Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  She shows him small burned breasts, keeps pointing at her neck. She tips here, quaking. Something like a laugh keeps breaking through her, blurring features to a smile, baring her blacked gums. She signals and signals at one side of her throat. Will’s own tired mind moves so slow today—but he begins to understand: this person is so beaten, so at the end of hiding—she is exposing her jugular to him. She presses against plaster, racked by small spasms like giggles, ones she fights in a manner almost genteel, grinning behind her hand in a way that sickens him for being someway familiar. Head tilted left, she’s offering this shaggy upright beast the right to end her.

  “No,” he says. Meaning: I won’t hurt you. But a marveling sound echoes in his own voice, gets his own attention. And it’s only now that Willie sees—just where this person’s shoulder meets her throat—how the crusted darkness gives way. In one protected seam, a paleness. First, it appears to be a scar. Then, slow, Will begins to understand that all the rest is—scar. That this poor raddled creature has been fully scalded down to this—rendered—down down the way fat’s reduced to make candles, soap.

  It’s now: The locked muscles of a boy’s knees give. Will seems to fall some inches while yet standing. He says just, “No. Not,” and turns aside.

  She stares up at him.

  Then he speaks, but to the wall. “—Not you?”

  She seems to understand. Slow, he risks facing her. She begins to nod. She soon offers big-eyed head-wagging child nods. One blacked finger then taps warped glass. She keeps pointing to a family motto in Latin. She gives off small asking sounds. It’s soon plain she wants this read aloud to her. Will learned the legend by heart at age five. So, moving like somebody old, settling onto the stone floor beside her unclean cot, he quotes it and loud, and with some great simple patience seeming older than a boy’s. “Morus tarden moriens moru cito moritum. ‘The family members, like the leaves of the mulberry tree, shall perish, but the tree shall live forever.’”

  Seeming strengthened, not onct touching him, she throws her feet over the cot’s edge, takes up her own walking stick, motions he should follow. Willie has not even brushed against her—he feels afraid to, child. Seems one squeeze from him might crack her to a hundred ashy bits.

  She now leads him on a tour of ruins. He keeps close behind her. Under the one bedsheet, she’s quite naked. Scar tissue gleams across her back. Willie, staggering, numb now, hopes he will eventually forget to be shocked. Please. He tries so hard to forget the crippling family pride. (His only hope now is to lose that, quick.) He can plainly see how his mother moves. Barefoot over gravel, she goes forward in a scurrying heedless way, so determined. Helpless against it, she’s grown right rangy, taking no care over how she looks, not understanding that. Now that Lady has started living from the inside out, and not the outside in, she’s become visible to him. She looks like a body turned inside out, flayed then tanned as saddle leather. But, odd, only with her broken like this, does the boy see how strong she has forever been. “My mother.”

  Her readiness to be so hurt while agreeing to stay on, alive—it seems to Will the strangest miracle of all. (A woman whose idea of luxury was forever resting, chattering, fanned by others, blindfolded with silk.) He almost feels sorriest for her first self.

  And Willie, following, head down, aware mostly of his own breathing, now feels a prickling light his scalp. Now he feels the deepest pride set in. That’s it—he feels so proud. Proud that—even rendered down to this—his mother’s found no choice but to stay alive, to really really want that. Cooked stupid, she has noticed her life.

  Trailing Lady, studying his own hurt feet, Will needs to know: How has she eaten? Who has tended her? Willie guesses she has made this tour daily for the many weeks since everything was leveled. From a barn’s coals to the flattened summerhouse and back, she scuddles. She seems to feel that by watching each site hard, she can maybe bring each back to life—can maybe teach them by her own example. She says nothing, she leads her son past a browned lilac hedge three-quarters killed by fire.

  At each blackened foundation, the woman props herself up on her stick. Like at the stations of a tour, she makes such pitying sounds. Finally, faltering onto the stone porch, she points, lets the stick’s end drop, stirs ashes still smoking in some spots. Seems she hopes to offer each pile the will to rise. Lady keeps going, “Unnh. Unnh.”

