Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  They nodded. They knew. I felt that.

  WELL, them kids were right on the money. Said I needed a better stage, more lights than the one, and a bulb that wouldn’t hurt the audience’s eyes, please. I hadn’t known. Maybe some tiny furniture, props. “And phonograph music? Something with bugles?” Ned—those eyes on me—asked in his usual absentminded way. Said he would go borrow Ruth’s Victrola, and what records? “Maybe something more towards Aida?” says I, already sounding like D. W. Griffith on the set. “No, don’t ask Ruth. She’ll be over here in a jiff anyway. I know her, she’ll soon be giving all my trade secrets to the Methodists. Those Methodists got to copy churches above or below them, not one idea among them, Methodists.”

  Power had gone right to my head, child.

  Kids’ good help surprised and pleased me. The right question is all you ever need to discover this again. Kids speak in questions so often because they love to be asked, only too few grownups do. I had. And today I benefited. Ned and Billy adjourned to build me a stage with a proscenium so it’d hide my rooster-spur-scratched hands, or the wrists at least. My girls had good ideas. I thought: You, Lucy, of all people, should steadily recall how smart kids are. Yours especially. You’ve hardly said three sentences to anybody else but them, Cassie, and him for ten breeding years.—But, too, the more children you have, the harder you got to work just keeping them stocked with basics, the less time you’re free to notice sideline bonuses, to notice the only reasons anybody’d ever bother.

  It stirred me, their smartness—and those quiet twenty-five minutes before. I didn’t care if kids much noticed my trying and keep the house clean, or how I left their macaroni and cheese in the oven extra long to brown on top the way they liked. But their loving my figments mattered to me, child. As they filed out, talking amongst theirselves, like folks leaving some real performance, I stood behind my worktable feeling nervous. “Thank you,” I called after them, and one child visitor, that lovely Billy Preston, called back, “Thank you, Mrs. Marsden. Didn’t even expect this today.”

  “Nor me, Billy.” I was now gathering up scraps and spools tossed everywhere while throwing my idea together. Usually you’d find me tidier than this, but for onct I had let loose. I spied my Louisa lingering in the doorway, half in the hall. Toying with her braid, she looked back in, said nothing, didn’t smile. Just nodded onct, her eyes on mine, then Lou left behind two words, “Was good.”

  I stood here at my worktable where I usually made and mended their school clothes. But today I was backstage, full weight resting on my arms, head forward. “Was good,” the girl had said. I felt grateful—grateful as a child praised honestly by other kids.

  And it was later that evening, after dinner and when little friends had all dragged home, our house got strange and quiet. Captain was in the country for a week, buying has-been racehorses at auction. Just us here, us chickens, but the place was strangely still. I went looking for the trouble. Soon as such a hush sets in, watch out. They were in our front room doing homework, face-down on couches, grinding through geography, arithmetic, asking each other answers, shushing each other. Always surprised me how they could concentrate with all them others antsy in one room. Only later did I—a only child—understand. Of course, being there were nine of them, they pretty much had to.

  I found they’d quieted because Louisa—it won’t like her, really—had slipped out and changed into the new green velveteen jumper. She just waltzed around among lined paper and notebooks. She glided among brothers and sisters who—hunched over their work—looked up a while, made Lou a short-lived one-girl fashion show. She was a hefty child and stayed a large-boned woman. Her braided hair was too thin, but she moved so nice, already a presence. Tonight, Louisa stepped with this stiff grace, she held one braid up in the air, a fine silly fanciness that rivaled Baby’s. I tarried in the hall’s safe dark, not wanting to spoil her moment. Others—faces neutral but not disrespectful—stopped long enough to at least admire her. Then quick—not trusting the moment—Lou swept from the room. Imagine, she’d put that dress on because, earlier today, my pipe-cleaner Judith had wore that selfsame color. For a minute and a half, Lou felt famous.

  I hadn’t got a compliment like that since 18 and 96.

  2

  THE MONDAY after my first figment play was such a smash at the Baptist Fellowship Hall—then known as just Annex—my husband lost his shirt. Ours. He had, along with half the gaming gents on Summit Avenue, sent our money to this broker up in New York, who sunk funds into Louisiana oil. Men did it on the advice of our lieutenant governor, later indicted. It only happened to the best known of Falls’ several good old boys. It was a rehearsal for ’29, when the rest got hit. It was our Crash and struck us local but real hard.

