Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (20 page)

Once Cap closed his home’s front door, once he strolled, whistling, toward a garden gate, when he stepped onto sidewalk where I heard him greet three other walking-to-work gents by first names, once he moved past earshot, that same second such a racket of plate clattering and chair shifting banged from one floor under.

Last night I’d asked Cap if this Castalia person lived in. “Not now,” Cap said. My thoughts wrapped clear around these words. At least she’d been banished—maybe for
that
I should feel grateful? Years earlier, his family had owned her, a slave child purchased at age three—imported like some handy portable Afro agricultural product. This much I’d already got out of Cap whilst under covers: From age ten onward, she served Captain’s spoilt beautiful momma as her main “body servant,” whatever that meant. Years after Emancipation, Cap hisself bought Castalia a cottage seven blocks and a continent away downhill in Baby Africa. She now worked here six and a half days a week, leaving our ready-made dinner—on day seven—warming in the oven. What
else
could I learn about the venom factory presently bowling butter churns around the kitchen?

I’d just been given direct orders to keep in bed—prisoner of sheets till shops’ closing time. Well, that type slackness just won’t within my personal makeup, honey, not even on day number one. Sure, I was tired. Sure, seeing my own bloomers across the way—lined with black and white and red all over—made me feel unwell. Yeah, I was scared to face Big Woman downstairs, fixing me either breakfast or arsenic or the two in one. But if not now, when?

Even so—keeping to my own truce side of the huge four-poster, I did dawdle a while. My palms pressed flat over mattress edges, legs kept swinging like a kid’s would. I was. A kid. I wondered how I might could ever make a older sadder person such as her admire and maybe even enjoy a person such as snub-nosed little me.

Meantime, down the oak stairwell, a certain helper now chose to drop a twenty-pound frying pan. Seemed to take metal two full minutes to cease making every single sound that crashing metal can.

There are many kinds of wake-up calls. This, child, had been one of them.

ALMOST
home, my husband he’d touched far corners of his brown beard like some Catholic might tap forehead and shoulder blades. The man had half grinned behind whiskers—maybe as excited as me about being back? I pictured him, a beardless boy of fifteen, hiking home from a war in Virginia and on foot, so eager to see Falls. Maybe even more thrilled than I was tonight, safe back from my bloody Bull Run Honeymoon?

Captain checked his pocket watch. “You’ll soon be properly greeted, my Lucille. I tarried back at old Hedgepath’s in hopes of making precisely this happen.” And—grand as some junior-trainee God—the gent smiled, pointed one forefinger at the hill—
now
.

Sure enough, bells of our churches commenced a Babel of clanging. My breath all but locked. Gongs from far ends of Falls unfolded, overlapping in air like petals of some metal artichoke. Bells chimed slow or fast according to denomination. (Years later, I understood how much my own notion of each religion had got shaped by whatever order its bell announced the hour, and in what tone. Nobody can now tell me that this won’t decided partly by theology, not just via each church’s sexton’s zeal or sloth.) Though all these outfits were Christian, none could agree. Not even on the time of day—much less the angel dance-attendance records atop a much-contested straight-pin head.

First Baptist always sounded off the earliest, maybe as one way of continuously staying
First
. (Those days, most good American bells were cast around Philadelphia and cost you a good bit. Some of Falls’ earliest examples had got melted down for cannonballs during the war. There
was
a cut-rate bell broker in Birmingham—but, like my granddad Angus McCloud believed, you always get what you pay for.) Baptist bells won’t meant to lull you into no false cheer. Their bronze seemed mixed with pig iron and brass. Tart notes scolded you: Years are dicey, Hell is real, Time will go on gonging just this quick, so Get Right with God, Quick, Brimstone Bait. (No Baptist steeple ever bothered to announce the quarter hour at fifteen and forty-five after. Fundamentalists only registered their clocks’ basic bottom and top—hell or high water.)

The choicest bell in town was the rich Episcopalians’. A masterpiece, it was big as two wheelbarrows joined like famous hands, in prayer. Bronze pure as a museum statue’s, its tone come mellow and boozy, old as Europe. It had a most forgiving aftermath—like a retiring senator taking it all back. Sometimes (Mondays especially) it failed to even ring. The sexton, like All Saints Episcopal’s parishioners, drank and admitted so. All Saints’ building was Tudor, its steeple antique brick, Falls’ tallest. Nearby towers—Lutheran’s
starch and Methodist’s high-collar—were white frame. (Locally brick was considered far classier than wood.) These two white churches forever seemed swan-necked on tiptoe, both turned toward All Saints. White steeples near the brick one seemed ladies in cloth coats claiming not to
want
the floor-length fur that they keep ogling.