  “Yes,” he says like to a child. “All gone.—You do know me, don’t you, Momma?—It’s Willie. It’s over. I didn’t get killed. I’m home. I can see it’s you.”

  They’re both standing on the stone veranda of nothing. When he speaks this, the second he says it—she nods to show she’s recognized him, to prove there’s still a little memory left—which means a bit of hope.

  And it’s just now that both these people seem released—sprung like from some trance that’s run years too long. It’s now that Lady E. More Marsden finally shoves away a stick that’s held her up and, spinning, drops toward flagstone. With what great glad energy, she falls. Will catches her, but must break her toppling by going down hisself. Even in collapsing, their hands are on each other. And only when all possible falling is done can they sob. They do and do. It might sound comical to you, child, if you yourself had never cried. You have.

  To them, these noises are more satisfying for sounding like beasts’—just so many gulps, brays, yelps. Sounds are way below anything as dignified as language, far under the best hopes of a civilization refined as theirs was. They keep pulling at each other, one trying to jolt the other like fighting to recollect some important errand they both at least recall forgetting. With un-words—her in peeps, him in strange broad trombonish blasts—how they comfort each other!

  Sun begins to try and set. Barn swallows still spin around blacked chimneys. A May breeze rises. On the third-floor mantel among intact figurines, one French clock’s pendulum is stirred by wind. Unexpected—the bedchamber’s white onyx timepiece, all sooty now, gives three unasked-for gongs, then falls still. The two former owners below, they laugh at its happening. They chuckle and hoot, they cackle together. And scream together. And scream.

  NEXT DAY, wearing a overcoat some neighbor has lent him, riding that neighbor’s only mule, Will turns up at Falls’ best boardinghouse—he carries a child-sized person wrapped in a borrowed quilt so that nobody might see her and laugh. After his bossly trip to the livery stable to announce he’s back and has lived through it all and is taking over—he soon fills his mother’s rooms with what furniture Castalia’s managed to save, masterpieces she hoped to maybe sell for herself, or maybe peddle to her former owners, but certainly to save, which she has done. Was a warehouse’s worth and though it yet smelled of the great fire, it all got packed with Chinese box-in-box skill into double rooms, chairs handstanded upside down on chairs, mirrors making much of far too much to start with, chandeliers like great marine catches hung up for dockside drippish weighing.

  And, thirty years later, it’s just me, a stubby pigtailed schoolgirl knocking on that door, three sharp pencils slippery in one hand, a list of hard-strict questions (don’t push me) bunching in my other. I’ve come, ready to pull from the Mummy and others such rude facts as braid and latch and link semi-together till—it becomes this story I’ve just told.

  BLACK, white, and lilac. Well, darling, I got me a Satisfaction Minus. Miss Beale never did give a Satisfaction Plus, not in her whole half century of teaching here. When Emily Saiterwaite (hooked on teacher praise) asked why not, Beale only replied, “Satisfaction Plus, in this godforsaken bush-league wilderland?”

  I didn’t even mind the Minus all that much. Poor grammar was ever the millstone/albatross strung around my neck.

  “While Lucille would patently prefer unbridled narrative to the discipline of composing a history theme, one nonetheless senses she has posed many difficult questions to many willing persons from various walks of life and has made, from all she’s gathered, this lurid showy pie. True, she fails to use the semicolons required but t
he pupil does attempt an organization involving a three-color scheme. She hopes, This Reader believes, to demonstrate how relative our moral standards truly are, how war can reverse forces even so seemingly immutable as the planet’s very colors. Perhaps Lucille collaborates with history too readily—as if its terrible pageant were being daily staged to simply amuse, horrify, and entertain our little friend. Even so, she has spared herself no end of legwork. Lucille has, I believe, when it comes to the spirit of events chronicled here, entered in. With Lucille’s theme, as often occurs in both my own historical vision and in History itself, I am left wondering what worse could possibly happen next. Seemingly, something always does, does it not?—Lucille’s acknowledgment of suffering as a constant, argues, I believe, the beginning of this child’s compassion. Therefore—dear one—Satisfaction Minus.”

