Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  Such flattery never really spoiled our oldest boy but, too, his big eyes did register each compliment. Took after his poppa in that way—and, come to think of it, his momma, too. A great gatherer, our Ned. If there was more than two of something, loose, free of charge, and small enough to pocket, why he’d collect them. His corner of the boys’ upstairs bedroom looked like a magpie’s own ideal museum. And now, during Captain’s pilgrimage, Ned had already snagged stones from each battleground, plus leaves and—whenever possible—bird feathers he found.

  There was something about Ned. For one thing, he seemed as smart as I remembered being. Which was, truth be told, and allowing for mistakes of recollection, pretty crack-outfit bright. On balloon tires as we rattled through Virginia—me holding our newest baby—I sat recalling how one morning when Ned had been nearbout a year old, his eyes were just starting to like the middle distance. His eyes’d finally settled into their true color.

  I was bending over his cradle. It’d been the Captain’s. Castalia and other slaves had hid it with The Lilacs’ choicer furniture when Sherman’s torches swarmed through Falls. I was just tucking blankets around my baby’s feet. I felt something strange, like a sudden lift in temperature or some dip in the wind outside. I, quick, looked up to his face. It was framed by the cradle’s dark hood. Studying me, they were, the eyes. Eyes made up most of his face. Hair was all white-blond and eyes were shiny, bounded by pale lashes. Ned’s eyes shone broad and gray, speckled as birds’ eggs with these flecks of amber set way in, lids hardly blinked. For the first time, eyes really saw me as one person, whole, as me. They fixed right on my skin, bored in, moved from my ear down my neck to breast to breast and back again. A dog barked two blocks off. I felt I should be learning something from this. Ned’s eyes seemed about to ask for help. Thinking he was hungry or that a diaper pin was sticking—I bent closer.

  And I had pulled right down over his rosy face when I felt something catch in me, this kind of hiccup got me just under the rib cage. You see, I’d recognized the eyeballs. I pitched back, then drew nearer, saw how his eyes were less asking for my help than offering some of their own—giving off a kind of baby-animal curiosity, guessing, “And what do you need, sister?”

  I had to lean against his cradle, counting on its rockers for support. Because see, darling, here they were. The same. The eyes—old and young all mixed in them, those eyes I’d first seen peeking (civilian) from the Captain’s fort of a face. Now my boy batted his lashes, showing this 20/20 sweetness. He proved to me: My faith had been rewarded. I’d helped to free them. It was my small part in Emancipation. Just when I thought I would never reach the boy I’d first spied hid so deep in the smug reviewing-stand officer, just when my own tiredness made each dawn feel like a huge new horizontal subtraction mark, I looked down at my child’s blue blankets, I saw he’d torn that whole set of eyesight free from trouble.

  Saved! Here were eyes aloose again and full of peace, a fresh start in the open air. “It worked,” I spoke to his cradle. I stood there, one exhausted girl, half laughing. He watched—a mild careful expression. His hands kept moving in round baby spasms like planning to someday somehow clap. Ned’s eyes seemed smart enough, they trusted so. Our house was real quiet just then. Mantel clock ticking in the front room. Oh, I felt like everything was possible at last. I felt honored to be at home with a gaze this safe and sure. “I did it,” I told his face in his father’s cradle. “I did it.” No shame, I wanted full credit. Ned couldn’t talk yet but he could see. Me. Among others.

  SO, at age eight, here he fidgeted in the car’s back, watching farmland sweep by, plenty old enough to love such a trip. Ned’s rock/leaf/feather collection was under his father’s front seat and it looked more and more like the nest of some scruffy mammal half beaver, half bird. (And I knew he’d catalogued each scrap of it.)

  Riding along his dad’s war path, little Ned stood, leaning on the back of Captain’s driver’s seat, arms crossed, head bobbing level with his seated daddy’s, listening hard, Ned’s yellow-brown curls bright against the first grayed touches in Captain’s temple. Times, gazing forward, they looked like two heads of the same thing.

  We would see a low stone wall, Cap would pull the motorcar over, would sit there parked, hands fisted on the steering wheel, motor still going, his forehead warping. In back, our other babies—all but Ned and Lou, our oldests—kept picking at each other, squabbling like all children on car trips will: “Did so, did not, did too, unh-uh, bet you anything I own, you don’t own one dry bean, do too, do not.”

