Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (12 page)

Smith said, “Home, I was the best non-Chinese tailor in New Bern, sir. I could salvage anything. I do mean anything,” and he stared so hard at the scapegrace outfit, Digby finally went, “Oh, yes. Well. I once was a very particular dresser. Owned twenty stickpins, none less semi-precious than a tiger’s eye. Now, down to this. It’s the times, boys, it’s these times …”

Smith winked. “While I’m in here (though I don’t plan to stay long), let me set this rag aright for you, sir. Only thing I hate worse than spiffing up one of our finer-looking enemy officers is idleness. Ask Willie here. Why, I’m not just un-lazy, sir, I’m counter-lazy. Ask Will. Will?”

But Digby had opened a Bible. He explained the oath of Federal allegiance he was now bound to administer. Smith fidgeted and glared and said things loud. Willie studied his jumpy friend. Back in camp, Smith kept pretty quiet. To fellow enlistees, Smith always acted kind and mild, sewing on their buttons no matter how ornery each hellion was. But one thing Salvador Smith could not abide: a officer, any officer. If Sal hated Reb officers, he was all but boiling whilst this Digby yammered about reforming unregenerate Southerly hooliganism.

The room was filled with guards and muskets. Sal Smith tried getting around the desk to offer Digby a jolly back pat. When pistols discouraged this, the Corporal went, “Sir, was it Dickby, Digby? Us Southerners sure did give you ragged-looking Yankees a perfect conniption fit at Manassas, didn’t we, though?” The Major called this insolent, especially from a man about to swear the Union his undying loyalty.

Digby’s lecture rolled on when Smith butted in again: Us Rebs sure wiped you-all’s noses in it at Manassas, huh?

Guards grabbed Smith, they held his hand onto the Bible. Oath finally done, Smith sweated and shook like a man forced to take poison. “Sir?” he asked, shivering, right hand still in the air. “Am I a good Yankee now?”

“I dearly hope so. They claim the Bible has unlimited power.”

“Well, Major, Yankee to Yankee, didn’t them Rebs just whup the living hell out of us at Manassas?”

Two days later on a inspection tour, Digby bobbed into Smith and Marsden’s straw-lined cell. It’d been a classroom. A map of the world was painted on one wall. You could see that rich girls had daubed up each and every ocean. Just the word “Persia” in red cursive was a poem that filled a fellow with careful feelings. It made Sal Smith speak at length about six daughters’ quirks and merits. The Major wore a even worse-looking uniform, carried the other tossed over his arm. “I wonder … in view of your professed sartorial ability and since nobody else here can …” Digby passed Smith the tatters, plus one needle and a spool of thread. “Scissors, you will understand—gent to gent—are simply not possible, under the circumstances.”

“Say no more. Now my fun starts.” Smith grinned. “Anything beats idleness, even helping out one of my fellow blue-bellied yellow-backed Yanks. Sir, you won’t recognize this rag when Salvador Smith gets through with it.”

“I suppose I should thank you.”

Next morning, just past dawn, one dapper red-haired major of the Northern medical corps strolled away from camp. He led a young prisoner-assistant. This wandering officer acknowledged the gateway sentinel’s salute, but he paused. “I seem to detect, Private, a touch of the pinkeye. Not good. Report to my tent during sick call at nine sharp. That clear, son?”

The guard saluted, then rubbed his eyes. “You know, I
thought
they were burning.”

Next, the doctor and his aide wandered unarmed nearer Southern lines. Smith soon stripped so the uniform wouldn’t get him kilt—he felt relieved to appear nearly naked and less a officer for that. Then the blue monogrammed jacket was carried to camp and hung outside the headquarters tent—a trophy. That whole day, Sal and Will—centers of attention—were considered clever as possible. “Tell us it again,” troops asked.

The Private and the Corporal felt huge, reborn. My husband explained to me how: While you escape from what seemed your surefire doom, adrenaline makes the world almost too beautiful to bear. Overample brightness burns so far into your eyes it scratches your skull’s inside rear curve. Light hangs over every tree and hillside like some stray fuel that you might gather in your arms and maybe eat. A thirteen-year-old boy, walking beside his trusty friend, felt like he was, oh, maybe a brand-new velvet pincushion, nearbout
wanting
shafts of steel in him. Nothing seemed too hard for you
to stand. Pain would maybe register as pleasure, the way—leaving both school and jail—your first sight of a wet pretty woods at dawn came in, so new-looking it almost carved you up with tenderness.

Return was all grace and celebration.

Was the very morning my poor Will got shot.

