Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (52 page)

Over sounds of edgy Yankee talk, over the un-noise of the awaited prince’s white blooded horse from Upperville or Lexington—Lady hears exactly how each lowboy takes to high flame, finds she’d really rather not know. What each hiss means. Lady finds she just can’t quit this farewell map making. Goodbye, four jasper Wedgwood compotes set into stairwell’s niches. See you, Priapus overdressed. Goodbye, Empire ormolu, ivory-colored Louis-the-umpty-umpth thus-and-so pulled from earlier fires at earlier castles and brung to safety here. So long, Delia Robbia choirboys belting out Latin hymns from the study’s frieze. Toodle-do, the Ter Borch oil picture of a lady wearing white come evening, cloth silk-pursing last light. So long beauty, order, swan life, god-and-goddessy clocks.

With this much carbon combing past her, Lady’s eyes are shut, but oh her head is so alive. It almost hurts, this final surge. Feels like it’s her blood’s own museum inventory. Lady’s ears already fill with blowing grit, her braids’ brush ends begin to coil—they smell metallic from the heat. Seems the kiln this home’s become is changing
her
into some semiprecious store-bought thing. She’s finally and truly turning “It.”

Lady hears Yankees gossip from close by—hears slaves mumble, awestruck, yards away. Her winding sheet crackles, suddenly unwet due west, seems to be browning like meringue in a low oven. Before smoke overcomes her, it teases, sharpens all sensations. She finds a strange new calm—and Lady wonders: “Perhaps this is what it’s like when one is close to dying. This is how one’s body comes to its own rescue, chemical toddies that hostess you through your own exit. Could I be thinking of last moments because these ones happen to be mine? Wouldn’t
that
be odd.”

Meanwhile, she knows exactly what’s become swan-song smoke in every room and with what sort of sigh, which tint of flame, and at what turncoat speed. Morocco-leather-bound books downstairs, her husband’s greatest joy, a lending library for Combustion now. (“Illiterate scamps, they spared the ladder but not the Gutenberg Bible!” She refused teaching slaves to read, claiming it’d interfere with their natural dignity.) Lady hears books—burning somewhat alphabetical from floor to ceiling—perish in a frying roar. Seems like world literature ain’t dry at all, but victual as bacon.

She knows when doilies quarter like dinner guests’ napkins folded after a final satisfying course. In ending, buckled veneer suddenly lies flat. And under carpet, a long-lost key finds itself at the very last second, glows molten orange, “So.
Here
I am! I never doubted it.”

One second-floor Dutch painting, a lady in white satin, burns bright blue, but its gold-leafed frame—on the job till the very end—puts off a yellow light, continuously framing blue damage. The owner, eyes shut like some Lady Oracle, knows what’s turned black, what’s whitening, which item curls purplish at its edges. (Myself, I own some family snapshots, a shawl, the cameo Momma give me, my husband’s scabbard and bugle, some sterling
thimbles. Still, they’re mine. They make me guess: Hell for a collector must be hearing fire collecting on and under every item you love.)

Poor thing (are those my two favorite words, darling?) keeps breathing, coughing through cotton gone warm, hot, now singeing. She shivers—heat registers as one terrible chill. Lady believes she must now become choice butter smeared onto magnolia log, or maybe a cinder flying on to warn other gentlefolk downriver. She has time to recall one neighbor’s scolding, “You
must
use your conservatory’s white brocade lining to help bandage our South’s bleeding boys.” Lips now sound out, “Should have, should have.” Words you tend to utter whilst your house burns.

“At least my headache’s cured. Small blessings,” and it finally strikes her—if she
does
get through—she’ll wake in a landscape minus house, minus Bechstein grand, without a living son maybe, surely sans husband, without no clothes, all slaves gone. Dying loses some of its former sting.

Idly, idly, like she has all the time on earth, Lady E. More Marsden tells herself concerning death, “Well, something about it appeals to me.”

Tree’s roasty creak lets Mistress know: her magnolia has now gone over to the other side. Lost in smoke, she curls around the trunk. Worse heat tans her fingers, sets the pearls to sizzling. Last of all—hot in silk, slick with dew, renowned for perfect pallid skin—Mrs. Marsden hears it leave her ownership and this world’s: the concert grand, black painted white, probably charred darker than its starting ebony. She hears her signed masterpiece come plunging through three floors—riding a sound like Hell’s idea of Music.

