Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  He motioned toward the bed. I heard the nickel fight approach getting physical. I’d need to go downstairs and referee. “Come, please.” He beckoned and was smiling and I saw that it’d only take three minutes, tops. He just sat there, seeming so sure, so ready, and looking at me with this appetite I knew had love in it. For me. I felt a kind of weakening under my apron and at the knees’ very hinges. He was so much bigger than yours truly. I’d best keep my wits about me just to survive here. “Fun,” he smiled, “ever heard of it, Lucille?”

  Then I figured: What the heck? You know me. I can resist anything but a dare. “Why not,” I flirted, “for ‘a mature man,’ you ain’t totally un-cute.” I hate myself. He reared back on our shared bed. I heard his boot strike the muzzle of a rifle under there, he kicked it gingerly aside. He eyed me like a hypnotist and, slow, commenced unfastening his pants. I told myself I’d have to go through with this now. Somewhere, in so much of it, things often shifted toward a somber ugly feel, brown, some service I provided. Me wondering where I came in, though he sometimes acted so sweet and patient, dwelling on every sigh I made and coaxing forth more.

  “Hel-lo,” he said, mouth gone grave in its white pretty beard. I stood between the legs of him sitting here. We kissed. He’d learned how from Castalia and he was real good at it and that in itself made married life some better. I touched his white shirt and his hands were all up suddenly under me and welcoming theirselves to what was always mine and sometimes his.

  I pressed his shoulders, then remembered and jerked back, I saw I’d bled onto his shirt. “Oh, look,” I said.

  He sleep-talked, “Whaa …”

  “I’ve gone and spotted your shirt. If it ain’t the roosters’ blood, it’s mine because of them. I’ll never get this clean.”

  He pinched me then—not mean but, being betwixt a person’s legs, surely attention-getting. He craned up to be level with my face—which he nearly was, even sitting. His bass voice whispered, “Who gives a flying fuck about one white cotton shirt?”

  I leaned back into his goodly grip and looked at him. I wanted to say, “I do. Since it’s what you put me in charge of. I don’t love doing it but since I do, I want to do it okay, okay? So, yeah, I care about the shirt.” But he was right. He could afford another shirt. Why’d I bother even bleaching them? But how might I admit all this, honey? Then I’d seem really powerless. Instead, I chanced sounding wifey and conventional and chill. I hated how few choices I had. “I’d best go soak it in cold water. Blood takes that. I’ll

  “You haven’t answered me, about the importance of one shirt,” he said. “For years you haven’t answered me. Someday I’ll get your attention to the point where you’ll answer.”

  “That a threat?” I asked, and his hands at onct abandoned my lower parts and I wanted to mourn their leaving me, yeah “mourn.” Right then, for reasons of my own (a puzzlement so often) I really wanted him so much. Wanted somebody.

  “Ned owes me thirty-five cents and now …” Louisa was right here beside the bed before she noticed what was what.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Yes, fine,” her pop got very still. But he spoke under his breath to me, “You people,” he said it with tears in one of his gray eyes only. “Nickels and shirts and shirts and nickels. And you wonder why I’d rather sit around anyplace else remembering real things.”

  I didn’t answer him. I caught his drift. I should not have abandoned him there on our bed. I think now: A better person than myself would’ve touched his beard or hair, touched anything but the traces of red on his second-nicest business shirt. Instead, I put my arm around Louisa, who was upset at interrupting what she didn’t understand but surely felt. “Now what’s all this about your famous bank account?”

  And he was left there on the bed. Alone. He had his side to everything. I see that.

  And later that afternoon, when he’d locomotived back to work, I came in looking for my scissors and found a handkerchief on my pillow, a hankie closed around a gram of his own ivory seed. He’d left that for me, a love song, a ransom letter, a poison-pen love note shot right my way. I decided not to wash then bleach that hankie. I just tossed it out. But it’d been a perfectly good Irish linen handkerchief and, in tossing it—why?—I felt a little guilty. A waste. I sometimes think I felt more guilt and love toward the laundry than I did some days for him.

  It’s a thing I live with, sugar, year in, year out forever. I blame pride.

  But then, that in itself is cowardly, that in itself is pride.

  A Minstrel Show for God

  Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity.

