Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (34 page)

BEING
a man of his word, Will Marsden stepped onto the Atlantic Coastline’s spiffiest club car, every brass spittoon polished to the point of being way overqualified for this line of work. He wore a new suit bought from Lucas’ off a wax dummy. Will picked a jacket with pockets cut roomy enough to hold a little handmade cask that had come to seem almost as valuable as the German clockwork wonder it’d protected so well.

Now, glad for a window seat, Will has stopped by his reunion (they’re all alike and need not be spelled out here) and is headed up more North by train, this time to Maiden, Massachusetts, itself. The Utts are waiting. He’s told his kinfolk in Alexandria he’ll be back in time to buggy South with them.

ASIDE
from earlier sightseeing on foot near Antietam Creek, Maryland—Willie’d never set foot north of the Virginia line. Falls’d always felt quite
north enough, thank you. What he saw from this slow train to Boston started scaring him. The shock part was, child: plain streets, simple trees and houses, regular horses, rivers running blue and brown, even barbershops striped the same two-tone as Stark’s Scissor Tonsorium. He’d expected—what? bands and drill-unit soldiers busying every town square. Will expected more Yankee homes to be painted holy Federal blue. Will felt like Northern shadows should be someway denser, maybe proving bluer than your sunnier Southern gray ones. Slow, along the train ride to Maiden, young Marsden understood how much the color of a Yankee uniform had, like four years’ cataracts, tinted and blurred his whole picture of Unionists’ pastures, Federal cities. In Delaware, he saw a splendid magnolia tree all starred with full white blooms. He felt tricked. If the whole North looks just like the South, what had all that whole mess been about? Though his moneyed family once knew the North real well, though his granddad, Judge More, attended Harvard College, Will had grown up when the South kept to itself, all haughty, separate. The boy should’ve known better but didn’t.

He stood windblown between train cars, lashed by cinders, keeping clear of Yankees. The more northerly this train got—the more Willie feared that his drawl might bring him bodily harm. He refused to eat in the dining car. Waiters wanted you to order out loud, and with three strangers right at your table, the three then tried and “draw you out.” No thanks. Besides, who knew what they might slip into the food of a reverse scallywag, a carpetbagger with a boxed watch rattling on his person? Willie kept one palm cupped over the plugged pocket of his new brown suit. If people looked at him, he stared away. In his trouser pocket, he had many bills of Confederate money, like some ID badge to give him anchoring strength. Sitting near the Pullman window, staring out like somebody on their first weekend jaunt to Mars, Willie felt like a unemployed spy still sneaking peeks but doing it freelance now, on no side at all, and noticing what for who?

The trek from Alexandria took him nearly three days, seemed weeks. One reason time did so funny, the boy refused to eat. Anything Yankee. He would drink train water in small paper cups but only after he saw children do it, and when they seemed to live afterwards, rushing back for more. Willie understood right off, he’d not brought sufficient money. Overnight on reaching Boston, he couldn’t afford a hotel and so slept sitting upright at the South Station (not the North one). He had his return ticket, he figured maybe he’d come so poorly prepared as a kind of accidental penance. He’d brought plenty of folding money but it was mostly the losing kind, Jeff Davis on it, already the stuff of bad and bitter jokes.

Will traveled by buggy then another short-line train then wagon again and finally, on foot, he entered a little town outside of Boston. There was still country all around the burg called Maiden. He had wired ahead from Washington.

Once past Maiden’s city-limits sign, Will heard the watch grow louder. Or maybe it was just Will’s being off trains and wagons, plus maybe hunger.
Still, the instrument sounded as if it knew what home was. Will kept his right hand, like for comforting the thing, on its decorated pine crypt. Five and a half years’d done slipped by since Marsden nailed this crate together while waiting rescue inside a surrounded barn. By now, Simon Utt would be twenty. (But, of course, Simon wouldn’t ever be—he’d never have to.)

Will showed a stranger the Utts’ address (he still dared not speak). The Yankee quacked instructions. Will nodded and, lips moving, went over his prepared speech again. Today, at last, he’d tell. He had found, in three years of Winona practice every Thursday, telling was good for what ailed you, the soul and so forth. Under his big black hat, he felt like some foreigner, a hawker of bad goods, an undertaker and a bounty hunter—mixed.

