Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  I touched one corner. He pulled the thing away like believing this was just a game. I tugged and saw that he meant business. And I knew I did. He leaned against our headboard, breathing, mighty against the decoration of Ned’s bugle and the twig and his own scabbard.

  The room stunk of him. Or maybe us. Our years all come to this. Seemed like when I’d left my kitchen just now I had been a girl and here, seeing this, I was fifty-five going on ten thousand. Old as vintage dust, older. Old as colors.

  “There are limits and you’re way over now. No.” I grappled for the hem. On knees, he lifted a sleeve of it to dangle, like some bullfighter, luring. I caught the hem of her mink. Just seeing his huge corded hands there galled me—sacrilege. We were waling each other within ten seconds. I was half on the bed, trying to yank the fouled rug out from under him, and I was managing, despite his greater weight. He saw I was winning so he got me by the voice box again. I lost all air, all, honey. This time he meant it. His hands, around my throat, felt ceramic.

  Soon onct more: them little stamp-sized silky fabric swatches, just floating betwixt my face and his eyes wiry with bloodshot. I wanted to scream for help but dreaded Cassie’s coming, seeing her masterpiece, then I tried screaming anyhow. He choked me whilst muttering, “They killed … They …” I flailed around, my arms extended to their furtherest. Hand open, I touched the cool brass upright of our bedstead, knocked aside the twig, and found a cool cool scabbard. My air seemed a thing of the past but I had enough sensation left so I still felt how cold the metal was. I welcomed that.

  The rest is history—which means: You would’ve done it, too.

  I worked the scabbard off our headboard. I was down to final oxygen. Likeways, I was under him. I let that whole arm straighten free of him bent over me … out to its full length, my own arm came back sideways at him and with last energy—with all my life really really meaning it, with purest glee and rank conviction and a joy just shy of, oh, exceptional sex—honey, I’m bringing that scabbard’s heavy handgrip up hard hard against the ribs and then toward collarbone and finally up against the head of it. Of him. Trying and send him back to It where It belongs.

  I kept chopping, blind I was, a steady chipping sound. And yellow was the only sight I saw. I heard a noise out in the hall and tried shouting to her, “No! Don’t look,” but he still had such a vise around my vocal cords, child. I heard just metal meeting bone, nice sound. I did that more, a kind of spasm dance betwixt us, hooking us like in the old days, but for different final reasons. “His temple,” go for his temple, and in adrenaline’s wild cascading calm (always my friend, Adren, and a pal ofttimes called upon) I had time to realize that Temple was a church and holy place, plus the pivot trigger of a brittle head. Here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the door and free all the people.

  There came two noises, one a long shriek from behind me that I knew was not from the sight of me being strangled—not from the sight of me bludgeoning the man back, a sight by now grown almost humdrum—no, it was her, understanding that her coat was dead. The sound rolled endless as some great tire screeching flat, as a great ship’s sinking.

  For the coat’s sake, I kept at it. I got a pinch of air, and finally after one serious break and splinter, wind rushed into me with such a sissing welcome sound, like, gasp, my flying up, inhale, to freedom finally.

  “I’ll live.”

  A skull is a fairly tough old egg but can be broken.

  He was bowing across a fur coat smeared in liquids yellow and white and now smudged with added red. Half his face and head were black-red, messy. I regretted that. But I was busier screening her coat from her, me crying, “Don’t look at what we’ve done to it. Go out, go wait. I’ll fix it.” The blood I’d helped to add. I wadded fur behind me, I pressed it there, hiding it, and blubbering.

  “Embarrassed”—I literally felt that, shielding her garment as I squatted over Captain Marsden’s sideways carcass.

  Cassie stood there in the doorway, hands joined, fingers laced before her, wagging the head side to side and looking completely and totally detached from me and from him under me.

  She said two words, very quiet. She said, “White people.”

  I REMEMBER it was Election Day. I’d volunteered as a poll watcher and was due in two hours’ time and felt guilty about missing that. Cas and me stayed like this the longest time. The unfailing Seth Thomas chimed in my clean kitchen and I longed to be there with it, out of this, all this. How had this occurred like this? Ugly.

  She stood in the door looking at my husband and myself and doing nothing. Nothing left to do.

