home-rolled “shoe,” a leather upper wound with strips of gunnysacking. The bridge holds, which is something anyways. Underneath it, cup-shaped white water lilies are ribbed with soot, spotted like decayed teeth.

  Will calls his mother’s name. “Expect nothing,” he reminds hisself. But once he’s nearer the mansion’s smoldering foundation, he’s already calling her so loud. Willie climbs up onto a flagstone veranda. (How high its steps look, leading, like they do, to nothing now.) Willie stares straight down. Only whilst bellowing her name does he hear how his own voice had deepened. First he shouts “Lady,” then “Mother,” finally “Momma.” The boy trots everyplace, choppy little visits, dodging into here and out of there.

  Moving fast as his raw feet allow, Private Marsden even stumbles through woods towards a little woodside cave. He’s always considered it his secret. Nights at the front before a coming battle, Will would sometimes picture this here tunnel, its hidden drippings steady as a tent dweller’s dream of mansion clocks. He ofttimes wished that, in 1861, he had just slipped inside this den. Will could have lasted out the war here, happy to be a coward, a deserter and wise man. Think of all he might have learnt if—for every minute that he’d felt fearful these long years—he’d been snug here reading, getting stuff straight, making up his mind. He could’ve maybe become a hardworking scholar like his late dad who ofttimes mentioned Aristotle’s owning thirteen slaves, Plato fifteen.

  Soon Will has checked most everyplace but the slave quarter. Will never once saw his mother out here—except during state visits, a few christenings. Stooping at its door—“Have I grown?”—he ducks into a single long low bunkhouse. Sixty-odd people slept here—so many died and born in this one chamber. Its walls, alive with handprints, seem smudged now from all these spirit entrances and exits. Will has never understood before—the place has no windows. Maybe planned that way so, come night, the single bolted doorway could be guarded by Winch’s men.

  The main dormitory, rows of corn-husk mattresses, looks to’ve been deserted in a hurry. Will remembers the little annex running alongside this hall. Was known as Dr. Marsden’s “office.” Willie now slips into that narrow chamber, finds it wholly draped with dingy sheets. He recognizes his mother’s monogram, the two thorny M’s making a pedestal, one looping L set—a curly boot shape—not unpleased to ride on top. This alcove’s tenting makes it seem a pitiful slave copy of his mother’s brocade tower music room. Or maybe somebody’s memory of a household game: On rainy days, as a boy, Will—with his mother—played it hour after hour. Always with whatever slave children he chose.

  This cell is so dark, he first mistakes the tall mirror yonder for a corner exit. Then Will sees glass give back a sliver of the open doorway where he stands. “You in here? Momma?” Mirror’s mahogany frame has buckled from weather. The glass—though losing conviction in some spots—still works. He moves toward this brilliant oval. In his daze from hunger, with both feet bleeding—Willie has yet to understand that he might register.

  The boy only hurries here because he knows it’s hers.

  When he has got six, now five feet from the glass: a standing giant in gray looks back at him. The beast is half again as tall as Child Willie should be. Like him, it turns aside, but way too slow. A uniformed shape is on its hind legs. Sad part: You can tell by the creature’s vexed face—it wants something better. You can someway tell it plans to try and maybe school itself back towards being … what? … half human again. The creature’s eagerness sickens Will the most. If only, like that great Bible King, this thing would simply go down onto all fours, would just eat grass, be done with trying. Willie Marsden presses the real beard of it. Yes, it’s a boy’s thin beard. Yellow furse shows three cockleburs tangled in. Will slides one hand clear through a great rip in the outgrown tunic. He touches something’s left nipple—this mark seems some one-of-a-kind defect.

  And people have noticed him like this! Throughout two ex-Reb states, during steady hiking—strangers have been viewing this for free. The shape is worse for being—these long weeks—such a secret to itself. “When miniés stopped flying, did I think I’d gone transparent? Coming through towns, everybody stared so.—Now you know why, Willie boyo.” And he understands, this is exactly what his absent mother would reel from first. Having others see her at a loss, that always grieved Lady worse than any loss itself. If people gaped at her too long, and even in a manner too admiring, she’d inhale, “What?”—she’d touch herself as if some secret stain was giving her away.

  During battles, for comfort, Willie Marsden decided war had one hidden advantage: Yeah, he’d almost lost a leg to the surgeon’s overeager saw. True, his side’s army—after giving up so much for victory—went and sacrificed the war itself. Fact, he’d lost his friend, his friends. But at least there was this: He’d found the terrible cure for Marsden family vanity. Might be war’s single benefit.

  Willie recalled his daddy’s self-justifying scholarship—Dr. Marsden’s pleasure with his own mildness (a person can be proud of anything). Will knew his momma’s high-handedness about her music, her beauty—things she expected the world to daily help her improve upon. Walking home, the boy told hisself: At least something good has sprung from all this ruination. At least—along with everything else—he’d finally lost his share of the inherited vanity.

  But now his mother’s mirror tells Willie M.: His present case is maybe forty times worse than the one he marched away with.

  Understanding he’s gained nothing from these three years, what breaks across the side of his neck, against the brunt of Will’s forehead, is so strong a shame he feels a moment’s blindness. Needing steadying, he reaches for the quarter’s wall.

  IT’S THEN that he hears something shift.

  Something else alive has claimed this room. It has made a burrow of sheets in the tabby hut’s corner. Crimped breath can now be heard to rattle behind the mirror. Will’s war reflexes come back so swift—knees dip, weight’s center lowers, arms fling out, stick hoists off the floor—gone from cane to cudgel in one instant. The boy half stoops, primed for danger even before noticing the sound as sound. Will is about to leave the mirror (glad to), he’s ready to sidestep his reflection and check behind the glass.

  When three dark fingers curl around its frame.

  The boy all but cries out.

  By dodging behind glass, Will finds—huddled in deeper shadow here—a prickly swaddled shape. Its
matted eyes reflect all the daylight streaming from behind him. This creature acts so frightened by the staff he holds, he throws it willingly down. But the noise of wood striking flagstone floor makes the victim draw in even tighter.

  On a filthy cot, she smells the way we all would if we just quit on niceties, admitting being animal. A rank gamy lanolin sweetness—like original sin. And about as hard to shake, child. Shouldn’t people at least get to naturally smell like … lilacs, minimum. That too much to ask? She clutches a picture frame against her chest, holds it like some shield or crucifix. The granny-woman tilts back, gasping. Her head looks sheared. The face shows black blisters, partly healed. Her body needs washing so bad—it’s gone gray-brown as a fresh-dug potato’s jacket. Knowing she’s been uncovered, the crone makes even worse pleading sounds. Her tone itself plainly asks, “Don’t hurt me more.”

  She has failed to know him.

  And, child, he don’t know her.

  Stepping inches nearer, Willie first believes this squaw to be vague Old Zelia, finally unstrung like folks’d long predicted. Then Will takes this person for some mad black stranger, hiding out from damage suffered elsewhere. He leans over the hurt one. “It’s all right,” a baritone echoes in this stone vault, half surprising him. She curls deeper under one sheet, she pulls further into the corner, frowning from the hurtful white light framing him. Her face’s whole left side is mashed flush to plaster, her one visible eye bugs out so, blinking. He can hear the wet eye snapping, snapping.

  Will wants to help the creature. He’s not certain how. She moves—one fist yet gripping the gold frame. Her other pulls the sheet aside. She’s naked underneath—he hadn’t planned to look at her, it. But the boy’s too curious about a signal she keeps making.