  I first knew something was amok when I saw the bank president—a portly man who’d given away coins at the Christmas play, this gent as dignified as a beautiful tufted club chair—he’s running down Summit Avenue, pocket watch bouncing its links in the air before his belly like some escaping convict’s ball and chain. Then around the corner came forty citizens waving papers and bankbooks, fists. I sat on my front-porch rail, touched my forehead, thinking that in my desire to put on good shows at church I’d flapped over into fantasy land. Our banker had used official money for personal gain, and had lost the gamble. Same second I heard a shot from the Wilgus home, two doors past Ruth’s. (These are the folks that, from behind curtains, watched Cassie deliver twins in that wagon.) I now noticed Mrs. Wilgus, fifth-richest lady in town and a invalid since the eighties, come sprinting out of her house like Bill Tilden playing the net (and eyeing the ball boys). Her white hair hung down, her face was wild, she ran to me, the one person not chasing a bank president, and cried from our sidewalk, grinning in her nightgown, barefooted as the day she was born, “Unless I’m very much mistaken, my husband just put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It seems to’ve ruined, though maybe I’m wrong, the embroidered Spanish shawl covering our Baldwin. Unless I’m very much mistaken … I’ve not the faintest notion why Robert did that …” and then she gracefully drifted around the corner of Summit and Sycamore, a ghost.

  Next Sunday’s text, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, proved harder to act out than Judy’s revenge on her lover-enemy. But even choirs of angels—live and in person—wouldn’t of been noticed by children who’d just seen two men jump off the roof of the bank, our one Falls building tall enough to do the broker-jumper major damage. It did. One fall each did it.

  I’d made my hickory-nut Paul sit at stage left writing the letter and then a larger group of believers opened his little letter while I recited it. Dull, I’ll admit. But who noticed? That day collection plates were not passed at First Bible-believing Baptist. Was the single time in our history that us big-time losers weren’t asked to give a dime. I almost blamed my so-so figment performance. Broke, we deeply appreciated our preacher’s tact.

  THOUGH Captain confessed we’d lost a good deal, his gun collection grew. I now see he was doing a pawnshop’s business with weapons he’d admired for sixteen counties. Wives of the weapon collectors were all too happy to get these out of the house, considering the local rate of self-done death lately. Some pistols had been gifts. Cap claimed one was ruined by the brass plaque our trophy shop had screwed into its cherry-wood handle: “The Elks (BPOE) in fond appreciation of Capt. Marsden’s patriotic Confederatism, selfless service to others,” etc. The plaque eclipsed half a curving stock. “Imagine putting a brass name tag on the face of the Mona Lisa, Lucille, and you have some idea of the desecration.” People were jumping off roofs and he was raking in the dueling pistols of the dead, and with no worse sign of strain than bags under his eyes.

  When he bought the very gun that Mr. Wilgus used to spoil a valuable shawl, I knew we’d best watch out. Sunday morning—just as I was loading up my cast of helpers to carry stage and lighting and Ruth’s on-loan phonograph to church—in Cap roars back from some county overnighter, in he bounds, arms stacke
d with further muskets, two pirate-looking pistols tucked under his belt. “We should’ve had those for Halloween,” said Baby in a baby talk I’ll spare you (she’d just tricked or treated as a tapdancing Miss Annie Oakley).

  “Over my dead body,” goes I, rushing back to my workroom for David’s harp made entirely of paper clips and rubber bands.

  We stood waiting for Cap to stow the new ones under our bed. By now he came home with a few items weekly, sometimes dumping prizes on the table like he hoped I’d plop them, calibered carrots, into some family stew. By now, beneath our fourposter, he had a elephant gun, cute ivory derringers about the size of dice cozy in their own velvet caskets. I thought of the Alamo’s own arsenal under our mattress at night, there on the dark floor—daring any dust to accumulate around them. Guns soon felt somewhere between being our roommates and a snake farm, one that might snag a woman’s ankle when, at 3 a.m., she trotted off to get three wakers water.

  THERE’S good news and bad news: The good is that soon our Sunday-school Annex’s curtains, still screening your present age group from your past and future, soon fell open like a Jericho of shower curtains. And all to see my “show.” I tried avoiding the word “show,” which, for Baptists, has a low tinselly tone. “Show” hints at loose women and high admission prices, sin sin sin. If the wickedness us Baptists Imagined was half the fun of wickedness only Lived, we’d have reason to go somewhere and be real bad. I called mine “presentations” or “visual aids,” but “show” made kids happier and they wouldn’t quit calling mine that. Let them say Show.