  She said, “Wants it all, they take nearbout everything good, these goddam whites.”

  I clamped hands over my ears. I’d rather look at him than hear this out of her. Despite the mangling of the head’s one side, there was just a bit of pink across his white beard—not bad, like damage you spit out when you’ve brushed your teeth too hard. He appeared, child, unbelievably relieved. Cataracts filmy. Calm for the first time in decades, or maybe ever, maybe since that day he left our beloved town holding hands with his buddy like girlfriends that age might.

  Finally I said something pitiful and male and really white: said I’d special-order a sable for her, would she like a sable? After I’d tried that crude type of bribery, she come over and dully helped me get down off the bed. “Well …” she said, resigned, exhausted. “Well, so it like this, is it?” and she looked him over. She spoke. “Oh, Willie Willie Willie, look at you.”

  She lifted the chenille spread and I feared she’d toss it over him before I was even sure of his state, though I basically was sure already. Instead, Cas eased the cloth over her coat. She yanked mink free of his weight via many unsentimental shoves. She carried her mink like a burn victim, child, to one corner closet and in there, bending to the floor, Cas hid the thing.

  Next she dragged back over and pressed one ear to his chest. “He gone,” she said. “You ain’t got nothing to worry bout,” she said, like she sure had. “Be self-defense.”

  “Self what?”

  I’D SAID I would relieve Lolly at the firehouse polls by six and I got there just in time. Naturally I cleaned myself up first. Cassie wouldn’t talk to me. I sent her home in a cab. Silent. No winter coat of mine would fit her. The sheriff and the undertaker had finally left. I’d phoned them all, cool as anything, and told each what’d happened. My tone of voice was samish, boring—I just laid out how I’d killed my own spouse, around three-ten, in there.

  At the cinder-block firehouse, wearing a scarf and a clean jersey dress and after bathing my late husband’s shit and cum off me, I settled there greeting people, smiling some, Lucy Regular. Nobody really knew yet and I was enjoying this part because I understood it couldn’t last. Had to end. I got there around six and had thirty-five minutes’ grace before one of the Lucas children came in and gaped at me—not able to hide her shock—and said, “Lucy? Should you be here like this, after … this afternoon? Are you all right?” I said nothing. Other ladies at the table cut their eyes my way. Lolly did, she’d stayed to chat. The Lucas girl, Jean, sweet person, Jean, she says, “May I? I know this is chancy, but may I?” I shrugged. She pulled my nice silk neck scarf aside. The others gasped at the four-inch blood blister, clear around. I hadn’t let myself even look at it in a mirror. At my age, you can bathe and brush your hair away from mirrors. Maintenance.

  “I am going to ask to walk you home, Lucy, may I? I think we should, really, or stop by the new doctor’s on the way. May I do that, please? Let me walk you over to Summit, sweetie, now.”

  “I don’t want to be there in that house tonight, Jean. The polls don’t close till nine. I believe I’ll work straight through if that’s okay.”

  SHERIFF told me there would be an inquest.

  I told him in glum flat detail how I had beat my husband’s head in with his sword holder and how I was really ready to take my medicine. I’d known Sheriff Cooper since childhood. His granddad and dad we
re both Sheriff Coopers before him. He pointed to my neck and he pulled my collar open (Jean had snitched!) and Sheriff said, “Looks like you’ve already taken some your medicine. No, ma’am—Mr. Marsden’s death will likely be reported as on account of ‘a fall at home.’ If I have anything to do with it, and as elected county sheriff, I do, ma’am.”

  “Maybe a serious fall at home,” I said.

  “Okay then, serious. He did have what doctors call a violent streak. Them that lives by the sword … Ma’am, I’m out of line here but some of us never got over the thing with the gun and Ned. Ned was my age at Lower Normal, my class.—In all my years of police work, I’ve never come near to throwing up until today. The sight of it sickened me.”

  “I know.” I looked down at my own hands that’d done it. “I’m so ashamed. I used his scabbard on him. I told you, Mr. Cooper. I don’t know if I had to hit him that number of times to slow him down.”