Falls’ Catholics (all nine families) met, secret as Masons, in a different home each week. (We heard as how they moved their 24-carat life-sized Mary statue under cover of darkness each Saturday night. Nobody’d ever seen it.) The local Jews—prosperous, learned, standoffish except whilst in their stores—buggied to Raleigh fifteen times a year for their non-Sunday Sabbath. This was mostly so their children could meet children of like faith. (A trusted Gentile head clerk was left to manage big Saturday sales in the clothing emporium and to lock up.) Our twenty Jews had a odd place of local worship. Wearing clothes too fine to ever be sold by a store as local as theirs, they gathered in one stone gazebo behind the Eksteins’ giant home. This gazebo had a latticework extra-pointed star above its roof. The star was covered in climbing yellow roses that seemed to try disguising this symbol as any old genteel trellis. No bell drew attention to their rose-draped gazebo synagogue. We heard they discussed novels and poems in their services. Strange.

Finally, our Presbyterians didn’t plan to let no bell get
near
their church. They considered such bauble trappings frivolous. And this too, child, seemed pretty much in keeping and predestined.

(No black church owned any bells larger than the hand-held schoolhouse kind. Black churches
sang
their steeples.)

So: Our first evening back, and from a mile off, how clear we heard each set of chiming move across wide fields, plowing air. How plain we knew each steeple’s voice and what each meant beyond the time it told.

Pink sunset sky made the green hill waiting up ahead look blue. Blunt hillside cast a shadow half a mile wide. And into this stripe of membership shade we kept straight to a straight road, our buggy aimed us right on home.

It wouldn’t last. None of it. But did we know that on this balmy, palmy evening June of 1900? Those two open zeroes were wide eyes greedy to be filled by anything grand. Our town itself would not. Last. The hill itself wouldn’t. And us, least of all. So far, true, I have. But will not. For all that long. Take my word for it. The person herself knows.

I’m using all my last-stand salt-lick energy on this and you.

Even the churches I’ve mentioned as being on Church Street—they too have gone the way of all flesh. No fair.

By late Truman/early Eisenhower, in there, suburban churches’ unlimited parking had begun to suck the faithful out their way—great space-age-looking buildings. Even the Baptists built one shaped like some science-fiction nun’s wide-flaring headdress. Don’t ask me why. First Baptist downtown lost its life to make way for the Church Street Sears store and its huge parking lot that only ever fills clear up at Christmas anyway.

Them forlorn old Houses of Worship left standing downtown have been turned into (a) Belfry Decorators, AID—“with window treatment and interior advice for institutions and the discerning individual,” and (b) Stained Glass Disco Supper Club. (My favorite dancing orderly in here, Jerome, he calls it the
very
Stained Glass Disco.)

Christ once drove certain money changers from the temples. Seems our temples drove out to be near our money-changing malls. Modren times!

Of our great downtown Houses of the Lord, only All Saints stays in use (traditionalists still rule there and have long held potent seats on our City Council). Only their Tudor tower, where Daddy made the farting noises, stood long enough to qualify for a national landmark, it being brick and all. The bell is now rung just on Sundays, only for late service (nearby heathen sleepers complained about the 8 a.m. racket and put a end to that around the time poor John Kennedy got shot). Not even the Episcopals can afford to keep a bell ringer on duty round the clock every fifteen minutes—are you kidding? with these unions and all? Nothing’s what it was. Used to, a blind man could get the Falls time told him free all day!

But not yet, not gone yet, thank you … it’s still the evening of our return. 1900. Here is the church, here is the steeple—I open my mouth and still hear its people.

TO FACE
Castalia Marsden. I got out of the bed. At some point, you have to. Floor was cold under bare feet. I needed that. I stood at the mirror and, even to myself, looked like a sleepy kid—mostly bone. I just wanted Castalia (pushing three kitchen chairs back and forth across kitchen floor) to like me. Is this so much to ask? That, I’m afraid, child, has always been my particular cross to bear. Some folks don’t even notice who’s fond of them, who-all is staring daggers their way. But me? if a imported Yankee clerk at the Mall acts grumpy, I worry over it for weeks.

