Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  “‘I’m Bianca,’ I said.

  “‘Hot dog,’ dear dear Samuel replied. That is how my happiness began. I refrained from informing him about my being a McCloud as well, as in the Angus McClouds. (He’d never heard of us, or Poppa’s fortune in indigo. Which shows you how intensely rural Bear Grass then was.) My reckless bachelor cousin had sacrificed his disappointed life so I might find my own.”

  Four days, Momma’d been considered killed or lost. People searched the train tracks for three miles, seeking jet buttons from her dress, her satin reticule maybe tossed into a ditch. Nothing was found. The locomotive wheels were scoured by police told the color of her hair. Grim business. The strain shortened her loving parents’ lives. Samuel Honicutt had discovered her groaning in a ditch. He’d seen the crowd around a derailed train nearby. He carried her home to his folks’ cabin one mile off in piney woods.

  Now, feeling stronger, she had herself buggied into Falls so’s she could plan a wedding. Folks downtown at first considered Bianca McCloud a ghost. Her girlfriends thought she’d made up this romantic meeting as some byproduct of concussion. Humoring her, they agreed to be bridesmaids. It pleased some girls how Bianca’s wedding freed up her three serious suitors—plenty now for everybody. Local society soon heard about the noble rescuer, and they acted right excited to meet my poor poppa.

  Now, darling, in most families there’s this split. One bunch is rich and graceful and not a little proud—their genes a tea party of p’s and q’s. The other clan is, well, a hornet’s nest of public teeth pickers, dud grammar, weak kidneys. But I got to say in all honesty, rarely was the split as wide as happened in our odd home.

  Having chose a man from the suburbs of Bear Grass, Momma must’ve found his rough-cut history someway charming. At first she did. But the woman lacked the strength of character over time’s long haul. Her people claimed one college vice president and many piano teachers. Is anybody more high-toned and refined-feeling than a small town’s three very best piano teachers?

  Whereas my poppa’s great-granddad had been shot for being A.W.O.L. from the Revolutionary War. Family glory had been downhill from there. The Honicutts’ role in our national life had been deserting it right regular. Pop swore the shot soldier was only home for a day, just to lay in firewood for his pregnant wife, their kids. Momma said nothing for or against. Pop’s motleyest relation (low even for Bear Grass) perished of tapeworms. Fact. The wormy case got more interesting as the patient grew more peaked, and before the fellow knew it, his riders held the majority. Outvoted by his major stockholders, Pop’s poor cousin was kicked downstairs.

  When Pop, as was his habit, tried making light of his unpretty history, Momma ofttimes said, “You, we love. But as for those others, we remain unamused.”

  INDULGING reasons all his own, Pop’s first service at All Saints Episcopal, he chose to make lower-body-gas noises (with his mouth) then flee the sanctuary.

  After that, Pop was never exactly welcomed into Momma’s former set. Time hung what you might call heavy on his hands. When my little girlfriends came near our house, he’d pepper them with well-meant but dumb pranks. He’d cook up instant nicknames for each. The man would lumber at them on his knees—child-high across our marble foyer—one raw hand foremost, him saying, “Shake, Wee Jake.” Emily, she ran.

  Nobody knew what to make of this grown fellow living in the porch swing all day, and working full-time at only being company for Momma. He begged my friends for tastes of their milk or cookie, he barged right into my door without so much as a knock. Odd that only Shirley, bashful as she was, knew how to talk right back to Pop. She called him “Mr. Card.” Once—when he rushed her, his hand out, running on his knees—she shoved him so hard he fell sideways and laid there, laying, saying, “Again, again.”

  I stood apart, watching them together. Seemed I could be the mother or sister of them both. I crossed my arms. Felt like pleasure has swung open my whole chest, a mirrored medicine cabinet stuffed with patent cures.

  If Shirl visited, Pop got all bossy, joshing. He loved to peeve Momma by misquoting scripture. In marrying him, she’d done her post-accident life’s one wild unexpected thing. But with that in place, she become a slave to the letter of the law in all else. She longed to be invited to the homes of her old girlfriends, now married to her three ex-suitors. Yes, old pals spoke to her on the street and at neighborhood do’s, but Poppa (home on the porch) stayed her social albatross. That I favored him seemed likely to drive my poor mother crazy. She never regretted choosing him, but his side effects sure made her sad around the house. All her ambitions turned on me now—I would send the precious family genes diving back into the social swim. Good luck.