YANKEES
whoop at this sign of progress. Horses back off. Oh, honey, the heat! Third-floor roof begins to slack. Then it bows. Caves in. Sparks braid up two hundred yards. Nearby lilacs are already cooked but good. Soldiers clap. All but the boy whose single arm must hold the reins. He pats his Arabian’s flank. The horse bolts. Off go others. A yodeling gallop across the Chinese bridge. Troops turn right, towards Falls. Towards the next farm. Is The Lilacs’ punishment now over? Has Freedom started yet?

On the hedge’s cooler side, black people sure cling to each other. Through purple blooms, they see the familiar house offer a glut of smoke to the sky’s map. By stealing into the open, by turning to stare downriver, freed folks view a hundred miles of rich folks’ disasters.

Ownership of people as property has just ended. Long live un-ownership! Odd, but property itself has died somewhat like people do. In picture books, the souls of the departing go smearing up—birds—vertical into air. White houses have left the world in just this way, smudged black, straight up. A windless afternoon and these great stripes, each half a acre wide, rise far apart at the river’s finest bends. Like proud figures in pain, they keep to theirselves, columns of a single mammoth temple. And only when each
pillar floats far up (we’re talking miles, child) does it begin to sidle over toward the others. That high, a mild gray roof forms—transparent, weightless—tipped on jet-black uprights.—This former home now sets its vertical in place.

Freed women and children cannot quit holding one another. Their hiding seems done forever. Getting near as heat allows, don’t nobody cry. Ain’t one soul laughing. Out the mansion’s every white hole, a separate stem of darkness rises. This house is spoked like a black candelabrum. Children see the mansion playing Catacombs. It has started being un-adult, it is coming down onto its hands and knees. The Big House ain’t now.

CASTALIA
inches close enough to understand: the famous solid-marble pillars are only veneered. She stares right into a hollow post—four foot wide, its inner curve shows home-cast brick, round pine cross braces. Who ever considered there’d be shortcuts here? Who knew all this could end so easy, like any
house
would?

Zelia points. Upstairs, on the former third floor, you can see the music room’s exposed white onyx hearth. Lady’s mantel still holds its French clock. The pink porcelain shepherdesses so recently well dusted are now lined like some minstrel show, all black-faced. Between the silver andirons yonder, almost comical, part of a ceiling beam must’ve dropped—a small fire burns just exactly where a fire should. All this happens eighty feet above you, held stark against the sky.

For ex-slaves, seeing the great white place crack to pieces feels joyful, scary. It’s like the moon has died. (What good is the moon? And yet … you’re used to it.)

In smoke, Old Zelia creeps nearer a particular tree, apron swaddling her mouth. Folks move like they onct tiptoed past the mistress’s bedchamber during migraine. Heat makes people get closer only in measured sidesteps. They hear a dying mansion suck and gobble on its self.

“No,” says Little Xerxes, not yet able to believe.

“Oh yeah. Be so,” one woman says.

Then to make it truer for hisself, the boy tries mouth sounds copying so huge a housefire, “Ssnaffle, hump sheeee-crimpicle—poik.—Um-kay. More
like
it.”

Must be four-thirty, the hour for high tea. Certain clocks—on fire and otherwise—still chime their duty. Xerxes then “does” time, too.

Smoke this thick ain’t a mist, it’s a new place you might could stand on like a stage or staircase. Folks breathe through wet pillow slips grabbed off the line. Adults hold children’s hands, fearful that such whey-thick fumes will claim the wee ones as revenge. People risk the heat’s full brunt. They now stand grouped twenty feet from a tree all flames.

IN EXODUS
, Moses finds the bush that burns but ain’t ever quite destroyed. Ex-Marsden slaves study a magnolia busy consuming itself. But today, see,
that’s
the speaking miracle: Hers burns just like the four huge ones flanking it. She ain’t being spared a thing. Fire, turns out, won’t just another family friend that owed Judge More a favor.

Her hiding place has lost its houseward side. Only a few silver-hot twigs stay put. Everybody scans these for the near-albino person Castalia hid. Nothing’s left but a charred trunk crisscrossed with fire’s favorite lizard-skin design. There’s one small flaking bulge, sheet’s top and bottom merged with smoking bark.

Castalia moves to climb but—first branch up—burns her palm so bad she hops back down and dances—cussing, shaking fingers in the air. She wrestles off her apron, rips it, binds her palms with rags, then, well wrapped fingers to wrists, scutters right back up. Old Z, eyes shaded from the heat, stands quiet, staring overhead. Her untoothed mouth keeps opening and closing like a doubting extra eye. Maybe Z will now be punished for certain sassinesses earlier. She don’t yet understand: she’s free. Z could be flying to town. Honey, how long will it take her, greeting her own freedom?