  “No, not him. That, I seen before. Not him, the coat, ma’am—what he did to her coat she grew. She’s been wearing that since I was knee-high to nothing. That was the worst. Excuse my professional opinion at this time of mourning and all, Mrs. Lucy, but? Ma’am? he was one sick motherfucker.”

  “Was he? I guess so, sir, but … you know. Right along, he was also sort of … you know. It’s day to day, ain’t it? You just take it day to day.”

  DIED on me finally. I had to.

  3

  I DIDN’T clean his room up, couldn’t face it yet. Felt surprised when the undertaker cleared out Captain on a khaki stretcher but not it, not her coat. It was still in our closet there under chenille, like personally ashamed.

  Sleep, I didn’t expect. But I slid right down into the famous rabbit hole. Major final thought: I’d get a new one for her, genuine sable. I would phone Mr. Ekstein—use my first and only in-jail phone call, if it came to that. I’d order sable floor-length. His store’s motto: “If you don’t know furs, know your furrier.” True, Cas wouldn’t have no access to the names and dispositions of each li’l beast in it. But I did at least have sense enough not to go and buy her a new mink one.

  Next day downtown, Ekstein said he could, for a price, get the sable here by Friday and the funeral. It’d come clear from Raleigh in a truck with just that in it. I ordered it against the Captain’s life insurance and savings, and though it cost a pretty penny, I loved news of its expense. It had to cost a lot to even start to mean something. It could never mean enough.

  I hand-delivered it, but all I’ll say is, I knew it was a pale imitation of the real ruined one. (I’d taken the original to the back door of Ekstein’s in a big shopping bag and, with him stone-faced at the smell, showed it to him, asked, “Is there a chance of … cleaning it up?” He finally held his nose and shook his head and said that this coat had cost him more fur business in Falls for more years than I could even imagine. A homemade fur coat scared people off from getting a real one.)

  All I’ll say is that she acted mighty mighty cold to me. Cas was eating block starch when I arrived and she barely stopped that long enough to take the sable out the box and try it on. The new coat looked, to my mind, just excellent on her—a perfect fit, which made it cost more, getting pelts aplenty to cover her with some to spare. “You done tried,” she said, but withdrawn-like. Then she took it off and tossed it on a chair. I’m talking “tossed.” You know how she gets.

  It hurt me, though I saw what had been took away from her, and I sure wanted to understand. I’d hoped she’d see, child, it won’t me that did it—but too maybe it was, partway. That’s what kills you.

  She come to the service but wearing no coat. And in November. I’d wanted the new one on her. I longed to hear others praise it. But she’d know that every compliment for this one meant it looked piles better than her last, her first, her real one.

  THE BURIAL was quiet for somebody so famous. Embarrassment maybe. “Died of a serious fall at home,” the Falls paper said. Most all my living kids turned up in black clothes, only Ned’s red-and-white cane adding color to our row. There were flowers from the Meltons’ barbecue place and civic clubs, and Lucas-Hedgepath Enterprises someway sent a huge batch of glads with a note: “An ever-faithful customer is gone and regretted.” The local chapter of the National Rifle Association sent a football-mum bouquet, the only one I refused to have at graveside. Tacky of them, if you ask me.

  Castalia refused to take the first-row seat we saved her though Lou went over and asked Cas to join us, asked in a way few humans could refuse. Cas stood back there, her arms crossed, glaring at everybody. I had imagined sitting in the crook of her great arm, and that arm suddenly all sabled. Nothing turns out quite like you expect, does it, sug? Fact is, for all my loving the woman, I’ve never really known her all that good.

  NOT ONE tear was shed at the grave, and though I couldn’t manage myself, I do wish somebody had.—It’s slavery, being middle class!

  I never did get locked up for doing it. There was a type of hearing—so called—but nobody there truly heard me. You’d think I was having fantasies while I sat telling all, telling and retelling the stubborn truth. “Fine, fine,” said Billy Preston, handsome in black robes, “accidental death. Would you like some water, Mizz Lucy?”

  I considered running a confession in the Herald Traveler. I got as far as calling their new young Yankee editor. He said, Was this another of these sick Southern jokes and who was this, and hung up on me. That did it. I tried relaxing. You’ve heard of the perfect crime? Usually takes months of preparation, honey. I had onto fifty years to get it right.