DEAD
Simon’s mother, still dressed in mourning, proved stout and pointy, sleek as a seal. She paced her cottage porch, waiting. Though Simon’s dad had been deceased these many years, his family yet lived in a brick home beside a matching church. The Utt homeplace looked small but extra tidy. Like a cottage on a candy tin. It sported yellow flowers spilling from window boxes. Great honor-guard stands of rouge-tinted hollyhocks surrounded the place.

Slowed, tugging at his stiff white collar, Will now slid through the Utt garden gate. Their home looked like Simon had described it. Will took off his hat, held it to his chest, grinned a tinny awful grin (he felt this falseness and it pained him into grinning wider, faker). His features felt haywire and might do anything, already busy showing guilt first thing. He felt that awful swimming sense you get sometimes in church or at a overfancy concert where you
know
you are about to jump up screaming something nasty.

Three dark older sisters, each in black wool, all wearing hair lifted into buns, stood, grave and smiling behind Simon’s exact eyebrows. Their faces looked like early tries at getting his one right. They lined up on the porch, eager to shake Will’s hand. Ladies smiled varieties of one fixed searching smile. Sisters had, they admitted right off, memorized all Will’s finer letters. Plainly they’d spent time imagining the last person to have seen their young brother alive. The Utts had allowed theirselves certain romantic thoughts concerning this striking Southern person. Ladies must’ve seen how bad Will’s spelling was (they were all teachers!) but they knew his words come right from the heart—which helps you overlook a lot. There’s many kinds of grammar, child.

“Here he is at last,” Mrs. Utt sighed. “An answered prayer. We dearly hope that this might prove but the first of many visits, ‘son.’ But we consider today your true homecoming, William—if I might call you William?” William, he nodded. Child—what choice?

Entering the house, smells of baking, of standards, righteous cleanliness.
Lining this hallway, seminary diplomas written in foreign languages. Even the cottage’s plaster walls looked fresh-scrubbed. Will was glad he’d bought him a brown suit for this. Apart from business black, he only had a dressy gray one and he saw right off how that’d be rude, gray here. The brown did feel a little tight now. He toyed with his new black hat, its brim (a planter’s sunproof one) was wider than most worn this far north. Mrs. Utt’s fine voice explained that owing to William’s kindnesses since Appomattox, he’d given this grieving household the greatest comfort, did he know? He’d made their several crosses easier to endure. “Would it embarrass you, William, to understand how knowing you has smoothed most every acrimony one might tend to continue feeling toward the other side?”

“The other
cause
, Mother,” an older sister corrected.

“Yes, ‘cause,’ certainly … they coached me to say that,” she laughed. “But with you I need not stand on ceremony, sir. I feel that to my very heart and am so grateful for your coming all this distance.” The ladies in black each pulled forth fresh-ironed hankies folded into triangles, getting ready. It seemed to Will a cue.

The widow led him to one corner of a dim family parlor. Here stood a little shrine to the dead boy soldier: cuff links, a small oak bear riding a sled (a toy Simon’d carved—with a good deal more skill, Willie feared, than his own watch crate showed), some blue baby booties, childhood daguerreotypes, two school essay prizes and, beneath them, the papers themselves, showing a fat steady script. The same design of sampler the sisters’d sent Willie hung framed above this altar. Flanking relics, two candles burned. Swallowing, wiping his wet palms along his pant legs, Will said, bold, “There’s something I better tell you right off. Something I reckon you all should’ve known all along.” “Splendid,” said Mrs. Utt, “just as you wish,” but seemed to wait on something else. Then Will remembered. The gawky civilian reached into his pocket then, he heard the lining start to rip, he fished forth the homemade box, turned to Simon’s sleek mother and handed it over. He said, “Here. I told him I would. And now I have.”

Thanking him, she quickly set aside the wood-burned cask Will had made and decorated with such care. Right disappointing, her ignoring all the work he’d put into it. Mrs. Utt cradled a clicking watch in the palm of her right hand. Relieved as Will felt, he was also pained some to see another person touch it. He almost felt that she was getting to touch his personal privates. Odd. The chain trailed down her dark sleeve. She looked over at her three quiet daughters. One nodded. Permission. Mrs. Utt hit the latch. Time showed itself. Gold popped open in a rush of holy music almost perfumy, squirts of something pure unleashed in the close air of a Yankee parlor. Two sisters reached out and quick took hold of each other’s arms. One sucked air as if she’d heard her brother speak (and maybe, within that, her father’s voice cased within Simon’s own). Against long dark dresses, white handkerchiefs shivered and knotted.

