Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  “First sane thing you’ve said, husband.”

  “Besides, they’re far too valuable.”

  “Thank you. As their mother, I thank you.”

  “The firearms, Lucille. These museum pieces. Aren’t you pleased? Don’t you understand what we now own?”

  “It’s just guns to me, darling. One is one too many by my lights. And now we have no better way of getting to church than the old Pat and Mike method. So I ain’t exactly bouncing up and down, no. Been busy, got other things on my mind, I guess.”

  “It takes imagination to understand our nation’s history, Lucille, and how these items gracing your own kitchen table figure in that struggle.—Requires imagination.” Arms loaded, he left the room and us.

  I set here looking at Castalia. She shook her head. Her mouth was all pursed with irony but her eyes burned full of redbird fury. I pretended not to notice. I had enough on me without further fearfulness. I dreaded knowing what was coming next. Even in advance, I half understood. Even now, even stuck safe here in a Home where serving ladies with hairnets make three meals a day for me, I pull back from saying that next part. Like, by polevaulting over what’s ahead, I can maybe leave it wholesale right out of my life. Can you, darling listener, handle a few detours?

  But, of course, our bargain: A person’s got to tell. Tell it. Tell it all.

  Just, please, not yet.—Okay?

  Good Help

  A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of one’s birth.—It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.

  —ECCLESIASTES 7:1–3

  EVEN WITH the nine, even mostly managing alone, I never wanted a servant to boss.

  Momma grew up in a household staffed by twenty-four black helpers. Most tended the yard and horses. Her enjoyment of good service got stunted early on. The accident taught her. She passed such fear to me, her only daughter. Even at my present age, I try helping every waitress who tries serving me. “Here, honey, that looks heavy,” I stand, sometimes jostling her tray, sometimes spilling stuff.

  Momma’d just turned five when this here mishap grabbed her. It proved nearbout fatal. She ever after blamed a certain nurse, one Bible-believing older lady named Maimie L. Beech. This woman dozed off whilst minding the white baby. Accident. Child Bianca floated in a coma for three weeks. Neighbors brought casseroles enough to pave a modern-day patio.

  Bianca’s poppa—the “Indigo Baron” of Falls, North Carolina—had three smart older daughters. But he favored his unruly baby. With her now drifting beyond help and love, past the power of money, young Angus McCloud nearly lost his mind.

  ONE poisoned baby girl, my future momma, had been considered the local hellion of all time. Darling, this is truly saying something in Falls: Brat Capital of the Tidewater. Wealthy Summit Avenue spoiled its kids because it really could.

  Soon as Bianca learned to walk, other walking and crawling children hid from her. Some parents did, too. The town’s fire chief all but ordered the McClouds to keep li’l Bianca “observed” after what’d happened in a flammable shed near the lumber mill. She was bad about matches. When Angus donated a fire wagon to Falls’ Volunteers at a brass-band ceremony, his youngest was discouraged from attending. She was off kicking the Collier twins in all four of their shins. Hopping around, these decent older girls asked, “Precious, why us?” Bianca spat back, “Go check the mirror, bug-faces.”

  HELP! Maimie L. Beech got summoned, a last resort. Among certain rich folks who’d spoiled their children seemingly past help, Miss Beech was called the “secret weapon.” Nobody knew this woman’s method, nobody asked. She herself had been a orphaned slave girl doing laundry in a Pastor Beech’s home. His six rowdy children started orbiting around Maimie like bees fretting one brown honey log. She did nothing to woo or humor them. Fact is, Maimie scoffed, pinched. Kids couldn’t get enough of her brimstone disposition. Maimie was the single household slave that didn’t fear these devils. They sensed this and admired her for it. Kids’ wildness soon tamped down some. Preacher noticed. Word spread.

  After Freedom made her a semi-free agent, young Maimie Beech found she had a skill that sure beat ironing all to pieces. Decades gone and monsters later, Maimie was much sought after. J. V. Vining, Sr., had nearly got J. V. Vining, Jr., age eight, thrown into military school or a state reformatory or some weighted sack suitable for river tossing. Maimie turned up, she stiffly tended the boy for two months, he showed first melting signs of being almost human. Now “Vining’s Cotton Mill” bore a extra gilded plaque: “and Son.” Maimie got part credit and a bonus big enough to help her buy the little riverside home.