  WE GOT thirty-nine casseroles before, after, and during the funeral. A household record. We also got the modern kind, called quiche—the first I’d seen. History! Ned and Lou and the twins were perfect and Baby got home after the funeral but in the company of the best-looking young man anybody’d ever seen. She had more luggage than Barnum, but good luggage. And she was dressed like Jackie Kennedy did later. A picture.

  Then everybody cleared out and it was me alone in the humongous house. I had bad dreams at first and slept on the living-room couch, nearer the door. But slowly it got to be tolerable and finally a silent joy. Some of the old folks in here talk like a side-street house, with just you in it, is a curse of Satan. I got to like it. I asked Castalia over for meals. She refused three weeks straight, then finally managed the porch steps. She’d gained still more weight and, next time we had supper, I had to go call on her. I did not feel all that welcome. For one thing, she’d pulled down all her front yard’s mink cages and those beasts left alive were living right in her home with her. Running free! Sanitary it was not—but I didn’t like to say nothing. The hem of her new sable coat had fallen half on the floor and one lucky mink was hiding back of it. I bit my lip, said nothing. The coat was hers. I tried eating the chicken and dumplings she’d made but you could see mink droppings along the wall’s edges. Minks scurried along the sides of Cassie’s rooms. I went to fetch something for her and them little things in one cardboard box just snarled at me. Mostly she sat here eating and—in the next three months—her body spread and it was ugly to see now. Seemed the more there was of Castalia Marsden, the less there was of her. Bits of food and stuff, I noted, silent, had dropped right on the sable near her table. Her face was graying up on her, started being sunken. The last of her beauty was lost to view, but one day I snapped my fingers. I stared at this shrinking wizened head of hers set atop the body, mammoth. “You’re looking like your Auntie Reba. I never seen her in person but from what you’ve said … you are a dead ringer.”

  “That a fact? Well, I can’t see it but could do worse, seem like.”

  Then I got the inspiration. Her old coat was still in our garage uphill. I didn’t care to have it in our house but couldn’t throw it out. I had asked did she want it, or want it burned, or what? She wouldn’t react none. Now I said how we should bury it, proper, in the family plot—not next to Captain surely, but there under the old magnolias where Lady More Marsden rests along w
ith famous others. “We’ll buy it the best child’s casket and put it in there proper with some balms and some sachets and we’ll say stuff over it and I’ll hire real gravediggers to lay it down there decent.”

  She looked at me. She quoted me at me and it was the first sign of real life from her for many weeks. “Shows you you thinking, Lucy. Right good sign.” Then Castalia nodded. “That’s fitting. I accept.”

  At that funeral, we wept.

  Gravediggers didn’t know what was in the bronze baby casket and maybe wondered why no preacher man was present. The fellows lit cigarettes off to one side till Cassie hollered, “No smoking, clowns. We got a funeral going on over here, ever hear of one?” They stomped them Chesterfields but quick.

  We held on to each other. Just us chickens. I looked around at granite markers. Already I knew most names on most stones. “So,” I thought, “Falls.”

  November, Cas and me both shivering some. Oh but here I wished she’d worn her new fur coat today. It was back yonder on a kitchen chair catching crumbs and ferret breath. It’s tacky to talk prices but I’d asked for the best from Mr. Ekstein and I’d paid fifteen thousand dollars for it. Plus state sales tax. I will say that I could not exactly afford it, looking back. I don’t know if I blame myself or Ekstein but I wrote one check for it and the check went through and most of the ragtag inherited money I had on earth went with it. And so, it was vain of me, I know—but I wanted it worn this day at least, you know, at the other one’s funeral? Though I see this is my limit. I had learnt my limits, darling, and I am learning still.

  Anyway, we were mourning the real coat and beside me this mammoth woman (I had to drive right up to the hole cut in sod and to then put out her folding chair), Cassie cried, “My babies. I never met one mink I liked.” And I heard this fond admiring in her tone. How strange, I decided, that this most basically likable person I’d ever met should put a premium on that, on keeping folks off, preventing anybody’s nearness and pleasure in her—but then I understood that this made sense for her, for Miss Castalia Marsden, what with history and all.