Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (40 page)

The prosperous gentleman stopped dead. One portion of his tinted hair slowly unpasted and, like some bug’s antenna, lifted as Will watched. The telltale cowlick! The gent touched my Willie’s shoulders and checked behind this young out-of-towner. Maybe seeking a boy back there like Will had hid—all except his arms—in arrears of Private Ned Smythe, that kid almost irksomely perfect.

“Because it’s been crossed so many times.—You?” Sal asked. “Grown? Better looking’n me, nice
hair
. You okay basically, pal?”

They fell against each other and wept there while the yes-men acted shy and a bit bored. Marsden found his tears falling on a leather coat that smelled of rubber. Tears became instant beads. Some tricky coat. Will asked Salvador Cortez Drake Magellan Smith, “Where’d your leg go, and what’d the money come from?” Old friends get to ask straight questions very soon.

During the ride to Sal’s country house, another story unfolded. You tired of them yet? Sal got home from Surrender on a overcrowded troop train, Rebs a wasp-like swarm on every metal inch of it. The train crossed a war-hurt bridge. Here a locomotive gave up its ghost, went loco right into the creek taking all down with it. It chose Sal’s favorite leg to fall upon. Which proved almost lucky. Because it also picked sixteen torsos to crush, plus four soldiers’ favorite heads. What’s a leg, really? Sal came home dead broke and partly missing. He gimped into a tailor shop ransacked of tweeds by one sly loverboy assistant. The shop contained a calendar (last year’s), cups of China tea grown blue with mold, back bills for buttons, and—jammed on a rear wall’s nail, this: a four-inch square of black rubber tarp, which tended, unbacked, to split and droop. It had been fused, by steam iron maybe, to a four-inch square of good hundred-percent cotton duck. With it on the nail, our Florida-hidden Chinaman had left this note: “Maybe do a gobbet for the day rain come down sky? Make hole soot. Sorry rob you. You nice me.” Mr. Smith took this paper home and read it to his loving hungry family. “Gobbet” they guessed meant garment. “Make whole suit”?

Thusly, dimplenook, great ideas get translated into reality (then bank accounts). Stripped of tweeds, Sal gained one watertight notion, a idea vivid to a man who’d just lived four wet years out of doors in sooty holes. His daughters helped him try and join floppy rubber onto good white gauze. Many vile-smelling fusions later, Sal borrowed money, secretly. He traveled with his smartest Spanish-speaking daughter by schooner to what’s considered Ecuador today. Latex contacts were made before the Smiths, taking on twin boys and the wife at Norfolk, sailed up north to mills in Massachusetts. Visiting D.C., Sal did a little patenting. The man who’d stopped one operation with borrowed dueling pistols started many other operations in civvie life. Magellan Drake, et cetera, proved worthy of his name.

At his large new house, he treated Will to Madeira and the company of daughters whose pictures he’d showed often from First Manassas to Appomattox. Girls took after their pretty mother, as did the twin sons, now onto twenty. The new house was a monument of cold good taste. But joined to it by a lattice veranda was Sal’s family starter cabin. Adjourning to this humbler tacky spot, the large handsome family grew louder. This place was solid family pictures, keepsakes. Its mantel was a mess of doilies and gim-cracks, seven obscene sets of ladies’ thighs carved from forked sticks (their history comes later).

“Life’s been strange yet kind,” Sal touched his rosewood pegleg. “The thing that’s bothered me most about our years together, Willie, son: my hair! Why did no one tell me? When I turned up here, my Emily was critical. She found sticks in it, big sticks. The color too was terrible. I’m now ‘ash-brown,’ much more like it. But, children, shall we explain to Willie what’s the only stuff that helps me keep it mostly flat?” A nod all-round. Sal led them with his index finger, “Axle-grease!”

Sal Smith and his sons showed Will some fine new rifles. They’d just
been goose hunting and what Will later recalled the best was: one humble cabin’s kitchen table heaped with sixteen dead Canada geese and teals. Daughters plucked and plucked. Someday, imagine having sons, someday to hunt ducks with your fine sons!

Will arrived back in Falls a downtown novelty. Him, all over in black rubber which, inside, meant tender white cloth. Behind each great man, a back-up lady keeping him all flexible. Will prayed for rain and—while folks hid under storefront porticos, applauding—he sloshed back and forth, crossing and recrossing puddled North Church Street, shouting, “Nothing to it!”