I guessed Castalia’s life hadn’t exactly been no picnic of extras. The night before troubled me, finding her, arms locked across her davenport chest, ready to be sourly useful in the dim foyer. Castalia’d growled like some spoiled old house pet the day a new pup bounds indoors fluffy-frisky then stops dead.

I now slipped into my simplest blue dress (“understate by two” was Momma’s final words of fashion and moral advice for her only child, bound into marriage—not a breath about biology). I used my new silver hairbrush—“M” engraved loopy as a bow across its back. In my washing-up room, for courage I sniffed violet-scented baby soaps saved from Atlanta’s Honeymoon Hotel of Horrors. I hung six prisms from the window sash. I breathed deep, made my mirror face: Try and look like Mrs. Married and Christian. Ready, you? Pinning up braids, I forced myself downstairs, I made
as much noise as possible, not wanting to startle Castalia none, hoping to clear the coast. I even hummed, then worried this might just aggravate the woman.

“Morning?” calls I down several hallways, not sure which leads to the kitchen. Spying a lino rug’s checkered corner, I tiptoed that way.

Her body seemed arranged to offer me a hemorrhaging double-dare on first sight. She leaned far back against the front of a ten-burner stove, arms yet resting on the mighty bosom, lips pursed like the purest form of hard rubber. One gold dance slipper beat time, a steady clockly tap, irked silly. I smiled so hard I practically got a sore throat. “Hi” was about the best I could manage.

Though bright, Miss Castalia’s clothes looked plainer than last night’s Indian blanket of a Joseph’s cloak. I now understood, she’d been dressed up special for Captain’s return. This worried me. For her sake, his, and yeah, mine. Saddening to think of Castalia’s liking Cap so much she’d bother helping him celebrate the arrival of unpopular
me
. Her face now looked the way burning wires smell.

“Hi,” a child bride repeated. “Captain’s gone, I reckon?” (I
knew
this. Why’d I ask? Don’t you hate yourself sometimes? Why can’t we just keep quiet? Why can’t I?)

No answer.

Behind her, along the stove’s top and covering the wall beyond, dozens of ceramic and paper redbirds—figurines, picture cutouts from calendars and such.

Castalia finally spoke. Her voice parted like dark fur. “You usually sleeps so late?”

My smile got marked down to a grin. I pointed at the big Seth Thomas yonder. “But, Miss Castalia, ma’am, it’s six forty-six a.m.”

A pause.

“You usually sleeps so late?”

She judged how I’d taken this. Then Castalia spun around with the unlikely buoy grace of a real sensitive fat person. She flopped a brick-sized hunk of butter onto hot griddle. “Over easy? Fried? What? Quick. Some us ain’t got the full day long to lounge in. Some us works.”

Still on my feet, I pulled nearer. I found myself speaking to her back. Its shape buckled, frilly-edged as veal too long in a hot pan. I later credited the first day’s boldness to my yet being sore and half asleep. “Ma’am? Ma’am, we don’t even know each other. Please, I want us to be friends … or at least not to start out so doggone harsh. Really. Don’t mind my speaking too frank but I bet we’ll soon get used to things, our both staying here in his house. But doing like
this
, why, we’ll just wear each other down. It’d be such a waste. Let’s commence peaceable, umkay? You could teach me a whole lot. I’ve never onct harmed you, nor you me. So, ‘Peace.’ All right?” (Maybe what I said was shorter. But close to this.)

Seen from behind, her apron straps made two X’s like the answer No
doubled. “Do
that
be what she want! And on her first morning? Well, dreaming’s free, girl. But I been wanting all kind of things. Hoping to be, oh, say a angel made of light, with snow for she wings, and maybe hummingbird feathers for the nappy hair under the arms of her, why not? But I keeps wishing into one hand, spitting in the other, and Cassie can’t help but notice which one keep filling up the quickest. So what else you craves, skin and bones? How you wants these eggs? Get snapping here. Some us earns a living.”

My mother often judged other people’s servants as being “insolent.” I always felt like if I ever personally saw this particular trend, I’d probably recognize it too. Well, honey, I felt like I’d just recognized it.