Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (80 page)

IN OUR
shady front room, along cool halls as wide as ones in good hotels, my folks and me kept busy living like we talked: Momma pretty much perfect if unnoticed, Poppa wrong but witty, me mostly plain mistakes. Momma worked at playing—bridge and semi-classical piano. Poppa played at working. He whittled and was visited. He often sat picking at the calluses his farm boyhood had cobbled him with. His palms were ridged and horny as toenails, worn amber brown. Marriage had sprung him from manual labor but the man never tired of studying his paws—wide and naturally quilted as any catcher’s mitt. Never dawned on him (or me) that I might someday have hands worn raw as his.

Sometimes Pop chewed his palms’ tougher spots. Ofttimes, staring into hands the hue of beef jerky, he retold:

“No way you can imagine it, Lucy of the silver spoon. Before your momma landed at my feet, literal, like manna from the heavens, I was poorer than poor. Be out chopping firewood at four in the morning, blisters bulging off my blisters, hands’d get to dripping like tears were weeping out before the blood came. Four older brothers with no more curiosity than logs. Mornings, Momma’d ask them, ‘How you boys sleep?’ One’d say, ‘Log.’ Others’d nod. Logs, redheaded logs, forever beating on me. Nobody in the family knew a A from a Z. I’d sneak off into the woods with books hid down my britches. At least Honest Abe read by hearth light. I had to snitch matches, build campfires for to be my lantern. Oncet I burned up two acres
of pinewoods by accident, for the light. Your momma makes fun of the troubles I went to, just to read my Westerns. But, Runt Funny, I’ll tell you, compared to where I started, I’m already about up with Mr. Shakespeare. People in Falls wonder what I
do
all day on this here porch. Oh, I keep occupied, got plenty to think on. You know my trouble?—and don’t laugh. But, see, I got me a Harvard College mind in this Burgaw County body—and the split between them is so blamed wide, all it’ll let me do is set right here and mull about it.”

The man wrote weekly letters home to his folks that couldn’t read. Whenever we visited to the outskirts of Bear Grass (another story), my grandfolks had pinned up every envelope—unopened, neat on one log wall. Like Poppa, they loved to get mail and they displayed it for the beauty of the stamps’ pastel colors. Still, Poppa admitted that even this busy with whittling sassafras (some smell!), even with porch swinging, cowboy novels, cheering his visitors, some days around 3 p.m. he did feel a tad bored.

His train-wreck angel had saved him from working. “But, Runt Funny,
should
she of?”

ONE IDLE
morning, Pop decided to become local assistant postmaster. (He’d dreamed he
was
that.) Might get him off the porch a while, put him more on the cutting edge of local gossip. Hearing her husband speak his first ambition in eight years, Momma practically percolated. With only her mouth appearing overjoyed, she dressed quick in her finest black outfit and, looking feetless as a gyroscope, the lady glided chin-up to City Hall. Her former suitors were now mayor, alderman chairman, and city manager. She’d never asked them a favor. They sure owed her for her having married another.

Pop waited, swinging, soaking his rough hands in corn-husker’s lotion. He waited at home for sixteen more months. He speculated on changes he’d make (extra daily mail deliveries to each home—postmen hired to read important mail to the unlettered). Pop praised the beauty of fine stamps. Why, he told me, there are stamps as pretty as … as Shirley, pretty as anything we’ve ever seen and from whole countries we’ve never even heard about. Momma had a uniform made for him, just in case, just to keep his spirits up. Poppa was helping Shirl and me engineer the addition to our tree house. He told me more low-down salesman jokes—warning me not to pass these on to Momma. He bathed too seldom for Momma’s taste, he asked after Shirl’s health like it was my wife he spoke of. He avoided church, waited for work, he was liked even by some of those folks that could never invite him socially into their homes, liked even by men who envied Samuel his wife’s small fortune.—Finally the offer arrived. “Influence,” Mother did a little dance, unlike herself.

Poppa was to report for duty the next day at 8 a.m. sharp, downtown P.O., bring own lunch. Momma threw a select party the night before. I invited Shirl. Place cards were shaped like parchment envelopes. On them I painted little stamps from nations as beautiful as possible, unknown to me until I made each up.

Pop left home early, waving back to us, uniformed—like a warrior finally headed, bold, towards enemy ammo. Momma cried, “What a perfect darling he is, a child really. I think the way we met is perhaps the most romantic thing I’ve ever even heard about.”