  If youngsters soon hung around our house, pointing at the shut door of my sewing room and listening, whispering to Lou (who, I believe, charged admission)—kids whispering, “Is she in there, doing it for Sunday?”—if kids loved the undullness of my visual aids, other long-suffering church teachers, long starved for a novel way to teach the Bible, struggling many years for some new tack to take, decided one by one that this won’t it. Mine won’t. Someway I knew this when I seen them lined against the back wall’s bulletins and fruit-tinted lithos of Our Lord. Arms all crossed, each was dressed in mourning dark. I soon saw them as a set of black castles, eager limits towering over the low foreground of curly golden laughing children’s heads. The more noise kids made when Saul threw his spear at the harp-playing David and so forth, the quieter my grown fellow-teachers got. Joyless, no lips, the lot of them. Just made me gush and imagine all the more. I dared them to fire the best darn Visual Effect by a Supporting Baptist. Let them try. My young audience would have their old dry lipless heads on a platter! See, I’d turned Gloria Swanson overnight! Vanity about vanities.

  Soon, other religions were after me like ducks on a June bug. I even got a feeler from the twenty catacombed Catholics over in Rocky Mount, but I wrote a note that said I only did short-range travel with my sho … visual aids. At Lucas’, I ran into my old Sunday-school teacher whose voice was like the sound her nickel-rimmed spectacles might make. She was still at it, one lowered cotton drape from mine, still complaining. “Well, well,” said she. “Aren’t you the clever one, it’s our Lucille. Everybody’s talking about your little Old Testament flea circus or whatever it is, and though it charms the children to the point that when I pull my curtain afterwards and try to discuss the holy mysteries, pupils’re keyed up to talk only about the color of the wigs on this week’s nuts, and though I think you’re smarter than I ever thought you were when you and the late Shirley gossiped through your years under me, I must say that, bright and ‘modern’ as it all is, one thing I feel sure your lessons aren’t, my child, is DEEP. Good day.” I was left feeling stunned and shallow in the extreme, darling. Cheap.

  The playboy lieutenant governor still hunted ducks and took along a certain white-haired vet storyteller. The state spent gas money and probably bullet money, too, for a motorcade clear down to Duck, North Carolina (the name given to a town by wishful thinkers—a form of decoy). Limos zipped past shanties of those who should be fed by the state funds. Captain spent all his charm with the big boys of our state. News of our small-time Gloomy Monday finally seemed to reach him. Not even new guns could cheer him up around the house. While I was enjoying newfound fame among the youthful Baptists of the Greater Falls area—and here’s the earlier-mentioned bad news (how should I put it gentle?)—he hit me a few more times. Two. Maybe three.

  Here I was, bound onstage weekly before the entire Sunday school, and suddenly I was sending Louisa to the dime store for foundation makeup to disguise a blacked eye. The first. Ruth, next door, noticed one day while I was out hanging up the clothes. She had the face of a secret drinker (though—to be fair—we never caught her). Poor Ruth bent over our fence, spied a lump above my eye, and said, just so I could hear, “There’s worse things than a husband who loves but leaves. Some of us’d rather be proud and alone, Lucille. Is what I think,” then drifted inside, limp as her wash dress. I pitied her. And mostly agreed. But I now knew to hide my war wounds better.

  My husband still muttered in his sleep, shouts of artillery danger, naming childhood friends but mixed with recent daytime news. A whole night’s worth might run: “Nine dollars a head and not a nickel over … said I shouldn’t … vines’ll just grow faster … got face cards every time, Ned. Ned? Duck, duck!” I’d lay awake listening, still trying to feel like feeling sorry for him. Not so sure, a ice pack on one eye.

  I will say: This was the last of that part. Seemed connected to my puppet reputation at First Baptist. The more times folks came up and complimented him, the less he went to church.

  Onct when he was being sweet, I asked him what him and the Lieutenant Governor and other poker guys discussed at Duck, in blinds at dawn. We were alone in bed and my husband turned to me without a pause, “Pussy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Pussy ‘n’ money, money ‘n’ pussy. The order varies.”