  Other McCloud servants were soon jealous of a new-here woman given nothing to do but mope around the energetic youngest. Castalia remembered seeing Maimie around town, a spindly steepled lady nearing seventy. Maimie admitted to some Tuscarora blood. This showed in her thick straight hair, the stalky high-boned face, something in her surefooted stride. Beech’s upper lip wrinkled every quarter inch with a ruler’s evenness. She wore a cross-shaped brass locket she touched right often. Her nurse’s cap looked pinned to her—some unopened envelope. She was long-limbed and springy as the daily switches she forced some brats to go cut for their own whippings. Beech jumped at loud sounds. Everywhere, everywhere, she carried her dark Bible big as a child’s tombstone.

  First, Maimie served as Bianca’s jailer. No stranger to shinnying down drainpipes, the child often slipped away. Baby Bianca collected neighbors’ rotting jack-o’-lanterns (she’d slyly waited for a nice frostbite decay to set in). Then the scamp sneaked indoors, pulled over a chair, climbed up, mashed four spongy pumpkins apiece into metal workings of her sisters’ three signed Steinway grands. The older McCloud girls cried but proved saints in not biffing little sis. Angus’ eldest three, in dark high-buttoned clothes, were tidy yet unbeautiful as furled umbrellas. They enjoyed just the kind of impractical tastes that female children of self-made men were then supposed to have. The day of the pumpkin mash, my momma—a pointy quail-boned crinolined little thing—took a lawn mower to the neighbors Persian cat. She did. The cat survived but its feelings never recovered. It developed facial tics and therefore whiskeral tics, too. Every few minutes, its whole fluffy head went off like a alarm clock. Something to see. Legal action was mentioned but Angus McCloud paid nextdoor cat owners fifty-five dollars—held to be a fortune in them days.

  Doubts were soon expressed about Maimie’s secret powers. Had she met her match? Nurse kept muttering from the Bible she carried room to room the way some women honor their purses. Miss Beech stuck right in there. To Bianca, the woman quoted scripture: How if you spare the rod you just are going to spoil your child. Nobody knew what private punishments went on. Momma later hinted about somebody making a certain child kneel in prayer position whilst bare-kneed on a purposefully sandy floor. The squatting Naughty was then made to pray while forced to hold a heavy flatiron level at each shoulder. (Was this Beech’s Christian ritual? I wouldn’t be the least surprised.) Honey—what’s nowadays known as Child Abuse, folks once called Just Good Maintenance.

  The McClouds soon noticed their Bianca did seem tired, then worn calmer by a notch. All around the mansion and back yard, Bianca listened to Beech’s tales of wicked children and harsh angels. The child’s face grew sullen—a bruised, building reverence for her jittery and Pilgrimish Miss Beech.

  2

  BEFORE his favorite’s accident, Mr. McCloud, Glasgow-born, figured you got pretty much what you purchased. Till then, Angus made almost a religion of cash value. Hisself a foundling, he’d become a ship’s cabin boy. In 1839, he sailed into the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. He liked its looks. It appeared familiar—the way unlikely Heaven seems familiar to so many. Unnoticed on deck, a little scrappy redhead spoke under his bre
ath: “It’s on these shorres that Angus herre’ll found … whateverr Angus here can find to found.” Thirty years later, he sure had. McCloud employed over three hundred souls, he owned five freighters for transporting his cotton bales and the patented secret-formula blue dye. This local legend believed in something called the Verrra Best. His brogue burred “Verrra” till it seemed to mean even more.—You did things right, because you did things once. Your every transaction and employee lasted you jolly well forever. A king couldn’t beat the quality of McCloud’s major household items. What ever outranks the verrra best? Made you a potentate on earth—and certainly in Falls. Your four daughters: princesses exempt from everything but Poppa’s treats. Angus’ favorite hymn: “Under His Wing, Everything Prospers.” Of McCloud, locals said, “Whatever the rogue touches …”