  Pop was no churchgoer, claimed that his own funeral would be attendance enough. But he soon whipped out a pet Psalm for Shirley. He used it on her every night she slept in my room. “Why, look who we done trapped under our quilts,” he’d come in, teasing. “Shirley Goodness and Mercy, will you follow me all the days of my life? Please?”

  She pulled sheets overhead—a modest thing to do but (from in there) chuckling proved she considered herself Miss Surely Worth the Attention.

  When Pop finally left us alone, we played our secret game called “I Am Chicken Little.” For our own child reasons, with fingernails and hair pulling—with a wicked little hatpin I dearly dreaded—we’d hurt each other, sometimes a lot. Once when I caught a fever and Momma was undressing me, she reeled back from the sight of marks and nicks. “What got you, child?” Maybe Momma was recalling bugs. (Shirl always left worse marks on me than I seemed to manage. I felt sorry for her, stopping short. Shirl’s mother kept Shirley’s fingernails glazed in colorless lacquer, filed pointed, terrible.) Whoever gave in first had to squeal after long torture, “I am Chicken Little.” I never knew why we did this to each other. We played it once every ten days or so, for years.

  POPPA might’ve been cut dead by the fast crowd on Summit but he had another following. A certain kind of happy-go-lucky local bachelor and politico, pool sharps, black sheep from your best families—they stopped around each November, especially. Till this flush of company, Pop seemed pleased enough to sit alone on our porch swing, pretending not to know how unpopular he was.

  But busy Novembers, people climbed onto our porch, come to ask Sam Honicutt’s election views. Like me, the man was a magnet for others’ gossip. The postmaster was a close buddy. Expecting company, Pop shaved for once, wore a boiled Sunday shirt. I helped him with his collar studs and cuff links. Even Captain Marsden stopped by, young then (for him), mid-forties. Rich and busy as Cap was, he arrived on our porch steps, hat in hand, nodding all around, a practiced quiet charm. I claimed the swing, hobbling, proud, silent for a change. Even the Captain (gloomy usually behind his warrior’s face) gave Poppa’s jokes wide grudging smiles.

  Visitors asked for certain of his well-known stories. Especially the one where Jefferson Davis, hoping to avoid Yankee capture, dresses up in women’s clothes. Soon enough somebody’d say, “Well, Sam? What news of the Republican candidates this go-round?”

  Daddy, democratic, started. “Listen, I ain’t hinting that their one up for mayor might dip his hand into our fair city’s kitty, but you’ve seen the size of the man’s wife, ain’t you, boys?” Pop paused to scratch his scalp. It looked like he was choosing what-all he’d speak next but, weeks before the election, I’d watched him pace our back yard, planning, lips going. “Yeah, that poor Republican’s got to keep his wife in pastries someway—why, I ain’t claiming that his wife is fat, but I hear tell …” Pop looked around, lowered his voice, milking his crowd of respect. “That she’s so plump, she has to put a bookmark in her neck just to find her pearls at night.—Fact!”

  Men yahooed. It was what they’d come for. They slapped porch uprights. “God’s native truth,” Pop kept straight-faced but barely. “Ask Lucy here. Ask my little Second Hand if it ain’t Gospel.” My job was to nod. I did so. So hard the porch swing squeaked its chains. But, just i
nside our screen door, I noted Momma’s stiff shape, arms folded, one foot tapping. Momma was already planning my coming-out party. She didn’t like to find her one child out here serving as a Little Xerxes minstrel-show straight man.

  Only Momma counted Poppa’s Aint’s, and mine. When others swore that her Samuel could charm the birds out of the trees, couldn’t he? she’d draw herself up and, defended, claim she would know—having neither feather nor leaf anywheres on her.

  Still, I figured she’d picked him, hadn’t she? With her indigo inheritance, with her good blank check of a face, Ma might’ve chose most any pretty rich boy in eastern North Carolina. Now, as then, there are thousands, God be praised. Instead, she’d proposed to a skinny county wag—one who’d saved her life, she claimed—a man Bianca McCloud Honicutt felt she could totally boss and totally enjoy.

