Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  SHE DID. The poor thing couldn’t budge from it, for guilt feelings. I asked a favor of idle Ruth next door: Please run to Kress’s. I wanted to ease Baby’s mind. I ordered myself a ten-cent ring with a clear glass rock about as big as an acorn. Rhinestones are tacky, yeah—but the sunshine they trap inside theirselves ain’t no different than a diamond’s daylight.

  For Baby, I modeled the flashy thing. Poor child already wore a pressed-looking face, like she was straining while just walking around. “See?” I acted Lady Bright. “No hurry. Momma has got lots of rings, Tulip. You only ate one. Things take care of theirselves. Just be natural and live like usual. It’ll happen.”

  This Kress’s ring was way too small. It cut right bad. I wore it full-time anyhow. Maybe it’d help my Baby to relax. I showed it off, smiling.

  “That’s not your real ring.” Louisa can be right whiny when she puts her mind to it. “You’re nobody’s wife now,” Lou points at me, using her left braid’s tip. “Or maybe you’re just the wife of Baby’s stomach. I bet it’s fake. Yeah, that’s probably just a one-cent toy ring.”

  “Will … You … Shut … Up?” I mouth across the kitchen, but our darling, hurt, dashes screeching down the hall. Then, timid, Baby scuffs back, grabs up Pottie. (She’s made a pet of it. In her loneliness, she’s named it Mr. Pottie.) Baby pouts off, shy and wronged. She turns back and, full of self-pity, a family disease, full of it even for her—she puffs, hugging the saucepan even nearer, “Baby’s onwy fwend.”

  It about breaks my heart. It does.

  SHE SWALLOWED my ring at a bad time—but then it’s always a bad time, you know? Still, I was bushed just then. Cap stayed gone weeks at a sweep then, selling and buying livestock. Kept gallivanting off, jawing with other vets about the happy bloody olden times. I felt every inch the vet of the vet. He left me high and dry in the gory present. Doc Collier had explained: Since Archie’s birth, my body lacked so much iron, I could eat our entire eight-burner Wedgwood cookstove and still not break even.

  Was one of them moments: I’d finally get the children all pajamaed, watered, tucked in, and storied out. Coming down the stairs at last, I’d settle on our landing’s window seat just for a second so’s I could rub my lower back, just so I could look out on a sidewalk clogged with family trikes, bikes, scooters.

  In them years, at such a time of night, you never heard one sound you couldn’t name. The Wilguses’ collie and the Thorps’ corgi-mix stirred each other up, barking over nothing. The Orange Blossom Special, two minutes fast, outraced its whistle. (That’s how long ago this happened: some trains ran early!) Doc Collier’s buggy creaked on home: he’d visited a tenant farmer’s wife weeks overdue. Wind in the trees—you knew whose elms and which direction the breeze came from and what it meant for tomorrow’s weather. A nod later, still slumped in the window seat, I reopen eyeballs: on morning and, already, my children nearbout late for school. What kind of mother is that? Eight hours’ sleep was just a blink in the bucket of my swarming backlog. So—this here ring thing seemed the straw that broke the spine, meaning my own.

  But—as will happen—Lord be praised—disasters can often interest you the most. They make you feel like a Sherlock, hired to solve your own sad case. They perk a person up and prove that World Drama is basically a homebody.

  Tell me: How do you usually get your valuable rings out of your Baby’s sweet gullet?

  I don’t plan to make you ill with the crudest details of my ring search. Let’s just say: Motherhood! Let’s say I borrowed many old newspapers from the neighbors. These unmarried people hoarded paper for just such family emergencies. But, not having no families, they lent their bounty to us instead. Seemed our house stirred up troubles enough to keep a radio soap show in daily episodes forever. Times, it felt like I had more problems than Dick Tracy. I asked poor Ruth and other neighbors to please not tell the ring news to our well-meaning pharmacist, deal-maker, and jack-of-all-trades, Luke Lucas. Folks agreed but grilled me.

  Why’d she swallowed that? They had every right to ask and, of course, each did. “Because,” I admitted, “it was siney … shiny. That’s all Baby’ll say. I just slipped it off whilst washing dishes. Always do, scared I might otherwise lose it down the drain.”

  “It surely seems that’s precisely what’s occurred here,” one old bachelor smiled. (These non-parents can really Monday-morning-quarterback your life for you!)