  Five years before my mother’s mishap, Angus came inland from coastal indigo growing, home to hear his oldest girls play six-hand pieces in their teacher’s parlor. The elder sisters McCloud were then real young but musically already mighty good. Angus felt it. Though he lacked formal education, Angus—with his pure pitch for quality—knew this in the very gristle of his kilt-worthy calves. Family talent called for “seed money.” The man didn’t even wait on recital applause to peter out, he bounded right toward the telegraph office. Angus, man of action—distant acquaintance of his idol, Mr. Carnegie—wired direct to Steinway and Sons in New York City, New York. By next train, causing great interest at Falls’ little station, here came three matching ebony/ivory concert grands in crates of boat-sized and seaworthy-looking blond wood. A minor Steinway cousin actually rode along to “install” the things. Such are the benefits, child, of buying only the you-know-what. A party at the house was wrote up in the Falls Herald Traveler, photos inclusive. I’ve seen these yellowed newsprint pictures of my square-jaw grandpa and his plain musical girls. The Indigo Baron is shown being taught scales at three different concert grands by three thin gifted daughters. One giggler hides her face behind a raised hand. Another uses sheet music plainly marked “Humoresque,” that camera-shy.

  3

  DETERMINED to succeed here, Famous Maimie Beech soon doled out unexpected treats for good behavior. She’d granted just such privileges at earlier homes, even to her little white boys. For some reason, they loved it, too: Beech let them plait her silver-black hair. In back-yard sun, Nurse unpinned her cap, set it atop her Bible. She pivoted Bianca on a high stool opposite and child fingers were soon maundering all over a dignified woman’s nobbly head. Senior McClouds and three older girls smirked, worried, from their house of windows. Miss Maimie rested down there in daylight, patient, nodding forward like some African-and-Tuscarora elder saying Yes. She spoke lanyard hints as corn rows sprouted off of her. Beech’s hairdo—under Bianca’s loving if stubby touch—come out somewhere betwixt Medusa and a Maypole.

  Nurse and girl soon set to work on one another. Seeing this felt wonderful if creepy. Maimie would brush Bianca’s mud-rich curls around a long expert black finger. Maimie tallied curls aloud like treasure. Bianca would quote rhymes she loved to scramble: “King is in the countinghouse counting out his honey. Queen is in the parlor eating bread and mon-ey.” The brat—tongue pressed between baby teeth—improved Maimie’s hair into a mass of plaits each ending with its own rag bow. Miss Beech’s scalp soon looked to be some dandelion seed puff sprouting kite tails.

  You saw this talkative pair enjoying long strolls across the county (leathery-black six foot one/marshmallow-pale three foot two, hand-in-hand arms swinging). Maimie, nodding toward bees, mud, hogs, explained: “What’d I tell you? ‘Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’ It planned.” After hiking through Meadows’ Pasture and beside the bright river, Bianca rushed home with major news: Jesus could walk on any water He chose and whenever He liked, couldn’t He, Maimie, hunh? Tell them … they don’t know anything.—Maimie, pure authority, nodded. Onct. Though the McClouds had surely heard about His Knack for the Buoyant—why did it seem like Maimie’d just made it up? And if she had, who here would contradict her?

  When Bianca made a clover bracelet for Nanny, Beech wore the thing till you found its last brown twigs sprinkling the mansion’s Oriental rugs. Nurse and child settled in back-yard clover, shooing away bugs, weaving jewelry for each other. The Indigo Baron wandered out, smiled down. “Ye take bees, for instance,” he began. Beech, somber, nodded. Angus asked if his favorite ladies knew: Bees weren’t even native to North America but, like him, came over on a boat. Like him, they soon slipped free, diversifying, which meant “branching out.” Even by 1750, bees still hadn’t buzzed beyond the river Susquehanna. But Indians soon called them “white man’s flies.” Indians learnt that such bugs moved a hundred miles in advance of the troublemaking westbound settlers. Fact.

  Maimie sat here, appearing knowing, nodding but amazed. She took this bug news right downhill to friends. Bees? they asked—brung across the water in rope hives, captive as slaves? Whites had shipped in America’s every bee and black and bird, too? Hogwash. Nobody believed Maimie. Which only made the Mansion McCloud mean more to her.

  On Bianca’s bad days, Beech hand-fed the girl. You’d walk in, you’d hear this seemingly joyless old woman stifle certain nasal buzzing sounds, a spoon had just been flying around one crimped pretty mouth. Maimie hushed saying, “Miss Flower? Open Up. It Me. Here Come You Main Admirer, Marse Bumber Bee …” Feeling your presence, child and nurse would practically leap. Bianca gulped down that spoonful so quick, she chewed hard, nervous as if caught at spy activity or kissing.

