Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  THE DUMB SOLDIER

  by Robert Louis Stevenson

  When the grass was closely mown,

  Walking on the lawn alone,

  In the turf a hole I found

  And hid a soldier underground.

  Spring and daisies came apace.

  Grasses hid my hiding place.

  Grasses run like a green sea

  O’er the lawn up to my knee.

  Under grass alone he lies,

  Looking up with leaden eyes,

  Scarlet coat and pointed gun,

  To the stars and to the sun.

  When the grass is ripe like grain,

  When the scythe is stoned again,

  When the lawn is shaven clear,

  Then my hole shall reappear.

  I shall find him, never fear.

  I shall find my grenadier.

  But for all that’s gone and come,

  I shall find my soldier dumb.

  He has lived, a little thing,

  In the grassy woods of spring,

  Done, if he could tell me true,

  Just as I should like to do.

  He has seen the starry hours

  And the springing of the flowers

  And the fairy things that pass

  In the forests of the grass.

  In the silence he has heard

  Talking bee and ladybird,

  And the butterfly has flown

  O’er him as he lay alone.

  Not a word will he disclose,

  Not a word of all he knows.

  I must lay him on the shelf,

  And make up the tale myself.

  It Ends in the Air

  … We, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

  —II PETER 3:13

  HERE WE GO. Up. You feel it in your breastbone and your wrists.

  It’s my first time on a aeroplane ever and me this scared and you here with me. I bet you been before. I thought so, these days. Of course I’ve seen them before, planes. Were you watching when that astronaut teacher blew up in that rocket? Her relations were right there watching from the ground. Don’t think about it. Since Jerome’s off in England with his friend seeing theater shows finally, I figured I’d have to do this by my lonesome. You’re the only one I phoned when good news came and here you are, big as life. Here we are, in the air where we’ve both always belonged.

  How many times have I already showed you the letter? See, Agnes Scott Nursing School in Atlanta, it’s honoring “distinguished graduates living or dead.” And our Lou won one. You reckon her prize will be a plaque or a cup? Friends at Lanes’ End laid odds I’d wind up in Miami Beach, hijacked. Think there’s a chance?

  Your taking time off and helping wheel my chair on here and your liking my impulse-bought jersey suit and your settling right beside me, it’s appreciated. Oh, here comes that stewardess again. Bet you she hennas. They do stand straight. How can they tolerate those heels all day?—Why yes, miss, I believe I would accept a compliment martini, I thank you kindly. (What’s in one, sug? You want it? It’s free.)

  You reckon the awards banquet will expect me to make a speech? Sure hope not. I can’t put two words together, I mean not in public for strangers. Not chummy like us two together, hunh? Some joy it’s been for me. Way back, you just said, “yes?” The rest is history. Tell you what: On land, we’ve sorted through my mess. Now we’re up here in the air, it’s your turn. Don’t get shy on me. All I got is time.

  Mustn’t look now but the one on your left is smiling at you. He is so. I saw it. Businessman. Somewhat bald in front but kindly, cute. I like his looks. Decent Billy Preston kind of Southern boy, God love them. Oh, here’s our new friend with my first martini. So, so this is gin, hunh? Bet it’s silent but deadly. We’re vibrating some, that normal? I did see my mended rose-pattern valise come up the conveyor belt. At least my speech notes are aboard. I did prepare a little something. Taw helped. Look at those cars, the color of Easter eggs from this height, live and learn. You know? flying already feels natural. So much does when its time finally comes. I count on that.

  Bet I already told you my one about The Man Who Loved His Wife Too Good. Uh-oh, did? Fine. Well, there’s still When the Shoe Fits.—That too?

  Then it’s Lucy’s turn for pumping you. But first, scrunch over here close to my shotgun window seat, tell me what that is, darling. See yon two-toned stripe written all through the woods, how trees in one line only are a different color? You figure maybe acid rain did that? These Republicans look the other way while industry just poisons us. Or maybe a deep vein of potash or something. I wouldn’t mind napping now, but first I got to find out what that is. You know me. This gin ain’t half bad. Don’t let me embarrass myself, beyond the usual. You’re kind to let me hold your hand and all. You been so doggone loyal, coming back and back, I do love the idea of Loyal.

  Look, Bill’s already dozing over his personal copy of Business (I told you he was a businessman). Appears to be married. We’ll ask him about that strange color brightening land down there. He’s from Georgia and should know.

  See? It’s plainer again, like one lightning zigzag but with trees inside it of a changed color. Seems to go miles across in some spots, narrows at others. The mark keeps pushing southward under our plane’s crossed-shaped shadow yonder. Is that us? Thought so. Green inside the stain looks newer than what flanks it. And all this feels familiar, like I knew about it onct. Let’s wake young Bill. Don’t be chicken, just nudge him with your knee, he won’t mind, I know. The Bills of this world are wonderful. He just drank his too fast. If he wakes up mad, I’ll take full blame. Promise.

  TO ALREADY be pointing down there, eager to ask, when Bill goes, “See the stripe?” it freezes me, his guessing. I feel upset for no real reason I can name.

  “Know what that is, Mrs.? They claim it’ll fade on us in a few years.”