  —ECCLESIASTES 12:8

  JUST WHEN I’d chose which cardigan to consider packing (my worn maroon but with the deepest pockets, naturally), something nice happened. I’d hoped for a gypsy or a job. Wouldn’t you just know, right when woe is getting your life organized in straight deep ruts, you get a canal slashed right through your jungly Panama and, zip, you can now look from sea to shiny sea.

  A Baptist committee came to call with exceptionally fine news. Seems this lady at church had got cancer (that won’t the news) but she’d had to quit teaching Sunday school after thirty-one years and I was being asked to take over her class. Would I, please?—Imagine … teach!

  The committee said it’d been a oversight, my not being pressed earlier. One deacon went, “We figure: You want something done superbly, Lucille, ask a busy person.” Flattery. I’ve stayed a sucker for it. My failing.

  As the world goes, such a job might sound right minor to a person with some choices, like you. But living like I had, being who I was, I took it serious. It was what they were giving away that year … I wanted some.

  My brightness’d mostly been used in learning how you cut eleven pieces from one pie, in telling kids how many colors our single sky gets to be. My husband was somebody long since “discovered” by a vet-respecting world. What did I usually receive for trying hard? A chance to go unnoticed yet another week. So Sunday-school teaching made me stand up straight. “Here goes. I’ll sure give it a whirl, with God’s help.” I added that aloud to cheer my visitors concerning my credentials. I meant it.

  No sooner had the committee in dark clothes set down my best teacups and cleared out, I rushed to look up next Sunday’s lesson. I fetched the massy marbleized volume inherited from my grandad Angus McCloud, and still pressed full of four-leaf clovers that him and his youngest daughter had collected amongst backyard bees in happier days. It was a Scottish edition, “The Testaments Old and New in King James’ Peerless Translation, With The Apocrypha in an Annotated Version Intended For All The Daily, Scholarly and Devotional Uses of The Modern Family.” Well, child, today that seemed exactly me and us! Lou’d been hanging around the kitchen, waiting for the crowd to leave. “Who died?” She drifted into my sewing room, where I now sat, scholarly and devoted, reading the pre-assigned text. I told her of my honor, asked would she please keep the wee ones quiet for a while. Lou did, of course, after closing my door quietly behind. Lou most always did what we asked her to. That was her tragedy.

  Next week’s text was where: Judith cuts off the head of her people’s worst warrior-enemy, a man she might’ve come to love. That, plus her getting him drunk and cutting his block off, was their tragedy. Okay, good—something juicy to start with. A story with stuff really happening in it, my favorite type. I’d practically memorized the scripture when I hear a scratchy sound—was Ruth, my sad neighbor, not the Bible character. Ruth, having seen the group in black leave, is now tapping at her window screen and, mouth moving, sounding out, “Hi. Who’s died?” I waved her away with a smile, pulled all shades on that side of our house.

  Holding the Good Book, I paced my narrow mending room, door locked. The children lived on tiptoe suddenly, the hush enforced by our long-suffering Louisa. In print, Judith’s story was so lively and severe—full of gore and a love life, the heroine with ideal looks and patriotic reasons. I soon thought of her as “Judy�
�� almost. But I well knew how in Sunday school it’d come out dull as Thursday’s leftover rutabaga. I was stalking back and forth with growing stage fright. I asked myself: What is ever more boring than a boring church-school lesson? I had to find some way to make this mine, a Lucy-type lesson, something real as life, something New. A story! I’d suffered through so many Sundays.

  Shirl and me had sat in First Baptist’s big back room, it was sectioned off by curtains on wired rings indicating your age group. You could hear the class you’d soon grow into, droning on, just as uninviting, behind a cotton drape. Our teacher’s voice was so nasal it twanged like a Jew’s harp, sounded like her nickel-plated spectacles spoke each slow word. “This here is just so deep,” she always said, lifting the book within inches of her eyes. “A uneducated woman’s got no right to even touch the hem of this in here. Still, somebody’s got to, so we’ll try, but, boys and girls, I’m not up to it, it’s just so deep … It’s the Bible.” “No lie,” says I under my breath, drawing snickers from Shirl and others. Our only joy was counting Mrs. Snipes’s pet word on our fingers: “deep.” We compared after class. Her one-day record was thirty-one. Fact. I hated Sunday school. And now, my first time in the spotlight, I risked turning into just such a spiritual dud. I told myself I’d never apologize for lack of education. Artists never apologize. “Consider the lilies of the field, they neither sow nor reap nor have a fancy B.A. degree but which of them won’t knock your eyes out with beauty?”

