Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  Silence fell and then a real loud attempt at talking. The Chaplain asked could he please speak to young Prothero out of doors, at once, please? The Chaplain was a dignified-looking man, a gaunt gentleman of exalted standards. He’d been entertained in the best homes of the Southern nation and he said so often. He smiled a lot and was held to have a good heart but his interest in the Confederate Army seemed a snob’s. Loss of life among the leading families’ sons made him speak of tragedy. Deaths among the sons of grocers seemed to him inevitable, if sad. The Chaplain’s features appeared to have benefited from sixty years of German music and the most serious available reading. As a preacher, he was cursed—or so his untutored men felt—by a fondness for musical terms. “God,” he would say, “has transposed our parts down a minor third and still our voices crack.” On the veranda, he now grabbed Prothero’s arm, almost twisting it. “I resist saying so … but you’ve just acted nearly unchivalrous as our barbaric enemies. Why are we fighting them if you choose to adopt their very debased style? In a boy of your connections this resounds with especial discord, sir.”

  Prothero strolled off to one side, cleaned his spectacles, he was smirking, shaken. He put glasses on and, absentmindedly, crossed himself. When he returned to the party (probably a mistake) old Mrs. Randolph cut Prothero directly, then rushed upstairs. The pale daughter seemed nervous to be near him now. He twice tried to joke with the girl. She twice drew other gents into the conversation. The Lieutenant, acting hurt, stepped away from her and stood, silent, in one dark corner. For the rest of the party he looked only at her. Prothero’s respect for the girl appeared to slowly turn into a jolly kind of hatred.

  Next afternoon, he was seated alone in the Randolphs’ garden house. Unison had been out gathering the season’s first grape hyacinths and an armful of forsythia. Seeing him here, she braced herself. First she headed the other way but then duty or resolve or interest changed her route. “April!” she said to him. It was a general comment and intended to be harmless.

  He jumped to his feet, fumbling to set his pince-nez in place. “My sentiments exactly. Forgive me … Spring forgives everything and you must, too. The strain works on my mind in ways I fear I cannot quite predict, Miss.”

  They talked then. Alone with her, he relaxed. She settled as far from him as the small round gazebo would permit. He spoke about his entertaining married sisters. He frankly said how lonely a warrior’s life was. He said he’d heard her practice, he sensed she was a brilliant musician, he longed to hear Unison play something difficult straight through. He stared at her. Dark mourning clothes handsomely contrasted with the spring bouquet. She held flowers with the same brisk care Unison brought to everything she did. He said, “I so wish I could lay my head upon your lap. If that sounds scandalous, it shouldn’t … in these times.” He said how propriety must alter along with the great historical events.

  She told him that she feared for his reason. She sensed how he had behaved before the war—she felt like war had made him rash and wild, quite bitterly unhappy. She advised the young man to make adjustments as he could. She said she pitied him.

  Her own honesty surprised and moved her. Her honesty surprised and moved him. He admitted to terrible confusions. He told her he had killed up to nineteen Northerners already. “Nineteen,” he said. “And I have not one wound to show for it.” Boy sounded regretful.

  He smiled at her and Unison felt astonished: Orderly fat silver tears rolled down his either cheek from under the pince-nez. Eyeglasses held bright accurate copies of the river past the gazebo, the river behind her. Tears came down his cheeks on alternate sides—the way, from a distance, she’d seen him brush his hair with two silver brushes. One-two, one-two.

  He spoke loud, “Think of your brothers on the night before their deaths.” Her face she hid behind beautiful lifted hands. Prothero kept right on. “Imagine if some young lady of breeding had been kind to them that final evening. Can you not find it in your heart to help me here? It’s so little that I ask. One simply wants to rest one’s head on your lap, among the flowers of your lap. One’s head will be more on flowers than on lap.—My sanity, dear Unison, depends upon it.”

  Somehow, while she yet screened her features, he dodged over, silent. He stretched out along the gazebo bench. Her hands parted and a whiskered tear-streaked face was already riding her upper thighs—looking direct at Unison, seeming her own disturbed reflection.