Moving slow and certain as some preacher at communion, Mrs. Utt
faced the shrine and placed Simon’s watch atop its own coiled chain and at the very center. She spoke a simple prayer aloud and, after her Amen, wept in a orderly, almost planned-seeming way. Odd squeaks bellowed out of her, half-barks like a schooled seal might sound. Everybody waited. When she’d finished, everybody sat and acted right cheered.

Draperies got pulled wide open. Will decided he’d now tell. Had to. The whole story. Sure did seem high time. Trying to live a life in Falls with Simon’s watch still ticking on Will’s mantel—it’d seemed, well, like a form of bigamy. In some way, Will’s own freedom—to buy land, to haul off and conduct a life both legal and civilian, personal—all that depended on his fearless honesty right this second.

“I’ve got to say something out, ladies,” Willie Marsden, hat in hand, announced just as the food arrived. You could see it’d taken ladies whole days to make these pastries. Tea biscuits, heart-shaped, gleamed with gems of careful red jam on top. Beside these, round discs, frosted to look like watch faces. One had a little toothpicked drawing of a deer. Ladies had remembered the deer but forgot the chasing hounds.

“Yes, do tell us all. Lovely. We must get to know each other ever so much better. Yes, but first, you have to be famished, considering the miles you’ve come just to be here with us.”

The Widow Utt held a silver tray spread with buttery crumpets, browned just so, and still more watch shapes with little baked-on winding stems. Will understood: He hadn’t really had a meal or anything in three and a half days. Now, at the sight of all this thoughtful food, he felt half faint. Still, eating seemed out of the question. But as trays of other sweets appeared—he started understanding just how truly hard his telling this would be here. He refused cookies. He saw it hurt their feelings, so he added, “Later, maybe … looks beautiful, you-all sure eat beautiful up here …” He was playing the hick, child. They laughed but seemed confused. “Well,” he cleared his throat and picked up one of each treat. Ladies breathed again. “Well,” he smiled, “there’s much to say, seems like.”

To sit here, your hat on one knee, big left hand full of sweets crumbling, with Simon’s one sister on your left and another to your right, with others facing you head-on, and you a person still not old but aging fast under these gray-blue Bible-believing eyes all trying and make you out to be a hero …

“So,” the widow spoke.

Earlier, on the porch, lined up, these sisters had seemed much alike. Now differences came clear. They soon grew lively—for flinty New England matrons (a style right mineral and fixed compared to the animal-and-flora of Southern womanhood’s humid waltzier type of heat). The oldest sister announced: Will might find amusing certain stories concerning her boarding-school pupils during wartime. It seems that one little girl misheard the word “Rebel” as “Rubble.” She imagined the advancing Rubble forces to be squadrons of gray stone men, formed of roots and mud, marching against far softer animal Northerners! Everybody laughed. Will laughed—
late—but somewhat harder than the rest. He sat shaking his head No to prove this was just
like
children, was it not? Then he nodded Yes. Rubble.

Sisters had been saving some one tale apiece. Each told each with an easy lightness. Their grace felt painful. He waited for his opening. He leaned forward like a runner at the starting line. Cookies crumbled in his left fist. The sisters’ smoothness made him feel more heavy, murderous and coarse. He’d once been two years younger than their Simon. Simon had been ten to twelve years younger than these sisters here. Now Will was already three and a half years older than Simon had been when he got shot dead by a certain nearby person. Will, sitting here, did figures in his head till he felt sick from tallying (“I
should
eat”). The age of fifteen seemed something to forever subtract from any future age of Will Marsden’s. Oh, but Will wanted out of here. Just run! Some mess. He felt embarrassed by his own superstitions. Would these teachers believe he’d expected many Northern houses to be painted blue? That he’d expected Yanks to still be swaggering around in war regalia? (Back home, gray uniforms were now illegal, only that prevented their being worn daily by many die-hard vets.)

Ladies mentioned the room upstairs where Will would sleep tonight. It overlooked the churchyard and cemetery where Simon’s new marker stood. Will wondered if Simon’s body had been shipped back up here, but there was no gentle way to ask. Ladies’ interest in the watch hinted that Simon’s body like so many others had been buried in a hurry at the time. Willie grinned at further mention of that Rubble story. Wasn’t
he
that? A gray boy born out of a rocky hole. Compared to these fine ladies with their polished chintz and lace doilies, Will felt made of pond scum, scabby tree bark, stones—a Rubble soldier sure enough.