  (Bless you, Miss Witch, our silk purse stuffed with the big bills of History and Taste. You knew everything but how to save yourself from the folks you most hoped to save. Lord rest your martyred heart.)

  THERE, pretty much done. Except for a final question. And I am asking it, darling, of me and you and of flint-hearted History itself.

  What is black, white, and lilac?

  If this here query had been put to me at age eleven, I would’ve bragged, “Why, that’s the modern history theme I just wrote for Miss Witch Beale and that she liked right much. The one that Poppa helped me age the new brass hinges of.”

  At twenty, I’d have said, “A school paper done by a very innocent little girl very, very long ago. That, plus maybe some new multi-tone boudoir-decorating trend mentioned in a recent number of McClure’s?” At fifty, “Three names of three popular shades and whatever on earth happens to be those particular tints. Period.”

  I think, at seventy, I had enough on my mind so I’d probably forgot ever doing the twenty-six pager I’ve tried breathing new life into here. Asked the question then, I might have said, “What is this? three colors? a joke? Maybe one about some nun hooked on red wine or something? Tell me it.”

  At age ninety, I ain’t too sure if I’d have recalled Mr. Goethe’s naming colors “the deeds and sufferings of light.” I do now. At the end, so much comes back to you, and clear as day.

  With me creeping nigh onto a hundred (imagine), I’ve grown more cautious about blabbing any off-the-top-of-my-head ragtag answer.

  Look, by now, I know what I know.

  By this time, honey, so do you.

  Miss Beale, the best thing I found out: How much they’ll tell you if you trust enough to ask. True, my paper don’t exactly mount up to no national document. Still—ma’am? it’s what I learnt.

  Today, if some pushy eleven-year-old shoved to my bed’s edge, if she offered me the old question, child, I believe I’d try a shorter truer comeback.

  Q: What is black and white and lilac?

  A: Depends.

  BOOK THREE

  Give

  Strength,

  Lord

  Back to War Again

  And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Love suffereth long, and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth.

  —I CORINTHIANS 13:3–6

  CAPTAIN wanted to name our oldest boy Ned. I didn’t think it was too good of a idea, seeing what’d happened to Ned the First. More babies followed—knit one, purl one, turn around, you got a afghan—family spread across your knees and spilling down, warming the very ankles that’re swollen so on their account.

  Those days, it was either one end of your use or the other. Like being a broom that’s strawed at both ends, north and south, you circle yourself to keep cleaning up after him, even after lamps go out.—Those days, I can’t tell you, you that’s always had the vote, that got to go to college and can smoke anywhere so easy it never even dawns on you to start, which is good. You, who can discourage babies in advance of seeing what they’ll look like and then falling in love with their first smile instead of saving your own self! Well, comparing then to now, it’s night and day. I’m ready to start over.

  WE GOT us a Ford car, was the first in all of Falls. Model T, black of course. Oh, spluttering to church especially, we were mighty stuck-up for about four weeks. Till we got outshined by Doc Collier’s Pierce-Arrow. Then near-strangers would say right to our faces, “Yours is just a Ford.” Jealous. Still, it was good for me—overnight I’d grown snooty as Lady More Marsden in her prime. Went out and bought me the goggles, a driving hat and veil, gloves. Some days I wore them around the house, as a joke for the children. Cleaning in those. I was just a girl myself. Captain drove that thing as if he’d done it all his life. Children begged for the privilege of washing the Ford. I caught Louisa, a enterprising darling, charging neighbor kids admission to scrub our auto—big kids, too, boys! I felt proud of her. “How much you clear?” I called her aside. She acted ashamed, “Not enough for nursing school.”

  “That what you salting it aside for?”

  Lou nods.

  “We’ll get you in, Miss P. T. Barnum.” She held out a nickel, offering to rent my goggles, hat, and gear. I give them to her absolutely free.