  The one chair in here rested before my foot-treadle Singer. I settled, book in hand. I’d just finished making a bottle-green jumper for Lou’s first tea party (at the very mayor’s house where I’d disgraced myself only seventeen years before, dredging in my knickers). I’d just been tearing up one of the Captain’s rooster-bloodied shirts for rags—it was stained so serious, made Forty Mule Team Borax cringe. (I had not given up on purging bloodstains, a matter of pride really.) Sitting here, I drummed fingers on the tabletop, started fooling with leftover scraps from Lou’s frock, then with Cap’s ruined shirt. My class would be the nine-to eleven-year-olds, plenty old enough to notice. Lou and Ned would both be my own pupils. I didn’t want to embarrass them.

  Picturing Judith, I held up one scrap of dark green velveteen. I saw my Judy as a redhead, though carrottops were probably right rare in Bible days. Who cares? I imagined her a patriotic child, half Irish. Ain’t sure why. The green maybe.

  Next, I bunched a sleeping tyrant from a swatch of onct-white Egypt cotton. This I placed on a horizontal bias to become the fighter, snoozing at night. Then it seemed only natural to let the green hop right onto this speckled white, a battle pitched. Him Punch, Her Judy. I sat (glad to be hid from nosy neighbor and questioning kids), my worn hands pushing remnants here and there, making them stand, then lying each down.

  I’d been telling my brood, about their Halloween costumes, you can’t get any fancier than what you have on hand. So I now surveyed my sewing table. You got your hatpins, thimbles, a pincushion shaped like a tomato with a pet of a red pepper leashed to it (for needles). During a camping trip with his pal Billy, Ned had gathered me some hickory nuts, now resting in a little yellow bowl here. To make decent Pirate of Penzance mustaches for my trick-or-treat girls, I’d bought a pack of pipe cleaners and held these over my stove to get each good and black. Had half the box left here.

  This is how Sunday-school history was made: I reached for a hickory nut and, using my biggest darning needle, bored a goodly hole into one end. I wedged a pipe cleaner’s wire into this hollow. Then, for feet, I found two silver thimbles, I hooked a V-bent pipe cleaner to each. Then I Xed arms over the neck stem, keeping the nut up. You getting this? Before me stood a simple little human shape, six inches high and recognizable as just one of us.

  From the same supplies, I made a Man one. I shoved him beside my first. I’d chose to think that the Lady was my first and that he come after. I’d made Man from her ribbing starter culture. I could. I could do anything I liked. I was the boss in here today, the shades drawn, door locked. I soon felt powerful as Eden’s single landlord and subcontractor. Like Adam, I got to name stuff, a caretaker’s tender joy.

  Outside in the hall leading to our kitchen, I heard Lou shaming quiet the nose-picking and sometimes lackluster twins, I heard Baby telegraphic in her tap shoes on a rug today to hush them, plus Ned and Billy suddenly whispering pig Latin. I loved my kids for sparing me part of a half hour. Sometimes twenty minutes clear of your own kids’ eyes can save your life.

  I’d soon made more decisions in a shorter time span than had maybe ever happened previous, child. For me, I mean. I ain’t making claims that I turnt up a cure for cancer, mind you. But it was honest fun—which is something anyways. I hadn’t hurt anybody.

  Half tranced, I turned to my trusty Singer and, feet at pump, started dressing my new doll thingums. A few simple tubes—wide one for Judy’s skirt, two skinnies for sleeves. (Put gold rickrack to edge all and to provide a certain Bible-day Oriental gypsified dash.) In a minute I ran up Holofernes’ nightshirt—white cotton flecked with blood which played right into our story’s hands. I worked in a blur, like I’d redreamed all this for years, like it had taught me how to play each angle. I recalled being a kid, inventing in a tree house. How if you made one thing be so, others followed. I felt—how to say this?—a dampening in my hurry—a quickening lower-body thrill.

  It was a smear of time those minutes I come up with Puppetry Gospel. Like Ned sliding towards home plate during side-yard baseball—I felt myself flopping towards some goal my body knew better than my poor young hickory-nut head did. I felt certain. That’s it. Part of me understood how my husband’s inborn certainty had long been one of his big continuing advantages over me. How, if you seem certain, you are. And if you don’t, people sniff it and that is that, for good.