  “Why? Why are you like this, sir?” Exactly at that moment Willie Marsden and two young pals who’d been bathing in the river strode back towards camp. They passed the gazebo, noticed this spectacle, saw young Unison’s face contort. Discovered! Boys stopped dead, then hurried off, trying to keep their expressions neutral. Word soon spread: Either the pair was engaged to be married or else Unison had seriously compromised herself. A whole division felt jealous, they blamed not the society wag with his scents and whiskers—they blamed a very foolish and surprisingly unstable girl who had succumbed, who’d been successfully tricked, who’d lost her virtue and her precious standing in their hearts. He might be odd. But her? She seemingly was loose, far worse.

  Next day she appeared with a tray of cookies hot from the stove. The first three men she offered treats refused them. Others accepted but their faces stayed narrowed, grudging. They seemed to be doing her a favor by quickly gobbling warm sugar cookies stamped with a cutter, heart-shaped.

  After this she refused to see Prothero on the grounds or in the mansion. Old Mrs. Randolph felt a change. Unison had told her nothing, not wanting to trouble the widow. Prothero began stealing into the big house uninvited. Unison was at her harpsichord. The Lieutenant asked why she had, like so many others, turned against him. She told him she was his truest friend but that his being so unpredictable made him hard to be near, impossible to help.

  The young man offered light jokes about her makeshift wartime wardrobe—the three black dresses. He held his pince-nez in air between her face and his. He predicted that, with the slaves run off and her being mostly orphaned, lacking a dowry as she did now, she would quite possibly never marry. Yes, he added, he could picture her—maybe working as a nanny to brats of the newly rich. He claimed he knew just how a lady like herself would look, dry at fifty.

  She had been trying to practice. She stared at him. “Your voice sounds so much like my brother Edmund’s. It’s a kind voice underneath. I can only think that the war has done all this and other things to you, sir. I wonder, would I prefer our Edmund to have died when he did or to have been subjected to such changes as you have endured. I must tell you, sir, that your being treated cruelly gives you no right to treat me so. I wish you nothing but good. The first time you walked into our hallway, I felt quite giddy. It was the pleasure of how you looked and how you pulled your scabbard aside so you could bow as deeply as you did from the waist, sir. The hand-kissing, however, struck us all as affected, I fear. I always speak plainly. Some of us have no choice. A blessing, finally.

  “The war will end and you will return to yourself. You are not essentially like this, and I feel that. Even so, my mother, who knows little of what’s happened, will never let me come near you again. The Chaplain fears rumors are in circulation concerning untoward events in our garden house. I feel innocent of wrongdoing. I only hoped to save you but I fear it is beyond my powers. That is all I have to tell you, sir. Good day, Lieutenant.”

  She ignored him after this, she tried. Mrs. Randolph begged other officers never to leave the girl alone with the odd, pretty officer. But when the widow asked this favor, gents stiffened as if with some secret. Unison’s coolness only drove Prothero to mutter further insults. He treated the girl as if he was her loving taunting elder brother. His pranks ran darker and darker. He found her working in her cutting garden. He stood upon a clump of irises. Silently, Unison drifted upstairs to practice her recorder. He took to patrolling the home without permission. In its basement, he found remains of a fine liquor cellar and many kegs of maple syrup brought South before
the war. He ordered the company cook to annex these. “Flapjacks for everybody. And on our charming hostesses,” he said. Mother and daughter kept silent. They watched him drink their dead kin’s last brandy. Noticing their faces, the Chaplain later apologized.

  On the evening of a hard day’s fight two miles southeast, women found young Prothero inside their home and now upstairs. He was sitting, eyes wide open, in a gilt Venetian chair along one dark corridor. “Yankees are abroad. Therefore I am guarding you,” he smiled. “You would not believe what some of these dogs will do to ladies, no matter their age or basic attractiveness. To Northerners this matters but little,” and then he crossed himself and smiled. “Savages,” he said.