  One noon, Cap drove home with this look on his face, fingers kept carving maps all through his brown beard, he paced, counting platinum watch-chain links like the Pope doing beads for dear life. Kept talking about a pilgrimage. Revisiting the war. By then we had eight of the children. Yes, child, eight. Happened just that fast. Many of my wee ones were in their diaper years. Sure made traveling harder. Won’t like now, where you just throw them paper things away. Oh my no—had to wash each one, had to keep the evidence on hand, you had to love your children then, just to stand it.

  Auto was a hand-crank Model T. Not like these station wagons you see these days, ones with added playrooms for your babies to go be busy in. Children were either on the floorboard or in your lap, period. I’ll skip the arguments I gave for not traveling. It come out, he’d bought the autocar just so’s he could go. Here was the twentieth century’s big breakthrough and what’d he want to do with it? drive back to war in the nineteenth!

  We set out one Thursday just at dawn. I had told him he should go alone. He said, “Lucy mine, fact is, I’m frightened to.” That got me, naturally. I packed enough picnic stuff to feed a regiment. By then, we were one.

  Leaving, our town looked sourish but pink with waking. My baby in my arms, I stared out at all the unfamous things I knew best: the school, the church, a tree where me and my best girlfriend’d built a tree house and practiced our first kissing on each other, the courthouse monument to Our Fallen. I sat worrying we were bound for something that we shouldn’t see. “Say ‘Bye,’” I told those children awake in back.

  “Bye, everything,” Lou said, waving at the Courthouse Square’s highest-shooting water fountain, the green bench before Lucas’.

  Took us nearbout three weeks all up into Virginia and Maryland to find his basic war spots. Cap had left two trusty black men in charge of the stockyard. By now, they mostly ran it anyways. They scolded the Captain, growing more frank the more work they did for him—at the selfsame pay. Fellows explained he was crazy to buy the first local autocar. Here they were, trying and sell Marsden horses, Marsden mules—and he went tooling around the counties in this show-off backfiring boat unhitched from any animal at all. He shrugged, he told them flat, “I wanted one.” It’s all the reason a boss ever needs.

  We bumped into a few other vets, men nosing around old acreage, men fingering fence posts for bullets still wedged there, men pushing their wives’ and children’s fingers into brick walls and tree bark so’s they’d feel the lead there. Treated kin like Doubting Thomases that didn’t believe it’d all happened, that wouldn’t believe till their hands got poked wrist-deep into the sticky maw of it.

 
I heard one wife say, “I am not jamming my finger into one more thing, Stan. I know it was rough.” Us wives, sisters, mothers followed our men. Some vets were on crutches, some got lugged on stretchers by hired black men. But all vets were looking overly alive. Us wives give each other tired grins. We rolled our eyes, overeager for peace, quiet, and a good couch. Counter-pain. The children thought this open land was just a playground. But, for vets, it sure was not, and you had to keep your babies quiet and in rows. It was hard.

  And you think the Captain would let me tend our brood in the autocar whilst he stepped off battle events, maps held nestled up near his brown beard? Not bloody likely, child. We had to follow every last stride. So the babies would remember, he said. Was like pacing off a hunt for buried treasure, only without the treasure. The second-saddest thing to fighting a war is remembering it inch by inch decades later. I told my husband that a child has got to be seven or a mighty smart six before such fine print stays recollected. Our babies couldn’t recall their home address much less which Reb regiment under General Thus-and-so tried holding on to which Reb ditch.

  Captain did name our oldest boy Ned. I let him, had to. “You pick the girls’ names,” he said. Well, Ned was old enough to notice the trip. He was bright, eight, all eyes under sweet humid blond ringlets. His curls would tighten up and ease, our own live-in barometer. “Come here,” I’d call. “Let’s see, oh yeah, says: Clearing by late afternoon. I thank you, messenger boy.” “No trouble,” said he, running off to organize those younger. His curls were noticeable, like ones in the picture of Ned number one I’d found during our honeymoon. No girl or woman could resist wrapping her pinkie finger inside a bouncy little ringlet and asking, “How does he do it?”—like he stayed awake nights. Lolly, my beautician, avoided Ned. Forced to see Ned’s curls, she went glum. “I do excellent work—but sometimes I lose heart. God sure is the hair burner to beat!”