  After three smoke-free weeks, Beech invented a extra treat for polite little girls: they got to go downtown with Maimie’s five best women friends: Saturday lotion-and-notion shopping at the Woolworth’s store, hooray! Maimie called her favorites the Sisters. They were Beech’s age or younger but their shapes bosomed where hers slatted. These ladies were as hardworking, faintly medicinal, as fully respectable and semi-religious as their boned corsets. They moved in a talcumed pigeon-breasted rack, all talking at once side by side under similar wonderful hats. You saw their dark cluster window-shopping led by one bossy pointy white star of a child. Bianca, meeting whites she knew (most everybody), loved introducing all of Maimie’s friends by name and very slow. Just more of her mischief. Castalia knew Beech and friends. Cas had no time for them: Freed from slaveness, they signed on for a white Jesus, gossiped about white bosses, lived for Christmas bonuses, married the men they lived with, named their daughters Letitia or Mary Grace. Cassie’s own pals made everything up—from their home-rolled redbird religion to their children’s names.

  Bianca, well served, now got to hold Miss Beech’s hand throughout dinner. Nurse supervised each spoonful, she napkined Baby’s mouth clean. Even when the Governor came for Christmas, Maimie was allowed to sit right at table. Otherwise, my momma flat shrieked.

  Elder McClouds did feel twinges of jealousy, they admitted these but only in jokes. You almost missed Bianca at her most overwound. Still, there were reassuring flare-ups. Especially if Cook, against strict Angus orders, left out tempting kitchen matches. But four months of Maimie: and Bianca started seeming like somebody nicer, if maybe somebody else, somebody less. Four months’ Jesus tales offered like bribes of promised powers, four months’ stern hypnotizing care and feeding (“Open up, it’s me”). Sure looked like Nanny’d half tamed Summit Avenue’s champion Rounder.

  4

  TO HIS paneled upstairs study, Angus summoned this miracle worker. He sat toying with a inkwell made from twelve deer hooves all on point. Behind his massive desk, in glassy golden frames, a fine collection of arrowheads—arranged on honey-colored velvet, by size, like money.

  “Come in.” He admired Beech’s strange heron-long limbs, the silver hair kept seriously knotted behind her like some hostage that—if not watched—might try some funny business. Angus McCloud looked straight into her black Bible of a face.

  He asked Beech to sit, please. She would not. She seemed to expect reprimand. I
nstead Angus smiled. The fellow dispensed charm like twenty percent interest accumulated daily. He handed Beech a blue business envelope. “Your bonus for managing … her. But tell me, miss. Off the record like, how do ye do it?” It was his favorite question. He put it to many men and a few women. Asking this, Angus always seemed to beg for some sexual-type favor, his eyes twinkled that much, you felt his palms were sweating and God knows what else. The world was a secret formula like his personally improved richly rewarding powder for home indigo dyeing. When it came to necessary celestial blue, he’d cornered the international market.—The man usually got a answer.

  Maimie L. Beech met his gaze with a stare that was a dye: a stare too darkly like Angus’ own to be transparent till it dried later. Looking into these jet eyes—Angus saw one word waiting in each slot: “Patent” “Pending.” He nodded, touched the inkwell’s doe cuticles, for luck. He felt the washing joy of it—Beech too was his, the verrra best.

  This woman’s lot in life might prove real dicey, but—given that—she knew her value absolutely. McCloud leaned forward, reviewing the amount he’d stuffed in her envelope—enough? “How?” He was still waiting.

  She studied her dry hands. “You maybe after Maimie’s secret, sir?—Don’t half know it my own self. Maybe that the secret. Got something to do with remembering what worked last time.—Sir, could be it come from Maimie’s having … you know—Talent?”

  He laughed hard enough to slap his upper leg, causing the deer-hoof thingie to skitter over desktop, spilling not a drop of ink. This let Miss Beech risk one pleased snort, gnaw slightly on her lower lip.

  “We’rre going to get along just fine here. Sense of self-warth. Nothing like it, Beech. Hold on to that, ye hear me?”