Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (74 page)

Barging out the door, she leaves a cash register and every all-round item totally unguarded. She is seeing she was right, it’s real, it’s spastic, roughly thirty feet beyond her. Mrs. L. is half past the store’s sidewalk tool display marked: “It’s May. Think of your Neighbors. Get Your Yard Right This Year.” She grabs a pair of hedge clippers—not sure why till later.

What has changed this often lazy woman into such a jump-back Savior? Something called “You must.” It can make heroes of us in one second. It can just as easy show how deeply cowardly we are, can leave us knowing that forever. Which hurts. But her? Hey—she’s running—it’s the longest such trek she’s made in twenty-seven years since—during a church picnic—she ran unsuccessfully on purpose from the huge and horny Luke Lucas, then eighteen. She is now flapping her apron all around her like some bullfighter’s cape, clippers are hid beneath. Mrs. L. chases a child she recognizes from behind as a definite McCloud, the wild youngest one that stole so bad till right here recent.

Nearing Courthouse Square, Mrs. Lucas (made a temporary genius by adrenaline that will, in a short time, fail her the way genius fails some people early—a woman blessed with sudden juice that’ll leave both thighs chafed, her body taxed from two years’ effort spent in six good goddess minutes), Mrs. Lucas draws alongside one fast little barefoot child. The child is galloping with eyes closed, hands wavering in front of her like a drowner’s underwater hope to please grab hold now, please. Mrs. L. sees: The child’s head is already twice a child’s head size owing to what’s released by shiny stingers stinging yet. And the woman throws her apron over this entire buzzing noggin. She uses her own running bulk to knock the youngster off her legs and onto grass beside our War Memorial. The girl goes into a cartwheel that looks almost planned. Mrs. Lucas is seriously falling, too, one prolonged respectful thud. A girl’s worked-on head is now resting in a woman’s lap.

The perfume that Mrs. Lucas suddenly inhales is so strong and unexpected, it almost makes that marked-down cheese come up. She shouts at the slit-eyed features because they seem so far away. She bellows past bugs curtaining a blue-white face. She does what you are always told in First-Aid Classes: “Remember to assure your victim aloud.” It’s something that, in being victimized by the
sight
of your victim, you can easily forget. A fine stout voice cries, “I’m here. It’s Doris Lucas, honey. It’s okay. I know just what to do.”

Like all of us, this lady during lunch hour is really only inventing it as she goes, child. She’s horrified all during. Sometimes you act because you’re less scared of making a mistake than of
not
making one in time.

Quick here:
fake
it.

•   •   •

HER OWN
palms are being bitten so, stingers pock each hand with little map lights. Mrs. L.—hedge clippers in one fist—chops off long curls, throws brittle clotted curls as far away as possible. She’s staring down into the open mouth of the poor head she’s pruning. She swats and crushes insects in the air but never on the flesh itself. And even as wasps bite Doris Lucas, she keeps yelling kind words down at what might be a corpse by now: “Almost over, nearly done now, hold on, sug. They’re off you mostly. You’re with
me
, it’s Doris. Lucas. Doris’s got you. Fine, we’re going to be fine here. We’re almost through. It’s over with, I swear to you, we’re done. Breathe, you,
breathe
. For Doris, do.”

And she pounds a child’s back, pounds, she pounds it.

AT HOME
: Schubert continuous, Caucasian Jesus wades in dreams.

As for personal property during such valor—the Collier twins arrive at Lucas’ to buy rickrack for edging a round felt tablecloth. Finding the Ail-Round Store empty of every last Lucas for the first time in human memory, these stalwart girls choose to stand guard and are actually sweeping up already. Tending the counter, they’re acting like this is their usual shift—Doc Collier’s twins, who’ll never have to sweep their own place, are really loving playing store. They even sell a little marked-down cheese to a good-looking colored fellow in from Apex. They even offer to wrap it.

A shorn head is finally opening to sun, free of hair—a child mouth, breathing at last, allows a scream to fountain out of it. Scream cuts past and over the fat woman, whose own breath stops dead. Bianca is a siren that stills the action of eleven hundred souls—napping, lovemaking, piano playing, store minding. First: The scream brings Maimie L. Beech out of sleep and onto her shoes and into the act of running—Bible held against her chest like a shield for discouraging bullets. She is bound the six blocks toward the sound, she feels capable of going headfirst down into the troubled mouth of her beloved Bianca. All this before Maimie even understands why she’s moving and toward what and who she is and how she is not Jesus on some pond promenade but one employee, mortal—before she knows what her beloved job is, was, and why she has just lost it.

