Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (102 page)

I’d soon made more decisions in a shorter time span than had maybe ever happened previous, child. For me, I mean. I ain’t making claims that I turnt up a cure for cancer, mind you. But it was honest fun—which is something anyways. I hadn’t hurt anybody.

Half tranced, I turned to my trusty Singer and, feet at pump, started dressing my new doll thingums. A few simple tubes—wide one for Judy’s skirt, two skinnies for sleeves. (Put gold rickrack to edge all and to provide a certain Bible-day Oriental gypsified dash.) In a minute I ran up Holofernes’ nightshirt—white cotton flecked with blood which played right into our story’s hands. I worked in a blur, like I’d redreamed all this for years, like it had taught me how to play each angle. I recalled being a kid, inventing in a tree house. How if you made one thing be so, others followed. I felt—how to say this?—a dampening in my hurry—a quickening lower-body thrill.

It was a smear of time those minutes I come up with Puppetry Gospel. Like Ned sliding towards home plate during side-yard baseball—I felt myself flopping towards some goal my body knew better than my poor young hickory-nut head did. I
felt certain
. That’s it. Part of me understood how my husband’s inborn certainty had long been one of his big continuing advantages over me. How, if you seem certain, you are. And if you don’t, people sniff it and that is that, for good.

But the person could change things, couldn’t she? Yeah, she could. Certainly. Even Ruth sensed something with her X-ray eyes through my lined drapes. Poor Ruth knew I was on to something good, so she cranked up a tacky tango, loud. Nothing bothered me.

I jammed a darning-needle sword in Judy’s right hand. And there she stood over her sleeper. I’d emptied one of Cap’s cigar boxes of scissors and such, I covered it with red tinfoil off a handy pot of immortal if uninspired Christmas poinsettias in the windowsill. With the stage all set, I reread the tale three times, then moved my dolls, puppets, whatever, through sensible paces. They soon did like folks
would
do.

The second they each had yarn hair, my cast became real to me. Their logic easy to figure as anybody local’s—even with Ruth blasting a dance that’d be shaming in your nicer Argentine circles, Holofernes was a older man who snored nights, a meat eater and sound sleeper after a day of war’s bloodshed then red beef. Judy sprung to her dark work.

ONLY THEN
did I bellow children in, “It’s show time, li’l Chrustians!” Which froze them on tiptoe. My tone must’ve spooked them, they were so unused to me excited about anything except both twins getting gashed on the same grape-soda bottle.
Certainty
they heard. Kids packed my sewing-room door,
faces braced to find me jerking in some fit. I apologized for how selfish I’d been, hiding in here for twenty-five full minutes. Couldn’t get the tone right yet, the tone of feeling “artistic,” “entitled”—the deep pleasure all this’d given me already. Sinful—fun for me felt sinful then. (Lately fun is holy.)

My kids’ playmates hung back but I called them into the dark workroom. More the merrier, I needed honest child reactions. They grouped on the floor before my worktable as I slid behind, standing there. I flicked on my gooseneck lamp, aimed it at a glittery cigar-box stage like some real theater. I then quoted the whole story straight through.

“Now,” said I, so stirred I felt ashamed, “let’s see how all that might could
look
, shall we?”

I was winging it, child.

But you can’t let them know that, see? Children, dusty from our vacant lot, tipped nearer our one light source. In light, my hands coached strange new little figures through a drama that was, it seemed, way bigger than them, bigger than us. I had this vision as I told and showed, both. It sounds cheap but it happened: felt I was being puppeted by something with me in its hands and these figures in mine—something lowered into me. I thought of these shapes not as dolls but figments. Like in “figments of your imagination.”

Finally I’d moved my couple to their outcome. I followed word for word—like some slow chef working through a cookbook. At last, when my lady figment—with a goodly sweep of her silver needle-sword—slashes the sleeping tyrant’s neck, and when—with a playful yank—I accidentally on purpose jerked that old soldier’s head right off (felt
good!)
, all the children made one swallowed gasp. The hickory head of Holofernes rolled across the floor under my Singer and four kids scrambled for it, checking its neck end, seeking bloody traces. Give me goose bumps, their belief. I believed.

Then they just clapped like crazy and Ruth’s record stopped, the entire trumpet of her Victrola seemed trying and listen, too.

I made the figments both take bows. Even our headless wonder hopped up (bald of brains), receiving credit. When babies kept whistling and stomping, asking for the whole thing once again, well—like they say, I believe, in the Moving Picture Industry—I knew I had me a hit on my hands.

In
my hands. What more can I tell you? Fame spreads. A good thing, in a town this size, is soon unbusheled into broad daylight and I had requests to “freelance,” you might could call it, at other Sunday schools. Everybody invited me but my friends the Jews, who still met in their secret rose-covered gazebo. I think they only held back out of shyness. I would’ve done them a freebie just to see inside. Nothing to offend, either: Most of the good stories are
Old
Testament.—Of
course
I’d like the Old Testament best, darling, look who I married.

After that second time through my premiere, after reattaching the head just so Judy could have her way again (you won’t be surprised to learn it’s harder to hook a head back on than to just yank it off), I asked kids for
tough criticisms. “I can take it, believe me. Don’t treat me like anybody’s momma. Treat me like a … equal. I need to get this right by eleven on Sunday for church school or I stand to look real foolish. Mess like this, it either works or it’s pure pitiful, you know?”

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.

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 stacked 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).