  Ned, tilted forward, hair full of predicted weather, waiting for whatever news his dad would choose to spill. Lou wet the tip of her pencil, ready to jot into the travel diary I’d bought her. Good calfskin—it locked. I made sure of that. Lou’s broad hands held her precious book, she was a large-framed girl, built like her poppa (but with the fine skin of his momma, plus such a memory for figures).

  Captain would start, “First Gunnery Sergeant John B. Morris, grit aplenty, broke his left leg right here, just there, a fall from a maverick mule.” It didn’t mean much to me, it meant nothing to our babies, meant everything to Cap. I’d nod, looking out, playing interested. So would Ned, then Lou. She’d write down this much, she’d wait for the rest. It rarely came. After twenty minutes’ melancholy, you could all but hear a memory churning towards curd in the poor man. Then he’d open his door, ready to go hand-crank the engine starter again. Then I’d have to tell him he never cut the motor off. He’d go, “Oh … right, silly of me.” Lou would be heard to lock her diary shut. Ned would stand straighter so our Ford’s forward lurch wouldn’t knock him back into the others’ laps. Then we’d get two miles or three. Out the window would poke the left-hand-turn signal of memory, and over we’d pull again.—Oh, but it was a long haul, honey.

  I HOPED that seeing the lake where his childhood bud had got ambushed might help ease Captain past calling out the warnings in his dreams. He still did. I hoped a visit would get him over repeating the whole story aloud his usual every other week or so, to us and strangers. I expected that by facing up to it again, he could let the bugle practice slide.

  He’d lately taken to dragging out into our toolshed around eight or nine at night. Just when I was upstairs getting all the children settled in and was listening to their prayers—right when they again asked God to let Poppa see his way clear to letting our family own just one cocker spaniel dog, please—“We will share it”—the durn horn would start out back. First time he did it was the anniversary of Ned’s dying. If, as a boy, Cap had ever learned to do reveille right, he’d sure forgot it.—At the corner grocery next morning, neighbors give me certain looks and the clerk goes, “I didn’t know our Captain was musical.” “Nobody knows that,” I said, and tried explaining that his music was, you might could say, a war-related wound. The clerk holds up his palms to show I don’t need to apologize, he understands. Not a soul complained except through frowns and stares. One mother from two blocks off cornered me near the bread to ask, “And what time do you try and get your brood to sleep?” Finally I wished somebody would just yell at me—or, better, at him. There’s a certain type of soggy understanding look that your Lucy here finds most galling of all. Between pitying glances and what his bugle did to dogs’ ears—the din of hounds howling over half of Falls—I felt ready for a cure.

  FIRST, I figured I’d been wrong to fear the trip. Bound to help. Between familiar battle zones, while pulling over more often than some from-around-here tractor on a state road—he stayed right patient with the children. They played their usual rumpus seat games: Mules and Graves, busy with questions both silly and sensible and both at once.

  “Daddy,” Louisa touched Poppa’s nearest suspender—he’d taken his jacket off in the heat. “See those hogs penned over there?”

  “I do,” he said. “I ever tell you about the farmer whose shoats were so skinny he had …”

  “Yes. The tails? You have.” I laughed at Lou’s honesty. Good girl.
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  “What about these hogs, Louisa? Those’d bring you three cents a pound in market. No more, wormy-looking beasts.”

  “Poppa, hogs aren’t smart enough to know that they’re alive, right? Does it mean they’re more alive for that or less? Are we smarter because we know what ‘alive’ means or are we maybe less? Are we smart because we’re alive or is smart something extra added on overtop?”

  He whistled. “Excellent question, Louisa. You must take after my side of the family brains-wise. Little joke, Lucille.” Cap drove on at the speed limit (in them days the upper limit was however fast Henry Ford’s skills could push you forward).

  “A hog is no less alive than us. Do you children, when you see a mother sow wade right into the mud and flop down, ever think, I certainly wish I could do that?” Back-seat opinion split between yes and no answers adding “yuck.”