TO MAKE
a long story less gory and more short, the swelling finally commenced to shrink after three weeks of what sickroom lingo still calls “touch and go.” Puffiness slacked, but not before it’d made a independent gargoyle-type beast out of just the head of one small girl. Bianca’s face had widened to the width—gossips said with their genius for citing things’ dread sizes—of a beehive—“face spread that broad till skin actually tore from the insides of either eye, or so one hears.” Bianca’s hands—from trying to save the head—were near as swollen as the head was.

Downstairs, well-wishers arrived each afternoon and evening. They spoke in low voices, many wore black. Mrs. Doris Lucas herself turned up,
rouged, fists bandaged, saying, “Anybody would’ve. Lucky to’ve
been
there, really,” a heroine. The cook had given word that no more donated casseroles would be allowed into
her
kitchen. “They think I don’t know my job here?”

In the parlor, instead of lying, offering the usual story improvements granted Falls’ sick and perishing—folks told true tales. About the languishing Bianca, they recalled her spunk. No angel, her. They skipped all recent advances Maimie’d brought about. They told of serious former naughtiness. Vandalism they called High Jinks. Arson they named Playing With Matches. They made up hymns to the Calamity Jane momma I might’ve got. Quiet elder sisters, longing for keyboards—secretly mourned their young Mozart and Schubert along with the family baby. Sisters now heard of fresh Bianca crimes. Confused, they risked minor-key smiles. News: Several occupied privies suddenly in flame—cats granted hairdos, dogs found tied in human clothes. The time Bianca sat on the brand-new maroon velvet church pew cushion and smiled a strange smile and said, “A test. P.U.,” and you know she had peed on and deeply into it. Why? Shyness? You ever try removing pumpkin meat (and later its smell) from seven hundred piano wires? Well, don’t if you can help it.—Folks today made her brattiness a litany. Their stories of her brilliant no-no’s tried to pull Bianca back from dimness. Folks wished
they
had been way worse when young.

“Nice” seemed counties closer to Dead than “Bad” was.

WHEN BABY
Bianca finally opened her blue eyes, everybody rejoiced. Maimie most especially. (If prayers were books, Maimie would’ve been through every library of the Western world since her child got stung.) Afro Gethsemane Baptist had steadily petitioned for the life of its recent fresh-mouthed visitor. True, that girl had lived, but she’d brought bad stuff out of her three-week nightmare in the dark. Maybe she confused the color of her coma or the darkness of wasps with skin tones of poor Maimie Beech. When that loving nurse finally got squired upstairs for a first viewing, when she stood in the open door, ashamed, hopeful, grinning, holding out a scentless bouquet bought with her own money, the child took one long look. The child swallowed hard then went straight up over the back of her carved bed, clawing wallpaper, trying to get away. The girl, covering her puff-pastry eyes with puff-pastry hands, screamed a scream that again cost people three heartbeats apiece for blocks around. Even birdsong lost its place. “Black!” is what Bianca shrieked.
“Black!”
was the first word of her scared new life. Black, child, is the presence of all colors. Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.

Poor Maimie’s one mistake had been dozing off whilst hired to guard. The white girl (white is naturally the lack of all color) blamed a black nurse for that—and through it, child, for all the pain on earth. No fair. But wee Bianca felt it was this simple and this fixed. Angus McCloud gave Maimie L. Beech a large chunk of severance pay. He handwrote five pages concerning her sterling character (a letter Maimie carried home stuck in her
Bible and later learned, with help, was maybe her all-time best). So then—nicely taken care of—she sat in her small clean house by the river and slowly understood she had been fired, if verra genteelly. Since her livelihood had forever been tending rich white troublesome children, since news traveled for as far as she could walk to work, her single nap had cost Maimie L. Beech a good deal. She could afford to retire but—without work—she had no baby of the moment. Without that, what use in wearing starched whites, in staying up to iron? Alone at home, there was no need to fake daily Bible reading—this made the Secret Weapon feel less worthy.
She
knew she couldn’t read. God, all-knowing, all-sight-reading, surely knew. Still, Maimie missed going through the motions.—So much of the grandeur in our lives comes, strangely, from certain loving daily habits. “Here I am, doing
this
again.—Amen.” Yeah, grandeur. In a second, I’ll explain her chancy later life.