  IN OUR shady front room, along cool halls as wide as ones in good hotels, my folks and me kept busy living like we talked: Momma pretty much perfect if unnoticed, Poppa wrong but witty, me mostly plain mistakes. Momma worked at playing—bridge and semi-classical piano. Poppa played at working. He whittled and was visited. He often sat picking at the calluses his farm boyhood had cobbled him with. His palms were ridged and horny as toenails, worn amber brown. Marriage had sprung him from manual labor but the man never tired of studying his paws—wide and naturally quilted as any catcher’s mitt. Never dawned on him (or me) that I might someday have hands worn raw as his.

  Sometimes Pop chewed his palms’ tougher spots. Ofttimes, staring into hands the hue of beef jerky, he retold:

  “No way you can imagine it, Lucy of the silver spoon. Before your momma landed at my feet, literal, like manna from the heavens, I was poorer than poor. Be out chopping firewood at four in the morning, blisters bulging off my blisters, hands’d get to dripping like tears were weeping out before the blood came. Four older brothers with no more curiosity than logs. Mornings, Momma’d ask them, ‘How you boys sleep?’ One’d say, ‘Log.’ Others’d nod. Logs, redheaded logs, forever beating on me. Nobody in the family knew a A from a Z. I’d sneak off into the woods with books hid down my britches. At least Honest Abe read by hearth light. I had to snitch matches, build campfires for to be my lantern. Oncet I burned up two acres of pinewoods by accident, for the light. Your momma makes fun of the troubles I went to, just to read my Westerns. But, Runt Funny, I’ll tell you, compared to where I started, I’m already about up with Mr. Shakespeare. People in Falls wonder what I do all day on this here porch. Oh, I keep occupied, got plenty to think on. You know my trouble?—and don’t laugh. But, see, I got me a Harvard College mind in this Burgaw County body—and the split between them is so blamed wide, all it’ll let me do is set right here and mull about it.”

  The man wrote weekly letters home to his folks that couldn’t read. Whenever we visited to the outskirts of Bear Grass (another story), my grandfolks had pinned up every envelope—unopened, neat on one log wall. Like Poppa, they loved to get mail and they displayed it for the beauty of the stamps’ pastel colors. Still, Poppa admitted that even this busy with whittling sassafras (some smell!), even with porch swinging, cowboy novels, cheering his visitors, some days around 3 p.m. he did feel a tad bored.

  His train-wreck angel had saved him from working. “But, Runt Funny, should she of?”

  3

  ONE IDLE morning, Pop decided to become local assistant postmaster. (He’d dreamed he was that.) Might get him off the porch a while, put him more on the cutting edge of local gossip. Hearing her husband speak his first ambition in eight years, Momma practically percolated. With only her mouth appearing overjoyed, she dressed quick in her finest black outfit and, looking feetless as a gyroscope, the lady glided chin-up to City Hall. Her former suitors were now mayor, alderman chairman, and city manager. She’d never asked them a favor. They sure owed her for her having married another.

  Pop waited, swinging, soaking his rough hands in corn-husker’s lotion. He waited at home for sixteen more months. He speculated on changes he’d make (extra daily mail deliveries to each home—postmen hired to read important mail to the unlettered). Pop praised the beauty of fine stamps. Why, he told me, there are stamps as pretty as … as Shirley, pretty as anything we’ve ever seen and from whole countries we’ve never even heard about. Momma had a uniform made for him, just in case, just to keep his spirits up. Poppa was helping Shirl and me engineer the addition to our tree house. He told me more low-down salesman jokes—warning me not to pass these on to Momma. He bathed too seldom for Momma’s taste, he asked after Shirl’s health like it was my wife he spoke of. He avoided church, waited for work, he was liked even by some of those folks that could never invite him socially into their homes, liked even by men who envied Samuel his wife’s small fortune.—Finally the offer arrived. “Influence,” Mother did a little dance, unlike herself.

  Poppa was to report for duty the next day at 8 a.m. sharp, downtown P.O., bring own lunch. Momma threw a select party the night before. I invited Shirl. Place cards were shaped like parchment envelopes. On them I painted little stamps from nations as beautiful as possible, unknown to me until I made each up.