  I venture, maybe some mineral deposit livening the color of that land? But Bill tilts across you, apologizing, his nice face rests direct beside mine and I’m comforted by feeling heat drift from him. I like knowing I’m in air, plus semi-tipsy and about to learn something else new.

  “Sherman’s path,” Bill says. “Still shows from way up here, imagine. Ma’am, see how it changes at that river crossing? Going in at one spot, then wading out with the horses and torches downstream, there? Stretches clear to Atlanta, which he burned, you’ll remember. From your history books, I mean.” Bill thinks he’s made a joke about my advanced age, child. But I’m in no pranking mood, knowing how that Struggle still shows—to God’s eyeview and birds’.

  I mash my forehead on the chilly plastic porthole here (half fretting for whoever’ll have to clean this grease spot later).

  “Yes, ma’am, the whole burned part grew back greener.” Bill is ordering another round for us, a gent. “Maybe charcoal helps trees come up stronger? I’ve got a brother-in-law in wood technology at Georgia Tech, should ask him. But, yeah, that’s what you found, ma’am. And on your first time up.”

  He retrieves his Business. Grateful for this hand you let me squeeze unmercifully just now, I am—like always—glad to know. But spooked some. Maybe it’s the free drink or could be the danger of getting this high up and playing like I’m owed this, which I’m not. A while back, we felt how this plane worked to leave the dirt—this plane prefers the ground, makes sense. I don’t know what I’m feeling here but maybe it’s just: thrilled. Going to fetch a plaque for Louisa, or maybe even a silver loving cup, which would be more useful probably. And then you coming along, and my getting treated like Somebody by strangers and then to look down on this wonder of Nature over combat. Will I embarrass you? my forehead pressed here to cold plastic?

  Fresh green is teaching me something. This burn rambles clear from Virginia past our hometown to Atlanta. What a beautiful map of a scar! Educational—a bitter, optimistic green. I recognize it. Up under my ribs, a sweet unlatching starts, a tallying. I stare
down at that tint changed by hurt. Recovery has upgraded everything that blossomed after. I know scorched-earth policy. And I know about continuing, child. But I never knew that keeping on could, from this high, just look so pretty.

  Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light. Fact. The fact is fair. People recover. Ain’t it something, what folks can spring back from?

  Today I feel right wonderful myself. I’m thinking fond thoughts of my husband and my children, child. To be riding our Southern sky, with me strapped up here in a seat belt I secretly invented, to be getting gently half plastered on a second free drink supplied me by a friendly moral man, to be going to harvest prizes my kids earned—oh, it’s a day. And that a young friend such as you would take off work, and use vacation time just to shove my wheelchair on and off this silver rocket, well, it’s more than anybody should expect, ever.

  You’d think that all along I really had been college material! You’d think I was Mrs. Gotrocks, somebody you’d ask for more than street directions or her shortbread recipe.

  I see that path down there, refined. Again I feel this wild ambition stoke up in me. I want to. What? Anything, darling. Everything. I have seen so much and have someway been left alive to tell. I ain’t told all, but most—well, some. Now I need to hear your all. Start from birth and go till now. First though, let my eyes stray back to that color yonder, as self-made as me. I am listening. I know how. Before I shush, one last thing needs saying. I want to speak a fact that Green just taught me. I’ve long waited to know this. I got to say it now out loud to make it so. I’m mighty mighty glad to have you helping, listening. It’s just this.

  Nobody could stop me.

  Several tried.

  I am still here.

  At last, I get to say down towards our world, “The war is over.”

  ALLAN GURGANUS

  Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. His honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  ALSO BY ALLAN GURGANUS

  OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL

  Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and Colonel William Marsden was fifty. If he was a “veteran of the War for Southern Independence,” Lucy became a “veteran of the veteran” with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator’s daily battles in the Home—complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72663-7

  PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

  With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists—refugees from the middle class—hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher’s son whose good-looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina “Alabama” Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each other’s work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this trio grows up fast, somehow founding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70203-7

  THE PRACTICAL HEART

  In his fictional town of Falls, North Carolina—a watchful zone of stifling mores—Allan Gurganus’s fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, and betrayal. Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted great-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and eighteenth-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths—sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming—from human hearts as immense as they are local.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72763-4

  WHITE PEOPLE

  In these eleven stories, Allan Gurganus gives heartbreaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires and triumphs of a grand cast of Americans. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, senior citizens startled by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70427-7

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2001

  Copyright © 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Allan Gurganus

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1989.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Earlier versions of chapters from this work have been published by the following: “How to Leave” in Antaeus, “A Body Tends to Shine” in The Paris Review, “The Tailor and the Leg” in Southwest Review, “Fight Song” in The North American Review, “The Passable Kingdom” in MSS, “Love at 99” (“One Old Man in Here I Like”) in The Leader, and two separate portions from “How to Return,” one as “Under This Very Mall” in Harper’s and the other as part of “Garden Sermon,” an essay concerning the novel’s historical sources, in The Iowa Review. “Good Help” was originally published as a chapbook by the North Carolina Wesleyan Press in a signed edition of 1,000 illustrated by the author; twenty-six alphabetized copies were accompanied by original drawings.

  I appreciate the editors’ early and abiding encouragement.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Gurganus, Allan

  Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All/ Allan Gurganus—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76411-9

  I. Title

  PS3557.U814 O4 1989

  www.vintagebooks.com

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