  “Yeah.” I fought sounding surly. “Yeah, sir, it’s a drain, okay. But the human body is the one drain that gives back. You wait. Just watch.” Then I remembered to thank him for his extra Herald Travelers.

  “See you in the funny papers,” he hollered after it. It was something people said then but, that day, I took it personal.

  I FED my lover of shininess prunes. Many stewed prunes. I whispered it’d be Baby’s secret food. She asked me to eat some, too. “Baby feel so … only,” she confessed. (She meant “lonely.”) Baby acted scared these prunes was poison. So I gobbled the same number, matched her prune for prune—and paid for it afterwards. Seemed the least I could do.

  I begged our other children not to tease her. And they tried. Kids fought not to giggle but it struck them as funny. Ofttimes, it did me, too. But I could not let on.—I worried I’d mess Baby up. I pictured Baby—years later—in the office of some counselor or social worker, certificates paving his walls, and Baby’s mouth near his face, telling him the many mistakes I’d made. I imagined him going, loud, “She did what?”

  No, I wanted to behave right. I mostly do. Odd, nobody much speaks of how hard we all try and be clever at not hurting others. That’s so much of every day in the world. And yet, it’s only the wars and muggers that get wrote up. How do you figure it? Stories of real-life kindness stay left out every time. (This one’s bound to be lost. I mean, how minor can you get, darling? One ring, a woman running a side-street house in a town whose Main Street won’t within a hundred miles of the beaten track.) Meaning: I thank you for listening so far and hope you’ll stay and see how it all turns out. You keep coming back, God love you. Soon, another meal. They’ll be wheeling in the chair that fetches me to Wednesday’s chicken à la king, never my favorite.

  Meanwhile, Baby dragged to her room, whimpering. I listened from the hall, not wanting to seem pushy. Mostly I felt glad my stone was pear-shaped and not one of them spiky claw-and-ball ones you see. I told you the gem had been my husband’s own rich momma’s. White gold, her initials and some Latin engraved inside of it. I pictured the grand old lady hearing of her jewel’s damp whereabouts. I saw Lady More Marsden, gorgeous, spinning—like a wood lathe—in her grave.

  What’d helped to smooth my ring? What’d made it a safer passenger through Baby? The wear and tear of years of household days. Why, just my taking it off every night to do our dishes, just my popping it back on, finger soapy afterwards—that’d whittled extra harm and angles off of it, that’d sent it—without a hitch—on a tour of tender vitals. There’s some justice: Effort is streamlining!

  Late evenings, with the wee ones finally in bed, my man counties away, me alone downstairs and pretending to read (just to prove I’d had a chance), I started thinking of my absentee diamond. My thumb and little finger kept reaching for their pet and sidekick. In stores, I’d commenced studying other ladies’ rocks. None came near comparing to the shine of what I’d lost.

  My ring—a minus—made me recollect my own small circle of history: me, a fourteen-year-old kid being offered that fine gem whilst seated in my momma’s garden one autumn night. The moon was a witness as blue and white as the ring which moonlight lit. My breath came and went with his—one mixed huff and curl. The moon proposed. The face-up diamond blinked, “I do.” Or how, left alone in my husband’s big house before our first baby dropped into view, I would wander the place, bored silly, a child myself, that ring held up before one open eye. Hoping Cassie wouldn’t catch me at it, I’d be bumping into walls, seeing corridors and furniture through my good-sized rock, squinting at twelve ver
sions of every andiron and fern. It was like, needing company, I made my husband’s house flash into nervous copies of itself—my practice family. How, though they shaved me every which a way for my ninth childbirthing, nobody thought to take the ring off me. And during the worst of bossy Castalia’s “Push, push,” my stone someway got turned around and trapped inside my red fist, got mashed so hard into the center of my palm that, afterwards, it looked to be one nail hole bruised there.

  I now sat downstairs, alone, a novel open in my lap. (I’d been faking reading this same book for a year and a half.) I sat—my right hand’s thumb and index finger busy being the left one’s departed ring. It got so I missed that diamond, like on the very worst days—you feel you’ve someway missed out on your whole life.

  SEEING how low she’d sunk, I started calling Baby “Momma’s favorite safe-deposit vault.” I told her to look on the bright side: If a robber jumped us, he’d never find the most valuable thing that Momma owned. Baby barely smiled—she was usually a genius at pleasing—too much of one. (She’d been caught curtsying to mules downtown.) She half grinned, but later I found her eating whole handfuls of salt, trying to make herself sick and lose it. I carried her around the house then, rocking the poor thing, saying, “Trust time, sugar beet. Time will bring us what we want. You wait and see.”