THE
skinny pip wandered out of camp, still feeling half drunk on the joy of slipping free. He found some berry bushes. Since his hometown buddy’d died, Will had started acting pushy, vague, and sometimes wild. Will remembered Sal and others tying him to the cot, preventing his nighttime one-boy raids on Yankees. He drifted between acting passive as a small-town debutante (“stand over there,
smile”)
and going haywire as any Mormon double-crossed. Some mornings, Willie woke up feeling all kitten-weak—others, he came to like a fist in boiling oil.

Only now that something decent had happened did Will start remembering how it felt: being just regular and human again. So, just before Antietam grabbed him, Will settled near blackberry bushes, was just commencing to gobble his fill. Came a sound—hoarse, buzzing past like a squirrel running on one tree limb overhead. Was then Private Willie Marsden noticed his left leg, from the knee down, had gone the red-purple of blackberries. For one second, feeling nothing bad yet, the boy told hisself, “It’s just sweet berry juice. I spilled. I spilled a lot.”

In the medic’s tent, Will was visited by the orangey-pink corporal who’d stitched him clear of prison. Crusted sleep matted the corners of Sal’s eyes. A good-sized twig stuck unnoticed in his hair. But Sal was one of those people whose grossness is part of their comedy and so is okay and—to Will now—almost dear. Yeah, “dear.” Who
else
was there?

Smith touched the boy’s forehead. “Free of frying pan, grabbed by fire, hunh, buddy? Sure wish I could sew it back right for you. I reckon it hurts plenty.” Sal studied the matted pant leg ripped wide open.

First, Willie, not yet thirteen—still too ready to believe in textbook braveness—shook his head No.

“Not hurt? To be shot right in your leg and it don’t smart?”

“Well, I was shot, Sal … but more
across
the leg.”

“Hey, this is Sal, bud. Went slam
in
. Bound to be paining you something fierce, why just look at the swelling. Near big as your waist.”

Willie finally nodded. He lay staring at the tent’s top. All afternoon he’d tried counting its threads. His pal’s fringe of red hair now tickled the edges of his view.

“Does,” Will admitted. “Sure hurts plenty, Sal. Burns then freezes. And you know what? It’s weak of me, I know,” here he signaled Smith closer. “There’s a black girl on our farm, name of Castalia—and I been thinking it’d sure be nice to see her face. She’s not what anybody’d call beautiful but she is. Too, I can’t help it, Sal—Momma’s real bad in emergencies but … I do … just wish … she was here …”

“Nothing more natural in the world, buddy.”

(I got to put in, child, how this tailor-farmer’s full name run: Salvador Cortez Drake Magellan Smith.
His
mother read novels. She had dreamed of a gallant son. She’d got one. She had dreamed of a handsome son. That, she hadn’t got. Willie loved looking up at Sal, whose Adam’s apple was the size of a coffee mug. Sal’s cowlicks shot out even wilder, his freckles more flapjack-scattered than Will’s own.)

“
SAL
?” Will now spoke real soft to his visitor, like enemies were listening. “They’ll try and take it. Off. I know they’ll want to lop it from the knee down. Sal, I really wish they wouldn’t. Sal, it just looks bad. But, hey, I’m
in
here. The person understands these things. If they’d just leave it on to heal, it will. Heal. But, cut clean off? nothing ever does. I’m not going to have a chance in heck, Sal, if they cut my whole blamed leg off.”

This particular day, Salvador Smith looked worn, blue-green rings ham-mocked under either eye. A letter’d awaited his return from prison.

Good news and bad news—though, as ofttimes happens, child, in
my
life anyways, the show-off bad outdanced the wallflower good. Still, the good sure
was:
After six daughters, Sal’s wife had hauled off and had twin boys. She joked she was going to “Junior” them both, naming one: Salvador Magellan Smith, the other: Cortez Drake Smith. Then the Corporal read how his farm had been foreclosed, how the one Chinese tailor left in charge of his New Bern shop had fallen in love with the alderman’s stout wife and run off with her, nobody knew where to. Missing: the shop’s cashbox and its best worsted.