  “Don’t mind my saying so, sir, but it sounds kind of strange to go all that way to the coast just to grab-ass each other, you know? To me, anyways.”

  “We know it’s dumb, Lucille. That’s what you women never seem to recognize. We like that. We find it a relief from all these duties that you and these children are always weighing us down with. Do you know how much is eaten in this house? It’s fun to act like boys again when we get to, and you know what, Lucille? We get to. But enough small talk, there’s a topic I’ve felt a certain burning urgency to discuss with you and you alone. Only you can help me with it.”

  I felt wary but, too, half drawn. “So what’s that? Shoot.”

  “Poos-say. As my black brothers pronounce it. Pussy, Lucy. Specifically, your own.”

  This is sick. It was us, though, and I’m telling. I put up with it. Probably I was asking for trouble. And you might think me twisted, child, but some-ways, most parts that mattered, I liked it. When he breathed his own sad smut my way, I stayed for it, didn’t I? You either stay or leave. For now, till what-all happened next, I stuck right there and took what he dished out.—And I blame myself for everything that followed, child. Really, I should be in jail now.

  HE WAS not a happy drunk. Losing the money set him back. Drink made him talk war. “Sorry,” he’d say after biffing me, and sit on our horsehair couch with his face in his hand. He knew it was rolling out of him, him muttering figures, how eleven states left the Union, twenty-three stayed, twenty-four counting West Virginia, rough odds at best and no wonder the two hundred and thirty thousand fellow Rebs had been so wounded, two hundred thousand of his Southern brothers killed outright, and on and on he kept the score. He seemed to want (some Fridays especially) to hit me. I saw that look, I handed him a pillow, “Duck feathers are in there, hero, go to it.” Fridays were bad. I’d rather it happened on Monday—Friday meant a shiner really bloomed in time for my precious Sunday-morning hour onstage.

  The last shiner, I gave him notice. He’d just hollered, “That’s for Wilson’s Creek.” A war skirmish’s name, I guessed.

  “For what?” I screamed and ran h
is way across the room and pulverized his shoulders. “I plan to get out of here if you lay a hand on me ever again, ever! Give me it back, now. I want back everything you’ve ever took from me, which means most everything.”

  From behind two huge hands covering his face, he said, “Where would you go? You having gentleman callers?” I saw he was smiling, so certain.

  “Very funny man,” I said, not sure.

  Then we’d make up. You figure it out.

  • • •

  NOW DAYS folks get divorced if the other person looks puffy at breakfast or has what these TV ads call “morning breath.” Meaning halitosis. Typical, such ads change two of the most beautiful words in English, “morning” and “breath,” into the title of a stink curable with one product only. Back then you contracted till death do you part or till your husband’s body parted from its spirit, whichever came first. I rode it out, God knows.

  Ruth’s Willard used to knock her cockeyed twice a week and she’d come over with a beefsteak mashed to one eyeball, a beefsteak that I, being on a stricter budget, would’ve loved to swipe—even with Ruth eyelashes on it—for a nice little lunch. And now here she was giving me lectures on the joys of being alone and uninjured.

  Some tacky tango cranked up, and we could see Ruth through the window, cross-stepping in the middle of the floor of one huge unfamilied room. “Poo Wooth,” Baby sighed, watching. Once more I scolded my prettiest girl for lisping so. Ned was, I reckon, finer-featured than our Baby. She had a kind of ready surface peachiness, she flared it at all comers, working on them curls and nails, mad for matching accessories, at age eight. Ned, quiet, favored some statue from Greece, a perfect if eyeless boy whose features seemed more natural that far into the past. His face was almost too refined to bear a world as spiky and overtimed as this recent one is. Neddie was one of them kids where: if we were out and he ate candy and his hands got sticky, he stared at them, whimpering, half crazy from the goo till you had to find a sink for him so he could see the world again. He moved dreamy. When I attended to some back-then version of a PTA open house, his this year’s teacher, always a lady, would call me aside and say, “What is it about our Ned?” They were not complaining, they were showing me they’d caught the dreamy quality in those eyes that rarely seemed to blink, that steadily stayed a good gray percentage of his face. It was a privilege to be around that kind of beauty and made your waiting on the others almost easier, him silent at their middle, watching your very-close veins very close. I kept learning from his patient eyes.—Oh, what do people do that don’t have children, child?