  But the person could change things, couldn’t she? Yeah, she could. Certainly. Even Ruth sensed something with her X-ray eyes through my lined drapes. Poor Ruth knew I was on to something good, so she cranked up a tacky tango, loud. Nothing bothered me.

  I jammed a darning-needle sword in Judy’s right hand. And there she stood over her sleeper. I’d emptied one of Cap’s cigar boxes of scissors and such, I covered it with red tinfoil off a handy pot of immortal if uninspired Christmas poinsettias in the windowsill. With the stage all set, I reread the tale three times, then moved my dolls, puppets, whatever, through sensible paces. They soon did like folks would do.

  The second they each had yarn hair, my cast became real to me. Their logic easy to figure as anybody local’s—even with Ruth blasting a dance that’d be shaming in your nicer Argentine circles, Holofernes was a older man who snored nights, a meat eater and sound sleeper after a day of war’s bloodshed then red beef. Judy sprung to her dark work.

  ONLY THEN did I bellow children in, “It’s show time, li’l Chrustians!” Which froze them on tiptoe. My tone must’ve spooked them, they were so unused to me excited about anything except both twins getting gashed on the same grape-soda bottle. Certainty they heard. Kids packed my sewing-room door, faces braced to find me jerking in some fit. I apologized for how selfish I’d been, hiding in here for twenty-five full minutes. Couldn’t get the tone right yet, the tone of feeling “artistic,” “entitled”—the deep pleasure all this’d given me already. Sinful—fun for me felt sinful then. (Lately fun is holy.)

  My kids’ playmates hung back but I called them into the dark workroom. More the merrier, I needed honest child reactions. They grouped on the floor before my worktable as I slid behind, standing there. I flicked on my gooseneck lamp, aimed it at a glittery cigar-box stage like some real theater. I then quoted the whole story straight through.

  “Now,” said I, so stirred I felt ashamed, “let’s see how all that might could look, shall we?”

  I was winging it, child.

  But you can’t let them know that, see? Children, dusty from our vacant lot, tipped nearer our one light source. In light, my hands coached strange new
little figures through a drama that was, it seemed, way bigger than them, bigger than us. I had this vision as I told and showed, both. It sounds cheap but it happened: felt I was being puppeted by something with me in its hands and these figures in mine—something lowered into me. I thought of these shapes not as dolls but figments. Like in “figments of your imagination.”

  Finally I’d moved my couple to their outcome. I followed word for word—like some slow chef working through a cookbook. At last, when my lady figment—with a goodly sweep of her silver needle-sword—slashes the sleeping tyrant’s neck, and when—with a playful yank—I accidentally on purpose jerked that old soldier’s head right off (felt good!), all the children made one swallowed gasp. The hickory head of Holofernes rolled across the floor under my Singer and four kids scrambled for it, checking its neck end, seeking bloody traces. Give me goose bumps, their belief. I believed.

  Then they just clapped like crazy and Ruth’s record stopped, the entire trumpet of her Victrola seemed trying and listen, too.

  I made the figments both take bows. Even our headless wonder hopped up (bald of brains), receiving credit. When babies kept whistling and stomping, asking for the whole thing once again, well—like they say, I believe, in the Moving Picture Industry—I knew I had me a hit on my hands.

  In my hands. What more can I tell you? Fame spreads. A good thing, in a town this size, is soon unbusheled into broad daylight and I had requests to “freelance,” you might could call it, at other Sunday schools. Everybody invited me but my friends the Jews, who still met in their secret rose-covered gazebo. I think they only held back out of shyness. I would’ve done them a freebie just to see inside. Nothing to offend, either: Most of the good stories are Old Testament.—Of course I’d like the Old Testament best, darling, look who I married.

  After that second time through my premiere, after reattaching the head just so Judy could have her way again (you won’t be surprised to learn it’s harder to hook a head back on than to just yank it off), I asked kids for tough criticisms. “I can take it, believe me. Don’t treat me like anybody’s momma. Treat me like a … equal. I need to get this right by eleven on Sunday for church school or I stand to look real foolish. Mess like this, it either works or it’s pure pitiful, you know?”