  “Well, we could all wallow in the muck but know not to. Shoot a hog or shoot a man, they’re just as dead. A man … simply wants more, wants to live. He wants his family and friends to.—I guess we’re all about third cousins once removed from hogs, Lou.”

  One twin piped up, “Except Louisa. She’s kissing kin to a Duroc.” (Times, Lou could have weight problems.)

  “For saying that,” their father spoke, “you’ve just lowered yourself far into a sty. Do you hear me? You’ve set Louisa high above the angels, and she and the angels are looking down on you.”

  “Well then, I better take it back,” the one twin goes.

  “No. There’s never taking anything back. Done is done. Try calling back a minié to its starting place.—Ned, you have any questions?”

  Captain, praising Lou, often turned aside—unaware of creating contests—he asked young Ned to better his older sister.

  “Ummm, no. I will, probably, but so far … no.”

  “Well, speak up when you do. Fine thing, questions. Did I answer your last to your satisfaction, Louisa?”

  “Not yet but I’d rather think it out myself, thank you.”

  “Sounds like her mother,” Cap says to nobody present.

  “I thought one up,” Ned’s voice was vague as air but pressing. “If dogs hate cats and chase cats, do dogs eat cats when they catch cats? Everything has enemies—and everything’s against rabbits. But who is our natural enemy?”

  “We are,” Louisa answered. Her father, driving, shaken, turned and looked at her. Ned still sat waiting.

  “What she said.” The Captain stared at the road. “Exactly as your sister put it, son.”

  2

  ON WE RODE, me figuring we’d go right to that infected spot and, being there, move right through it, like lancing a boil. We’d dry out the badness for good. Our whole family would be in on the balm, too. “The Family That Heals Together … Can Deal Together” or “Mends Together … Can Fend Together” or something.

  But, child, the nearer we drew to the hurtful place itself, the more I commenced to worrying I’d been wrong. For one thing, he started telling whole new facts about his friend. Here I thought I was already Ned’s very encyclopedia. I mean, I knew exactly which foods Ned liked (he favored custards and creamed corn, if it matters one whit). I knew every song he had by heart. I still recall his favorite canary’s name. He bypassed his momma’s title of Von Himmel—instead giving his the moniker of Waverley because he’d read Sir Walter Scott and he figured a canary’s song moves like that, kind of waverley-like. But Captain’s memory was now marching double-time. His eyes stayed locked on the bumpy road, his mouth now telling children all this fresh stuff about their “Uncle” Ned, who’d never turned fourteen. Cap tale-told to our youngsters and—along for the ride—I got to eavesdrop. That’s how it felt.

  —How Ned, in a letter home two weeks before he hit the lake, wrote Winona Smythe: “And, Momma, I want to ask you not to worry so much. If I do get killed, I’ll only be dead.”

  —How Ned, in battle for the first time, vowed to act manly and bold as possible, a regular Ivanhoe. He smudged a little mud across his face to make hisself look older and more blended with landscape. He crammed all bugle-colored curls up into his cap. Marching orders were hollered. With his bugle dangling, with his bayonet jabbed forward for show, Ned goes walking alongside others, moving stiff-legged through a batch of scattered Yankee casualties from the day before.

  Ned soon passed a boy fourteen or so, boy lying down. This child was redheaded and resting prone in a very tidy blue uniform, stretched out on his back. He must have known that he was dying (though no mark showed why). He’d crossed his arms over his chest the way his momma’d probably taught him to. Some children in them days were trained to fall asleep that way—“If I should die before I wake.” None too cheering for a young mind with insomnia tendencies.—This boy’d set his blue cap close beside him. Squared away, perfectly dead, he was still pretty and rested on this mat of dried oak leaves, not a foot away from two pink-blooming ladyslippers. Face up, his eyes were open, each yet fresh with luster. You could not believe that he won’t just playing possum. He had been a corpse just under twenty minutes, no more. Ned stopped. Ned noticed how some other Rebel soldier (from his own division) had just robbed this body. Pockets had been slashed, a thief hunting some coins, a watch. Instead what spilled out was homemade sausages and ginger cakes, food probably sent by a Northern mother and sisters. This meant some sacrifice for the women, mailing such treats to the front. The dead Yank might of been saving home-cooked sweets for some choice quiet moment.