Given life’s surprises, why
had
the ocean stayed so mad?

SOMETIMES
on our Home outings to the Old Mall, I’ll see a group of Viet vets near the fountain and its palms. The water splashing seems to soothe them. Though other folks’d like to settle there, nobody argues with these skinny men in fatigues and civvy mufti, mixed. Fatigues, the right word.

They look a lot like the vets I done described lolling in our Courthouse Square after that earlier war. A lot. One thing about a life stretched long as mine, you see things come around many, many times: here’s those selfsame starved-out missing-something warrior faces.—The Rebs and the South Asian vets, they both lost. Makes your being home-and-hurting mean something different. You win, you’re forgiven more. Lose, means you’ve lost, both in your own head and in others’.

These moping boys were not necessarily no geniuses before getting shipped to Asia (or Maryland). Maybe that’s why they were the ones that
went
. They grew up in churches, grew up being told: Freedom is worth saving, ladies and children first, standards, decency, rules, gentlemanly honor. Their home-boy waffle-iron brain motors purred along patriotic. All was well. Then, shipped to the front, they were told: to preserve home standards and women and kids, they should bypass all they’d been taught. In a civilian civil-type war, this might mean hurting non-home women and kids and gents, this could mean lining up suspected enemies against thatch walls and taking no chances, no prisoners. The boys’ brain motors still worked, chugging hard to try and fit all this new stuff together, find a way of blending what seemed opposites. But, once home, the brain rebelled. It still
looked
like a waffle iron. But it was a implement that’d briefly had a city’s worth of voltage pulse through it, knocking it right widely haywire. Motor still goes but all circuits are blackened, fused. So as a vet, you sit in the middle of the Courthouse Square, where ladies leave you mended shirts and leftovers, or near the Mall fountain that sounds like Asia’s jungle rain. You people-watch the shoppers, Americans you gave your all to save. You see them call their children away from your spot. You see they’re scared of what your saving them has done to you, guy.

I want to park my wheelchair among them and offer, “I know. I lived with one, my last husband, he suffered it too.” I’m scared to bother them. They’re in groups at the Old Mall, whispering, laughing, talking in infantry lingo decades after that stopped meaning anything to anybody but them. They lost. It shows, you smell this shame and rage they trail. What they’re missing is what Rebs also lacked at the end of theirs, the real belief, reward. They now slouch out there in the temple of sales and busyness and maybe feel like they’re yet guarding it and us. They were kids, and men told them to do a thing. Good literal boys, far from home, they did.

Now, out of work, living with Mom, forty-five years old, hooked on cough medicine or whatever at the Mall can be pilfered quick, they’re glad for the fountain and the Oriental palms. They’re most glad for each other. They lost a struggle. Everybody lost, lost them. They’re out yonder every day. Waiting for the circuits of the head to heal. Waiting to be salaried as our guards. Waiting for a better war to come and make them right again.

Meanwhile I learned about survival training my husband had offered weird Winona Smythe in her back yard. Folks said her boast of the “town brain” only meant “a morbid streak.” Being the single intellectual in a village of eleven hundred souls ain’t much fun, especially when one thousand and ninety-nine of those don’t think you’re all that smart.—One year after Will’s return, Winona got lessons in how soldiers ate and slept and took care of personal toilet needs. She used her army surplus “trenching tool,” made small latrines under the wisteria. “Don’t you want to know how it went, the
al fresco
… release, William?” Grieved, he made a sound. She answered, “Like clockwork. I faced the neighbors’ house and thought pure thoughts and, well, clockwork.”

“Yes, ma’am,” was his only comeback.

She wanted to live entirely off mushrooms and berries found in her tangled yard. She ordered hardtack, and when the Lucas delivery boy come back empty-handed, she asked for Luke’s explanation. He claimed such soldiers as has lived through war vowed they’d rather die than touch a piece of hardtack ever again. Winona’s note said: “Order it and I’ll swap you my second-best singer.”

Two days later, Luke, in his apron, turned up early morning hours when he someway knew her caged birds warbled best. He used Winona’s mingy parlor, took the bird he wanted in there so’s he could hear its song unwoven from all others’. Sly one, Luke. He carried away the cage while passing Winona a tow sack that clattered as if full of roofing slates. She rushed past her three ignored neighbor ladies’ greetings as they supervised maids hanging wet laundry. Tent flaps lowered, Winona took a hunk and bit, rebit, then sat there chewing and chewing. You had to. It was the flavor of mourning itself—soapy, harsh, and blank in the mouth. Metal and brewer’s yeast, surf foam plus a trace of tar. Had the taste of history. Outside, the cicadas were already at it, throwing up these sheets and jagged stacks of sound. Made a tent over this two-man job where a big-jawed lady, all in dusty widow’s
weeds, sat cross-legged chewing chewing chewing on it. It lathered and stuck and became different slow-dawning colors in her mouth. Strange to be out here eating Then, eating Him.