  Prothero soon joined poker games near the nightly fire. He often won. His daily face was hard enough to read. At cards, this became an advantage. His betting was unpredictable, full of bluffs. No one could find the pattern. They envied his success with women. They hated his success at cards. They finally blamed him for compromising Unison.

  Fewer and fewer men would sit near Prothero in the Officers’ Mess. Just his mentioning Charleston brought groans. Card games were soon organized in secret. One evening Prothero stepped away from his mirrors to go fetch a cup of water for personal hygiene. A Yankee sniper opened fire. Candles and mirrors were blasted like a shooting gallery—nothing left but silver bits, the splintered walnut frame.

  “That was a gift, you!” Prothero ran—exposed to harm—shouting toward black woods. Others, well hidden, watched him grab a sword and pistol from his tent. Target still suffered from a last beating. Prothero jumped onto the animal unsaddled, wearing its plaid blanket. At high speed, lacking orders to do so, the young man galloped off alone into the dark.

  Will and others waited, very still. The ladies Randolph waited in the safety of their marble foyer. Fifty minutes later, everybody heard a single shot. Everybody looked at each other. Shortly afterwards, Prothero came trotting back into camp. He jumped off Target, passed reins to Will. The Lieutenant hurried to a wagon’s flatbed where the broken mirror was. He gathered the shards with great care, setting these inside his tent. Prothero then returned to the same spot and—on wagon’s slats, overtop glittering blue glass—he mashed down one small item. The youth then went off mumbling to his tent. Will and others gathered. Here among mirror bits was the tip of something fleshy—maybe cut from a Yankee person’s earlobe, maybe from a person’s nose.

  No more sniping happened for some days.

  5

  IT LATER came out how, drunk one evening on borrowed brandy, the Lieutenant had pushed into Unison Randolph’s very sleeping chamber. Her four-poster was a hundred years old and required a stepladdered gangplank for entry. She woke to find a blond young man sitting, grinning—boots off, cross-legged at her bed’s end. “Edmund!” she cried, and reached forward. Then, seeing who it was, Unison jerked back, one hand covering her mouth.

  As a joke, Prothero had unbuttoned his fly. Through it, he had poked her blond recorder. “Hello. Can you see how lonely I am.”

  The young lady’s brown hair trailed down her shoulders. She tossed it behind her and pulled covers high around her neck. She asked the Lieutenant to please leave, now. Prothero explained he only wanted to talk to a woman, alone. “This,” he pulled out the recorder, “was just a joke. Not a terribly good one, I fear.”

  He said that a lack of contact with women had, he felt, confused him about certain rights and wrongs. “Please, I’m not the kind of person I must presently appear. You can help me. You know the story of the toad who was a prince. You can send me back.”

  She agreed to have a conversation but only if he’d please go sit in a chair across the room please. Instead he rose onto all fours and, pince-nez dangling off its ribbon, stuffing the recorder in his mouth like a beak, scurried nearer, hopping.

  Only then did Unison Randolph reach under her pillow. Her father, last thing before riding away, had presented her this little pearl-handled revolver. Using both hands, holding it at arm’s length before her, the young lady aimed directly between the gentleman’s eyes. She held the pistol very steady. “Manners,” the young lady said.

  He sobered then, climbed off the bed, smiled, took her instrument from his mouth and set it on a bureau, collected his boots. “Goodbye, you,” he waved from the doorway, his tone gone grave. “You see, I now feel even lonelier. I expected better from you. I shall not forget this unkindness. Women should go to war, too. Just for living in tents, so we might come and talk to them after battle or before. Especially after—no, especially before. I’m held to be talented at fighting. It’s only willpower. I haven’t the gift. Some of us need women’s company. It would be a service. ‘The soul of another is a dark forest.’ There’d be less war if women were nearer to it. You had a chance to help a fellow know his rights from wrongs. You failed him fairly badly. There will be consequences, I fear.”

  She considered telling the Chaplain. Finally Unison knew she’d speak to no one of the visit. She felt she was protecting the Lieutenant. She sat here in her bed, listening hard till dawn—listening to what? for what?