  Ned, wearing gray, set his own rifle alongside the body. A file of fellow Southerners stalked on far ahead. Nobody had missed him yet. Not even young Marsden. Ned plunked onto sod beside the Northerner. The whole idea of manly conduct gave way so quick. I sometimes want to ask: Who forced men to feel they had to strut like that? Other men? Men’s idea of women’s idea of men?

  Years later, I took my children to the moving pictures, to see this Nanook of the North picture. All about how hard this one lonely Eskimo had it, hunting blubber, pretty thankless work. My kids set there—big-eyed—all during, not saying a word. While we wandered toward daylight, I asked how they’d liked it. One, Baby, turned to me, her face curled with worry. “A good one,” she nodded. “But, Momma? who makes him live there?”

  It’s that question I want to ask of these here bullyboys. Bluster ain’t assigned. Takes nerve for one to finally holler, “I didn’t pick this. This ain’t me.”

  In ’62, Wee Willie Marsden circled back and found young Ned seated, his mouth full, studying the Northerner. Mouth stuffed, Ned tried explaining, “These’d be wasted, otherwise. I’d have fed him mine. I’d want Momma’s stuff used while it was good.”

  Ned chewed, sat watching the dead soldier’s eyes cloud over, waved off the gnats. Ned had just quit the hero stuff cold turkey. For the rest of his term of duty, he’d be sneaking off to pick raspberries for cheering others, he’d turned up baby rabbits carried in his hat with dry grass all around them—naming them Natchez and Nashville, he’d practice bugle and sing his nightly songs. He learned quick to avoid this Seeming Brave. He hid whenever possible. Nobody could make him live there. In my book, that made the pip a choicer type of hero. He stayed on the ground beside the dead boy, the sound of muskets cracking through the woods beyond, his face all crumbs, sucking fingertips, saying, “Somebody made these. They’re still so fresh. Here, have one. A lady baked these, Willie.”

  WELL, Ned, our Ned, wanted to hear everything. His face aimed over his poppa’s shoulder, nodding at this story, looking awful serious. He started asking better questions about the boy he’d been named for. He needed to know—it’s only natural. I could hear Lou’s pencil scratching now, jotting down all facts. Our Ford bounced along washed-out country roads. We rambled all over creation, hunting good scorched spots, finding one-night bivouacs Captain and his pal had shivered through like puppies in a box. And I kept quiet, Mrs. Perfect Listener, but getting more edgy every mile we chugged. I heard my husband tell so many other full new stories about his true
love, ones with details all in place like the miracle of your baby’s ten speck-sized fingernails. Fuller and richer fine-grained lore pulled out of him. I soon come to feel pure shocked by the number of untold tales. You could see why anybody’d be fond of the sweet dead boy—a sentimental nervy child, game for most anything but shooting people, simple as his momma was pushy, a lad tender as a tadpole nub. From the back seat, I heard Lou sigh. I understood why she admired the boy’s small deeds. Still, he didn’t sound quite real. First I wanted wartime Ned to be a good person and then—while he grew sweeter, story to story—I got grouchy about all that virtue packed into one green pip.

  I asked myself how Ned the First would have turned out if he’d had to live. If only the good die young (what does that say about my present age, sugar?), maybe that’s how come the young stay good? Would Ned be a governor or even President by now? Actor, preacher, probably anything but regular. It was left to us who’d survived—getting through having turned out only Ordinary.

  Oh, but I wanted this autocar to head back home, and now. To move away from tracking that lake, from seeking the very tree where it all happened. Ned had got killed near the start of Captain’s war but Cap held off visiting that death site till the very last of all.

  • • •

  WE NOW circled, looking for it hard. The rest we’d mostly seen. My husband had even acted cordial to the Yankee vets swarming these same boneyards, their accents duck-harsh as the winning side’s would be—wives just as bored, just as busy being neutral as myself.

  By now, on the trail of it, Cap would stop and ask directions of farmers: a gristmill on a oblong body of water, please? We got a lot of head scratching. The pond didn’t have a name my husband could recall. Even the most brittle memory, like his, gets groggy with the weight of forty-some years ham-mocked over it.