  Did I mention it was 19 and 10? Honey, that was one of our last safe years, ever. This mousetrap of a century waited up ahead of us—a whole miniature golf course of pits, traps, rapids, mines. “Trust it,” I told my third-to-youngest. “Time is—like everybody says—a big nice river, sort of. And we can all float.”

  “But, Momma,” she frowned in my arms. “You told Baby Baby was a river.” (She was like what they claimed of Teddy Roosevelt: “He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”)

  “Okay, fine. Go ahead and be one. I reckon there’s always room for another decent river.” That calmed her. I told Baby to trust time. So she did, poor thing. She would become an actress, she would begin succeeding when she died at thirty-one. They called her Baby to the end. “Trust time,” I kept telling her. What choice do we have?

  Then I gave her a lid for the saucepan. Nothing had happened. I wanted to nudge her memory. “It’s named Mr. Pottie,” Baby reminded me. “And his lid’s name will be … Miss Lydia.”

  “Fine,” I smiled, and hoped. Soon Baby brought me Miss Lydia tight in her place on top. Grinning, Baby looked worn but proud. “Thank you, sweet pea. Momma’s pleased.” I grabbed my second-best yardstick, snatched up many a newspaper. Lugging pot and Lydia, I bolted our bathroom door and spread the business section in the tub. It was all I could think of. I’ll spare you the rank facts of my long long search.

  To think back, seems like it took weeks, whole Sunday Herald Travelers. My one wish (“Seek and ye shall find”) used up all the want ads. I didn’t usually have time to read a daily paper, not even a Sunday one. But now I let myself get hooked on little human-interest items off along the edge. Hadn’t seen a funny paper for years. I now spared the funnies—kept them back for myself. I was usually so busy trying to save everything and everybody else—just to squirrel aside Mutt and Jeff for a midnight read seemed sinful. Which shows you, child, how far off course things’d drifted. Only now, with me nigh onto a hundred, with me alert in my last leisure, with my whole family missing—only here recent do I have hours on end for telling tales to cornered strangers and to loved ones like you. I can nap when I please. I got no chores left. Except to concentrate on staying alive another day. The Herald Traveler promises to send a photographer over if I hang on till my hundredth. That keeps me interested. I ain’t been in the paper since a flattering wedding picture taken in nineteen aught aught. (The veil was down.) My nurses pull for me. One pretty one is pregnant and I want to stick around and see if it’s a boy or girl. Zondro’s now off at art school in Philadelphia. I miss her. She felt so sad about the six other freshmen girls with Mohawks, she shaved hers. She has a beau and brung him to meet me, she’s answering to “Sandra” now and wearing a dress!

  These days people let me be. It’s nice but I miss work. I have substitute children. You, for one. I still can’t believe my own youngsters are gone. Every one, and of what? Natural causes, mostly. Even Louisa, the practical nurse, she went like the rest—her medical knowledge no help. Times, I pretend they’re the missing diamonds trapped for a short while in something’s dark intestine. They’re all lined up, ready for a comeback in the light. Their characters yet seem so stubborn, real, and hard-cut to me. Permanent. Makes me think of these ads you hear: “Diamonds Are Forever.” What if my brood is still hid, safe in some spot that’s body temperature exactly? Of course, I know better. Still, you hope.

  Anyhoo—my older children took to camping outside that bathroom window, listening, laughing when they heard me start to rustle newspapers. Lou, standing on a apple crate like some carny barker, hung out there lording it over neighbor kids. A rounder, that child. But I could tell: Her gloomy imagination, like my own, had been kind of snagged by the human-interest angle of Baby’s stem-to-stern ring toss. Louisa (named for the author of Little Women. I said that.) usually behaved herself. She would help me around the house—but the child always grew rangy during disturbances. Now she stood outdoors, eavesdropping on our brick home, tucked behind bushes, telling others, “I bet Momma finds a real pearl, too—one worth … about six thousand and something dollars. Nobody’s missed it yet but it’s in there okay. And I bet Momma finds the good red cat-eye shooter marble I lost when I was about Baby’s age, way long ago. I bet …”

  Ned said, dreamy as ever, “She will find … a whole cocker spaniel puppy in it, alive.”