The letter sketched barest facts, and Sal—tired from escaping, his mind dancing like a janglebones skeleton—made up the rest: A heavyset woman came in to have her overlong skirt altered, a lonely wife, her husband another volunteer in the 70th Carolina Regiment galloped off somewheres to the North. The happy little tailor, going down onto his hands and knees, was soon moving all around Mrs. Buxom like a toy train, his mouth—the cowcatcher—full of pins. This tidy Chinaman asked—in signs—if the woman needed her hem much shorter. She kept going, “Unh-hunh.” She begun to feel his little child-dry hands work around across betwixt her ankles. Her big eyes closed. It was, Sal imagined, toasty in that cramped work space, just the clock ticking, a slow afternoon. Pinning made gentle bites and tugs around her calves. “Shorter still?” “Unh-hunh. Hem more.” From the customer’s toplofty view, the tailor soon seemed her own favorite infant, a pet, but old enough to vote. The more he worked around her shins, the more he seemed the best thing that’d ever happen to her next. Why not? She ordered: “Hem … hem.” The tailor looked up from below. In this warm back room, the lady’s big legs come to seem columns, something to get to the tops of the bottoms of. She was the slow boat from Shanghai, masted. She was a mighty excellent kind of transportation. The snug warm berth he’d stowaway and live in forever. Up skirt went, inch by inch, slowly back
the hem did turn, everywhere his hot dry fingers, soon upon her thigh, thighs. Alterations. A mouth full of warm pins got nearer actual legs. To feel a boy’s tape-measure breath on your bare innerest shanks. Pins burred like a mustache
between
his lips, pins thrummed words, “Shorter yet?” “Unh-hunh, baste it—baste it. Hem it, now.” In a hot rear room full of buttonholes and dummies, one thing leads to another, natural as gravity. Everything that goes down must come up. A hand here, and then to lift him, kiss a mouth with possible straight pins still living in it. Same night, well dressed, they eloped, breezing towards Florida in a rental buggy piled with a Quaker cloakroom’s worth of itchy winter cloth.

“Whoa.” Smith shook his addled head. It all seemed too real to him. He felt hisself in jeopardy of fever, ruin, or a fit. He confessed to Will—once he managed imagining all this, he’d had to step into the woods to relieve certain husbandly feelings. Odd, that being robbed should register this way. During war nothing comes at you on the level. At a maggoty time like this, to think about the Love act! Here a man’s sweet-potato farm was lost, his shop stripped, his wife—still laying in—reduced to a steady diet of yams mostly, the six girls passing croup amongst theirselves. Understandable, the bags under Smith’s eyes as he now told all near Will’s cot.

Trying for small talk, Sal mentioned the shame he’d felt last night: Newly returned to camp, he’d been corrected by a scholarly young society doctor. His nickname was “See and Saw,” owing to a willingness to amputate. Men said he no sooner seen a wound than out his saw flashed.—“Herr Salvatore,” he’d said, “you claim to find our ranks ‘decimated.’ A fine word, Corporal, and an ancient one, but incorrectly applied. ‘Dec-imated’—means a rank’s losing one man in ten. As in, oh, dec-imal points? Here, with us, however, it’s more, what? three in ten? four in ten? But feel free to go on using it in whatever rough way suits you. Only seemed right to clarify.”

This same well-groomed young Lieutenant now walked into the medical tent, nodded towards Smith, stooped nearer Willie’s leg, shifting it side to side without once checking on the big-toothed face hooked to this same unit. Sal looked at nothing else.

“The lead, I fear, is all but bowed around the bone. It’s going to be a difficult one, very difficult. We’ll know more tomorrow. But whatever happens, young man, we shall count upon your continuing bravery.”

The surgeon nodded, left. It was not like Will to cry in front of a fellow soldier. A boy thirteen wanted—more than any grownup might—not to act thirteen. Will cried. He took up Smith’s yam-colored hand. He kissed its toughened knuckles. He breathed on the calluses like trying to make a whole new genie life spring from one thick, working paw. “Don’t let them take it off me. If it stays on, it’ll mend. I just know, Sal. Don’t let him saw me up.”

NEXT
evening in the surgery tent.

A lantern at the patient’s head. One by his feet. One near the spoiled left knee. The precise Lieutenant and a thick-wristed infantry aide enter.
Willie, made drunk to help him abide the pain, is face-up toward tent roof, is listening so. A doubled cloth is stuffed into his mouth to block all crying out. Willie’s now too weak—with fever and the blood loss—to complain or defend life and limb, too weak for doing more than hearing everything go morbidly loud. He feels his eyes’ water slide—back, across wispy sideburns, into ears, now filling.

“Overnight it’s grown considerably worse. Here, some possible early signs of the gangrenous, son. Scalpel. Yes, lead is all but fused with shattered bone. The lead is killing you. It cannot be helped, son. I’m so sorry. Nurse, saw.”

This here implement—pressed in hand—looked pretty much like any nickel-plated one you’d use for household carpentry.