And it was the following Saturday that everyone in two miles heard the gun go off in Widow Smythe’s back yard at 3 a.m. Mindful of how grieved she’d been, aware of certain recent unsavory trends around her lawn (the neighbors’ children had peeped from their highest pecan trees and reported seeing her do every manner of personal no-no under the wisteria—and all whilst carrying a old double-ought shotgun). The children were scolded for lying. (If you wrote a book …)

A quick committee formed—in nightshirts and robes. The group ventured forth to check on the source of so dreadful and window-rattling a blast. It was considered a godless hour in the best neighborhood of a small town this size one century back, and it would be today, child. No nice person phones another nice person after 10 p.m. unless there’s been a death. Folks—appearing Tuscarora-tribal in their curling papers and eye cream—rung Winona’s front-gate bell. Not waiting long, they stormed around to the side yard. Canaries—all thirty-six were out here with her, tonight massed in a pyramid of cages beneath a tarp like their own tent. Stunned by the blast, they still chittered, scared. Here beside a lantern, one smiling widow set cross-legged as any Indian. She looked exceedingly alive. Her tent straddled a hole with a big feather-bed bolster spilling out at one end. She’d dragged a low bookcase into the yard, the thing filled with favorite volumes of verse, mostly overdue from the library, and, on top of the case, all the art glass snatched from First Baptist’s high altar. In lamp’s glow she sat massaging her right shoulder—maybe where the rifle’d kicked considerable. She was smiling, constant.

“Thank God you’re all right,” said the Mayor’s brother-in-law, a man who often introduced himself: “I am the Mayor of Falls’ only brother-in-law, and who are you?” “We dreaded the worst. What’s gone on, a thief, an altercation, some nigger intruder, what? Because: Not to fear, Widow Smythe, the neighborhood menfolk have gathered.”

“That’s what I keep a gun here for. Actually, a woodchuck. A monster woodchuck,” she grinned even harder, the first time in recent memory. Her pleasure spooked folks worse than any usual sourpuss gloom. “And happily I nabbed one fat enough to feed me for many days to come.” Then with a strange low chuckle, Winona Smythe reached into the grave of bedding. By its tail, she snatched forth a furred and dripping creature. The thing was bigger than some hunting dogs and it sent half the crowd scampering backwards, hiding behind each other, tightening belts of terry robes and letting loose a few squeals and several deeply felt “icch” sounds. For years neighbors had sworn that something near the size of hog was burrowing here in the Smythes’ yard. Folks claimed this beast staged savage night raids on hybrid dahlias all along the street. “I can’t
keep
dahlias,” ladies complained.

One Christian woman, now clutching her nightdress shut at the neck,
fought back her own disgust. “My dear Mrs. Smythe, if it’s come to this kind of hunger, we have, you’ll recall, regularly offered you casseroles, and for some years now. My squash one with the bread-crumb topping is, if I do say so my …”

“I like the taste of game,” Winona gloated. “Especially homegrown game I nailed myself. Game’s better when it’s fresh, don’t you find?” Then Winona couldn’t but tell the truth: “This is the first time I’ve ever shot a firearm. And, beginner’s luck, here I’ve realized a week of dinners, plus the pelt.” Cheered, she moved to clean her double-barrel.

The Widow Smythe emptied her yard almost at once.

HONEY
, I believe some men put on wars just to have a topic afterwards. My husband went and lived long enough to finally hear the Great War called that.

“Great?” Captain Marsden would snap. “They name this French thing Great and our only one on native soil gets downgraded to plain Civil? Why, that’s not even patriotic.”

My man’s peacetime memory lost many a house key but it recollected the whereabouts of every roadhouse in either Carolina. A tale-telling vet could get free bourbon after dark. Captain Marsden’s peacetime memory forgot to pay our grocery bills on time, but, child, his wartime one was a Dewey decimal system of musket balls. Every minute from ’61 to ’65 had schooled Cap in how to tell it true.