Around 2 p.m. I noticed a fellow, dead ringer for Daddy, right back in our porch swing. He slumped, wolfing the show-off lunch Momma had packed for him. He sat shaking his head No, muttering. Seeing me, the man grinned but acted ashamed. He tossed his official cap my way. I wore it, bill backwards. Momma bustled out looking for some sheet music she’d been studying, she spied him, froze, patted towards a wicker chaise.

“Samuel?” She settled, elevating her feet. “Does this mean the end of your postal career?”

Pop explained with so sweet a shrug. Said he felt more disappointed than her, really. Claimed he had hoped the P.O. would prove local gossip’s very temple. Not so. Can you believe the present postmaster, decent fellow but ignorant, didn’t even understand how Rev. Vickers’ daughter
hadn’t
spent six months visiting some aunt in Newport News but not yet fifteen was in the family way and put there by the church janitor! “How does a man who can’t count to nine on his fingers hope to call hisself official? How? Besides,” Poppa said each word slow: “I hate alphabetical order.”

Only Momma, his best audience and single sponsor, would utter what she now said: “Why?”

“I told them and I’ll tell you, pearl of my life. Ain’t no way M should come before N. N is like a practice for M. Only after one good try does N get to skin the cat and loop the loop and double itself into good old M. I mentioned this down there, M before N?—something’s wrong. And you know, not one soul in the sorting room had even
thought
about it? I ain’t saying they lack real vision, but those boys looked at me like I was foaming at the mouth. You can see it was on principle I quit. Had to. Point of honor. Talk about pigeonholes—that’s all they
do
down there all day. Who needs it?”

Upon the wicker chaise clicking like a cricket tally of her troubles, Momma kept both eyes closed, lids sealed. I settled beside Poppa, cocked his cap over my right eye, checking to see did he approve. He pulled me against him, lifted my braid’s brush end, spoke into it. “Does my Minute Waltz mind having her old Pop underfoot some more?” I hugged my answer. (His pet names for me: Pocket Watch, the Second Hand, Runt Funny.)

Momma’s eyes stayed closed as traffic clattered along Summit. Canaries at the Widow Smythe’s hopped from nervous perch to perch. It was Thursday
and dashing Captain Marsden was at Winona’s, indoors, visiting. Upset with Pop’s unemployment, no inch of my Mother moved.

“What’s wrong?” Pop sounded mad. “Don’t forget, Queen England, was you married me.”

“That much is clear,” and when her right eye opened, Pop fell off our swing, left me bobbing alone. He knee-walked to her fainting chaise, he offered (up nastily close) his best horrible face—two fingertips yanking down eyeskin, two others mashing the nose tip up so you saw not nostrils but mossy caves.

She touched his face the way a blind woman would, “My excellent successful fool. But, Samuel, my darling, you need a career. Men do.”

He mumbled to her neck, explained he would be playing more post office at home now. “Besides, you’re my career, Peachness. You two are my daily duties. You ladies are all I’m really good at. But with you two I feel—don’t laugh—like I’m … a Harvard professional!”

Stooping there, he hugged Momma’s girdled center, grazed at her lace jabot, his rude witty tongue lifted her gold brooch. “You,” she sniffed. April sun kept fighting to come out. Along Summit, a wagon knobby with seed sacks, slowed. Faces gaped up our lawn, thinking that bigwigs must live here. Ha!

Pop whispered to her waistline, “Special Delivery, upstairs.” For once, Momma was enjoying being floppy. He helped her to stand, he told me, “This is how I found her in the weeds thrown twenty-some feet from train tracks, her bodice tore open, her hair come undone and tumbling all around her. A angel fallen from God’s sky, my COD gift from Heaven’s Postmaster General.” He led her to my swing. I whipped off the hat. I took the fingers of the milk-white hand she offered me. I kissed my mother’s spongy knuckles. Then kissed his: toffee-colored leather. “You’ll go far,” Pop told me. “A retired postman says so.”

He tried lugging Momma over the threshold like when they were lovebirds home from the honeymoon. But Momma’d since gained some dividends. Pop was years from strengthening farm work. He dropped her leg half. Out of character, she cackled. Laughing seemed to hurt her like some deep cough would. But, too, you heard some air funnel deep into her corset. Momma kissed the man’s stiff auburn crest, said, “‘What mortals these fools be.’”

“Yeah?” He winked my way. “Well, it’s a job.”