  Then Lou asked little visitors what they hoped for.

  I hollered till I felt dizzy. “Go away. Life is hard enough.” Besides, I suspect that Miss Louisa had been charging neighbor kids admission, two pennies apiece for standing out there, listening, picturing, wishing.

  Growing famous, poor Baby kept to her bedroom, burrowed under blankets, the shades drawn, ashamed like a little plague victim. She would rest, face-up, thick lashes mashed tight, one hand rubbing her tummy, another testing her forehead. Mr. Pottie and Miss Lydia sat on a chair a piece nearby. They waited like two interested cats. To her own lower body, my poor blond child kept muttering, “Hurry, oh hurry.”

  Three meals a day, we all waited, trying not to seem to wait. We watched her chew. Unwed neighbors, the non-parents who’d loaned us Herald Travelers, strolled over and, half smirking, asked, “How’d it come out?” “‘Tain’t funny.” I’d squint. That old bachelor sure burned me up, going, “So, is our silk purse free of the sow’s ear yet?” Fists locked on hips, I snapped, “I sure see why you never married. You know nothing of a lady’s finer points. For your information, sir, it’s all silk purse.”

  Most of Falls, aisle to aisle at Lucas’ All-Round, pumped me for nastier details of my ring hunt. I crossed my arms. No way would I betray my darling. As I looked and looked for the family jewel, my search’s background—the daily paper—seemed to bulge with one word. “Ring.” (There must be a name for that—how, once you find some fact or notice a phrase—the earth just rushes forward to show you how often it’s been right there under your nose.) “Ringleader Confesses.” “The Raleigh Opera Society hopes to do—one work at a time—the entire Ring in the next six years.” “Prostitution Ring Exposed.” “Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s four-ring extravaganza opens.”—I commenced believing: Soon, everything I’d ever missed would be returned to me. With interest.

  NIGHTS, I started picturing it in there.

  Just as I dozed off, I’d be drifting in that half-life state that’s often smarter than my daylight best. Then the jewel came clear to me as in some X ray. I knew exactly where, inside of Baby, my solitaire had rested for the night. In darkness the exact size of my child, it winked. Sometimes, when I’m upset, I’ll twist the ring around and round, hardly thinking. It now seemed to do that
on its own—lonely inside Baby, “only” inside Baby. I’d snooze and make up crazy thoughts (or, no, they’d made me up):

  How, say, the ring’s clear stone is really a eye, see? Faceted for storing every sight. Each facet is like another angle in its high IQ. The gold band behind this eye is the circling skull that holds the eyeball steady, that saves up memories of things it sees. Then I let myself imagine what-all it was getting to view, for free, right now, as Baby breathed just across the room (I’d moved into the girls’ dorm, she was scared of sleeping alone with It in her). Easy to picture the ring’s total voyage. A Cook’s tour, it tours where this cook’s own home cooking tours, breakfast to dinner. I see my prettiest girl’s interior views. Here’s a canoe’s rocking route: It passes through great pink caves, blue arenas, slick and necessary tunnels of love, sluice gates, sewers of museum beauty. On a floating pleasure cruise, the diamond swims, inching through a whole coiled map of rivers. It swims so slow because it really likes it in here. A year-round 98.6 degrees—the Florida of my infant’s health.—But, wait, what if it snagged somewheres inside of Baby, what if it chose a spot, settled down, started gaining carats month by month? My own five-year-old will carry it full-term. Newspaper reporters wait near Baby’s favorite swing set, hoping for interviews. Finally, I’ve told her what to expect. I hold her hand, I go, “Push, Baby.” Out slides a gem big as a goodly coal chunk—hot ice shoots into the rubber hands of waiting Swiss doctors. Over their surgery masks, they wear dark glasses so’s they can bear to look onto such brightness. “Never in all our years,” they say. Headlines in the Herald Traveler and other world papers:

  SUDDENLY FAMOUS TOT BRINGS FORTH HOPE DIAMOND, ONLY QUADRUPLED

  Authorities Mystified

  These were my odd selfish thoughts whilst half asleep. Maybe I was going partway crazy. My child’s medical glamour was running away with me. But, honey, even wide awake, this much I understood: No painted picture, no treaty, nobody’s genius can compare with the wonders one ring might be privileged to glimpse on its ride through a regular baby’s ordinary digestion.