—I now want to mention how the L in Maimie L.’s name stood for Lucille. Odd, that young Bianca—not remembering just
where
she’d learned to love that name so much—later came to call me, her only child, after the sad nanny she’d got fired. Another story.

Little Bianca McCloud, now age five going on forty, no longer needed a zookeeper. Before the accident, fear meant nothing to her except a nice taste in her mouth. Like Poppa’s secret blue, she manufactured it. Fear trailed her everywhere, a wake of knee-high calamity. Cats scattered. Neighbors shut the lids of their spinets and, for good measure, sat on the shut lids. Now it had
her
. Fear did.

People change. Even children do. Especially kids. Catch them young enough, you can twist a poor baby to most any bentwood shape you choose. To make a violin, you wet the wood and
hold
it there till dry. What did a five-year-old believe about her perfume accident? Maybe she thought it was a punishment for all her early mischief? Did she see it as the dark race’s revenge on white folks’ strutting—all blackly visited upon young doughy her? Considering this version (a child’s, fairy-tale simple, fairy-tale wicked), I reckon it’s no surprise: Bianca never again exactly cottoned to residents of Baby Africa. That’d be putting it mild, honey.

She’d no longer go downtown on Saturdays when the Courthouse Square was most swarmingly “mixed”—sixty-some percent colored. If a big black dog ran across the McCloud lawn, the little girl stiffened with something like shock. Her body temperature dropped and Angus had to rush her in the house, rubbing at her pink toes and fingers.

After the accident, whilst Bianca convalesced in bed, her sisters—working shifts—did just what the un-brat asked. They taught her to read. Her early favorites? How-to books on Manners. She soon demanded that her plain upstairs nursery be re-covered in the very best of polished chintz—but only patterned in flowers—no birds or butterflies and certainly not no bees. She said
she
wanted a Steinway concert grand, and sighed, and did they come in white? She was soon scolding her big sisters for their wallflower
ways, pasty complexions, hours spent practicing in shaded rooms, their murksome dowdy clothes and social panic. Bianca had once speared her way through a neighbor’s populated goldfish pond while farmers, in a wagon parked on Summit, watched. Now, head shaved wholly bald (that way it’d grow out even and not clumpy), she observed high tea at age five. For Bianca, everything had to be just so.

Before the perfume, her poppa’d secretly loved paying off the grumblers who brought in items she’d broke or accidentally set afire. For Angus—the former up-and-coming cabin boy from Glasgow, a man who had his tartan vests and kilts made only of “hunting” plaids, not “dress” ones—Baby Bianca’s every shredded frock once seemed some flag of victory.

“Just like me,”
a parent’s fondest prayer, a parent’s worst fear
.

Now he mourned his wild child’s passing. (Secretly, he felt his son had died. He hadn’t known he
had
one till that imp got stung out of this world, drowned in a blackness Angus felt to be as cold as the North Sea around 3 a.m. on some off-night, midwinter.) The Indigo Baron now noticed: His Bianca was just a girl, just like the others, was she not? He missed being the weest bit afraid of her, that was it. It’s how the truly strong recognize each other. “Uh-oh” turns to “Ah.” Fear can be the start of truest love.

HAVING CHANGED
into a hedge that clips itself, Bianca McCloud later tried teaching her rude Baby Lucille such personal topiary. With me, darling, it didn’t really take. Back of Momma’s misshaped character stood what she considered one oversight made by one servant, black. And Momma never tired of blaming. A terrible destiny. To think:
Others did it to you
. To know the others’ color, to live in a hamlet whose citizens are sixty-odd percent that shade.

Adult Mrs. Bianca ofttimes criticized our neighbors’ gardeners and maids as “exceedingly insolent.” She claimed that the verra rarest commodity on earth was something called: good help. Momma swore she wouldn’t trust black servants far as she could throw them. And Castalia later told me: In Baby Africa, Bianca stayed the one white blacks loved to hate—turnabout being fair play.

Alone amongst the white ladies of Summit Avenue’s better end, Momma did her own housework. Something of a union buster. It just embarrassed everybody. Me, too. Others’ maids—bound for work—clucked, saddened to see so finely made a white woman out washing her own windows, hanging perilously off the side of our house, her head wound in a ugly-making indigo cotton rag and sweating like … a stuck pig, waving down to all and calling, “Hot day, nasty job. Must be
done
, though.” And basically loving it, child.