I heard them rush upstairs. I knew they’d nap for a hour and a half. Afterwards, they’d act extra kind to one another. Each would corner me to say what a dear, despite everything, the other was way underneath. Left alone together, they were among the happiest couples alive, child. Strange marriage but a good one. Fated, they both swore.

Sun arrived, canaries sang news of it. When I turned and looked, birds’d all pressed to their cage’s brightest sides. They appeared nearly yellow as
the sun itself, like downy bits of it fallen and trapped here but whistling straight back up, “Remember me? Remember me?”

The buckboard had stopped before our showboat home. I waved but farmers acted scared. One skinny boy in back looked around for something to show. From behind stacked bags of meal, he lifted a strand of pond fids—too small to keep. He pointed at his chest proving who’d hooked them. Wet fish glistened. I gave the boy a Postal salute but the buggy lurched forward, tossing him against burlap.

I heaved our swing side to side, feeling lucky. Birds sang. Sun shone. We had plenty to eat. I was the only child of two good foolish people. Poppa would return to our porch where he belonged. I had Shirley for my friend. Now, for Pop, I quoted his favorite from Mr. Stevenson’s
Child’s Garden of Verses
. (Poppa’s judgment was: “I like my poesies like I take my bourbon, short, neat, no funny business.”)

Shirley was due over at four. I owned a new hat. Our elms were alive with bug music, elms would keep on pushing up and up forever. School, that prison term, was ended and sweet summer only just about to start. What, during my whole lifetime, could ever really go wrong? What?

—Whatever could.

THAT YEAR
, a dead man was found in the livery stable. He’d sneaked in for a nap, he climbed to the hayloft without being seen. A old hobo. First clue: Horses tossed and bucked conniptions. Then men followed their noses to the unhappy sight. The fellow had forty cents on him. A folded Wanted poster showed this same face, only younger. A scandal attached itself to the livery establishment then. Shirl, in our tree house, told me in her quiet way:
Her
poppa couldn’t help who slid into his place of business to doze then die. Trying and cheer my friend, I asked if the fellow who’d tried rousing the corpse had hollered, “Ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepyhead?”

Shirl turnt sullen. She used a pet phrase learned from my momma. Ma had read how the reigning Queen of England spoke it about most everything from storms to headaches to Indian rebellions—“We are not amused.” I now told Shirl what Pop unleashed on Momma if she stayed unamused too long. “Yeah?” He smiled. “And who’s this ‘we’? You and your tapeworm?”

Shirl slapped me. Then she climbed from our tree house but her exit was slowed by crying so. I pressed one palm over pink stripes stinging my
cheek. Up this high, my head swam, ears popped, I swallowed. Through leaves I watched her mope around our mascot elm.

I saw Shirl pick at bark. She leaned there muttering. Then all those gilded curls (one arbor’s worth) commenced hobbling as she sobbed apologies to herself and me. She lisped into a knothole sixty feet below. I knew exactly what she’d said.

THE TEACHER
forced me to stay in and chalk up three hundred “I must never again dishonor my parents and community by saying Ain’t again” ’s. I saw
her
out there on the schoolyard swing set, knees pressed together, breath fogging, waiting. Winter, she stored fists inside a false-fur muff. Blue clouds left her pink face, the vapor scallop-edged as much else Shirley dressed in.

Loyal, my sidekick. Since the hobo died at the Williams stable, other girls acted extra mean to Shirl. “Shirley’s way too curly,” they chanted after us as we walked home hand in hand. “And Lucy’s sure a goosey.” I didn’t know what this meant. At that age, it don’t have to mean much—it’s the spirit that counts. I did notice—out under winter trees—our girl enemies, two different preachers’ fancy daughters, loitering about, studying my friend.

I scribbled faster, keeping a eye on them. High-flown girls tarried in the cold long after the playground was deserted. I saw them admiring Shirley, eyeing her like folks at some auction drifting around before bidding starts, singling out their pick. They knew Shirl was waiting on me. Seeing them appreciate my pal, I understood afresh: My poor Shirley had just two strikes against her. One—being a horse renter’s child. The other—having, for her only friend, a rough-acting tree-climbing rule breaker like yours truly, daughter of a mixed marriage, socially. I knew: If ever one of these drawbacks got hauled away, the most la-de-da crowd in all of Falls would snap my Shirl right up. But, too, I figured neither fact’d ever change. Not if I could help it (and I could).