  Something in his wildness she recognized. Something in his high blond craziness she felt to be the joined ghosts of her missing brothers. Edmund, Keane, and Billy’s love was communicating in some code she might eventually break—the way you can break algebra or musical notation.

  BY DAWN, she regretted sending him away.

  6

  THE CHAPLAIN kept mercilessly working music terms into his riverbank sermons. He soon lectured enlisted men about the actual harpsichord they heard played daily. (He mentioned how one side of her instrument’s inlay showed a shepherd on a hill, lutes and horns and ribbons crossed its other.) He asked young Unison to give a concert for the division. The Chaplain knew how she had fallen in the group’s esteem. He felt this might help.

  Always willing to do her duty, Unison said she worried that her instrument was in too poor repair. She blamed the river James’s humidity. She said she’d learned to tune the thing herself but that new strings, much needed, were impossible to find now (plus, such a use of metal would be downright unpatriotic). The Chaplain insisted. He asked leave for his enlisted men to gather on the Randolphs’ portico. The boys, he assured her, needed uplifting. Certain unworthy behavior was emerging in the lower ranks and—he added, watching her face—among junior officers.

  Unison looked back at him. “If it will help … that. And generally, sir.”

  River’s acoustics always bring sounds from great distances. Men heard rumblings from Northern artillery far downstream. But all that afternoon soldiers concentrated instead on a young woman’s serious tuning and re-tuning for tonight’s event. Will noticed that even Target kept all hooves on the ground, calmed by steady testing notes. While men cleaned their muskets, as they marched their ragged formations back and forth in the paddock—how fine the sound of one delicate instrument trying to get better, finding then losing and refinding its own thin voice. Cannons’ downriver roars sounded like something huge was being steadily blasted and chipped away. But bright metal notes from the house seemed to try and lightly pin that back in place.

  SUNSET, and the company assembled. All the bivouac’s lanterns had been set into the upstairs windows, placed around the portico’s broad columns.

  Clumsily and as if by accident, it seemed to be spring. Tonight a body noticed. (Spring is the earth forgiving itself.) In spite of war, between tents, a plantation’s quinces and dogwoods and jonquils bloomed with great sad almost-stupid lushness. The more flowers opened, the more mail boys sent home. The lovelier the grounds, the sadder a soldier could feel—evenings especially.

  Forty muskets were stacked on the veranda, there if something went wrong. Windows and French doors stood wide open to enlarge one instrument’s faint sounds. A chandelier in the music room had been lit with one hundred candles for the first time since Manassas—a spendthrift move. Coarse yellow army-issue candles were jammed among satiny tapers placed the
re before the war.

  Women and children invited from nearby plantations began arriving. Mrs. Randolph—in mourning black but of a richer fabric than usual—glided out front to greet guests. The old woman seemed so animated she looked silly to the soldiers who’d known her only six weeks as a solemn staid old thing. Her pale daughter waited on the porch. Dismounting from makeshift mule carts, deprived of servants, of their husbands, fathers, sons, these women—old friends—embraced. The children seemed startled at finding three hundred soldiers in cleanest uniforms. Women had worn their best remaining gowns. Binding long white gloves and fair satin sleeves, dozens of black armbands. On one old woman’s right arm, soldiers saw a tourniquet of six. Some ladies wept at finding the great house lit and wide open again. “Before,” they smiled. They meant: Tonight the place looked like it had for some spring ball held prior to Sumter.

  Enlisted men were forced to sit outside far from the ladies. They’d scrubbed hard anyway. In sunset light, boys’ washed faces now showed pink, freckled, baked. Supplies were long-awaited—new boots especially scarce. Barefoot fellows borrowed at least one boot. Along the big-house steps, they set in ways to hide single naked feet. Boys meant to reassure the patriotic ladies.

  Chaplain convened things, sparing folks his usual long-windedness. He just stood and quoted: “Musick is an insearchable and excellent Art, which rejoiceth the Spirit and unloadeth Grief from the heart, and consisteth in time and number. To our intense good fortune, Miss Unison Randolph shall now demonstrate.”