  Pop left home early, waving back to us, uniformed—like a warrior finally headed, bold, towards enemy ammo. Momma cried, “What a perfect darling he is, a child really. I think the way we met is perhaps the most romantic thing I’ve ever even heard about.”

  Around 2 p.m. I noticed a fellow, dead ringer for Daddy, right back in our porch swing. He slumped, wolfing the show-off lunch Momma had packed for him. He sat shaking his head No, muttering. Seeing me, the man grinned but acted ashamed. He tossed his official cap my way. I wore it, bill backwards. Momma bustled out looking for some sheet music she’d been studying, she spied him, froze, patted towards a wicker chaise.

  “Samuel?” She settled, elevating her feet. “Does this mean the end of your postal career?”

  Pop explained with so sweet a shrug. Said he felt more disappointed than her, really. Claimed he had hoped the P.O. would prove local gossip’s very temple. Not so. Can you believe the present postmaster, decent fellow but ignorant, didn’t even understand how Rev. Vickers’ daughter hadn’t spent six months visiting some aunt in Newport News but not yet fifteen was in the family way and put there by the church janitor! “How does a man who can’t count to nine on his fingers hope to call hisself official? How? Besides,” Poppa said each word slow: “I hate alphabetical order.”

  Only Momma, his best audience and single sponsor, would utter what she now said: “Why?”

  “I told them and I’ll tell you, pearl of my life. Ain’t no way M should come before N. N is like a practice for M. Only after one good try does N get to skin the cat and loop the loop and double itself into good old M. I mentioned this down there, M before N?—something’s wrong. And you know, not one soul in the sorting room had even thought about it? I ain’t saying they lack real vision, but those boys looked at me like I was foaming at the mouth. You can see it was on principle I quit. Had to. Point of honor. Talk about pigeonholes—that’s all they do down there all day. Who needs it?”

  Upon the wicker chaise clicking like a cricket tally of her troubles, Momma kept both eyes closed, lids sealed. I settled beside Poppa, cocked his cap over my right eye, checking to see did he approve. He pulled me against him, lifted my braid’s brush end, spoke into it. “Does my Minute Waltz mind having her old Pop underfoot some more?” I hugged my answer. (His pet names for me: Pocket Watch, the Second Hand, Runt Funny.)

  Momma’s eyes stayed closed as traffic clattered along Summit. Canaries at the Widow Smythe’s hopped from nervous perch to perch. It was Thursday and dashing Captain Marsden was at Winona’s, indoors, visiting. Upset with Pop’s unemployment, no inch of my Mother moved.

  “What’s wrong?” Pop sounded mad. “Don’t forget, Queen England, was you married me.”

  “That much is clear,” and when her right eye opened, Pop fell off our swing, left me bobbing alone. He knee-walked to her fainting chaise,
he offered (up nastily close) his best horrible face—two fingertips yanking down eyeskin, two others mashing the nose tip up so you saw not nostrils but mossy caves.

  She touched his face the way a blind woman would, “My excellent successful fool. But, Samuel, my darling, you need a career. Men do.”

  He mumbled to her neck, explained he would be playing more post office at home now. “Besides, you’re my career, Peachness. You two are my daily duties. You ladies are all I’m really good at. But with you two I feel—don’t laugh—like I’m … a Harvard professional!”

  Stooping there, he hugged Momma’s girdled center, grazed at her lace jabot, his rude witty tongue lifted her gold brooch. “You,” she sniffed. April sun kept fighting to come out. Along Summit, a wagon knobby with seed sacks, slowed. Faces gaped up our lawn, thinking that bigwigs must live here. Ha!

  Pop whispered to her waistline, “Special Delivery, upstairs.” For once, Momma was enjoying being floppy. He helped her to stand, he told me, “This is how I found her in the weeds thrown twenty-some feet from train tracks, her bodice tore open, her hair come undone and tumbling all around her. A angel fallen from God’s sky, my COD gift from Heaven’s Postmaster General.” He led her to my swing. I whipped off the hat. I took the fingers of the milk-white hand she offered me. I kissed my mother’s spongy knuckles. Then kissed his: toffee-colored leather. “You’ll go far,” Pop told me. “A retired postman says so.”