Children hold on to women’s skirts, needing company. If Lady’s body
has
gone to smoke—just another vapor in the black tower rising off this site—well, that’s one thing, that’s clean and fitting, if terrible. But to come across her bacon-strip remains—that, the children don’t want to see. Maybe when kids are aged eighty or even fifteen, when they have been snapped at and misused long as Zelia or Cassie, well all right. But not yet. Lady Marsden should’ve gracefully become, well, a dew. Resolved into a dew. Castalia goes on up hand over hand.

At The Lilacs’ Galas’ end, Cas helped Lady plot ways of bidding guests adieu gracefully. Cassie’d seen it happen often: The hostess would go halfway up her famous spiral stairs, hurrying to fetch a poetry book for somebody in the foyer. Then a wave, a flash of white hem—the last this party’d glimpse of her. Woman hated goodbyes. Her specialty was pretty dockside greetings. She could not endure departures, even if she knew she’d see the folks tomorrow. Guests—staring up—were slow to understand they’d just witnessed another swift exit. “Well,” somebody’d say. “My,” they’d say. And Cassie would then order Uncle Primus to go fetch gentry’s hats, to wave down-lawn at bored slave boatmen. Oars up, fellows—party’s over.

FLAPPING
at tree smoke, Cas nears her ex-boss’s last known whereabouts. Blue billows still go hard on the eyes. Where Lady sat wound in soggy white, nothing’s left but a flaking tumor. Its outer shell catches light from the first floor’s continuous uproar. Heat keeps others backed fifteen feet into the yard, arms raised, palms flat to shield faces. Against the savage orange light (okay, Miss Beale, maybe “savage”
is
going too far) others see Castalia, in black silhouette, straddling a tree’s black prong, dramatic against a … savage orange.

The lump Cas studies seems some tree-gall rising, three and a half feet long. Browned past crispness, it has turned the weathered steel blue you
sometimes see on old hornets’ nests. “Look like she cooked,” Cassie calls down. Z hollers, “That be the
first
cooking she ever done.” Two children laugh, then cover their mouths. Everybody waits for news, everybody holds hands.

Why are these people bothering to check? Couldn’t they be dashing towards a new life in Falls? Yeah, sure could. From a third-floor showcase, Lady’s art-glass collection—many rainbow-tinted Roman jars and medicine vials—busts, shooting-gallery sounds, ripe sweetish pops like notes strung on the hot air.

This close, Cassie can study a baked cocoon. She’s catching sounds furniture flopping in three directions before diving through a burning floor’s best hole. But she listens hardest for somebody on the ground—somebody who’ll tell her what to try next.—Sharp and willful as this young woman is, she’s forever been instructed what to do. Since age three, since the long boat trip over: steady instructions. Who will give her orders now? Little Xerxes down yonder? Old Miss Zelia?

So, instead—Cas takes in extra breath (her back’s so heated, homespuns stick against the skin, her red head rag is wet to black). Staring first at loved ones foreshortened in the yard—Cas—slow—lifts her rag-bound hand nearer ash. Up close, Lady’s sheet yet shows its every thread fused into a layered page of soot. Castalia touches. Ash topples a light gray crust across her thighs. Seeing what she sees, Cas draws back, all but loses her grip.

She is posed on something’s face side. Ash, a fragile coffin lid, has dropped to show one dark mummy’s face—aimed at Cassie’s. The thing’s eyes seem melted shut. Firelight shows too much. Its skin is really oh Lord God so charred. Cassie just goes, “Ooooh!”

“Wha …?” Zelia, below, jumps a single time, proves she means it. “Tell.”

Castalia bends closer, dares to blow on the shape. Ash’s next layer clears, the exposed form seems made of pitch. Cassie’s breath shoots confetti flakes to all sides. She turns away, half choking. White bits drift down on the upturned features of black children and women. Folks now chance the heat at this tree’s very roots. Arms screening faces, folks are impatient at being so near a inferno. They’re too eager to stay back. Still, no soul feels willing to climb up, to settle beside Cassie, to stare damage in its face.

One tarry arm winds around the trunk. It clings so. Heat has sheared away a silk gown’s front. Castalia must look at the ivory of exposed rib bones. Great glittery welts show where a person’s breasts once stood. Blisters rise big as brandy snifters, hang bottom-heavy with odd trapped liquors. Yellow firelight plays over the sheen of blisters.